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

Helium 10 Buzz 9/7/23: Amazon vs. FTC Update | Shopify To Continue Working With TikTok Shop | 2 Most Downloaded Shopping Apps

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

FTC reportedly may sue Amazon later this month after talks break down
https://nypost.com/2023/09/05/amazon-facing-ftc-antitrust-lawsuit-later-this-month-report/

TikTok is ending its support for Shopify‘s storefronts on September 12, but the ecommerce brand has found a new way to operate on the ByteDance-owned app. According to The Information, Shopify will integrate its vending platform into the TikTok Shop hub.
https://www.tubefilter.com/2023/09/01/tiktok-shop-ecommerce-merch-shopify-storefront-integration/

Amazon doesn't name Temu, Shein, or AliExpress as potential threats in any of its latest SEC filings. However, according to the latest app store rankings on Data.ai, Temu and Shein are currently the two most downloaded shopping apps in the U.S. on iOS and Android.
https://www.fool.com/investing/2023/09/05/meta-platforms-growth-chinese-amazon/

New York-based eCommerce company Benitago has reportedly filed for bankruptcy. The firm is seeking protection from creditors two years after raising $325 million in funding, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported. It listed both assets and liabilities of between $50 million and $100 million.
https://www.pymnts.com/news/ecommerce/2023/report-ecommerce-company-benitago-files-for-bankruptcy/

For this week’s training tip, Shivali Patel shows us how to create your own QR codes and design your product inserts inside Helium 10’s Portals tool. Lastly, Carrie invites you to join Helium 10’s Winning with Walmart Facebook group to connect, network, and ask questions to a community that is selling on the Walmart.com platform.

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

• 00:45 - Amazon / FTC Update
• 01:30 - TikTok Shop / Shopify
• 03:19 - Most Downloaded Apps
• 05:22 - Aggregator Benitago Bankrupt
• 07:22 - Amazon Price Tracker
• 09:00 - Pro Training Tip: Create QR Codes And Product Inserts Inside Helium 10
• 14:09 - Join Our Walmart-Selling Facebook Group

► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast

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

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

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

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

#489 - 8-Figure Amazon & 7-Figure Walmart Seller Talks TikTok Shop and Multiple Income Streams

Let’s catch up with Eugene Wong, an accomplished 8-figure Amazon and 7-figure Walmart seller, as he shares the latest developments in his thriving e-commerce empire. Eugene not only walks us through the intricacies of managing his expanding businesses but also reveals his secrets to maintaining a healthy work-life balance, turning personal hobbies into profitable business ventures, and exploring new income streams. 

Join us as Eugene discusses his journey into the world of TikTok Shop, where he has successfully launched products. Plus, get a sneak peek into the brands incubated by his dedicated employees and learn about the innovative system changes and automation he’s implementing in his business systems. This episode is a goldmine of entrepreneurial wisdom for anyone looking to diversify their income streams outside E-commerce selling and thrive in the ever-evolving online seller landscape.

In episode 489 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Eugene discuss:

• 02:52 – Eugene Shares Updates On His Business
• 03:44 – His Healthy Habits And Habits Outside The Amazon Grind
• 06:13 – Let’s Talk About Sports Cards From Hobby To Business
• 09:13 – Problems, Balance, & Boundaries For The Main And Side Businesses
• 13:54 – “You Need To Think Of What Your Hobbies Are”
• 15:43 – Diversifying Your Income Streams
• 18:00 – Launching Brands Incubated By His Employees
• 20:54 – Let’s Talk About TikTok Shop
• 24:32 – Browsing Eugene’s TikTok Shop
• 28:03 – TikTok Is Banning Amazon Links?
• 29:49 – Business System Changes He Is Implementing
• 33:03 – Eugene’s 60-Second Tip

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

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today we’ve got an eight-figure Amazon seller slash seven-figure Walmart seller back on the show, who’s gonna have a little bit different kind of episode. We’re gonna talk a lot about how, as entrepreneurs, maybe we can take a hobby of ours and turn it into an alternate income stream, as well as how he’s launched on TikTok shop. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think.

Bradley Sutton:

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

Eugene:

Hi, what’s up Bradley? Doing very well. Glad to be back.

Bradley Sutton:

Alright, so, so guys, you, Eugene has sold multiple eight figures on Amazon, seven figures on Walmart. If you want to get his full backstory you’re gonna want to go to episode 306. All right. So h10.me/306 to get a lot of how he grew up and what his parents wanted them to do, and then the kind of direction that he went to. Quite an interesting story. We’re not gonna go too much there, but you know, that, that was almost a couple years ago. Now it’s like pulling teeth to get Eugene to come on podcast. He’s so humble and he doesn’t like I don’t have much to say. I’m like, dude, you sold a hundred million dollars, few, $300 million online. Anything you say is interesting. So finally we got him back after two years at Eugene on the show. Welcome back and how, how are things been going with you?

Eugene:

Things are good, and happy to be back. Lots of changes to update you on.

Bradley Sutton:

Cool, cool. Now, right off the bat, Let’s just talk about on the business side of things, numbers, just raw numbers, 2021, we are still kind of in Covid and things. And 2023 at the end here. Things have changed, better, worse, whatever the case is. How are your numbers on Amazon and Walmart compared to a couple of years ago?

Eugene:

So, I think last time when we first last spoke on the episode I projected, I think 18 million, and we were pretty much right there at the end of the year. So it wasn’t surprising. Like we kind, kind of forecasted 18 to 20 and we fell into the lower tier of that. But we hit our target, so we were happy with that, we hit it.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, cool. Would you say Walmart and Amazon have grown or stayed around the same amount, or have both been increasing in a similar way, different ways? How’s the trajectory been?

Eugene:

Well, actually, Walmart got worse for us. Amazon is the one that increased Walmart to spread got even wider, which were, I mean, it’s, it’s something that we continue to batch our heads over, and we’re trying to still crack the code, but it went down. Yeah. Which stinks.

Bradley Sutton:

And now we’re gonna get maybe into some strategies that you can share with us that you or your team is doing on the business side. But I want to take a step back and go outside completely outside of the business side. Right now this wasn’t a big focus of mine when I had you on the podcast two years ago, but if you’ve listened to the podcast anytime in the last year, you’ll see that I, I ask almost every guest, like, Hey, what do you do to take yourself out of the business as far as for you know, hobbies and as far as health routine and et cetera. So let’s start, I know a lot of what your hobbies are, so let me start on the part that I don’t know about. What are you doing to stay physically fit, healthy? You know, like, you seem like you’re a pretty fit person when I see you, so you you’re not just sitting in front of a computer eating junk food all day. Do you do the gym or do you walk, or what are you doing to stay fit?

Eugene:

Unfortunately, or admittedly, I don’t really do too much physical activity right now because of, because of my hobbies and the work, right? I mean, obviously eat eating healthy well try to. But there’s not much like I don’t go to the gym too much anymore. I do help out with my kids’ sports that they’re in, football and soccer. So that keeps me pretty active, I guess that’s probably my main source of exercise.

Bradley Sutton:

And what else are you doing? You know for hobbies you like, like, I know, I know you’re big on Lego and stuff the family, like, you still doing projects like that, or what else?

Eugene:

Lego, actually if you wanna buy some, I have a lot for sale, but, Lego, I didn’t fully quit, but, but I’m downsizing that because I just don’t have time for it. I do a lot of surprisingly, I mentioned this also when I was at Sell and Scale sports cards, right? I had my eyes on that, that business model. And good or bad for me, whenever I get involved with something, I always look for the business angle, right? Not, not about money per se. It just, it just like finding the passion in it and sports cards. Not sports cards.

Bradley Sutton:

Hold that thought. I’m gonna share my screen of something that I was involved in yesterday here. Oh, no. Now, now just explain like, kind of like what’s going on. These are your hands we’re looking at in this video right here. And you’re opening up these pack of cards. I see your name right here.

Eugene:

You drips my name.

Bradley Sutton:

So this was a live Facebook. Explain like you’re doing commentary on what’s going on here, explain what we are looking at right here. Oh

Eugene:

My gosh, I can’t believe clip that. I’m turning red right now. Yeah, so, so that’s that’s, that’s part of the sports cards part. It’s pretty much, that’s called braking. So, pretty much nowadays, this is not like your, your childhood sports cards. Nowadays, boxes can cost 500,000, even $10,000. It’s sickening. But a cheaper way to jump in is, is you can get your team. So let’s say you like the Philadelphia Eagles, and instead of buying the whole box and ripping every single pack yourself and paying the full price, you can just buy one team and you get all the cards for the Eagles. If you’re a fan of the Eagles or if you want to gamble, which is kind of one of the elements to it. So I’ve I’ve evolved from, from being a pure hobbyist into kind of like collecting and ripping product and opening basketball and football stuff to evolving into breaking, because I saw the business side of it, and it’s very fun.

Eugene:

It gets me outta my element. It’s actually a very stress reliever for the Amazon side of business. In fact, I need it. Like, I need an outlet like that. It’s very creative outlet, because I have to first of all sell and engage an audience which is complete against my, my my personality. Like, I’m a super introvert, like, being on here, you had to rich, you twist my arm, but, yep. But I dunno, something about the sports cards. I’m just very comfortable with it. I’m very knowledgeable with it, and I like helping people most importantly.

Bradley Sutton:

You started as a, on the hobby side, like, you would go into Facebook groups and like join the breaks as a person who would buy like a certain player or a certain team. Is that correct? Or did you start immediately on the flip side where like, I’m gonna make this a business from day one?

Eugene:

No, no, no. I definitely wasn’t the business from day one. I was basically gambling, right. I was, I was opening the packs myself and, and, and paying in other people’s breaks, but it wasn’t sustainable. Yeah. I knew that entertainment was not a sustainable form of–.

Bradley Sutton:

But it was like a rush, right? Like it’s a rush. Like, guys, let me tell you, you from experience, like I’ve been doing this for years too, and it’s fun. Like for those who aren’t into sports cards maybe it’s kind of hard to describe what we are talking about here, but it’s super fun. But what I like about this is that you took something that was an escape on the side like a little hobby. And then you’re like, wait a minute, I could actually turn this into maybe even a side business where you’re still doing your hobby, but now instead of the money just going out and you paying it, it’s almost like maybe you’re breaking even now. So you still get that rush and that escape from your Amazon business, but you’re almost able to turn it into a side business. Because the way it works is this, this is not easy work, first of all, to organize this break, collect payment from like 20 strangers to, and then later organize the cards to different teams. But, but that’s kind of like built into the, built into the price, right? So are you kind of like breaking even on this now, but you’re still able to get that rush that you did when you were just a pure hobbyist?

Eugene:

I mean, in the beginning when you first start out, when you don’t have any, you don’t have reputation, no one knows you. Yeah. You, you might be losing money or breaking even, but I mean, again, I’m humble, but it’s hard for me to say this, but like, I built quite a following and, you know what I mean? I snap fill my, or I’m using the wrong terminology. I fill my pretty quickly. And usually a lot of people struggle. And I’m in a group that has a hundred thousand people and I’m probably one of the larger ones. And the stuff fails ’cause people trust me, my reputation’s there. I’m not one of these like, shady guys and I know what I’m doing. So reputation’s everything in this industry, just like Amazon as a brand, you know what I mean? Like one big mistake or, or one, like one shady element will take you down. And this literally is the most sensitive hobby where it will, you will, your name will be tarnished forever if you, if you mess up in a shady way.

Bradley Sutton:

You slip a good card out or something, something like that. Now how much time a week are you spending on this I guess we could call it side business/hobby.

Eugene:

Probably too much time. And, and I think this, this is a good, good blend of the Amazon and, and what we like the business aspect. It’s one of those things where, where I struggle with balance and boundaries, right? So I know I’m sitting on a gold mine with my hobby that turned into something. Now the problem is the scaling and hiring of people and hiring talent that goes live as well as capital to source product and stuff like that. So it, it’s a very similar business problem to the Amazon side, but of course I’m more passionate about it. But also it let, let’s, let’s be honest, it’s not gonna generate the profit that it does on the, for the Amazon business, right? Sure, sure. So I have to be realistic and real, real things in.

Bradley Sutton:

Do you have employees for this endeavor then as well?

Eugene:

I’m interviewing right now.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. But right now, until now, you’ve kind of just done it all on your own.

Eugene:

Yeah, yeah. Okay. For, it’s been a year over, a little over a year and a month.

Bradley Sutton:

But then, but then we talking 20 hours a week, 10 hours a week, 30 hours a week. How much would you say you’re spending on the baseball cards or sports cards?

Eugene:

Maybe 20. Okay.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. Now, when that happened, does that mean that you, it was 20 hours less on the Amazon side? Or is it a mixture since this it’s kind of not like to me, when, when I do sports card stuff, and, and I, I’m very similar to you. I was in the sports card. I’m actually flying to Japan in a few days. ’cause I’m setting up at a card show to sell some of the stuff that, that, that I have over here and over there. So I get it. To me it’s, it’s work. It makes money just like you’re profitable on this, but it’s also fun. It’s also an escape. So, so did, did you decrease your Amazon workload by 20 hours? Or is it kind of a mixture? You maybe only took away 10 hours or something because this is kind of like a hobby as opposed to just business for you?

Eugene:

I don’t think the 20 hours replaced 20 hours of Amazon. I mean, I guess the balance definitely took away some from the Amazon. And, and of course my guys are, are solid, and I know they kept things going. But of course, there’s some things that fell by the wayside, right? It’s, I normally don’t miss, and I admittedly like, this is why I need to balance, this is not the golden goose right now. It can be. But I need to find a way to develop it without hurting the main golden goose, right? So, so that, that’s, I’m, I’m living through it right now and trying to balance that out. It’s just that I, I can’t, I don’t wanna give it up because it took almost a year to build this up into this thing. And now, now I know there’s another level to climb, but, but I’m not at the stage where I can say, Hey, I’m 100% all in still on that because I can’t give up the Amazon side.

Bradley Sutton:

Wait a minute. Are you the one who also had a huge eBay account where you’re also selling the cards on eBay?

Eugene:

Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Y you were the one who made all those listings, or

Eugene:

No, that was, alright, now you’re gonna make me give away the secrets here. That account was, we used to sell very heavy on eBay. Okay. So we, we sold, this is before like, we got heavy into apparel. We were selling electronics and, and,

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, okay.

Eugene:

Yeah. So

Bradley Sutton:

When you say we, this is like your, your, your main conglomeration the, the same business that you’ve been doing for 15 years. This wasn’t as okay. Now it’s starting to, to come into picture a little bit more. Now you

Eugene:

Gave this Yeah it looks like that. It looks like it, like 500,000 sports card sales, but it, it’s not, yeah. But I’m starting to, because assignment model is potentially in the works as well too, but that’s a whole another infrastructure.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Yeah. So guys, I mean, the reason why I brought this up wasn’t just because I think this is cool that, that he does sports cards like me there’s a few people in the industry like Brandon Young and Mitul Patel, and a bunch of people of us are all in like this group where we, we talk about sports cards and stuff like that, but it’s the fact that think about what your hobbies are. And you can’t apply this to everything, but there’s a lot of you out there who might have a hobby, and this is kinda like the Gary Vee mentality actually, where it’s like, can you actually monetize the hobby where it’s not just a complete dream? Like if my hobby is swimming or something like that like if I’m, if you hobby was swimming and you’re like, I’m gonna start swimming for 20 hours a week, it’s kind of, it might be hard to monetize that per se but for the rest of you guys out there, actually I’m, I’m sure I could come up with something like maybe I become a swimming influencer or something.

Bradley Sutton:

Something like live streamer, I’m sure there’s, but, but, but that’s my point. Like a lot of it, even if it, even if it seems extreme guys, is there’s ways where you can turn some of your side side hobbies or, or things into almost like a side business where you are getting that escape from your day-to-day. Amazon, which is what I’ve been preaching for the last year, guys you have to have hobbies and things that take you away from the daily grind you know, resets your mind and, and just puts you in a different space. But at the same time, you gotta be careful that if you’re just like like one of my hobbies is Korean, Korean dramas. Like I just watch Korean dramas all day. I could if I had the time, but that there’s no monetization for me on that, that means it’s literally just taking away time from, from my, my, my Amazon businesses if I just go deep into it.

Bradley Sutton:

So you’ve gotta have the balance, but then think about it like, is part of, of this hobby is there a way to monetize it where not only would you break even, but now all of a sudden you’ve got another profitable business like Eugene has here with a sports card. So I, to me, it’s fascinating what you’ve been able to do, but again, you would not have been able to get to the point where you could even do this if you did not build up your team in a good way and be able to delegate so much of your Amazon business to your team.

Eugene:

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think my, my role had had evolved, and this is probably the past couple years, is that you gotta let the team do their thing, right? And my role now has become, okay, how do I make sure the team has a secure future? I have to branch out and go outside of the box and do different things, right? I’ve, I think there’s, there’s been other failed attempts at things whether, whether it’s an Amazon type of type of business or outside of completely outside separate from e-commerce type of business. And you know what I mean I’m always looking for new ways to generate income, right? And that’s more in general to diversify, which is very important I think not only within Amazon, but even outside of having Amazon as a business and then having, I don’t know, own something else, going to real estate, anything else, right? Sports cards, whatever. And that’s another way to protect my family, not not only my like personal life, but like more, like I said, the guys here that, that they deserve. They’re running the day-to-day, they deserve something to take home at the end of their whatever tenure or yearly bonuses and things like that. So that, that’s very important to have that opportunity.

Bradley Sutton:

Alright, let’s switch back from, from hobby back to business now. How many brands overall do, are you currently running?

Eugene:

We only have three brands, right? And it’s all under the same account we have.

Bradley Sutton:

So let’s say like these three brands are selling on Walmart, you’re selling on Amazon and maybe have some.com websites or something for them.

Eugene:

Yeah, they’re not all on the same marketplaces. Some have their own website. Some are on multi-platform, some are just on single platform. Okay.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. Alright. Any, anything, like, have you launched any new brands or have any new things in the pipeline or that you’ve done lately?

Eugene:

Yeah, we something that, and again, this is a a situation from one of our employees. It was kind of incubated by them, which I loved. And basically a pitch came across my desk with one of my employees. I’m like, Hey, like, what do you wanna talk about? And they had this great idea, the conceptual it was and they have like anxiety and ADHD, which which they struggle with. And they had a, a concept, a product concept that would help with that. And the mission statement, the vision, it resonated with me. Obviously required an investment. There was a risk there because this was not our lane. This is definitely not apparel or electronics that we were used to.

Eugene:

This is like basically it’s a weighted, weighted lap pad, right? But it was, it’s really made for kids. The ones on market just were not, were not as good, right? The quality or, or, or the way the, the, the weights are shifting inside and stuff like that. So internally we developed a better way to do it a better weight system. We also have ones that are custom. We have like a dog as well too. This is, this is a dog, and you can fill this with whatever you want. Rice or, or glass bees. We have a, we have a unicorn. So like, that’s the new brand that we’re, we’re trying to invest in slowly. We’re not trying to sink all our chips in that, because that can really hurt us long term, right?

Eugene:

So we’re trying to play that out, that just launched this year. And it wasn’t, it’s not one of those like products that we’re used to where we’re used to selling, let’s say like five, 10, 20,000 units of it a year, and then okay, wins and repeat. This is a definitely a lot smaller niche, but this was a passion project by someone internally that I committed to these guys. Like, look guys, if you have passion projects, let’s let’s discuss it. Let’s talk about it. Right? I can’t say yes to everything. However, there’s certain ones that we can’t bring aboard. This is one of them that passed the initial phase, and now it’s all the way through. And this is kind of one of our first brands that we really made like full effort of full branding, not how we, like, HD is like a, was like a mix of stuff.

Eugene:

And while it’s getting better now, it’s really focused on apparel. It didn’t start that way. This was our first clean brand that was fully immersed into this concept. And we have a, a future plans for sensory types of items for it as well too. We have workbooks we have influencers. It’s more of a lifestyle brand. But it’s one of those that it’s gonna be capped it. I don’t think it’s gonna be ever one of those $20 million a year things, at least I don’t think, but of course there’s, there’s future plans. We wanna do trade shows and, and pension get on shelves, Walmart well target probably more, more so. But but that’s, yeah, that’s one of the exciting things that we have in the pipeline is just, it just we gotta be patient and drive it the right way. Because you can burn through resources, especially PPC, PPC is if you don’t do it right, you can really hurt yourselves. And, and we, we’ve been in that boat a couple times already this year.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, I’ll very unique. I never heard about I mean, I’m sure people, people have it, but I haven’t had a guess that, that have said, Hey, we had a internal kind of where the employees could, could come up with ideas. You know, you have employees who, who have been with you five, 10 years, they know the business. All the ideas for new products doesn’t have to come from the owner you. So that’s cool to open up ideas and be open that to that who knows how much stuff your employees out there might have might have some ideas about some new products. Okay. TikTok shop is something that I think has grown exponentially as far as buzz around it. We’ve had other Helium 10 Elite members like Elizabeth talk about some of their some of her amazing success in TikTok shop. Are have you taken any of your brands in TikTok shop? Are you utilizing that or just influencers at all in TikTok?

Eugene:

Yeah, we we actually just started we we’re really late to the game, I think, well, I think we’re late to the game obviously in China. I mean, they have factories that are just going li like live factories, literally. Like, there’s cubicles of people going live which is crazy, and the amount of money that brings in is disgusting. So we finally made the leap in using our HD clothing brand to jump onto TikTok shop or TikTok live and TikTok shop. That’s how it evolved. So so the minute that opened to us, we didn’t get invited to the first round of it during the beta but as soon as it opened up to us, we gave it a trial. We put some listings up and right away we got some sales, which is cool.

Eugene:

And when we stocked out on TikTok shop, the sales went to our website as well too. So, so we got double wham, we got bonus sales on our website, which we never really get, like our website just to have a website, to be honest with you. We don’t focus on it. But we got sales there and TikTok shop. And then when we went, when we did more TikTok lives, we connected with more, more creators. And that went viral as well too on a couple posts, and we sold out a lot of our stuff. Now, the, the bad part is we were not prepared at all for the inventory. Like, we’re prepared for inventory for Walmart, Amazon, and that’s really it, right? And then now with TikTok in the mix, those sales are very unpredictable. We can’t say that, hey, just because that, that influencer posted that content that it’s gonna sell a hundred dresses in two days, we don’t know that.

Eugene:

So, like, I don’t even know how the heck to order for that. So it’s a problem we’re trying to figure out right now without like blowing the budget on, on over ordering inventory for a chance. So we usually pretty tight with inventory. We don’t like taking too many chances, especially with apparel. Apparel, you get stuck with it, you’re in trouble. So, so it’s a good and bad problem to have. So, so we’re also just like peace pets. We’re, we’re not taking a, a gung-ho approach where we’re just gonna throw everything at it. We just gotta take our time and learn some of the, the growing pains. And of course, TikTok shop has growing pains. I’m not an expert at it, but like, I’ve heard enough horror stories that there’s a lot of I think internal things that, that are not just like when I say Walmart or Amazon when they first started, there’s a lot of things that don’t go right.

Eugene:

For, for both the seller and the buyer. Things can be abused and manipulated. So so there’s a lot of that stuff that, that, that happens still, but but it’s definitely gonna be the future for sure. And, and I, I’m investing in that more and more each day. Obviously I think all brands should go on there. Clothing I think is actually a very easier thing because we just have a model that talks about it and wears it and walks around in it, right? And demonstrates it. That’s pretty easy.

Bradley Sutton:

Alright, so I’m here looking at your TikTok channel here. ShopHDE I see you’ve got a few videos here. Lemme just pull up one, enhance performance and style. Okay, so I see here, there’s a, a shop button. I’m gonna hit this. I’m gonna hit this shop button, and let’s see where it takes me to, ah, okay. So it just takes me like, I can just instantly I add it to the cart and then have this. It’s kind weird looking leopard skin shorts here shipped to me. That’s that easy as that. This is like my first time looking at, at TikTok shop, and then I can actually go click here directly to your shop and I can see all of your products, I’m assuming. Okay. And I can see best sellers. Looks like your tennis outfit is the top sellers here. Actually, it’s all women’s clothes, like your men’s. That just shows you that, that I guess more women are using TikTok shop, perhaps, because none of your men’s products are, are on this bestseller list here. That’s interesting.

Eugene:

Yeah, men don’t like to shop on TikTok. Apparently. We found that out early on.

Bradley Sutton:

Interesting. Okay. So now all of this this is your channel here. These, these aren’t your employees, like, are like, are these influencers here who have done all are these, like, what do you call it? Is this UGC or are some of these your actual employees or people you have hired to do videos? What are we looking at here?

Eugene:

It’s a mix of, I mean, we, one should be one of our employees. It’s a mix of influencers as well as our, our our models in China that makes some of the videos and photos for us. So it’s a collaboration.

Bradley Sutton:

Now here, I just happen to see this 8,000 views. Like is this a, a, a video that you boosted somehow, or just randomly? It went kind of maybe mini viral or something? This particular one right here, 8,000 views. That’s pretty good for this. Maybe that’s why I don’t, this is one of the top sellers.

Eugene:

I know. I didn’t think it was that one, but we had an influencer that blew, blew a couple up and their, their audience just went crazy and they stocked us out. We had to cancel orders and everything like that, so that was a mess. But, but yeah, a couple videos went viral from the, from the creators, which is kinda like, that’s for us, that’s one that was one of the secrets. We, we don’t need to create everything on our own, and we don’t have the expertise or the skillset to necessarily create every single one on our own. So we might as well leverage that, give up some of the commission and utilize their, their following their audience to make our stuff go viral. And then like I said, the inventory is, I don’t know how to solve that fully yet. Maybe some other gurus out there know how to, but without spending both loads of money on over ordering inventory, I we’re trying to figure that out. So that keeps me up at night.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Interesting. Interesting. So like, what, what kind of numbers are you doing overall? Like monthly or weekly on TikTok?

Eugene:

End of June is when we started on getting onto the TikTok shop. And then I think July was our first month of full month of sales. I think it equated to probably like like 300 some more to think, which is not for us, that’s not a lot. But from a new platform like that, we were excited and we, again, we love creating nothing from something. And that was one of the things. And, and yeah, so we want to keep it, keep it going. We wanna invest harder into it. And that was I don’t wanna say our person didn’t try, but that was like, that was like such early stage and we’re able to get traction like that.

Bradley Sutton:

Just imagine in the beginning, you actually don’t even get big commissions right? From TikTok. Don’t they give it to you free commission or something like that? Do you know?

Eugene:

I know there’s a lot of perks that TikTok gave to onboard you. And, and they’ll, they’ll reimburse you on shipping. They’ll give sellers like a 30% off coupon that we don’t take to hit on they TikTok takes to hit on it. So there’s a lot of those special deals behind the scenes.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Well, this is cool, guys. You know, like, like some, like he just said they just got on there here a couple months ago and are already doing like over 10 orders a day. Less fees than Amazon. But we talked about this on the weekly buzz recently, guys that TikTok is trying to move to send everybody instead of allowing potentially this, this is just a rumor for, for right now, but you know, TikTok, people have been saying that TikTok is gonna like, stop allowing influencers maybe to send links to Amazon. They want people just buying on the TikTok platform. So if you haven’t got set up with TikTok shop, this might be something to look into and then get, get to some kind of cadence here. Like obviously Eugene’s team here is, is posting on a regular basis, and we saw just one random video got six, I see one with 6,000 views here.

Bradley Sutton:

Here’s another one with, with 8,000. So it can sometimes, you know people pick up on this and, and they can definitely boost your, your sales and for at least the, the time being, even if TikTok shop is out of stock, like he said, what people are gonna do is they’re gonna go look for his website or maybe go look for his Amazon store and find their product. So, so there’s residual benefits, not just the, the traffic that TikTok shop brings, but it’s also gonna boost your dot com sales and your, your Amazon sales. Pretty cool. One thing you mentioned before was that you having your own warehouse and, and having a big business, you, you’ve got your own internal systems in place, but you were making like, some big systems change over something at your company.

Eugene:

Yeah, I mean, long story short is we, we had to, we had some personnel changes more from the, like the developer side, which is like we’ve had our internal like systems that run our warehouse management systems, our our data harvesting, our like just customized data that we pull down from Amazon API and, and manipulate into usable chunks that, that help us internally as, as a team. So I’ve kind of, in a way lost a big chunk of that as far as like being, have that flexibility to be able to kind of create whatever you want on the fly. I still have it, but it’s not as workable and or, or more so the employee is not as, as available. So it’s one of those things that I hadn’t planned for very well over the course of, of building the businesses is just kind of not rely on, on that system so much.

Eugene:

And we’ve been trying to break away slowly, but I think it’s one of those things you get lost in the comfort, and, and that’s a major mistake. And that’s definitely one of the teaching tools that, that I would tell anybody is, is like yeah, don’t, don’t, don’t pigeon your hole yourself in and get locked into a situation like that. Really it’s like, it, there’s other, there’s enough services right now compared to when we started that deal with forecasting inventory data management, data harvesting that can that maybe the basic Amazon report is not enough for people. Like, I know it’s not enough for us. It’s too basic and it’s it takes too time consuming to drill down to what we really need it for. So we need to have scripts that run behind the scenes that pull down big data sets to formulate into this grouping or these triggers for us for the different departments that focus on the specialties to make them, Hey, I know this happened, so I gotta look at this and do this, right?

Eugene:

Without that, it can get messy and you’re gonna miss a lot of things. Yeah. So, so we’re in the process of trying to find how to blend these worlds together now where, alright, we can’t go fully customized. We can do a little customization, but who are we gonna partner with? Who are we going to, I guess, park our business with to be able to kind of fill a lot of those gaps? And then the ones that we can’t fill we’ll need to figure out how to restructure that process internally and, and find out how we make do without, without having that. So, so it’s a little, little bit of a turmoil for that. It just definitely, you can still get it done raw with like raw data and, and spreadsheets, but at, at this stage maybe if you have like selling fry products, you can do that, but our clothing is, we have so many skews, so many new, new styles that come in, new PCs because of clothing, t’s almost impossible to manage. So so we need systems and efficient data systems to be able to run the business properly. So yeah,

Bradley Sutton:

That’s one of the reasons why I was like, man, apparel is like crazy. It’s like one, you have one item, but it could have 25 variations. If it has like five colors and five sizes each, it would be a nightmare to try and manage. Alright, well, just like with your first episode we always close these with asking for your TST your 30-second or 60-second tip. What kind of strategy do you have for our listeners today?

Eugene:

You get the right people in the right seats and you get the hell out of their way. I think as simple as that, we used to micromanage, we used to try to lay this corporate structure down and, and that was just suffocating and it just didn’t work, right? Like, like we’re, we thought we were from running from our business classes. Oh, this is how you run a business. No. You can do it that way, but, but employee satisfaction, I think it can be really bad. So we, we really just kind of give them the tools that they need, give the training that they need. Some, sometimes there’s not a lot of training that we have to pay for training to get them to the, to that level to build those core competencies. And then from there, just get outta their way.

Eugene:

They’ll need you, they’ll, they’ll reach out to you when they need you. Because if you step in, like right now, if I step into every decision, like, oh, I don’t like that color, I don’t like that pattern, I don’t like that dress. Well, they did the data. They have multiple people that did the research data behind the scenes already to validate that, hey, we make decisions based on data. That was a data driven decision. It wasn’t like, oh, I like that purple color, it looks cool, right? That that doesn’t go anywhere. Right? So, so I try not to step in anything now, I do step in for any legal copyright things. I mean, that’s where my eye is trained. Like, hey, I think we’re violating that looks too close to that type of situation. Let’s stay away from that.

Eugene:

Like, that’s where I step in. But other than that, they gotta have that greater freedom. And, and of course there’s gonna be certain levels of spend where, where I, I do need to step in, but like, other than that, like, it’s not, let, let them roam free, but, but you gotta let them run and exercise their creative freedom. If they’re not very creative people and there’s certain ticks that, that that drive them, I mean, you focus on that, allow them to do those things, and it’s definitely a form of respect at that point. Right? Of course. You gotta develop that trust. It’s not like day one you hire someone in their seat and, oh, do whatever you want, right? It’s not like that. It’s over time you do that. But that’s kinda like the biggest things I’ve learned is just get out of their way because you’re gonna slow them down if you try to baby them or micromanage them too much. I think it’s pretty simple.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Alright, Eugene, thanks for coming on here. Again, we really appreciate the knowledge and a little bit different. I wanted to do a little bit different podcast today with a little bit different vibe. And so you bring a unique viewpoint to things. If you guys want to know more about what, what Eugene and I are into all these baseball card stuff, you can check what’s your Instagram for the the baseball card stuff?

Eugene:

it’s @eugerips like my first name, @eugerips

Bradley Sutton:

Alright, so take a look maybe we’ll, we’ll add some more Amazon sellers to this sports card phenomenon. So Eugene, look forward to seeing you maybe at one of these conferences coming up and wish you the best of success.

Eugene:

Likewise. Thank you Bradley.

#488 - 4 Secret Metrics 99% of Amazon Sellers Aren’t Using

In our monthly training and “Ask Bradley Anything” episode, we talk about an important aspect of Amazon selling, uncovering the four secret metrics that a whopping 99% of Amazon sellers are missing out on. We kick off by shedding light on the abundance of untapped data points, highlighting the importance of these hidden gems provided by Helium 10. One of the standout tools in this episode is the Cerebro Match Type Filter, which allows you to reverse engineer your competitor’s PPC strategy, giving you a competitive edge like never before. We also explore the significance of Cerebro’s historical trends and how to check product trends week by week, all while unraveling mind-blowing insights from the Amazon Recommended Rank column. Discover why this column is incredibly vital in today’s time. 

Plus, don’t miss the engaging Q&A session with Bradley, where we address burning live questions from our audience. Learn how to get more reviews using Helium 10 Follow Up and gain a deeper understanding of how the Amazon Recommended Rank truly works. Lastly, catch Bradley at upcoming events for even more valuable insights. Tune in now and level up your Amazon selling game!

In episode 488 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Eugene discuss:

• 01:24 – There Are A Lot Of Data Points That Sellers Are Not Using
• 02:09 – Why Are These Helium 10 Data Points Are Important
• 04:45 – The Cerebro Match Type Filter
• 08:01 – Reverse Engineer Your Competitor’s PPC Strategy
• 10:19 – Looking At Cerebro’s Historical Trends
• 14:37 – Checking Product Trends Week-By-Week
• 17:11 – Mind-Blowing Data From The Amazon Recommended Rank Column
• 18:31 – Why The Amazon Rec Rank Is Very Important
• 24:23 – Q&A Session With Bradley
• 26:04 – Getting More Reviews With Helium 10 Follow Up
• 28:34 – How Does The Amazon Recommended Rank Work?
• 32:28 – Catch Bradley On The Following Events

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

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today in our monthly live training with Ask Me Anything, I go over four data points that 99% of your competitors are not using, and I also answer all of your recent questions live on the show. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think.

Bradley Sutton:

Are you a YouTube vlogger, blog writer, course creator, or other kind of influencer or educator? Maybe you just have a network of people interested in e-commerce. Did you know that you can earn commissions of 25% for life for everyone that you refer to Helium 10? We’ve got many partners earning hundreds, even thousands of dollars monthly in commission from Helium 10’s partnership program. If you’d like to join our affiliate partner program, please go to h10.me/crushit and tell them you heard about it from the podcast. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that is our Monthly Ask Me Anything that actually goes live to our Serious Sellers Club members. It gives you a little taste of what we do inside our Serious Sellers Club every every week we’re gonna be going over some pretty cool stuff today.

Bradley Sutton:

That’s mainly gonna be about some data points that a lot of sellers are not using. You know, even sellers that have Helium 10, you know, obviously seems like everybody nowadays is using Helium 10, right? But these are some things that in kind of studies I guess you can say, or my networking, I definitely know that a lot of sellers are not using. So anyways, we are talking today about unique data points, all right? And one of them, like, ah, to be honest, I was like planning to kind of talk about this more on special episode 500 of the podcast. You know, how we always do the big numbers. I’m actually flying to the Maldives to do it, so we’ll talk about how it affects the Maldives honeymoon period. But I was like, you know what, I’m gonna give this group a a treat.

Bradley Sutton:

We’re gonna talk about. We’re not gonna wait till October, episode 500 is not happening until October. We’re gonna go through this a little bit of it. Now, I’m not gonna spill the whole beans, but probably I don’t wanna like, you know, give false hope or here or anything, but this is like, it’s gonna end up being a pretty impactful, if not epic game changing thing to look at that nobody’s looking at right now because of the way the Amazon algorithm has kind of adapted over time. It’s a completely unique way to really kind of understand why your products aren’t getting PPC impressions, why you can’t seem to rank for new products or even mature products where you just, you know, like, you know, you’re converting well, but for some reason Amazon does not, does not show you highly for this keyword.

Bradley Sutton:

You know, like, I’m gonna show you a way how to know if that happens. All right? So what I’d like to do, let’s just open it up actually. If can some people throw me a, an example or a product that they want me to look up like it, you could send me to a specific ASIN. It could be your ASIN, it could be a competitor’s ASIN or maybe something else. Like maybe it’s a keyword that you guys want me to look up. I want this to be your show too. Lemme look up this acrylic. Let, lemme hold on. Lemme, lemme look up acrylic shelf dividers. Let me see. Okay, we’ll go ahead and do this. Let’s how do I add this to this stream here? There we go. Lemme make it a little bit bigger, okay.

Bradley Sutton:

Acrylic shelf dividers. Alright, let’s maybe pick one of the, one of the ones that’s a top seller. So I’m gonna run X-ray on this page. Okay, let’s see if I didn’t even check if there’s any BSR here. Okay, it looks like there is BSR. Excellent. Alright, let’s see. One of the top sellers looks like this Hem Devore Clear acrylic shelf dividers. They might be doing up to 2000 units a month. Let’s go ahead and pull them up in Cerebro. And let’s just say that set some context here. Let’s just pretend that maybe you know, I, I’m an acrylic shelf divider seller and I just want to get some more insights into the niche and into my top competitors. So we’re gonna go ahead and run that in Cerebro.

Bradley Sutton:

Alright, so now we pulled it up into cerebral. Now the first thing that I think that people are not looking, again, you guys know how to do Cerebro. We’re not here to just like, Hey, how do use Cerebro? We’re trying to find unique unique data points here, right? The first thing that I want to show you guys is the match type. Did you know that we are showing all of these other situations? What about, let’s say Amazon’s choice? They have not shown up in Amazon’s choice. Now, what is Amazon’s choice? This is not necessarily that they’re Amazon’s choice for a specific keyword, but what happens is, is if you go to the search results, do you guys see these special widgets here? It looks like search results, but it’s really kind of like a sponsored, all right? And the reason you know it’s sponsored is because it tells you right here, under highly rated, for example, that these are sponsored results.

Bradley Sutton:

So there’s different widgets that show up in search results and one of them is an Amazon’s choice. And as you can see, this keyword doesn’t seem to have an Amazon’s choice widget. It has a highly rated widget. All right? So that’s one of them. Other ones that have shown up in the past that aren’t showing up anymore is like editorial recommendations. So let’s see if we can pull up highly rated and this product here has shown up on 26 different search results for highly rated, alright? So like maybe I’m looking at numbers maybe in Search Query Performance, right? Maybe this is my own product. I’m looking at numbers in in PPC and, and I’m just wondering like, where is this product? You know, this, this product is getting 2000 sales, but the numbers don’t add up.

Bradley Sutton:

Well, remember from our Search Query Performance webinar last week, highly rated is not showing up. So if somebody were to type in acrylic shelf dividers, right? And they actually choose one of these products and take a look, right? Take a look that this product is right in there. I think this is the hum ofor that I’m pretty sure that’s the product we were looking at. Or is it n in K? Nope, six two, they’re not in there right now. They were in there before, if somebody clicks on this, this is not going to show up in search career performance, it’s not gonna show up in Product Opportunity Explorer, right? So like any sales that come from here, the seller themself wouldn’t know about it. You as a competitor obviously wouldn’t know about it, but that’s why you can look, use Cerebro to look at this.

Bradley Sutton:

Where are they showing up for in highly rated? Let’s take a look. If there are more for, if they are doing sponsored brand headers, you guys know what that is, right? That is what you see at the very top right here, right? So right now the one is that’s showing up for is this, you know, Soye brand, but if I look at Cerebro, I can sell, well now I know their sponsored brand header strategy. I mean, I’m not even sure, I don’t think that they’re, they’re just, you know, doing, you know, that much broad here. There’s only 69 keywords that, that they have showed up for in sponsored brand header. And you could almost guys look at this, you can almost reverse engineer what their target is for sponsor brand headers. If they’re doing phrase it looks like they’re doing phrase and they’re doing broad, one of the two four closet dividers, right?

Bradley Sutton:

Do you see how many keywords say closet and divided? Look at that. Like just by one click. I haven’t even like filtered anything else after this, I can now tell that they’re running a broad match or phrase match campaign in sponsor brand headers for closet divider as a root word. That’s crazy. This just shows you, you know, it looks like they also have one shelf divider potentially is a broad match that they’re doing. So I can directly see what exactly is going on with their sponsored brand header strategy, right? So this is like stuff like, tell me right now, did has any of you ever just run your competitor and run sponsored brand header to reverse engineer what words they’re targeting for their brand? Probably not, right? Maybe only a couple of you. If you have, then great, if you haven’t, then you just learn something valuable.

Bradley Sutton:

And then remember again, this is something that is not counted in Amazon metrics as far as Search Query Performance. The only way that you would know if somebody is getting clicks on this is by looking at this like, hey, where, where are they spending heavily on? Right? Because these sales do not show up in Search Query Performance or what else can we look up here? We can look up sponsored brand video. Like are they running video ads? I don’t know. Look at this. No data came up. So what do we, what do we learn now? Hey, this competitor, despite being number one in the niche, they do not seem to be running sponsored brand video ads. So there’s one thing that I can beat them on, right? If I’m running sponsored brand video now I know, hey, this is nice, I don’t have to compete with the number one seller in this niche on video because they don’t seem to be running video.

Bradley Sutton:

All right? Another thing that people are not, you know looking for enough in my opinion is the Historical Trend. This is for diamond members, all right? So before this is only for elite members, so very few of you, you know, like Rolando and, and a couple others had access to this, but look at the seasonality of their keyword reach and their sponsored reach. So let’s go ahead and show historical trend and let’s look up very interesting. We can go back two years, we can go back two years here and take a look at the, the orange that you guys are seeing is their organic reach. So we see that these guys peak in September, so, so we have September that we’re just about upon us. Now we know like, hey, looks like they go pretty hard in September and October for their organic keywords that they are ranking for.

Bradley Sutton:

And you can kind of see why, I know this is kind of small for some of you guys watching this on, on video right now, but do you see how this purple increases in September and October? The purple indicates how many sponsored keywords that they are showing up for. So it looks like these guys spend, I’m just looking at one chart here guys. It looks like they are spending more in PPC in September and October, right? At least that’s what they did last year. And then what that added spend did, like, you know, you can just see, look, at August, they were only showing up for 200 keywords in PPC for regular sponsored products that jumped up to 500 in September and it looks like 400 in October. And then for some reason come November it goes way down.

Bradley Sutton:

They were only showing up for a hundred keywords in sponsored ads. So now I’m looking at this and I can kind of like prepare for Q4 a little bit, alright? If this is the number one player, this is who I’m competing with, maybe I’m gonna save my spend in September and October and go hard in November during, you know, peak Christmas shopping season when he’s holding back. Or I could look at it opposite, maybe I’m looking at this and I’m like, wait a minute, maybe he’s trying to get ranked for keywords and going hard on sponsored ads before those keywords jump up in volume. But guess what, guys? This is not a guessing game. What I’m gonna do is I’m gonna go directly, I’m gonna choose September and I’m going to look at Cerebro as of September, 2022. All right? I want to see what he is ranking for completely.

Bradley Sutton:

Let’s go ahead and look at his, his sponsored rank. Where was he ranking highly for in sponsored keywords in the month of September, 2022. And let’s give it some search volume. Let’s, let’s give it at least like 200 search volume. Let’s take a look. Alright, so take a look here. These are keywords that he was, I put one to 10. Let’s go really to the ones that he was showing up for in top of search. Let’s go one to five in sponsored keywords. And now right here I have the 66 keywords. He was either doing a top of search bid modifier to get to the top of page or he was just doing a super high bid last year, right? And then I can kind of see right here, which ones did that help get him organic rank. And look at this, there are some keywords here.

Bradley Sutton:

Look at this shelf dividers. He was going hot and heavy on this keyword. 18,000 search, 17,000 search volume. He was number one sponsored and number one in organic rank for that time period. All right maybe I’m wondering, hey, did this get him to be one of the top clicked or top purchased? I don’t need to guess. Let’s look into the brand analytics. It’s right here. This is another one of the four things that people are not looking at. Alright, we’ve gone through three of them. Now I’m gonna hit this ABA total click share, which is 18.8%. I’m gonna click this and I want to go back to September of 2022. Let’s look up week by week on September of 2022. Lemme just go to the beginning of September and let’s go to the end of September.

Bradley Sutton:

Alright, so here we go. Week by week, what were the top products picked? All right in the very beginning of September, he was not one of the top clicked. But look at this guys, this is crazy. I love it. After a couple weeks of heavy PPC spend, the week of September 16th, 2022, who was the number one clicked ASIN for this keyword right here? Metaphor, clear acrylic shelf divide the product that we are looking at now. So he went from not even being in the top three to the top three, the, the next week week 18 to 24, he was still number one. He increased his conversion share to 14%. Out of all the purchases that happened for this keyword, this guy had 14% of all the sales. And then the next week after that, the very end of the month, that going to October, you can kind of see he dialed back a little bit and now he became the third, the third biggest seller.

Bradley Sutton:

Right? Now, let’s see what about right now, what the last three months? What if I want to see what happened in July? Take a look right here. This is what showing what is going on here in July or last month, July. Right now we’re pretty much in September. In July, 2023, he was the number one clicked product and it was almost all organic. Look at his sponsored rank. Average was 15, meaning he was showing up at the bottom of page one, maybe top of page two in sponsored results. So could this be why he focuses so much in September and October? Maybe he’s got some data that says, you know, like, I could be the top clicked one without having to do sponsored ads too much in the month of July. Look at this, in May, going back two months in May, he wasn’t even advertising for this keyword.

Bradley Sutton:

He wasn’t even doing a sponsored ad for this product in the month of May, but he still was able to maintain click share of 20%. This is the power of this information guys. We’re taking brand analytics, which is directly from the horse’s mouth, directly from Amazon and comparing it to Helium 10 data, which shows organic rank and sponsored rank to reverse engineer this competitor’s strategy. So guys, this is available for the Diamond plan and and above. So if you guys, I hope you guys can see this. If you can’t really see the value of this, then I’m not sure you guys are putting your best foot forward because if you understand Amazon and understand the power of looking at what competitors do, you probably are sitting there like, wow, this is kind of like mind blowing. What is possible?

Bradley Sutton:

This is stuff that you couldn’t even dream about doing two, three years ago because this data just wasn’t around either from Amazon or from Helium 10. Now this wasn’t the complete kind of like a mind blowing thing. The thing that I’m gonna be focusing on guys in my episode 500, one of the things is what’s called that is that first thing I showed you that Amazon recommended. Take your top product, your top ASIN, find your top asin, copy it and run a new cerebral search for it. I want to match type and I hit Amazon recommended, okay? And then I hit apply filters. If you have a mature product, it should be like a thousand. Kinda like this product has been around for two years. Now I want you to click the Amazon recommended rank column. So now it should rank it from one and going on.

Bradley Sutton:

Now this is what is critical guys. Let me explain what we’re looking at right here. Helium 10 is the only place where you can get this right now. This is showing you what, according to the Amazon scoring system, what Amazon advertising views as the keywords most relevant to this product. Now, this is not helium 10 hacking, you know, this user’s account, but there’s a backend thing that Helium 10 has access to. And we’ve had access to this for years and we’ve shown it for years. But this has kind of been a sleeper thing here, but this is what is going to show you how Amazon views your product. Alright, so tell me guys, in your top, let, let’s say 20 keywords here, do you see keywords that are super hyper relevant to your product? Let’s take a look at this product. Again, I’ve never looked at this product before today.

Bradley Sutton:

These, these are acrylic shelf virus. Look at the number one keyword that Amazon thinks is relevant closet shelf. Does that make sense? Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. This is for closet shelves, closet organization, number two, shelf divider, number three office shelf, bedroom organization, acrylic shelf divider. I think that was the keyword that we, that literally was the keyword that we used to find this product. All right? So now it’s like, okay, these people are, or this product Amazon is really showing, you know, kind of, well, it really understands this product. I’m gonna go a lot deeper into this guys, but I have been testing this and crazy stuff. This has not always been the case, otherwise I would’ve made it more of a big deal about this before. But the Amazon algorithm has changed in the last, it’s always changing, but it has this aspect of it has really changed where this Amazon recommended rank, which is based on an Amazon data point.

Bradley Sutton:

This is not some Helium 10 estimation or algorithm or something. It is highly predictive of the kind of success you’re gonna have with either PPC impressions or even ranking organically after interactions. And here’s the one thing, it is a little, little hint, it’s almost too much information I’m giving out. Have any of you ever had trouble ranking for a keyword where it’s like, Hey, this keyword is the number one. Like not, maybe not number one, but this keyword is super, super important to me and I know I’m getting sales from it, but I can’t get past like page or position 10 on page one. I can’t get past position 20. Like what’s going on? Like, I’m like one of the top ones. Check what your Amazon recommended rank is for that keyword and if it’s below 10 or something, maybe it’s something like 25 or 30 or, or even worse.

Bradley Sutton:

That’s the answer right there of why maybe you are having trouble ranking. Alright, so there’s four things that we went over today. I think that most of you, none of you are using all of them. A couple of these, maybe some of you guys have. But number one, look at the other placements in sponsored and just other widgets that you, you or your competitors are coming up with being sponsored brand video, you know sponsored brand header as the Amazon’s choice widget, the highly rated widget. It’ll give you a more holistic view of where your competitors are showing up, where you are showing up in search results that things like Search Query Performance is not gonna give you any data on. Number two, take a look at the historical ranks of your competitors’ products and your products. Where were you? What, what do they do on a historical basis of where they’re concentrating their PPC spend where they are, how many keywords they’re ranking for organically month by month over the last two years.

Bradley Sutton:

And then the third thing that we went through today was this Amazon recommended rank to see how Amazon thinks that how relevant you are for the keywords that you think and that you know you are relevant for. These are all super important things that I think not enough people are looking at. You know, how many or there’s actually four things I mentioned there, but do that and you get a leg up on the competition, especially now coming into Q4. Super important to do these things in Q4 and looking at it from a historical viewpoint too, because now you wanna know what your competitors do differently, what they are doing right now, you know, August, September is not the exact same strategy. I mean, how many of you guys just don’t do anything in Q4? Like maybe, maybe some of you guys, you know, you’re, you’re not in a niche that that has, you know, has a lot of gift giving or new keywords.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay? Maybe you guys aren’t doing much, but I would say 90% of you, you guys probably add some Christmas related keywords or you add some other targets in there, right? So this is going to be critical for you guys to be able to reverse engineer what your competitors are doing during this time period. Now we’re gonna open this up to questions that any of you guys have, but this is what we do every week. Those who are in our Serious Sellers Club, if you to get in our Serious Sellers Club, it, it’s for our higher end sellers. You’ve done about $500,000 worth of sales in the last year. Then you’re automatically entered into our, our secret Facebook group where you know, you guys can network with each other. And we do these weekly trainings every single week, 52 weeks a year.

Bradley Sutton:

One question, best way to increase reviews, easiest way guys is Helium 10 Follow Up and then setting the request a review template, alright? That’s just my go-to. Now, back in the day, I used to make custom emails. I used to make custom emails and, and they were really great. But then what happens is, is Amazon, even though emails are totally fine they, they just get bent outta shape over some minor, minor thing, which is not, you know, in any way against terms of service but to whatever bot that Amazon is using. It just thinks that it is. And so it would like sometimes suspend me for sending messages for like 30 days or not me, but other people. So for me, just so I can sleep at night and I don’t have to worry about ever getting suspended, I only use the Amazon request review template that is inside of Helium 10 Follow-Up.

Bradley Sutton:

And then I set it to after how many days the order goes. So like, let’s just say I’ve got a supplement. Well, I don’t want that email to go out right away. So I said it like, Hey, send this 20 days after the product was ordered, send this request review out. If I’ve got like some party supply, which I do have a lot of like straws and stuff like that, I’ll put that a little bit sooner. I’ll be like, send this seven days after the item was ordered. Send this request or review out or eight days. So easiest way to increase reviews ’cause it’s completely free if you have Helium 10 and all, all levels of Helium 10 have that Platinum, Diamond, Elite. Any other helium 10 related questions I can get to before we get going here?

Bradley Sutton:

What is the normal rate conversion for review? All right, so you’re probably, you know, in Follow Up you can actually kind of see like what kind of rating what kind of rating you guys get review rating in there, right? So it varies by product. You know, I can do the same exact strategy for two different products and it’s going to it’s going to show different, it’s gonna show different different things. Like I had one for an egg tray that I used to get one rating for every five orders. It was insane, right? That that’s just like unheard of crazy. And all I was doing was a request review, right? Other products get one out of every 10, you know, ratings, right? Other products go one out of every 25, right?

Bradley Sutton:

If you are one out of every a hundred, if you could only get one rating out of every a hundred reviews, or I’m sorry, a hundred reviews, a hundred orders, you probably don’t even have request review on. So you can actually see this inside of your Helium 10 FollowU p. Like here’s one of my accounts like the ones that I’m tracking and I’m not requesting a review a across the board on this. I’m actually not requesting the review completely, but it’s only like 3% here. So like one out of every, you know, 30 or so, 30 to 40 reviews I’m getting a rating on. But if I were to actually go in here and look at the product level, some of my products are, are doing much better than than that. That’s just my overall account, which I don’t even have it on, on, on everything.

Bradley Sutton:

Make sure you’re looking at that guys, because if you start it, you wanna know kind of like if it’s gonna have an effect, it always should have like a, you know, a few percent effect on your review velocity for sure. I’m actually curious. I’m gonna look at like my old July numbers. Yeah, look at July guys. You guys were looking at what my review rate was just for this month, but look at July, where it, it requested more reviews. I had 130 reviews requested and look at my request rating to conversion rate 8%. That’s pretty decent. 8% almost one out of every 10 orders, 11 orders or so, I got a review or a rating, I should say the keywords tab instead of the products tab. Manny says, according to which criteria does the Amazon recommended rank work?

Bradley Sutton:

It’s not a criteria. It it that that’s an actual Amazon data point that we are pulling from. All right? So it’s how Amazon scores keywords to a listing. And if you’re asking me how does that work on Amazon slide, nobody could tell you other than Amazon itself and they would never disclose that information, but, you know, you gotta just use common sense that it’s whatever their relevancy kind of like mechanism is where they just look at the how the listing is is optimized and maybe the history of interactions of customers with listings similar to that. You know, like, you know, if you were to ask anybody, if anybody tells you they know how that works, then they’re lying because none of us know exactly how it works. I mean, there’s so many scientific documents that Amazon has published and you could like look at it and kind of like understand how Amazon is making their algorithms, but there’s no like one exact formula where you can just reverse engineer reverse engineer that wish I was Mark Cuban says, when checking the Amazon recommended for competitors, should I do this for one competitor product at a time or many competitors product at once?

Bradley Sutton:

Very good question. The answer is either or if I just wanna look at like, hey, what is the number one guy or gal doing? And that’s what we did today. We looked at the number one seller for those acrylic, whatever the heck is we are looking at shelf dividers or something. We want to, we want to maybe reverse engineer what they specifically are doing because they’re just night and day better than the rest of that, that niche, right? Or maybe there’s like six or seven kind of like, you know, very on the, on the same level competitors. I can put all of them in there and then check what is the highest Amazon recommended rank average meaning that these are five top competitors. And by looking at the average, now I know what most of them or what Amazon is finding most of ’em relevant.

Bradley Sutton:

Now how, I’m glad you brought this up. Why is that beneficial? That’s beneficial in itself is because now if they’re listing optimization is similar, you know, like the main keywords that they’re using and you are using some of the main keywords and your listing optimization and vibe is similar to that one price point, et cetera. Well, what does that mean? Now you can almost predict what your Amazon recommended rank is or how Amazon is gonna view your listing relevant if you’re using those listings to kind of structure yours. I’m not saying copy the listings, nobody should ever copy listings, but obviously if you’re in the coffin shelf niche, you’re gonna do stuff that’s similar. Like, Hey, I’m gonna have the word coffin shelf like two or three times in my listing, duh, right? Doesn’t mean I’m copying it, but it just, it allows you now to predict that, hey, if, if I’m using a lot of the same keywords and optimizing my listing around it, I now know that Amazon’s probably gonna, you know, right off the bat view me relevant for these because I can see that Amazon or these other listings are relevant to Amazon for it.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay? So as a reminder if you’re part of our Serious Sellers Club or Elite members, elite members get this too. Whether they’re part of the Serious Sellers Club or not you guys get this trained every Monday or Tuesday at 11:00 AM Pacific time. So make sure that you’re getting the invites for this. If you’re not in our Serious Sellers Club Facebook group and you know, you have at least $500,000 of sales in the last 12 months, make sure hit up customer service. They’ll help you get into that Facebook group so you can take advantage of these trainings every week. We’ve got about 900 members there in that Facebook group who, who network with each other throughout the week. And guys, you notice today I’m wearing my Tokyo shirt. By the time you’re watching this, if you’re watching this on the podcast, I’ll probably be in Tokyo.

Bradley Sutton:

So next week I won’t be on this call I’ll be in Japan, but September I’m gonna be on the road a lot guys. So I hope to see you guys at some of the events I am going to be at. Let me get a couple of the the next one. The first one that I’m going to be at is going to be in Amazon Accelerate. In Seattle. We’re actually gonna have a networking social on the 11th. Alright? So if you’re gonna be in Seattle, Amazon 11th through the 14th about make sure to come out to Amazon Accelerate you Elite members, you’ve got a workshop on the 11th that you guys can go to if you’re a Serious Sellers Club member. I sent out an email saying a few of you guys I can get on a scholarship to get into that that Elite training that normally you have to pay $600 for.

Bradley Sutton:

So make sure to go to the Facebook group and hit me up there if I didn’t give you guys a hookup for that. And that’s the 11th to the 14th on the September the I think it’s the 16th, all right? Yeah, September the 16th. I’m gonna be in Milan, Italy at an event with Simon. And so if you guys wanna attend that, just go to h10.me/italy. So that’s on the 16th, I’ll be there. And then after that I’m going to the Maldives to Film episode 500. We, I’m gonna continue this conversation. I don’t think you guys can join me on that, but anybody who wants to feel free and then busy, busy October, I’ll be seeing you guys hopefully at Amazon unboxed at the end of the month. That’ll be in New York.

Bradley Sutton:

And then another event, I’m doing, seller velocity. There we go. The link is h10.me/velocity. That’s another event I’m doing on the 11th in New York City of October. All right, so h10.me/velocity, if you guys would like to attend that. And then right after that is Amazon unboxed and I’ll also be in Korea on the October 19th doing an event there, h10.me/kconference. If you guys are in Asia, wanna make a quick flight over to Seoul, Korea, h10.me/kconference. So a lot of cool events happening in September and October. I hope to see you guys at one of them. But until then, have a great time and we’ll see you next week on this weekly training. Bye-Bye now.

Helium 10 Buzz 8/31/23: Amazon Buy With Prime For Shopify | Walmart Seller Summit Recap | TikTok Shop Shipping Problems

Amazon and Shopify are partnering with the Buy with Prime service, Recapping the Walmart Seller Summit, and a new Helium 10 tool just released yesterday! This and much more on this episode of the Helium 10 Weekly Buzz.

► 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

#487 - Amazon Compliance & Black Hat Tactics In 2023

Chris McCabe calls 2023 a “wacky and wild year” in the Amazon space. Tune in as he dives into key events and trends that have shaped the Amazon-selling landscape. From the headline-grabbing antitrust lawsuit, FTC vs. Amazon, to how the new Inform Act has been affecting sellers in the US, we dissect the topics that matter.

In this episode, discover what common mistakes Amazon sellers are making and the consequences they face. Our expert emphasizes the critical role of interpreting Amazon’s policies accurately to maintain a thriving seller account. We also tackle the challenges of managing multiple Amazon brand accounts, shedding light on potential issues that arise. In an insightful twist, we explore Amazon’s rollback of account enforcements in 2023, Brand Registry revocations, and offer a cautionary note on the rise of new blackhat tactics that sellers should be wary of.

Lastly, we talk about the rollout of a new module for Freedom Ticket with Chris McCabe, and don’t miss out on the Seller Velocity Event, a must-attend gathering for anyone seeking to excel in the Amazon marketplace!

In episode 487 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Chris discuss:

• 02:34 – 2023: A Wacky And Wild Year In The Amazon Space
• 04:17 – Antitrust Lawsuit: FTC vs. Amazon
• 10:52 – A New Module For Freedom Ticket With Chris McCabe
• 14:15 – What Are Amazon Sellers Getting In Trouble For?
• 15:18 – Interpretation Of Amazon’s Policies Is Vital
• 16:07 – Talking About The Inform Act 
• 17:55 – Join Us For The Seller Velocity Event
• 20:58 – Issues With Having Multiple Amazon Brand Accounts
• 24:53 – Amazon Rolled Back Account Enforcements In 2023
• 25:45 – Watch Out For These Blackhat Tactics In 2023
• 27:07 – Amazon Brand Registry Revoked Issues
• 29:56 – Top Amazon Policy Compliance Tips From Chris
• 31:39 – Buyer Messaging Issues You Could Get In Trouble For
• 33:55 – How To Contact Chris McCabe

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

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today we bring back one of the world’s foremost experts on Amazon suspensions and compliance issues, and he’s gonna give us an update on things that’s gonna get you in and out of trouble. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think.

Bradley Sutton:

Black Box by Helium 10 House is the largest database of Amazon products and keywords in the world outside of Amazon itself. We have over 2 billion products and many millions more keywords from different Amazon marketplaces, from USA to Australia to Germany and more. Use our powerful filters to search through this database for pockets of opportunity that you might wanna get into with your first or next product to sell on Amazon. For more information, go to h10.me/blackbox. Don’t forget, you can save 10% off for life on Helium 10 by using our special code SSP10. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I’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.

Bradley Sutton:

And we’ve got a serious person here. Chris is one of the very few who have been on the podcast now four times. As you guys know, we have like one per year kind of like rule kind of thing. And, and we don’t always invite everybody back. Like we try and invite back the ones who everybody kind of request because they’re either very interesting or they have interesting topics or both, like in Chris’s case here. So if you guys wanna get the, we’re not gonna go full on into his backstory. If you want to check out some previous episodes, guys, you got a pen. He was first on episode 24, way back in 2019, episode 24 of the podcast. Then he was in 151 and he was also in 278. So we covered lots of things, but these are, you know, I would say just go to 24 to see his backstory.

Bradley Sutton:

But when we talk about the topic we’re talking about today, which is, you know, like compliance and, and legal things and stuff, I would almost say that those older episodes don’t, don’t even listen to it because these kind of things change like every year. And so this is the episode that you guys want to listen to because we’re gonna talk about what is happening here in August, September of 2023. And a lot has happened in 2023. But first of all let’s just see how you doing, Chris, you know, I’ve seen you a couple times in the past few months in different parts of the world including Japan. How’s your travels been?

Chris:

Japan was amazing. I spoke at an event in Istanbul, which was also interesting. This is the first year, by the way. Thanks. And kudos to you for doing unscripted. I like this. One reason I like coming back over and over is because of the authenticity of this podcast, and thank you so much. The approach you use, which makes it not only enjoyable, but informative and also fresh and different and interesting which given, appreciate that giving a lot of content out there. Not even, not even podcast glut, but like Amazon related content. That’s one reason why this is, you know, one of the better podcasts out there.

Bradley Sutton:

Thank you so much.

Chris:

It’s always a pleasure and privilege to be back on. I like what you said also about 2023 has just been a wacky and wild year for, I don’t even know how many reasons we can touch on in the next, you know, 45 minutes. But it’s been so zany to the extent of even a seasoned veteran like myself has been kind of impressed. And it does, it doesn’t or it does take a lot to impress me in this space because sometimes I’ve had trouble predicting what Amazon’s going to do next. And sometimes I’ve also had trouble predicting what business owners and sellers and even service providers might do in reaction to things Amazon’s doing. And to top it all off as of today recording, you know, we’re recording in August of 2023 on the cusp of the filing of the antitrust lawsuit by the FTC and the government against Amazon. So it’s just a crazy way to start Q4.

Bradley Sutton:

Let’s talk about that real briefly, because I don’t know, you know, maybe you have your own opinion. I’ll give you my opinion and whether it’s right or wrong, still, just my opinion, it doesn’t really count for much. But when I, when I first talked about that, that story in the weekly news, I was like, you know, I was reading these stories about how the head of the FTC is like kind of banking on this being her big bang. And I’m like, this is not the right move if you’re looking to make a splash. I’m not sure if she understands the Amazon seller’s viewpoint, but for me, there is a lot of problems that Amazon sellers have with Amazon. You know, like, like it’s not perfect. Everybody understands it, but we still love Amazon. But if we were to pick something that we wanna, like, go against Amazon for the preference to FBA listings or prime listings would be like maybe 75th on, on the list.

Bradley Sutton:

Because like we, we love FBA, like, it makes to me, we, I say we, but I love FBA, it makes sense to me that the algorithm would favor FBA listings because I’m not gonna deliver in one day to customers, you know, like, I can’t, I mean, sure I could, but I’d be paying FedEx $40 in order for that. You know, like I have zero problem with Amazon prioritizing FBA, not to mention now they’re bringing back seller fulfilled prime, which almost negates this whole thing of oh, only FBA things. But is this kind of like your take as well, or do you have a little bit different on this?

Chris:

It’s such a big topic. The first thing is what’s the history of lawsuits that tried to break up companies? Most people think back to the 1980s and Atlantic Bell and Pacific Bell and Southern Bell had to be split up from Bell, right? Bell was a conglomerate. They, they wanted to split it up into regional pieces. But I mean, aside from the Bell case, and then I think it was 1984, how many other companies have been broken up with antitrust lawsuits? Yeah. Not that many.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah.

Chris:

So you start from a position of you are not expecting Amazon to be broken up. Disclaimer, I’m not an antitrust legal expert by any means. I’m an interested observer like you are, like a lot of people are. I probably know a little bit more about it than the average person or the average Amazon business owner, because I was one of the subject matter experts for the House subcommittee’s investigation back in 2020. So of course I was on calls with people who were investigating it. I’m cited in the report, this is in a secret, this is public knowledge, but I’m not, that doesn’t makes me by no means an antitrust lawyer. Yeah. I am still looking at it in terms of my interest in how the marketplace shakes out.

Chris:

Not AWS I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about AWS and some of the other parts of the Amazon universe like you, I’m thinking about brands and Amazon sellers, and especially anything that would impact our clients or future clients. And so it’ll be interesting to see how this topic shakes out from the seller perspective, because I’m not sure people really know or understand how it will, it’s definitely gonna come up at the Seller Velocity Conference that, you know, we’re co-organizing with Helium in the fall, October 11th and 12th in New York. But when the lawsuit is filed, which will be pretty soon, maybe after Labor Day, I think that’s when people will start showing their cards a little bit, and then I’ll kind of come back with maybe more of an assessment on, Hey, this is like really far wide ranging investigation that’s led to a far reaching lawsuit, or will they narrowly define what they’re interested in here? I think it’s just gonna be a fascinating chapter in Amazon’s history. And Amazon to a certain extent right now atleast controls the chart and path of e-commerce history, and we’re all e-commerce enthusiasts. And we’re all interested in entrepreneurship and brands and brand expansion. I mean, it’s one of the, the main focuses of the Seller Velocity conference every year. So how rough and tumble it gets. I don’t know.

Bradley Sutton:

I just think that in general, you know, like sometimes there’s people out there, there’s influencers who try and always be antiaz Amazon and this and that, right? But when it comes down to it, guys, not one of us should ever be rooting for something like this to happen whether we think Amazon is right or wrong. Because if something like this ever goes through, well guess who’s the ones who’s gonna suffer. It’s gonna be us as sellers, you know, our fees are gonna go up and, and it’s gonna be more difficult to do things. So like but anyways, yeah. Let’s not harp too much on this because it’s still a lot of speculation still too early. Let’s talk about what’s affecting sellers, you know, nowadays. And actually just interestingly coming up on Freedom Ticket, you have recorded or are recording, I believe, by the time this episode airs a brand new module for, for Freedom Ticket even, right?

Chris:

Let’s start with that because I’ve been working on that a lot this week. Nice. Still putting on the final touches, and I wanna make sure Helium 10’s happy with it before you post it and publish it. But I’ve enjoyed doing it. I think it’s important material. It’s all geared around avoiding account or ASIN suspensions and I think it’s really important, especially it’s great that you’re launching it ready for Q4 because of the compliance issues, because of the nature of compliance investigations on specific listings. Because I can’t tell you how many times we hear from brand owners who have their hero product, their ASINs, that are giving them the most revenue per day, per week, per month, suddenly flagged for review, suddenly suspended. In some cases, Amazon just hints that they’re going to suspend it, but they don’t tell you whether or not they’ve decided yet, which is a bit tricky.

Chris:

But it’s better than having them suspend those listings outright and just saying, yeah, well now you’re in the reinstatement strategy protocols, and that can go either way. That can cut good, that can cut bad. Because that puts sellers back on their heels in terms of, well, are you ready for this? You might have only had a day or two to prepare to have to appeal for your bestselling ASIN to go down. And as you know, we work with brands that if they lose a top selling ASIN some of our clients, they’re losing 40 or $50,000 every day that that listing’s down.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. So guys, if you want to get the full module, those of you who are Helium 10 members, just go hit the Learning Hub, and then go to Freedom Ticket 3.0, and then go to week two, and it’ll be right here in 2.14 is where Chris’s module will be. Now we don’t wanna just give away the whole thing right in here, but just in general, 2023, what are the main things that people are getting in trouble for legitimate, you know, like, obviously there’s always new Black Hat strategies that are out there. Course, and we can talk about that, but, but what about legitimate sellers, maybe unknowingly are getting in trouble for in 2023? And

Chris:

I’m glad you mentioned there’s always black hat. So Amazon is overcompensating for some of the Black Hat by punishing sellers that haven’t done something wrong and accusing them of harming another seller or harming a competitor. There’s a huge spike in complaints to Amazon from brands complaining about other competitors attacking them. So we are getting some clients who are falsely accused of it, who have to dispute it. So there are people that will start getting some messages. We’ve detected some behavior where you’ve harmed another seller, not so much that you’ve damaged buyer experience. It’s not so much about buyers that you’ve attacked another seller in the marketplace. We can set that aside for now. I definitely address that in the module because it’s important. And as we’ve seen, sometimes Amazon over enforces just to make sure they get all the bad characters right?

Chris:

It doesn’t mean it can’t be fixed. It doesn’t mean it can’t be appealed. You can definitely fix it and appeal it. But beyond that there’s a lot of listing violations that are being flagged for a variety of reasons. Some sellers have created listings erroneously for a while, and they were never flagged. They were never reported, and now they’re getting reported and they’re confused. We’ve been doing this for two years, for two months. We’ve been putting certain terms, let’s say certain claims like health claims in the title. We’ve been using certain health claims in back, let’s just say supplements, right? For example, we’ve been putting certain health claims in backend. Keywords are in the title, and we were never flagged before. Why are we getting flagged now? It could just be because they’ve never been reported for doing it before.

Chris:

So a competitor did report them, the report was from the competitor, but it was a valid complaint. It wasn’t an unsubstantiated attack. So I think some sellers are suddenly put back on their heels by these investigations again, they might just get a note saying, you’re being reviewed, you’re not necessarily suspended yet. Or, it’s an auto suspension because of the keywords they’re using that the terms they’re using that should have been deleted. Some of it’s the sellers themselves doing it and not realizing they’re making mistakes. On some occasions, we’ve seen them hiring outside agencies or consultants that don’t know compliance. They’re marketing people, the revenue generation people, their salespeople, but they don’t know the policies. And sometimes they don’t know the laws, the relevant laws, or the FBA, you know, or the EPA, let’s say agencies and how they’ve interpreted the laws.

Chris:

So it’s kind of like the same as getting into trouble with Amazon because you interpreted policy one way, and Amazon interprets it another way. You always have to kind of change how you interpret it and make sure you match Amazon’s interpretation. Yeah. unless they’re wrong, there’s always the caveat. If Amazon’s interpreting their own policy incorrectly, and I can tell you this, and Leah who works with us can tell you this all the time. Amazon interprets their own policies wrong. Some, occasionally it’s going to happen to everyone at some point, but for the rest of the time, you have to make sure that your interpretation of their policies matches their interpretation without really thinking that you can just battle them backwards and force them to take your way. Because we’ve seen some sellers and some brand owners grab a lawyer, they think they can get a lawyer to write a letter for them and send it to Amazon and back Amazon off. If there’s no legitimate standing to that argument, that’s not going to be any more effective than a seller support case.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Now I think that something that everybody was scared about, you know, two, three months ago obviously, was when the inform act came, and then people were getting like, Hey, your account’s gonna get suspended. But, you know, the dust has kind of settled. Amazon like admittedly, they didn’t have a good rollout. The system was broken and, and people were getting messages, even though they had done stuff, and it was kind of crazy. They would say, you need to submit your postcard. And then, and then before we even got the postcard and the message disappeared, so you’re like, Hey, is everything good? And like, I have not heard of any, like, mass suspensions or, or things like that, but do you have anything you say about this? Like just moving forward, like, just to put a lid on this, like, Hey guys, just if you’re a new seller, get all this in a row. If you haven’t done something, do this. Or can we say about the whole inform act stuff? Yeah.

Chris:

And I can do that pretty quickly and concisely. The Inform Act is did not result in a giant batch of suspensions. That’s one of the feel good stories of 2023. We did hear from some sellers suspended, we did work with people to iron that out. It was a fixable problem in most cases. Some sellers, I think, were slow to react to the Inform Act and didn’t get their paperwork straight, didn’t get their documentation consistent. And some people panicked, appealed the wrong way. That’s typical of suspensions. Most of them were able to get it resolved before they got suspended. Some people had to do it after they got suspended. But account verification suspensions are kind of what the Inform Act stuff morphed back into. And verification and identity verification is with us forever. Amazon’s trying to improve their KYC, their know your customer procedures.

Chris:

Even they were even doing that before the Inform Act was passed, and there’s a good reason why they’re doing it. And there’s a good reason why banks have been doing more to bolster their KYC procedures. That’s just the age we’re living in. Know, your customer is something that every platform, every business, everyone needs to pay close attention to. Because if you’re not paying attention to who sellers are in the marketplace, example, then you, Amazon could be exposing their buyers to actors, bad actors, or misleading misrepresented business owners. And it reflects badly on them and their reputation for managing the marketplace. So yeah, as long as you understand that verification procedures are serious and you’re not really loose with your documentation, you understand that everything in Seller Central has to match up with the documentation you present, whether it’s your name, your address bank statements and so forth. You should be. Okay.

Bradley Sutton:

Tell us a little bit more about the seller Velocity conference coming up. Like the last year, Carrie went, I wasn’t able to go, so this is gonna be my first time. So I’m just interested what, what I can look forward to. I know what I’m gonna be talking about, and I’m gonna be presenting, but I don’t know. You know, like how many people are, are you expecting. What kind of activities you have, et cetera.

Chris:

Yeah. We’re expecting right around a hundred people, which is what we do. This is our, this is our fifth incarnation. We’re going back to New York City this year. That’s where the first one was in 2018. I’m sure you’ll have lots of info in the notes about it. It’s a two day event. We have a networking heavy event on the second day of the event. The first day is the conference, so-called Conference day, which will be in Midtown Manhattan. We got great speakers like you. I mentioned Joe Kovac earlier. We’ve got Janelle Page, who a lot of people in the community know she’s gonna be our MC this year. So you won’t have to listen to me J Drone on and on. You can listen to Janelle, who’s a lot more exciting to listen to than I am.

Chris:

But the theme this year is going to be optimizing performance as a means of driving your brand’s growth on Amazon or beyond Amazon. And we focused on this this year because we’re really seeing that competition, competition, at least on Amazon, is unprecedented. You have to have such a tight game now. You can’t afford to learn as you go. You can’t afford more than a certain number of mistakes per year, whether it’s in your ads, whether it’s in your account, health management whether it’s in ASIN creation, listing content and detail page content. You really have to have a well-rounded, highly tuned game all the time. You know, we even have started telling people in terms of their communication strategy with Amazon to start writing drafts of potential appeals they might have to have in place just in case lightning strikes.

Chris:

So you won’t be left scrambling trying to figure out how to escalate, how to appeal for reinstatement. Again, not being caught unaware and rolling back on your heels when account health calls you or compliance teams come knocking on your door. Have the game plan in place before things happen, because I can guarantee you some of your competitors are thinking that way and they’re worried about things maybe before you worry about them, or they’re planning for a rainy day before there’s a problem. It doesn’t have to be a problem with Amazon directly. It could be a problem with a competitor who’s really savvy, who knows how to game the system, who knows how to make you look bad, let’s say. Or they simply know how to make themselves look better than they’re supposed to look because they are getting away with padding their reviews or something like that. Those things matter. Those things directly impact sales rank. So those are the types of topics and many more that we’ll be covering this year.

Bradley Sutton:

Cool. Cool. All right. So guys, if you want to register go to h10.me/velocity, h10.me/velocity. What about, you know, another thing that I kind of wanna put a lid on, because I always hear just conflicting things is, you know, from Amazon even and that’s the matter of multiple accounts. I think everybody understands that, whether they get approved from Amazon or not you gotta have different bank accounts and different entities, and there’s gotta be a reason, you know, and stuff like that. But then the differing thing where people talk about is, oh no, you don’t need to ask Amazon permission anymore. Just go ahead and do it, and it’s all good, and you’re not gonna have to worry about it. Now, I mentioned this just ’cause literally last night, somebody at our company at Helium 10 she’s been wanting to start her own Amazon business, and then somehow her name was, I don’t even know, like she was never an admin on this other account, but we had a company account, like a company, it wasn’t even the Project X account.

Bradley Sutton:

I don’t even know what account this was, but she got her new account shut down saying, oh yeah, we think you’re the same as this person. So on one hand I’m like, well, if this is not even an issue anymore, and it’s not even the same, it wasn’t like, you know, with her social security number or something, she had started another account, or I mean, it, it was just that she worked for a company, Helium 10 that had this other account. To me, it’s still an issue then of, of this whole multiple account thing. It’s not something that just, you know, you can just be, yeah, lemme just start seven accounts, and I don’t even have to ask Amazon. Like, is this just a outlier experience or do you still need to be careful when starting new accounts?

Chris:

It’s true that you don’t need to ask for permission in the old days. Back in my Seller Performance days, you had to ask for permission until Seller Performance. Granted it not Seller Support, Seller Performance, the team I used to work on had to give you written permission. Those are the old days. Basically, they didn’t want a deluge of emails asking them if they could have, you know, spend time looking at whether or not it was justified. So they basically said, here’s the policy. You need to read it, understand it, and make sure you don’t violate it. If you do violate it, we’ll come knocking on your door. But here’s the policy. We think it’s clear. Of course sellers might disagree how clear it is. What they’re mostly interested in is not seeing a competitive advantage. Like if you have two accounts selling the same type of products, maybe not the same exact brand.

Chris:

If you have the same ASINs on two accounts, the same brand on two accounts, then it looks like you’re just trying to create multiple storefronts so you can game the system and have a competitive advantage over somebody that has one seller account. That was the intention of the policy going back to my years of the company. And that’s still the core piece that they’re most interested in in terms of seller compliance. What a lot of sellers were doing wrong was they thought, well, as long as I have an account with a different LLC and a different email address and a different, bank account, well then the rest of it doesn’t matter. They weren’t thinking about is this a competitive advantage over another seller or not. And of course, the Amazon’s interested in having a fair marketplace. It’s not a fair marketplace if one seller has a competitive advantage over another, number one. Number two, all the copycats will come out and do the same thing. If it works, if Amazon lets anything go, anything goes, it’s you. They’ll slide by anybody. Then everyone’s going to do it. And then you start getting into, I mean, we already know that a lot of accounts based in China are run by people who have dozens or hundreds of accounts, right? The message that your coworker or staffer got, I assume it wasn’t about being related to a suspended or blocked account. It only mentioned multiple accounts.

Bradley Sutton:

Yes, I believe so. I didn’t see the message, but that’s what it sounds like.

Chris:

Probably a mistake. They’re not really sending those messages that much anymore. Again, that’s kind of what–

Bradley Sutton:

I thought too.

Chris:

Yeah. That’s sort of another feel good story of 2023. People probably think we’re always talking about dark clouds and bad news around here. No, that’s the second good story is that they have rolled back multiple account enforcement, and I did some digging into it again, 10, 12 days ago when I was in Seattle. And I realized that a lot of investigators at Amazon, I think were sending that message in error. They were kind of grabbing the wrong dropdown, and in a lot of cases they meant to send a message about related accounts, but that was for related to a suspended seller, which is totally different than multiple accounts. And some investigators at Amazon were mixing and matching and confusing the two, which is alarming because those are two totally different concepts.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah.

Chris:

For whatever reason, those mistakes are being made, I think most people in your audience, and, and most people in the Amazon seller community will tell you that they’re seeing that message less and that’s a good thing, and it’s the right thing.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Alright, cool. Now let’s switch back to the other thing we kind of alluded to about like black hat, you know, things, like every year, the main thing is, is is different. There’s been, you know, black hat for themselves, they use brushing, and then as far as attacking other sellers, there’s, hey, you know, they, they find listings where you know, in the past where maybe in other marketplaces they didn’t, or in their market, their home marketplace, they didn’t fill all their flat file out, right? So they’ll hop in on some foreign marketplace and throw some adult keywords or health claims or something to get them all suspended. What’s in 2023? What are sellers having to deal with where they end up having to, you know, maybe even get your help or it gets them in big trouble with Amazon before they get it fixed. Yeah,

Chris:

And I’m glad you brought up the international marketplaces, because it’s not only just using illicit backend keywords in other marketplaces that you don’t sell in, but also rights, ownership issues. People who research and figure out that you don’t have a trademark registered in Canada or in the uk creating listings for your branded products in those other marketplaces, because they know that if you submit an IP claim without the trademark registration in that region, Amazon won’t accept it and will reject it. They might even punish the brand owner for submitting an unsubstantiated IP claim. This is one of the big deals in 2023, is we’ve heard from a lot of brands who had their brand registry revoked for submitting false or unsubstantiated IP claims. And there’s, that’s a huge topic we could talk about, you know, 40.

Bradley Sutton:

I like that. I mean, that might sound like, oh, this is bad news, but oh my goodness, how many messages have I seen in Facebook groups where it’s like, yeah, you know, like, I just got this message, and then I’m not really infringing, but Amazon just is telling me, oh, no, you gotta get the person who did this claim to revoke it. But it’s like that person is maliciously even doing it in the first place, so of course they’re not gonna revoke, you know, so it’s like this vicious circle. So it’s kind of good news what you just said.

Chris:

Yeah. I mean, it’s kind of a good news, bad news. Obviously. The bad news is if you are not legally aware or trained and you start submitting IP claims all over the place, which has been a problem for a while, right? A lot of brands had brand registry revoked because they were submitting false counterfeit claims against resellers that they couldn’t recognize or identify without doing test orders. And, or they would just send a note to Amazon, these people aren’t authorized to sell our products, so we want you to take ’em down. So here’s a counterfeit complaint, or here’s a trademark infringement complaint. They didn’t understand what they were doing. Or even worse, they were hiring a law firm that was helping them submit illicit IP claims simply because they wanted to collect more legal fees for something trendy, which is really scary.

Chris:

But of course, Amazon doesn’t punish the law firm you hired, they punish you as a seller, and the buck stops with you. You have to understand where these rules and policies are. So the good news is we finally succeeded. I think people like you and me and others getting the word out, don’t shoot first and ask questions later. Amazon tends to punish you for that. Make sure you do things the right way, right? If you want to deal with unauthorized sellers, control your distribution channels you know, you talk to people like Joe Kovac, who’s one of our speakers at Seller Velocity this year in New York. But also you just make sure you go one step at a time very carefully before you make any claims that could get, you, get your whole account suspended for submitting illicit IP claims or get your brand registry revoked. So we’ve seen fewer people coming to us with that problem, which means the word is successfully getting out this year.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. So based on what you’re seeing around there, what are some just maybe tips that you can give to sellers out there on stuff they need to be a little, a little bit more careful about than before, or perhaps do something completely differently than before? It could be about any aspect of Amazon or even a Walmart, but what are some of the signs that you’re seeing and how should sellers pivot a little bit?

Chris:

Yeah, and I think one of the issues is understand that either your agency or your consultant, or you have to have compliance people somewhere in your ecosystem that know the policies and know local laws, because you’re not going to be able to make excuses later if you, you, and it’s also, it’s not just listing content, it’s also the info on your packaging. We’re still seeing people put offending language or violation language on their packaging itself, and sometimes they have to pull all of their items out of FBA when they make those mistakes. It’s only happening for people that haven’t thought about it before they created the packaging or before they created the listing, or before they hired people to do that sort of stuff for them. Understand that from Amazon’s perspective, that’s a you problem, not a them problem.

Chris:

They don’t think it’s up to them to tell you all the laws, all the policies. I mean, they post on the policy pages, but they think it’s up to you to understand what compliance is, right up to whether or not you have to hire an attorney to explain it to you. And I think people understand now that they’re going to lose out on a lot of sales to a lot of competitors if their competitors have their compliance act together and they don’t because their listing’s going to go down and go down for longer, and they might have to incur the cost of withdrawing inventory from FBA. And if their competitors had that all sorted out before they even went live with the product, then they’re, they’re losing sales rank too. The longer you’re down for an account I’m sorry, an ace in suspension, the other guys are beating you on on sales rink as well. So you might have all this inventory, you can’t sell, right?

Bradley Sutton:

Any, anything going on with reviews of late, you know, like the buyer seller messaging getting blocked, you know, I remember, that’s kind of old news already. But you know, like some people didn’t realize, Hey, I can’t send an email and click the request to review. Or I couldn’t infer that they give me a positive review, right? And now I can’t, you know, do messages or, or Amazon gave me a nasty note because they didn’t like my insert card, right? Anything new in 2023, we kind of like, similar to the last few years, similar

Chris:

I still see people who have five stars across their, the top of their insert that’s considered asking for a five star review, even if it’s unspoken or unwritten. Don’t have five stars at the top. And just, the only thing I’ve seen lately on inserts, just if we’re talking about inserts, is stay away from the, are you happy or, you know, do you have a problem with the order? Contact us. Here’s how you reach us. No problems with your order. Do you mind leaving us a review? Stay away from that language that’s still considered out of bounds. I’ve heard from a lot of people who buy from competitors and show me their inserts or show me whatever free gifts and discounts they’re doing and, you know, report that stuff because that shouldn’t be going on anymore. I know it’s discouraging when you open a seller support case or you send emails to the abuse prevention teams and they don’t answer, or they, unfortunately, sometimes Amazon responds and says, we took a look at what you sent us and there’s no violation here, so have a nice day.

Chris:

I mean, it is discouraging when they do that. That’s not the end of the story. They’ve done that with our clients too, and we still manage to get that done and get that reported because those sellers shouldn’t be doing those things. So just be careful. Just because your competitors are getting away with stuff doesn’t, you know, two wrongs don’t make it right. It doesn’t mean that you should be trying it too, and it doesn’t mean it’s allowable any more than looking at a detail page live on the site that shows somebody doing something and believing that it’s permissible because you see somebody doing it at any given moment. I can look at any detail page on the site and find a violation. All it means is it hasn’t been reported yet and it hasn’t been Yeah. Actioned yet.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. If you’d like to reach out to Chris to get some more help, you know, just go to hub.helium10.com. You can type in any search right there, ecommerceChris, and then just type in ecommerceChris, anywhere on the interwebs, and you can definitely be able to reach out to him. I keep telling, you know Leah, we need to make a ecommerceleah.com as well maybe, even if it’s just a forwarding link to e-commercechris.com. We’re gonna have to work on that. And

Chris:

A big thank you to you, Bradley, by the way, and Helium 10 support for this year’s conference has been wonderful and enormous and very positive and encouraging from many of many Helium 10’s teams and members. And it’s refreshing that you guys are still creative and that you’re open-minded and that you’re interested in creating new and different kinds of content, not just on this podcast, but also for in-person events. Because without you guys, this year’s Seller Velocity conference you know, would not be possible. So we thank you again for co-organizing with us and co-hosting.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome. Thank you so much for having us, and I’ll be seeing you there in a few weeks. Thanks. And definitely we’ll have you back on for the fifth time next year.

Chris:

Great.

#486 - Walmart Seller Application, COMP Errors, & Tips For Account Suspensions

Let’s dive into the world of successful Walmart-selling strategies with the latest SSP episode! Join Carrie Miller and her guest, Jake Lebhar Co-Founder and COO of SellCord, as we explore key topics such as his company’s remarkable experience managing an impressive portfolio of 250 brands on Walmart, and the burning question: Is everyone cut out to sell on Walmart.com? Tune in for invaluable insights into navigating the application process, including expert advice for sellers whose applications face rejection and application tips tailored for international sellers.

Discover Jake’s expert recommendations for launching a product on Walmart, unravel the mystery behind COMP errors on Walmart and gain a comprehensive understanding of dealing with account suspensions and compliance issues inside the Walmart marketplace. Don’t miss out on Jake’s personal journey and takeaways from the Walmart Open Call, as well as pro tips for using the Helium 10 Xray tool for Walmart. Learn about new advertising features and placements on the horizon, and dive into Jake’s top-notch advice on conquering the Walmart marketplace. Wrapping up, find out how to get in touch with Jake Lebhar and SellCord, rounding out an episode brimming with practical strategies for thriving in the Walmart marketplace.

In episode 486 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Carrie and Jake discuss:

• 02:13 – Jake Lebhar’s Backstory
• 02:59 – Managing 250 Brands On Walmart
• 05:21 – Is Everyone A Good Fit To Sell On Walmart.com?
• 07:55 – Advice If Your Seller Application Is Rejected
• 11:42 – Application Tips For Sellers Outside The US
• 13:38 – Q: What Do You Suggest For Sellers Looking To Launch A Product On Walmart?
• 15:14 – What Is A COMP Error In Walmart?
• 18:46 – Talking About Walmart.com Account Suspensions
• 22:27 – Getting A Hemp Product Inside Walmart.com
• 24:20 – Is It Too Late To Sign Up For Walmart Open Call?
• 25:01 – Jake’s Walmart Open Call Experience
• 28:03 – Helium 10 Xray Tool For Walmart
• 28:16 – Tips For Launching A Brand On Walmart
• 29:38 – New Advertising Features And Placements Coming Soon 
• 30:07 – How Can I Deal With Compliance Issues with Walmart?
• 31:03 – Jake’s Top Tips On How To Succeed In The Walmart Marketplace

► 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 on the podcast, we are talking with Jake Lebhar from SellCord, and he’s gonna be sharing some strategies for sellers who maybe applied to the Walmart marketplace and got rejected. We’ll also talk about COMP Errors as well as what to do if you get suspended from the Walmart marketplace.

Bradley Sutton:

How cool is that? Pretty cool I think. If you guys would like to network with other Walmart sellers, make sure to join our brand new Facebook group called Helium 10 Winning with Walmart. You can actually just search for that on Facebook, or you can actually go to h10me/walmartgroup and you can go directly to that page. So make sure to join, you can tag me and Carrie with questions, and ask questions of other Walmart sellers or even share your own experiences in that Facebook group.

Carrie Miller:

Hello everyone and welcome to the Serious Sellers Podcast, brought to you by Helium 10. My name is Carrie Miller and I’ll be your host. And this is our winning with Walmart Wednesday show where we come live once a month and we answer all of your burning Walmart questions and we give you lots of great new up-to-date information about Walmart. Thank you all so much for joining me again today. I’m really excited ’cause we have a really special guest today from SellCord. His name is Jake Lebhar and he deals with a lot of of the questions that I get often about you know, count suspensions, COMP Errors, how to get your account activated if you were rejected from Walmart. So we have a lot of really good information coming from Jake today, so I’m really, really excited about that. So I’m gonna go ahead and bring him on.

Jake:

Hey guys, how are you Carrie?

Carrie Miller:

Good. How are you doing?

Jake:

Thank God. Easy. Wednesdays, this Walmart Wednesdays is perfect, you know.

Carrie Miller:

Yeah. I’m really excited to have you on today, especially because I’ve had you help me with some comp barriers and just some difficulties that I’ve had and I’ve also kind of referred a lot of people to you to help you know, get everyone going. So I’m pretty excited to talk with you about these things today. I’m gonna start with some questions. Maybe Jake, could you just tell us a little bit about yourself and, and your whole kind of Walmart journey?

Jake:

Yeah, I’m Jake from SellCord. I’m one of the co-founders here. I work with David Millstein and Michael Lebhar, which, you know, I’m sure the listener, some of them, you know, may have seen them. They have been on quite a few webinars and Freedom Ticket and whatnot. So yeah, I started in the e-commerce space when I was 13 years old as a seller. Up until 2018, we were just selling on Amazon. We ran into issues with one of our accounts with an account suspension on Amazon actually. And that part we weren’t able to get solved, so we really moved to Walmart. At that time we had one of the first few, like 3P accounts, you know, in Walmart. So we just started spending all our time there and there were very few sellers we were sharing our sales with, like one piece sellers.

Jake:

We were selling fitness products. Covid came along and then it flew off the shelf. And yeah, ever since then we basically we started off managing a few, you know, relationships that we had in the space. We managed their Walmart accounts and in 2020 we just branched out, you know, started SellCord. And since then it’s been a crazy ride, basically launching and scaling brands on Walmart. You know, currently we’re managing over 250 brands on Walmart. You know, some clients, you know, are doing, you know, just 10% of their Amazon sales. But then we have, for example, a brand that does 750k a day on Walmart, just to give you an idea in furniture. Yeah, there’s a lot of opportunity, there’s especially a lot of opportunity for the 3P brands right now to come in and kind of take their share of revenue from all those one p sellers that have been on Walmart for a while.

Jake:

And I think that’s what people really need to understand that yeah, Walmart isn’t exactly where Amazon is right now, but there’s so many markets where you can just come in and take your fair share and also establish yourself as an early settler on Walmart. So I’m always really excited and that’s why I do a lot of sales every day and, you know, hey, telling people about the opportunity that there is on Walmart. I always wish I would’ve launched more products in Amazon in 2013, and that’s kind of what I compare Walmart to right now. So that’s a little background to me and what I spend my time with everything for my whole day spent on Walmart, and it’s really exciting, you know, how quickly they’re growing.

Carrie Miller:

Yeah. Did you say was it a 1P seller that’s 750 K a month? No, this is Marketplace

Jake:

Actually. This is Marketplace.

Carrie Miller:

Oh, marketplace. So a third party, 750k a day.

Jake:

Yeah. Just to give people like the extended idea that there is, there are some categories like that, like furniture and stuff, which are massive in Walmart. And then there’s also, you know, some categories which yes, in the average, like if someone would want me to give an give a number, it’s usually about 10%. You know, like you’ll hear around, it’s usually about 10% of what you can make on Amazon, but that number is growing every month with how quickly. You know, Walmart’s growing, so I can be sitting here next year and saying it’s 30%. And I wouldn’t be surprised literally if Walmart’s growing, you know, that quickly. I’m very definitely very optimistic about it.

Carrie Miller:

Wow. That’s very encouraging. ’cause People are always asking me about, you know, how much there, you know, opportunity there is. And I guess it really depends on the effort you put in. I think that’s really the bottom line is how much do you wanna make on Walmart? That’s where it is. So I guess that kind of leads me into another question is, do you think that everyone is a good fit for Walmart? And like, you know, who do you think has the best chance at success for, you know, doing, like, getting to the point where you’re doing 750k a day? Like, what, what do you think, what have you seen?

Jake:

So there are more niche categories that aren’t built out, you know, in Walmart, like they are in Amazon. I do think everybody is a fit, but some are more of a fit than others. Meaning that if you have a more niche product, you know, that, you know, the search volume isn’t, you know, that high or you see that the category’s just not, you know, it’s not competitive. You just see, see a few sellers selling your product and then just random listings of other products not related. Yes, the category isn’t that big in a Walmart for certain, you know, the niche products, but it’s definitely worth listing the product. And for most products, even the more like niche products, you should be able to at least bring in a few hundred units in sales a month if you really launch a properly. And even if like for the main keyword, you know, you’re not able to bring in a ton of sales, there’s always other ways that you’re able to bring in traffic through advertising.

Jake:

I think a lot of times people kind of limit the opportunity at Walmart by looking at just the search volume, by just the Walmart search volume. When really, and Carrie, I know you spoke about this before, there’s a lot of searches that come from just Google and most of the Walmart searches come from Google, come into Walmart that way. So there definitely is, you know, opportunity for these niche products, even if it looks like, you know, sometimes the market isn’t that great. And yes, for the more niche products, sometimes it can only be about five to 7% of your, you know, Amazon sales. You know, depending on, you know, how good your Amazon store is, obviously. But on the most part, you know, you always have a decent amount of potential to come in there with. And you never know, which niches pick up, you know, really quickly.

Jake:

I’ve seen some niches and I’m always auditing different, you know, products and everything like that, that have just, you know, grown because, you know, shoppers are just starting to get used to shopping those products on a Walmart and you know, obviously Walmart started off by like, you know, their grocery and that’s what they’re really known for. But once you know, customers and shoppers are starting, you know, getting used to, Hey, I can also find this and I can find this. And they’re just seeing a lot more of a variety now those niches are opening up, so you never know exactly when it’s going to like open up and when you can hit 10%, but if you could already hit 5-6% right now, or 5-7% right now, why not launch it and, you know, get yourself to the top of the page and it’ll be a lot cheaper right now to get yourself to the top of the page. Yeah. You know, with your efforts and your advertising and everything like that. So yeah, there are, you know, there are more niche categories, but it’s definitely worth for everybody to go, you know, into the game.

Carrie Miller:

Yeah, I agree with that. So what advice would you have? I know there, I get this question a lot, like maybe in the last two or three years somebody has applied to sell on Walmart, but they were rejected. What advice do you have for them and is there, is all Hope lost or like what do you recommend for them?

Jake:

So yeah, this is a subject that I’m very familiar with because I’m talking to a few sellers a day on this that, you know, have been, you know, rejecting a Walmart and we’re probably getting like 40 to 50 accounts at SellCord accepted a month. So let me just explain a little more. Yeah, it’s, it’s crazy. And I’ll just explain a little more of the background of how the Walmart application process works and what’s going on, you know, in Walmart, so unlike Amazon where you could just easily open an account, everyone knows with Walmart there’s a bunch of like nightmare stories where people have tried to open accounts and then, you know, for three, four years they just haven’t been able to get in contact. They’ve tried getting new contact and they can, so I’ll explain kind of what goes on, you know, behind, you know, the Walmart applications.

Jake:

So obviously Walmart’s getting thousands of applications a day, like from Amazon sellers, right? Just this past year there’s 40% more sellers on Walmart than there was last year. 40% more 3P sellers. So just to give you an idea of how many applications they’re receiving now, they’re verifying every business and there’s a few things that they’re looking into every business. But at the end of the day, any regular Amazon, or not even Amazon, any regular, you know, business has a good, you know, proper tags, documents that, you know, that everything matches their address matches and everything like that, they’re able to get an account at Walmart. It’s not like Walmart was a few years ago where it was, they were looking really into the SKU count, the amount of revenue that they’re really not that like picky anymore. They’re just taking on a bunch of sellers right now.

Jake:

They just wanna make sure that, you know, verified seller. Now there are different reasons, and I’m not gonna sit here saying I know all of them ’cause at end the day that is the trust and safety department, and there are, you know, different reasons why they will reject, you know, an account. Sometimes that information doesn’t add up. There’s one thing that they saw that looks a little off, and a lot of times they’ll just end up just looking at the application, not approving it right away. So they’ll put in the archives and then, you know, that’s it. Once it’s in there, there’s no way to contact Walmart. You know, there’s no way to get any information in it, and you’re kind of just like left in the dark because they put your application in archive. I’ve seen sellers that make 30-40 million dollars a year and their application, there’s an archive and you know, it’s not like, you know, Walmart’s a corporate company.

Jake:

There’s a lot of people working there. It’s not just like, you know, they’re, you know, you can just reach out to somebody like, oh, you’re a massive brand, you know, we’ll take you in. You know, you have to, once the, once the once the applications are on the archive, it’s kind of impossible to reach ’em. So you really have to work with one of the Walmart partners, whether it’s myself or, you know, there are a few other partners that definitely, you know, have contacts with Walmart or Walmart directly. Honestly, if you meet Walmart or show Walmart directly, you can also, you know, speak to them. But with working with a Walmart partner like us, we usually, you know, have the contacts, you know, in Walmart that are able to take the application out of archive and basically show the trust and safety team, oh, here’s the documents.

Jake:

And they basically find the issue that was in the application. So, you know, maybe this one was the address didn’t master document they provided, or there was this, you know, they wanted to confirm that the business is actually operating out of this state, or one or two, you know, small things they need to confirm. And then, you know, they’ll just approve it. And, you know, our applications, you know, when I get, you know, people coming to me with applications, we usually get them within that week just, you know, approved. It’s just some back and forth information with Walmart and that’s it. But that’s just how the Walmart game works right now. It’s kind of like having something on the inside just basically taking the application out of archive and making new live on Walmart. So yeah, it’s definitely different than the Amazon process.

Carrie Miller:

Yeah. And I have sent some people over you to you who were rejected and they were able to get on, so that’s true. You, you have to have somebody who has the access to Walmart to be able to get you back and reinstated or have your application reviewed again. So that’s, that’s really good information. And I know I’ve also sent some international sellers your way. So what advice do you have for international sellers who want to sell on Walmart? Any kinds of tips or insight information about international?

Jake:

So international, I know there’s like, and I have quite a few people in my inbox that keep asking me like when their countries are gonna be added because you know, right now it’s just like, you know, UK, China, India.

Carrie Miller:

Japan

Jake:

Japan, Canada, and then the other ones, there’s one, there’s one or two.

Carrie Miller:

Mexico.

Jake:

Yeah, Mexico. And then they are adding all other countries and hopefully, you know, within the next six months to a year, you’re gonna see a lot more added on. Right now they just, you know, started like with the main ones. So you know, for those, you know, for those countries that you have obviously, you know, sign up, why not, you know, ready, you know, get moving with it. If we’re talking about is the question also what sales are, you know, like Walmart, Canada sales or Walmart, Mexico, or are you just saying for those international sellers on Walmart.

Carrie Miller:

The international sellers on Walmart? I know you guys have helped somebody, I think from Israel who was like, he was selling millions on Amazon, but he couldn’t get, his products were already on Walmart by other dropshippers, but he couldn’t get on and you guys helped him.

Jake:

Yeah, because a lot of times the international sellers and those accounts, they’ll get flagged because their IPs and everything like that, especially Israel being, one of them, Walmart’s seen a lot of and that’s my hometown, you know, just seen a lot of like, just activity that they don’t like from Israel or just a lot of applications being submitted. So certain countries, sometimes they just, you know, they have a harder time, you know, accepting applications from those. So definitely, you know, you know that that’s where you have to, you know, basically go through the back door and, you know, we have to go in there for you saying, Hey, you know, this is a good brand. We go to Walmart saying this is a good brand, they’re serious about scaling, this is the brand, no questions about it, you know, let’s get them going.

Carrie Miller:

Okay, very good. And I think this question kind of goes along with it. What do you suggest for sellers looking to launch a product on Walmart? Is the keyword research tool with Helium 10 a good start? Or like what do you recommend? I know you guys have launched some new products like just for Walmart, so what advice do you have?

Jake:

So I do plenty of audits you know, for new brands coming in, and I’m always using the Helium 10 tool, there’s no question about it. Obviously there’s that abstract traffic, which is, you know, hard to always, you know, to estimate, but I found un 10 very accurate. I’ve crosschecked it on multiple, you know, accounts that we manage and the X-ray tool’s working well as well. So I can definitely speak for that. And I wouldn’t if, I would’ve if the sales were off, but I definitely crosscheck it across many of our accounts and it’s pretty much accurate. So you use the X-ray tool as well as the search volume tool. If you kind of like, you know, spend some time on on both of those tools, you’ll be able to get a good idea of what your category really is like.

Jake:

And then, you know, part of it is obviously logic and, you know, common sense, like the larger products right now, you know, the, the more general products are gonna have a higher search volume, and that’s what you’ll find. So being that I’ve done like so many audits by now, I can kind of, you know, throw out a product to me, I can kind of tell you, you know, with just guessing around how much the search volume is and you know, how big, how many of the product, you know, you can sell on Walmart. So once you start really just spending a few hours in Walmart and, you know, using the Helium 10 tools, you kind of get a good feel of what categories are like, what the search forms, like, what the sales are like in comparison to Amazon. You know, all the tools are really there for you. So use the tools and you’ll have an easy time figuring out what potentially you have.

Carrie Miller:

All right. And the next question I have for you is about COMP Error. So what, like, what happens if you get a COMP Error? What is it? What does that mean?

Jake:

Yeah, so Walmart’s still trying to figure out their COMP Error, you know, process, and it’s definitely not as quick as Amazon where they have, you know, internal SOPs of every single thing that’s, you know, should be prohibited. And that’s not like on Amazon, I’m sure if you list many products, you know, right away if you have the wrong keyword or whatnot, they’ll flag you in a second. On Walmart, many times you can have your product listed for a few months and then out of the blue they’ll give you a COMP Error just because the system, you know, found something all of a sudden. So because they’re still building out their processes, this is just one of the annoying, you know, processes that, you know, affects accounts where, you know, they’ll add in a few new keywords, may be into their you know, COMP Errors, you know, system, whatever it is that’ll say, okay, you know, whoever has these keywords in their titled in their anywhere in their copy, you know, will get flagged and then all of a sudden a whole bunch of listings, you know, throughout Walmart will get flagged for those products.

Jake:

And then you have to, you know, take out some keywords sometimes, so there’s no exact guide on, you know, which on what to remove or, you know, which keywords are flagged like internally at SellCord, we always, you know, keep a document of like, which, you know, keywords and everything like that can, you know, can be flagged and which products usually are the most common and everything like that. I think it’s pretty much, I haven’t checked Amazon’s like comp, you know, process or prohibited products and everything like that, but I’m assuming it’s pretty much similar to Amazon’s. But yeah, what I do know is you just have to go back and forth with them and it, and it does take time to get a response from them sometimes to respond in a week or two.

Jake:

It’s not gonna help bumping up the case 50 times because that’s just Walmart’s support right now that that team is growing and they’re figuring it out. You know, they work hard at Walmart, it’s just that they’re growing at a rapid rate right now. So it’s just, you know, certain processes, no matter how much money you have as a company, takes time to build out, right? So yeah, randomly you’ll have listings that’ll get flagged for compliance and you just have to play around. And also, once again, use common sense and try to figure out which keywords, you know, would be maybe the ones causing the issues and then re-upload and re-upload the listing or a lot of times it even works, you know, if you are able to use another UPC for the listing, just re-uploading under another UPC and a lot of times you won’t get the error on that next listing. So first try taking out like some keywords that you think may be problematic after that, if that doesn’t work, maybe even try listing the product again under a new UPC.

Carrie Miller:

Yeah, I know with, with mine it was a keyword that was forbidden and it’s pretty much what I think you should do is if you take Amazon, there are some forums that have, people already have kind of discovered a lot of the forbidden keywords on Amazon. They’re pretty much the same on Walmart. Things like antibacterial, antimicrobial, all those kinds of things. Like they’re called like basically pesticides on Amazon. So what I remember what we did is we just deleted some of these forbidden keywords out of my listing and it just went live again within 15 minutes. So that is you know, something that they don’t even tell you. So I was trying to open a case and open a case and I don’t know what a COMP Error is, but and then when I reached out to you and you were like, oh, just take out those words, it went live immediately and you didn’t, I just closed the case. So Yeah,

Jake:

A hundred percent. Yeah, I remember searching up the Amazon you know, the Amazon like you were and being like, okay, it makes sense, you know, if we have one of these, it makes sense, Walmart’s going to, you know, shut it down as well.

Carrie Miller:

Yeah. so here’s another question. What happens if your account gets suspended and are some account suspensions, you know, permanent? Like what advice do you have for account suspensions?

Jake:

Okay, so Walmart or like, I don’t know what it is about like Sundays or something like that. Like in the be of the week, a lot of accounts will get suspended before Monday. I don’t know if Amazon works that way as well. They have like, because they keep, you know, changing around their metrics and like, you know you know, really, you know, put, putting their foot down on different metrics. Obviously the most common ones are, you know, just being on top of your shipments, late shipments, invalid tracking rate and then like too many cancellations. Those are the most common ones. And then here and there you’ll find like, you know, for like other reasons, but those are the most common ones. Walmart’s a lot easier about their standards, their seller performance standards.

Jake:

It’s not like Amazon where, you know, you have to freak out if you miss a message within 24 hours. And Walmart just started putting those metrics into place. But like, I haven’t seen an account suspended, you know, because you know their response times and everything yet. So most accounts will get suspended just because they either have some API that’s just shooting in a bunch of inventory that they don’t have and they’ll have a ton of canceled orders or their shipping templates aren’t set up correctly. And they’re not shipping orders in time and or just invalid tracking. A lot of times they’re not uploading tracking if, you know, they don’t have the right tool connected. So those are just the most common reasons and Walmart were to suspend accounts for those. So what to do when you have an account suspension you put an appeal together just like you would on Amazon, and a lot of times they ask for the invoice of the goods, just the invoices for the products, let’s say that were canceled to make sure that you guys basically, that you have them in stock, make sure to always provide that on the first appeal.

Jake:

I was actually just on a call right before this webinar with an account that a suspended account and their, in their first appeal, they didn’t include all the invoices. And now their second appeal is, is taking a lot longer for Walmart to look at. They will always look at your first appeal really quickly, and these days, in most scenarios, they’ll respond literally the next morning. So you want to give them all that good information in the first appeal. If you don’t give them all the information they need in the first appeal, it could take a lot longer to hear back the second time around. Once it gets to like the third appeal, meaning, you know, you’re submitting something for the third time and they denied the past two. It just lengthens out the process and could take a while before you get your account back.

Jake:

You can always get a suspended account back. It’s impossible to get a terminated account back. Terminations usually happen after, like an account is suspended for like four times, like four extensions or something like that. I haven’t seen that many terminations ’cause it’s very uncommon, but it does happen here and there. Or they’ve terminated a few accounts for like shipping products via Amazon fulfillment service and this and that. So I always warn people about that, like, people are still trying that funny business. It’s like, yeah, it’s like, no, you’ll save a lot more money by just returning the goods from Amazon, paying Amazon for 35 cents or 50 cents whatever return fee and then chipping it into Walmart. Like, don’t try that. But they’re very quick on their suspensions. Recently it’s like, you know, it used to take weeks to hear back from Walmart these days it’s like seen many accounts suspended and you know, we, we have an account reinstatement service, so we’ve gotten many accounts like by the next morning they’ll back in live on Walmart.

Jake:

So very important. You’re just very careful about the first appeal, basically. Yeah.

Carrie Miller:

So if you, if you need help with that, you can reach out to cell cord and they can take care of that. I do know you’ve gotten some people up that have sent your way. So that’s very helpful. Let’s go ahead and get into some of these questions here. I think I’ll go with this one first because, and I have a little bit of an explanation for this. Carrie’s having a hard time getting a hemp cream of mine on Walmart. Even Walmart giving her the runaround. If you can help her get it on, I’ll treat each Novo. I actually have made some progress in this. The hemp thing, once I put it on, I got a COMP Error for the hemp listing and then I was able to get past it and it was reinstated because I was able to prove, you know, there’s other products just like this that are selling at Walmart. And then I tried to get it into WFS and it was kind of taken down again and they were like, no, you can’t sell this product, you can’t do anything. But I was recently able to get it so that I can sell it and so we can ship the product. So basically fulfilled by the, by merchant kind of shipping. We just can’t fulfill it through WFS. Have you seen this kind of thing before?

Jake:

So you actually have more of an update than me on that. I’ve seen so many issues with hemp right off the bat. I was gonna say really hard to get a hemp product through. Yeah. I know that there are ones live and people always come back to me with that and I’m like, Hey, listen, you know, they may have listened to Walmart a little before and gotten it through. I think I even saw it in their guys specifically. It’s like, no hemp products, but like you’re saying, there you go, that’s a wall. Great workaround that like, you know, try listing it. You’re probably not gonna be able to send it to WFS, but like, you know, the fact that you gave them that was like good enough to push your listening through. And I’m not saying that’ll even like work for everybody but I know they’re very strict on hemp Walmart.

Carrie Miller:

Yeah, I was actually told by support to stop contacting them, they told me to stop contacting them, that was the final answer. So then I went directly to Walmart and they were able to give me the go ahead to sell it fulfilled by merchant. There are same products that are being sold on, on Walmart. So they’re 1p I think mostly that’s why they’re shipped by Walmart. Yeah. Okay. So kind of a rough one. Okay, so another one, this is from Bradley too. Is it too late to sign up for Walmart Open Call?

Jake:

Yeah, I just ended like, I think it was someday last week.

Carrie Miller:

Are you guys going to open call again this year?

Jake:

Yeah, we’re gonna be at Open Call and more importantly next week we’re gonna be right next to you guys by Walmart Seller Summit. That’s gonna be exciting.

Carrie Miller:

Yeah. Very, very cool.

Jake:

It’s gonna be really exciting.

Carrie Miller:

Do you, can you share what products you’re going to Open Call for? Or is it secret?

Jake:

Oh no, not at all. We have like fitness products and everything. That’s how we got ’em, you know, originally Michael, my brother has a nutrition two by four nutrition brand that they got into Walmart stores nationwide, you know, after they launch a marketplace. So it’s pretty cool. We’ve gotten a lot of brands recently, and it is why, you know, brands will come to us sometimes they don’t even care about marketplace sales. They just want to get into Walmart store, sorry, Walmart stores. So it’s a whole other side of Walmart. If you want to get into Walmart stores right now, you have to launch a marketplace and the buyer has to see that you’re basically getting your products, you know, to the top of the page or optimized properly, and they’ll notice your products. Like if you ask a buyer in the Walmart category, like, you know, if you tell ’em about your product and they’ve seen your brand a lot they’ve seen you sponsor, they’ll be like, oh yeah, I know you guys.

Jake:

And that’s a great way to get it into Walmart stores. And we, we have gone many brands in this past year and to Walmart stores, brands that are just mom and pop, Amazon shops and they’ve gone into Walmart stores, which is huge, right? So it’s a really cool part of Walmart that, you know, Amazon doesn’t really have where, you know, you’re not looking, and again, there’s no Amazon stores looking to get into, but Walmart retail’s huge and because of their emphasis that they’re putting on marketplace, you know, they’re putting a lot on the line for that. So they’re saying, Hey, you know, any new brands you wanna come into our stores launch a marketplace for us. So that’s a really cool side of things.

Carrie Miller:

Yeah. Are you guys going in for the latest four by four product, or would that automatically get invited to the Walmart stores? ’cause I know that you guys just launched another four by four product.

Jake:

Two by four products.

Carrie Miller:

Sorry, two by four.

Jake:

That’s Michael’s that’s Michael’s brand. So I don’t know exactly as much where they’re holding on the launch. I don’t know if every SKU’s in or whatnot, I’ll have to check with him on that. But I know we’re always, like some of our clients are going down with their products you know, that they, they’ve launched a marketplace, let’s say, for the past year or two, and, you know, they’re going down with their products and, you know, presenting them as well.

Carrie Miller:

All right. Let’s see, let’s go down here. So we’ve got Jake, are we saying SEO needs to be more optimized in a way to pull the right SKUs and volume to show it during a search that a shopper lands on the, I don’t know exact, do you know what he’s saying?

Jake:

Tell me if I’m wrong, but I think he’s just saying that you need to, and you need to optimize a Walmart listing for– It’s basically even for, for some main keywords that you could find in the space, even if it’s not directly like, related to the product. So sometimes we’ll do that where we’ll give up a little on like, you know, exactly what we wanna say the product is in order to get it in a larger space. So you know, let’s say Bamboo cutting board, you wanna put in the regular cutting board space? Well, you’re technically gonna have the cutting board keyword, but I can give an example off the top of my head, but yeah, sometimes, and I think this is his question, but you want to find whatever keywords, you know, are somewhat relevant to the product to, you know, get in that space because it is, you know, easy.

Jake:

Right now, it’s relatively easy to launch in some spaces in Walmart where even if you know your product isn’t exactly related to the, to the main keyword, you can still make a lot of sales off that. So it’s really case by case. You have to know, I guess, which product it can be like too irrelevant or else, you know, just, it’s gonna be, you’re gonna have a low conversion rate, but here and there, yes, we will like, use a larger keyword that’s maybe not exactly like the product, but, you know, maybe bring in some extra sales.

Carrie Miller:

All right. Somebody else said, is there a way to get the X-ray tool for Walmart working to the Platinum plan? We do, I think have some uses of, for the Platinum plan, but mostly Diamond is where you’re gonna get full access to, you know, unlimited access to the Walmart tools. So if you do wanna sell on Walmart, I would recommend going to the Diamond Plan. David, ask any tips for launching a nutrition brand on Walmart?

Jake:

Yeah. Launch sooner than later. That’s really, I mean, we could talk from today to tomorrow about all the Walmart tips and everything like that, but there’s just, like I said, there’s 40% more sales on Walmart this year, and there’s thousands of sellers coming in every day, literally into Walmart right now. So we know how competitive this space is in Amazon. And right now Walmart is, you know, not even a quarter of that. So you want to get in for nutrition specifically because, we’ve seen how quickly the nutrition game came up with Amazon, where, you know, in the be, you know, 2014, 2015, you had like–

Carrie Miller:

Yep.

Jake:

Nutrition brands, and now every day there’s a new one coming out. So yeah, get a head start, basically. If you wanna go more into details, yeah, it’s just more, you know, it’s starts with the listing optimization advertising. Everything has to be strategic because there are a decent amount of sellers in the nutrition space already that are putting in the proper work. So, you know, you wanna basically get ahead of the game right now. And there’s new advertising tools that are, you know, coming out constantly, sorry, not tools, but just like Walmart’s offering, you know, like video ads, you know, it’s coming out and there’s a few more, you know, a few more ways, especially nutrition brands can use to, you know, to advertise on Walmart. So launch now, basically. Yeah.

Carrie Miller:

Do you know when the video ads will be available to everyone?

Jake:

They say by the end of this year, so Okay. Anytime within the next few months hopefully. Yeah,

Carrie Miller:

I saw that there’s also brand stores as well in beta.

Jake:

Yeah. Brand. Yeah, that’s the most exciting one. Yeah, but also search brand ads, right? SBA search brand ads, you know, that’s also, but yeah, nutrition, you gotta launch ASAP because ASAP just being more competitive. Yeah, it’s a competitive space.

Carrie Miller:

All right, last question here. How can I deal with compliance issues causing my listing to get unpublished?

Jake:

Oh, that’s David over here. Look at that. Yeah. How can I deal with compliance issues causing, okay, so this, David, you should have been there at the beginning of this. If they’re getting unpublished once again, just like the compliance issues that we were, you know, talking about before you have to number one, you know, try to find the certain, the keywords that are wrong, just to recap your, trying to find the keywords that, you know, maybe causing it, you know, to, you know, to get ’em published. And then, you know, if after that, and if you’re trying for a good, you know, I would say two months, cap it at about like two months of going back and forth with Walmart and not finding out which keyword it is, then try a new listing. For now that’s what I would do.

Carrie Miller:

All right, perfect. All right. I think we’re about done for this episode, but I was wondering if you had any last tips or anything that you wanted to say to the people who are listening. We have about quite a few people listening right now. So any tips or anything that you didn’t get to say that you wanna tell people?

Jake:

Yeah, sure. I mean, let’s talk about Walmart in general. We see the traffic that’s coming into Walmart now. You know, I’m gonna be meeting Carrie by the show next week where Walmart is coming down with their whole executive team, I mean the CEO of Walmart, CEO of Walmat US, head of e-commerce in Walmart marketplace, just to show. And they’re all coming down for this show. It’s called Let’s Grow. Just to show you how much they’re putting in behind their marketplace. So when a company that big like Walmart shows you, you know, that they’re putting that much behind their marketplace, you know, that they’re spending whatever ad dollars to get more shoppers on the marketplace, you know that they’re fixing up their platform in whatever ways to get more shoppers. So they had, they grew 28% in overall sales this past year, which is a nice number.

Jake:

They’re the fastest growing marketplace, and by next year, they’re definitely gonna even beat that number. So we’re looking at, you know, the next few years of tremendous growth from Walmart. I know Walmart has been around technically as a 3P marketplace since 2018. And here and there, I’ll get a settle. It’ll be like, yeah, Walmart tried, it didn’t work. It’s very simple. This is the first time they’re actually putting proper effort into it. Before they were trying to, like, they started off maybe using Jet and Shopify, they realized none of that will work, and they’re just taking their own approach and they’re handling everything themselves. And that’s why it’s been working right now. And this past year it’s seen tremendous growth and it’s just gonna be crazier from here. So I remember, like I said, back in 2013, I was watching the first YouTubers putting out their Amazon content.

Jake:

So this is it right over here. You know, this is the first like Walmart content, and I know there’s a reason Helium 10 is investing a lot, lot in it, because the earlier you get in, you know, the more opportunity there is, and it doesn’t cost a lot to launch a Walmart right now. You know, take a bit of that Amazon revenue, you know, profit that you’re making and launch it into Walmart, and you’re setting yourself up to be one of the top sellers in whatever category you are, whether it’s niche, more, you know, really competitive category. If you are just detailed and on your game and optimizing listings, optimizing your ads, figuring out the new Walmart ways, you know, the new Walmart promotions that may be eligible for you, just doing all the, like the nitty gritty stuff, that’s how you’re going to, you know, get to the top of the page in Walmart, be one of the top sellers.

Jake:

If you’re like the other 90% of sellers of Walmart, they just list their products and wait for it to sell and don’t put any work behind it, nothing’s gonna come of it. And then you’re just gonna have that same outlook on Walmart. Oh yeah, just, I make, you know, 2% of my, of my Amazon sales. There’s no point to spending any time in it. Just like Amazon took time to build up. Walmart’s gonna take time to build up. So final tip, put in the work, now’s the time. All opportunities are in the timing right now, so now’s the time and, you know, start, get down and dirty. You know, with the, with the Walmart stuff, which aren’t that easy, we know how much errors and issues could come up. So if you’re one of the few sellers that fights through that, you know, then you’re gonna, you’re gonna win, right? If it was easy, everybody could do it. Spend the time and now put in the effort now, and I guarantee you’ll see results and especially over the next few years as Walmart grows that, you know, the numbers will just keep scaling.

Carrie Miller:

That’s really good advice. Yeah, I definitely agree. Put the effort in now and start now. So, well, thank you so much for joining us. I think you gave a lot of really good insights for questions I get all the time. So I’m really glad we were able to do this episode and talk to you since you’re an expert in these areas. So thanks again for joining us and we’ll see you. I’ll see you next week at the Walmart conference.

Jake:

I’ll see you then. It was a pleasure being here.

Helium 10 Buzz 8/24/23: TikTok Banning Amazon Links | Walmart Sales Booming | Amazon Influencer Videos

In this episode, let's explore the hottest news in the Amazon, Walmart, and E-commerce industry: From TikTok's plan to ban Amazon links and sunset Shopify integration, Amazon's influencer video offer, to Walmart's surging online sales. Discover new Amazon listing requirements, Etsy's diversification efforts, and Amazon sellers sentenced for price fixing! Learn about Solana Pay's Shopify integration and catch the replay of the Amazon data webinar. Plus, learn how to download your reviews inside Amazon with this week's training tip. Tune in to the latest episode of Helium 10 Weekly Buzz hosted by Bradley Sutton, Helium 10’s Director of Training and Chief Evangelist.


► 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

#485 - Amazon Search Query Performance & Product Opportunity Explorer Deep Dive

Today, we have a special Serious Sellers Podcast episode where we recap our latest fireside chat with Amazon. Our guests are Francesca Smith and Julia Hiltzik, Senior Growth Consultants at Amazon, and they are members of the team behind Brand Analytics, Product Opportunity Explorer, and Search Query Performance! And for the first time ever, Amazon is “opening the hood” and letting us know how these data points are collected and used. Tune in and learn how you can leverage unique Amazon data points in conjunction with Helium 10 to level up your business.

In episode 485 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley, Francesca, and Julia discuss:

• 00:28 – Why This Is A Special Episode
• 01:26 – Search Query Performance Brand View
• 04:27 – Search Query Performance ASIN View
• 05:10 – Search Query Details
• 06:50 – Search Analytics Search Volume Is Now Denormalized!
• 09:10 – What Counts Towards Search Volume
• 11:05 – What Does Not Count?
• 12:00 – What Counts For Products With Variations?
• 15:10 – Difference Between Helium 10 And SQP?
• 17:30 – How Is Search Query Score Calculated?
• 19:00 – How Does Product Opportunity Explorer Work?
• 21:26 – Product Opportunity Explorer: Search by Keyword or ASIN
• 23:12 – Product Opportunity Explorer: Keyword Niche
• 24:40 – Product Opportunity Explorer: Search Terms Tab
• 26:58 – What Is Unit Sold Data Based On?
• 27:45 – Download Feature Now Available In Product Opportunity Explorer
• 28:30 – Niche Details: Insights
• 30:15 – Niche Details: Trends
• 30:56 – Brand Analytics x Helium 10
• 34:39 – Search Query Performance x Helium 10
• 37:15 – Q&A with Francesca And Julia
• 41:20 – Get Your Tickets For Amazon Accelerate 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:

Today’s a special episode as we’ve got reps from Amazon, from the departments that are responsible for Brand Analytics, Search Query Performance, and Product Opportunity Explorer, opening up the hood for the first time, these super cool metrics and answering all your questions about them. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.

Bradley Sutton:

Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host, Bradley Sutton. And this is the show that is our recap of our Fireside Chat that we had with Amazon. Now, these are the people at Amazon who actually work in the departments and are responsible for Search Query Performance, Brand Analytics, Product Opportunity Explorer. And for the first time ever, Amazon is kind of like opening up the hood and letting everybody know like how these different data points are to be used. So this is definitely something that is gonna be very informational and we wanted to make sure that you guys got the best highlights of it. For those of you who missed the our live workshop keep in mind that if you have questions after this send them in our serious Sellers podcast Instagram account, because we’re gonna try and do a follow-up event where we go over all of the unanswered questions that you might have after today’s lesson. So let’s go ahead and hop right in to this Fireside Chat. Now you work for Amazon. Can you go ahead and you know, tell us what your title is there, how long you’ve been there, et cetera?

Julia:

Yeah, so my title at Amazon is a senior growth consultant. I’ve been at the company for about a little over two years now. And I get to work with our awesome analytics tools that you were just talking about. So excited to be here.

Bradley Sutton:

Talk about what we’re seeing here a little bit, Julia.

Julia:

Yeah, so this is a screenshot, I believe it’s from your Project X account for Manny’s Mysterious Oddities Coffin Shelf brand, the famous coffin shelf. So you can see we have where the customer starts and where they end going from impressions, clicks, card ads, and purchases. And in this case, just to clarify, purchases means orders. So what’s really cool is you can see for each of those four metrics what your brand count is, or how many of each metric your brand’s ASINs received versus Amazon as a whole or total count. So you can start to really get a sense of what mark your market share is for a specific search term over different time, sorry, over different timeframes. You can also see where the customer’s dropping off across the funnel. So in our case, you know, if I’m adding to my cart and not coming back to it, I might drop off before I see purchases show up. So maybe you have high click share, but a customer isn’t necessarily transitioning to adding your product to their cart. You can start to think of different strategies on how to entice them to move forward, you know, towards a purchase. Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative> maybe it’s a coupon, maybe it’s getting more defensive with your ad campaigns or even just optimizing your detail page to include certain buzzwords that customers are searching for.

Bradley Sutton:

I know some of you guys that don’t have big screens right now, maybe it’s gonna be hard for you to see the number, but those of you who can see it take a look there at the top. This is what we had opened up before. Do you see how the number one keyword was coffin shelf? Right? You see there under search query volume, it says that there are 4,000 searches for this keyword, and my brand had 9,000 impressions. Now, of those 9,000 impressions, if you look on the right hand side, you’ll see that buyers clicked on one of my brand’s products about 220 times. Okay? And of those 220 times, only 30 people added it to their cart. Now, if off screen, you can’t even see it here, if you scroll to the right from there, you’ll be able to see how many purchases I had from those 220, or from those 30 adds a cart. So this is for my brand as a whole. Now, this is the brand is Manny’s Mysterious Oddities, I have like five or six different coffin shelves and a coffin tray and other spooky items in there. So this is showing me this kind of level of information at the hole, but what other view do people have an option to see?

Julia:

Yeah, so you can also switch to the ASIN view to see which we did earlier actually. And you can see which are driving the most engagement for you. So you’ll see a similar format to the brand view, but at the ASIN level, so you can drill down to see how each of your products are performing. Another difference on this view is that, which is really cool, you can see now that each search term has a, has like a hyperlink. So if you click on one of those, you’re going to be able to see the top 10 ASINs with their actual number of impressions and clicks for the selected timeframe, which is data that we’ve never shared before.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay? So we can see that here, like, like take a look guys. So this is, this is, you can only click on the word. So everybody, I hope you guys are doing this with me. I hope you still have your window open. So if you were on the ace in view, you’ll see that all of the search terms have a hyperlink. Now just click on one of those and this is the window that should show up. Does everybody see the search? And see who were the top 10 products that had activity for this keyword? And if you see here, I’m not number one, but something interesting here that, again, I understand that you guys probably can’t see if, unless you’re looking on this on a big screen, but I noticed there was one competitor here that only had 3% of the impressions, alright?

Bradley Sutton:

3% of the impressions, and they had 200 clicks, 200 of the clicks, all right? That means their click share was 10%, despite only having 3% of the impressions. So people are loving this product right now. Take, compare that to mine, where I had more impression share. I had 4% on one of these products, but I only had 6% in the click. So these are the kind of insights that you’ve never been able to to see before. Now, us, a while back, there was actually a big change in the numbers that were shown in Search Query Performance. And then there was a message across the screen that said, Hey, this is used to be normalized and now it’s de-normalized. So can you talk a little bit about the search volume that we see in Search Query Performance and what this whole normalized and de-normalized? I mean, I think we already know that. I’m like, I’m the de-normalized one ’cause I don’t purchase and I’m kind of weird, but I don’t think that’s what we’re talking about here.

Julia:

Yeah. So within the 24 hour period, we count all search queries by the same customer. And what this means is that if a customer types in dog brush if they enter it into the search bar, again within that same 24 hour timeframe, the search volume will count as two. Whereas before it would only count as one. And there are some other nuances as well. If a customer searches for, again, dog brush and they click through to the next page of search results, or if they hit the back button, this is also going to add to the total search volume.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, hope everybody caught got that. That was very important. You know, so, so you know, th th you know, like if you’re using Helium 10, you might see a number that’s a monthly number that almost is the same as, or very similar to the weekly number. So you might be think, wait a minute, thi this monthly number must be off because Amazon is showing that this in a week, it gets this almost. But remember what the, the Helium 10 data is normalized. All right? So does, did you guys understand what she was saying? Like when you type in dog brush, that’s one search. And then let’s say I click on a product and then I click back well, there, there’s another search all of a sudden. Now what if I go to page two of the search results? Well, guess what?

Bradley Sutton:

There’s another, another search right there. So it’s just a different, it’s not that one way to look at search volume is right and one is wrong. It’s just one is de-normalized, one is normalized. ’cause Different people have different viewpoints on what they wanna see. But with Search Query Performance, the number that you see includes all of those different scenarios. Now next question. You know, if, if we go into the search results, you know, I I could see one product maybe like seven times, right? You know, it could be the sponsored brand headline ad. It could be a sponsored brand video ad. There’s an organic placement, there’s a sponsored product ad. Maybe there’s the, the highly rated like little widget and maybe there’s some sponsor display here or there. Now we’re going over now all of the top questions that, that you users had submitted for what is going on in Search Query Performance. So the one of the top questions is, is what, which of all of these placements counts as an impression that Search Query Performance is, is counting?

Julia:

Yeah, there’s a lot going on on that first page of search results. So both organic and paid placements are included in Search Query Performance in that impressions number it’s the same as I, like you were saying, shows up twice. So once sponsored, once organic, it will count as two. So it’ll count as two impressions. Also mobile app, any views or purchases on mobile are counted. And then in terms of pages, there is no concept of scrolling. So if the page is loaded, the ASIN will be counted as impressed. The customer has to click on the subsequent page for those ASINs to count in the report. So within the mobile app, infinite scroll is actually still using that pagination logic, but it’s just hidden from the customer. So when the customer’s scrolling to the bottom of the screen, when they reach page two, the results will be counted as they would on the desktop when a customer clicks on page two. And then lastly, just as a clarification point multi-unit purchases. So if I put three dog brushes of the same Asian in my cart and buy it are counted once, so that would be counted as one order, so not as three separate units.

Bradley Sutton:

Excellent. Excellent. Guys, I hope you understand the fire that’s being given right here. Like, this is stuff that Amazon has never fully explained in their documentation. This is like a historic moment here. Amazon is opening up the hood and letting us know what goes into this. Like all if all of a sudden, like, you see Julia’s camera go off me, it means she’s maybe giving us too much information. Her bosses are like, yanking her away, but let’s keep going here with this stuff before that happened. So that’s what counts. Now another question that a lot of sellers were having was, what are the things that don’t count for impressions and purchases et cetera?

Julia:

Yeah, so we don’t include paid ads shown in widgets, like what you’re seeing on the screen here, like highly rated climate pledge friendly new arrivals, as well as Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Video Ads. We also don’t count purchases that originate from search, but occur after the customer clicks a link to the PDP. So if it’s from the brand store or like from the related products, from a different detail page,

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, that makes sense. Alright, now another question that comes up and that I’ve always had too is variations. Because now this opens up a whole other can of worms here. Let’s say I type in a search, I click a listing that has variations, be it color, be it size, whatever. But then when I click into it, it’s maybe the red one or something. But now I go in and I click on the black one or the blue one. What happens then?

Julia:

Yeah, so this is a little tricky and I’m gonna do my best to explain it, but basically the child ASIN has to be clicked from the search page to be counted as a purchase through search. So the impressed ASIN has to be purchased for it to be considered as a search attributed purchase in SQP. In the case that we have pictured here, child ASIN A or the gray T-shirt would have one impression and one click if I click on it when it comes up in search, but zero purchases if I decide to go with a different t-shirt color child ASIN B or the red T-shirt is a variation of child ASIN a. So if I decide to click on this color and purchase it, it would have zero clicks and zero purchases since it didn’t show up and search and get the original impression.

Bradley Sutton:

Interesting. Okay. It’s a little bit complicated, but I think overall I hope it may makes sense to most people now though in some categories I don’t think I have this in for the coffin shelf, even though I have variations, but I know in some categories in the search results you can actually, while still being on the search results click through to a different variation, like in this little mini carousel kind of thing. So in that situation, how does Search Query Performance work?

Julia:

Yeah, so there is a nuance where if a child ASIN is impressed, but a different color or pattern is clicked from a search page that child ASIN child will receive the impression. So for example, if I search for red bedsheets, we can see on the screen that this ASIN has multiple colors that you can click on. So if I click on the blue color, the blue ASIN will actually receive the click, but the red ASIN or what appeared in search results will receive the impression.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Now how does the brand level, not the ASIN level, but the brand level search crew performance report account for a customer who clicks through to a product page for a Brand Parent ASIN, let’s just say, but then they purchase a different ASIN from the same brand, from that same page. So we were talking about the ASIN level here, but what, how does it work when we’re looking at that brand report?

Julia:

Yeah, so it’s the same logic if a customer clicks through to the detail page for Brands Parent ASIN, but then purchases a completely different ASIN from the same brand. So brand is an aggregation of ASIN level data. So if a brand has two ASINs A and B and the impressed ASIN is A and the purchase ASIN is B, the metrics are computed independently for each ASIN and then aggregated or rolled up to the total brand level, which is what you would see on your brand SQP report.

Bradley Sutton:

Got it, got it. All right. Next thing, another question that users have is probably the most common thing that as soon as this came out, everybody was saying, Hey, there’s no way this is right. You know, like the purchases seem way too low. Like for example, what I’m showing you guys right here in the screenshot I have Helium 10 atomic, what I use for my PPC management, and I just did a date range of eight six to eight 12. And just in PPC, you know, forget about my organic orders just in PPC for the word coffin shelf or for the search term coffin shelf. Amazon is saying that I got six orders, but then if I look for the same exact date range in Search Query Performance, it’s saying that overall organic and sponsored purchases, I only got four. And so e everybody else, you know, has a very similar thing where it’s like, wait a minute, this doesn’t even match with what my Amazon advertising is saying.

Julia:

Yeah, so that’s a great question and probably the most frequently asked for sure that we receive. So search for your performance attribution is currently only 24 hours. So you will see a difference between SQP and your advertising reports, which does have a longer attribution window. We are looking to update this in the future to show a more consistent view. However, for now, let’s say you received a click and add to cart ad from advertising one of your sponsored products campaigns but the customer left the product in their cart and not like you, Bradley, only checked out and they, you know, they checked out or purchased it four days later. So you may actually see that attributed sale in your advertising report, but you won’t see that reflected in Search Query Performance since it’s outside of the 24 hour window. So I know it’s a little confusing right now, but definitely something to note.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, that kind of makes sense. You know, the attribution window, the action has to be taken guys within 24 hours. So, you know, if, if I search for something and I’m clicking, I’m adding it to cart and that all happens like at the same time, those are all counted. But then if I just leave it there and I still purchase it the next day, even if it was just 25 hours later, it’s actually not going to count in Search Query Performance. So good to know. Alright, next question is on the left hand side, the very first column after the search term itself is this column entitled Search Query Score. Alright, so how is this calculated and is this like the reason why sometimes keywords might fall off of our Search Query Performance list?

Julia:

Yeah, so I actually saw a question in the chat about that earlier. So glad that we’re addressing it now. The keyword score the Search Query Score is calculated for each query based on impressions, clicks, card ads, and purchases count. You know, the four metrics we don’t share the calculation externally, but

Bradley Sutton:

I thought you were sharing everything with us today. What’s going on here? Hold them back on us, Julia.

Julia:

95%.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Okay, that’s cool. Sorry, go ahead.

Julia:

But basically the higher the number of impressions clicks, card ads purchases, collectively the higher the keyword score, and then we use the keyword score to rank the queries based on performance. So essentially, to answer your question, yes, this would be the reason why you may see a search term one week, but not the next. We only show within the brand view the top 1000 theories in the selected timeframe and top 100 for ASIN view.

Bradley Sutton:

Francesca is gonna be talking about product opportunity explore. But before we get into that, please introduce yourself to us how long you’ve been at Amazon and what’s your title, et cetera, et cetera.

Francesca:

Yeah, so my name’s Francesca Smith. I am a Growth Consultant at Amazon. Work really closely with Julia and the Product Opportunity Explorer team. I’ve been with Amazon for about five years, so most of my time actually has been spent working with some of these seller central analytics tools, so really excited to be able to share more about Product Opportunity Explorer and Brand Analytics.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome, awesome. Yeah, I see here on the slide here it has a little section about customer searches. Now you guys, as in the Opportunity Explorer team, kind of like take it to a different place than just a Search Query Performance. So can you talk about how you group these, et cetera?

Francesca:

Absolutely. I can definitely walk you through that. So very similar in the search funnel description. Earlier, customers tell Amazon what they want when they enter search terms to find their next purchase. So we’re taking that same search data, but there is a clustering component to it. So essentially what we’re doing is combining those similar search terms and those top click products to group them into product niches. And so we’re looking at the top 90% of click and purchase products coming from the search terms. So from there you can take a look at these niches and understand more about what customers are looking for and identify any other opportunities for improvement. And then last–

Bradley Sutton:

Oh, hold on really quick. Hold on really quick. Did anybody catch something she just said that is new? Like, she kind of just like completely glossed over it, but it, but for those of you who have been using Product Opportunity Explorer, she kind of like slid something under the radar there that is new Robert’s Got it. Steve’s got it. Okay. Yeah, Helen’s got it. Yes, 90%. Like before guys what Product Opportunity Explorer would be based on was 80% of the market, but they just like slid that under the radar a couple of weeks ago where it’s now 90%. So anyway, sorry for interrupting. Go, go ahead and continue.

Francesca:

Definitely excited to reveal that. Yeah, so I think really from here we’re taking the same concept, being able to review what are those search terms, what are those top clicked and purchased products representing the top 90%. And from there, sellers can use this information to understand where they can potentially launch new products, discover potential for new products, as well as how to optimize their own listings.

Bradley Sutton:

Here, I entered coffin and this is showing the matching niches for coffin. Now we’re gonna talk a little bit later about what exactly makes up a niche, but Francesca, what if instead of a keyword I entered an ASIN?

Francesca:

Yeah, so if you enter asin what we’ll end up sharing here is a Target ASIN, which is the ASIN that you just entered. And then we’ve also got similar ASINs that are gonna be in the same bestseller rank category as yours. And we’re also going to order them based on the relevance to the title as well.

Bradley Sutton:

Cool. Now guys, here’s just a quick hack. Quick hack here of how you can use this information. Let’s say, you know, a product and its variations have been in stock the whole year, never went outta stock. You know how Amazon reports BSR at the parent level, you know, not at the child level. So you never know which one is a good seller unless you, you know, use the other hack of using Helium 10 review insights to look at who has the most reviews. But another way to, to kind of estimate which color is selling the most is you enter that any of the ASINs into Product Opportunity Explorer. And then as you can see here, the top ones are almost always going to be the other variations. And if they were always in stock for the last 360 days, you could see kind of which one is probably the sold the most. Like the black one here got 22,000 clicks, and then the pink and the purple only about five, six, 7,000 each. And so that’s just like another way of getting estimations on how much each child item in the variation is. Let’s go to the next kind of view here. And this is a a keyword niche. So if I were to click into one of those keyword niches that, that came up, and I’m gonna go to this page now again, talk about how you make a keyword a niche.

Francesca:

Yeah, so what we do is we take a look at groups of similar search terms and check out what are those top clicked products that represent the 90% clicked and purchase products. So that’s actually what you’re looking at here on the products tab. Those top 90% of clicked and purchase products after customers might enter coffin shelf. If you wanna see what those similar search terms are, you can actually look at that in the search terms tab as well.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, so, so guys, this is actually a kind of cool way to see the domination or the non domination in certain niches. Like if there’s only five products that you see in a keyword niche, that means that those five products make up 90% of the sales. And so those five products are absolutely crushing it? So it might be, you know, some people might view that as opportunities, some might view it as the opposite. There, there’s, there’s no one way to look at things, but then you look at a niche where there’s like, it’s made up of 200 products, well, that means it takes 200 products to get to 90% of the sales for that niche. So, so just that in itself, the number of products that show up here is an insight. Keeping going here on this, this topic of the keyword niche, this tab is a different tab. This is the the search terms tab that make up this niche. So how, how, what goes into to this getting, getting search terms into this page?

Francesca:

Yeah, so these are going to be the search terms that are going to have a really similar search to purchase funnel. So you’re going to see coffin shelf, coffin bookshelf these are similar terms as coffin shelf, and we basically share with you there that search volume, the search volume growth, and the top three clicked products. I think a lot of times if you haven’t taken a look at this page, search conversion rate is often missed as well. So you can really see what are those successful search terms and maybe study these over time to see where you might need to transition in terms of discoverability.

Bradley Sutton:

Absolutely. Now just for those who didn’t notice this a few weeks ago or a few months ago, Amazon changed the Opportunity Explorer Search Volume to 100% match the Search Query Performance one. So if you see a number in Search Query Performance, it, it’s based on the same exact de-normalized data that you would see in Search Query Performance here in Opportunity Explorer. Now really quick, this page, I’ve talked about this before a year ago, something on this page inspired a Manny’s mysterious oddities product. So I noticed that a lot of products were getting like 1% and such conversion rate, you know, like coffin shelf, but then this keyword coffin bookshelf was getting like 0.1, like less than 0.1%, meaning that people were not finding what they were looking for. They were searching for it, but not clicking into it.

Bradley Sutton:

And so that told me that the market was kind of bare for this product, and so that’s why we made a coffin bookshelf and, and started killing the game with it. But that original idea for the product came directly from Product Opportunity Explorer. So that was a good, what did you say?

Julia:

I love hearing that.

Bradley Sutton:

Yes. She gets she gets a little bonus check from Amazon every time somebody says, says something like, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll need a little bit of a commission on that. All right. Now, now that was a good overview of these tabs here. Now one of the tabs there, it had shown something that said units sold. So where does that unit sold come from?

Francesca:

Yes. So again, taking that same concept from Search Query Performance, this unit sold data is based on when customers purchased products after entering the search terms. So it is a search to purchase conversion sale that is counted. And we are also following the same logic there as Brand Analytics. The sale only counts if the customer searched one of the search terms and made a purchase in the first 24 hours. So that same attribution time window is the same as Brand Analytics logic.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, perfect. Perfect. Now, a couple questions came in already about this. We’ll get to the questions later, but is this available for download or through the API only?

Francesca:

We are very excited to share that we have just launched the download feature in Product Opportunity Explorer. So you can download data and Product Opportunity Explorer in five different places. You can download the niche view, the ASIN view of the search results page and then when we go into those niche detail pages there we have the products tab and search terms tab. I think the most popular download that we’re seeing right now is on the search terms tab. So definitely take advantage of that. And then we also have one more download there on the product deep dive page where this niche product appears in.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome, awesome. Speaking of the niches, this page here, Niche Details insights. Now, what are a couple of highlights from this page? This is something we haven’t shown people yet.

Francesca:

Yeah, so on this page what we essentially do is provide some high level statistics about this niche. So you can see starting from that top line, which we will get this update here, here to show you that it is top 90% of clicks and purchases. But we’ve got, you know, from today, 90 days ago and 360 how many products have existed in this, in this niche. So you can track, you know, how many entrances are coming in, in and out. We also have the what I think is really important and what we heard from sellers when developing this page is they wanted to understand how many products and brands were representing the top five or, or 20. And so you can see we have the top five and top 20 product and click share displayed. This page can also tell you a little bit about the maturity of the niche.

Francesca:

We have things like what is the average brand age selling partner age, and then probably my favorite part of it is the customer experience, which is that bottom section there. In addition to seeing that star rating tracked over time, we also display average out of stock for this niche. And I think this is one of those really simple ways to identify if there is unmet demand. If there’s a consistent high out of stock there, you’ll, you probably do have some opportunity to to meet unmet demand there. And then it’s a little bit cut off on this slide, but we also have the listing quality score so you can get a sense for how these ASINs are, are doing in terms of their listing quality, you know, title, image, detail page. That’s a really easy way to differentiate yourself if you’re taking a look at that.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, cool. Another page we didn’t show was this trends page. And this is cool because of all those search terms that are in that niche. This aggregates that data and, and shows the, the overall search volume week by week. Alright, week by week it’ll show the search volume and then it actually so shows the product count as well. So this is kind of interesting. You can kind of see like over time, well that 90% metric of how many products it takes to the niche, you can kind of see is it going down, you know, going down, meaning that, you know, there’s a few products that are starting to dominate a little bit more, or is the number of products going up, meaning that it’s kind of like wild west in this niche as far as who’s dominating the sales.

Bradley Sutton:

Those of you who have a Helium 10 Diamond account, I hope you are using the Brand Analytics. We talked about Search Query Performance which is inside of Brand Analytics. We talked about Opportunity Explorer. Some of this stuff you need to start using in conjunction with each other. Like if you go to cerebral or magnet, if you have a Diamond account or above, you are gonna be able to click on any of these keywords and see the, the top click and purchase share that comes directly from these data points we’ve been talking about today. And why this is beneficial is because sometimes combining Helium 10 data with what we talked about, it gives you a next level of insight. Like, for example, if I was looking at these coffin letter boards, I could see that to be the top clicked in October of last year, for example, it was almost all about organic rank.

Bradley Sutton:

Like the, the other top two click. They weren’t even in the top, you know, they weren’t even on page one or two of sponsored ranks. But sometimes you’re gonna see trends where the sponsored rank is more important, like for our coffin shelf, if you look at Brand Analytics, you see, hey, coffin shelf is the number one most clicked product for this keyword, but then you look at the Helium 10 data and we’re only 12th or organically, but we are number one. So then now all of a sudden I’ve got this insight, well, wow, for this keyword, I really have to make sure my sponsored rank is at the top because it looks like people are buying from the sponsored ad on the top row as opposed to the organic rank. Another keyword might be something totally different, but again, you need both the Search Query Performance and Brand Analytics data and then combine it with the Helium 10 data, which like I said, if you have the Diamond account, you’re going to be able to do.

Bradley Sutton:

Another thing that you guys can do is on, you know, even people on the free account of Helium 10, you guys have the search widget. When you go on the widget for BSR on any Amazon page, I suggest looking at your top competitor, right? Look at your top competitor and find when they had, they were just crushing it in sales, you guys should know that it’s the valleys of A BSR, the lower the BSR, that means the higher the sale. So I’m looking at this one competitor and I can see that, oh my goodness, like in July they had this crazy dip in BSR, so they were just probably selling like crazy. They had another crazy dip in like November, you know, during the holiday season where their sales just kind of skyrocketed compared to what it was normally.

Bradley Sutton:

So there’s the Helium 10 data, and now I go into Search Query Performance or Brand Analytics, either one Brand Analytics, if it’s not my competitor, if it’s my product, I would look at Search Query Performance. If it’s my competitor product, I would run it in Brand Analytics. And then I go into the daily or weekly history for this Amazon data point that correlates to this exact time that they had a big peak in sales. And now I can see where were the keywords that they were one of the top clicked for that day or for that week. So another situation where you combine Helium 10 data and then now take it back to Brand Analytics and get some additional insights. Another thing that we just opened up again for Diamond members is the time machine. So I could, instead of just looking at Brand Analytics, who is the top three picked?

Bradley Sutton:

If I noticed that there was somebody crushing it in sales in the month of September, 2022, well I can enter them into Cerebro and now I can hit this historical function where I click on a month like September, and now I know all of the keywords that they were ranking for, all of the keywords that they were running sponsored ads for. Another way that you can combine data Search Query Performance, this is, this is directly from Amazon. This is what we were looking at. I can see here that coffin shelf, I had about 4,000 or the, not I, but Amazon had search volume of 4,000 for the week, and I, as in my product had 4,000 impressions. So as you guys learned from Julia, that means that pretty much every time that somebody searched for this product, my product showed up once on the page, right?

Bradley Sutton:

But take a look at this coffin decor, it had a very similar search volume of almost 4,000, but look at my impressions, there is only 704. So if you see this in Search Query Performance, you are like thinking what in the world is going on? Why is my impressions to search volume one-to-one on this keyword, but it’s like one to five on this keyword. What’s going on? Well, this is where again, you now take it to another Helium 10 tool keyword tracker and take a look here, this is coffin shelf. You could see that for my sponsored rank and my organic rank, most of the time I was towards the top of the page, it was going off and on. And so it make, it makes sense that at least one of these times, every time somebody searched, I was near the top of the page on those times.

Bradley Sutton:

But then take a look at that other keyword, coffin decor, look at my organic rank and my sponsored rank, my organic rank. Most of the time I’m on like page two, page three, sponsored rank. Only half of the time I’m on page one. So now all of a sudden it becomes clear what I’m looking at in Search Query Performance of why I’m getting so few impressions. It’s because my organic and sponsored rank, which are the two things that Search Query Performance is taken into consideration. It’s not high. So now, you know, for, for my sponsored rank, I can just snap my fingers and increase my bid if I wanted to and, and go to the top of the page. And hopefully over time that might help my organic rank. These are just like two three of the ways where you can combine what we’ve learned today with Helium 10 data and then really getting to understand what is happening with your products on Amazon or what is happening with your competitor products. So make sure to use this especially if you’re a Diamond, you have a Diamond account, you’ve got full access to all of that. Ahad says it’s not a question, but more of a request. Hey, can you add the parent ASIN option in Search Query Performance? Because when we have a lot of variations, it’s hard to look at it. So I guess that’s kinda like a feature request.

Julia:

Yes, that’s something that we are definitely looking into is also a very common request and totally makes sense when you have a lot of variations, it’s a little tough to figure out what is coming from which child. So keep your eyes peeled for that for sure.

Bradley Sutton:

David has a question for me. He says, Hey, if a search period performance is de-normalized, helium 10 is normalized, why is Helium 10 search volumes always higher? It’s not, the one you’re looking at is the week. Alright, the one that shows up in Helium 10 is a 30 day search form. So it’s much, much higher, the search courier performance, you’re comparing a month to a week which is two different, two different things. You, if you wanna apples to apples, you can compare the month, the 30 day value. This is from Nicole, why would a product or search term not have any matching niches? I’m assuming we’re talking about opportunity explorer here. Yeah, that’s a good

Francesca:

Question. Question. I can take that one for Product Opportunity. Explore, it’s possible that there might not be enough search volume yet on the term that you typed in. So I would just go ahead and try some alternate terms to see if that could bring up some results. I definitely like what Jason pointed out with how he started with SQP going into OX to see what are the related niches to those search terms. I think if you’re not finding what you need, just try different search terms or you can also try the ASIN view as well. If you type in your ASIN and go to ASIN view, you can also take a look on that ASIN detail page, what are the niches this ASIN matches to, and you might be able to discover some niches that way as well.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. And keeping with you, Francesca Logan says where it says, we talked about this a little bit, but where it says average units sold, is that per listing per month or it’s overall all of the products in that niche.

Francesca:

So it would be all of the products in the niche for the last year. And just keep in mind that it is counting the sales in that 24 attribution window. So it’ll probably will not match up with your standard sales reports.

Bradley Sutton:

Kay says, when you’ve got like 300 plus products, four brands, it’s a lot of data to go through. So what do you suggest the main focus or takeaway should be with the Search Query Performance? Like, you know, like if she’s a one woman show, you know, she can’t just sit there all day every day going through 300 products, Search Query Performance reports. So what, what would you say she should be looking for?

Julia:

I mean, in my opinion, I think you really focus on your top and your bottom ASINs, especially in Search Query Performance. Your top ASINs are most likely going to be showing up in the top 100 or at with those top 100 keywords. So I would really look at those top ASINs and see how you can continuously improve them. And then also take a look at, you know, are my bottom ASINs, are they showing up in this report and can I, you know, can I do anything to get them higher up on search or to get them, you know, more purchases. Also, take a look. I think some of the key funnel metrics are really looking at those clicks to add to carts, add to carts to purchases is your, you know, are you getting that traffic and if you are, are you getting the conversion from it? If you aren’t getting the conversion, take a look at, you know, your competitors and look at why is it pricing, is it your detail page? Could you be advertising more on different keywords? So I think that those are really the most important things I would take a look at. But agreed, it is a lot of information and we are going to try and find some ways to make that a little bit easier for you.

Bradley Sutton:

Well guys, that’s another reason that we gotta Hurry app Amazon and get this available in the API because you know, once that’s available now Helium 10 can like do a lot of that work for you and then you can set alerts and stuff. We’ll just let you know when certain things happen. Hint, hint, wink, wink to Julia there, I was teasing Francesca and Julia that they’re gonna be celebrities after this. ’cause So many people we had over 1200 people live on this webinar. So please ask them for an autograph. If you see them walking in Amazon Accelerate, you can ask them offline some questions. If you guys haven’t gotten your tickets yet to Amazon Accelerate, it’s still open. Go to h10.me/accelerate. Let me that’s just an easy way to remember the link. So h10.me/accelerate, that’ll take you directly to the Amazon website.

Bradley Sutton:

And I see that there’s maybe 60 other questions, but it’s hard to scroll in this Zoom thing here. So what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna consolidate all your questions. We’re gonna try and get to everything that Search Query Performance or Product Opportunity Explorer related. I saw a lot of questions that were just general, but we’re not gonna cover those. But we’ll try and do a follow-up, either podcast or video or something with Julia and, and Francesca. I thank you two very much for coming on here. This is unprecedented. You guys have never really opened up the hood on these things before. So we thank you for allowing us to break this to the audience out here. Jason, thank you for coming on and giving us a real world, real life experience of an Amazon seller who has benefited from this information. And I’ll be seeing all of you guys and everybody else out there, hopefully at Amazon Accelerate. Thank you so much. Goodbye everybody.

#484 - Amazon PPC Optimization Strategies To Improve Your Conversion Rates

Today, we’ll have a special TACoS Tuesday episode in the Serious Sellers Podcast, where our host Shivali Patel and her guest, Chris Rawlings of Sophie Society, dive into the world of Amazon PPC by answering your questions live and talk about strategies to level up your PPG game, uncovering hidden gems that can significantly enhance your click-through and conversion rates. We kick things off with a critical takeaway: the importance of benchmarking your essential metrics, a practice that forms the bedrock of a successful Amazon PPC strategy. Tune in as we unravel techniques to boost your CTR and conversion rates while exploring the intriguing “Random Walk Hypothesis.” Listen as we tackle live audience questions and even share wisdom on countering dips in conversion rates caused by negative reviews. Exploring bid adjustment modifier percentages and unveiling the Stealth Targeted Product Placement Campaign, we ensure every stone is turned in in your quest for Amazon PPC excellence. Stay tuned till the end for ways to connect with Chris Rawlings and Sophie Society, plus an invitation to participate in Chris’ Amazon PPC Challenge that will propel you to the next level!

In episode 484 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Shivali and Chris discuss:

• 01:12 – Meet Our Guest Chris Rawlings
• 03:01 – Amazon Ads Strategy For New Sellers And Brands
• 09:58 – You Need To Benchmark Your Key Metrics
• 11:45 – How To Improve Your CTR And Conversion Rates
• 15:58 – The Random Walk Hypothesis
• 19:46 – Q: How To Find CTR And CVR In SQP and Product Opportunity Explorer
• 21:32 – Q: My Conversion Rate Has Dropped Because Of Bad Reviews
• 25:26 – Q: Do You Do Bid Adjustment Modifier Percentages On Top Of Search And/Or Product Pages?
• 29:38 – The Stealth Targeted Product Placement Campaign
• 32:29 – Join Chris’ Amazon PPC Challenge
• 32:59 – How To Contact Chris And Sophie Society

► 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:

Today on TACoS Tuesday, we answer all of your PPC questions, live and discuss some underrated and rarely discussed optimization strategies that have the potential to completely transform your click-through and conversion rates. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think

Bradley Sutton:

You wanna see the size of your niche or your market, maybe how much sales overall is it generating, and more importantly how the size of your piece of that pie changes over time. Or maybe you want to know when there’s a new mover or shaker, an up and comer in your niche that you need to be on the lookout for. You can monitor these things and more with Market Tracker by Helium 10. Find out more information at h10.me/markettracker.

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 monthly TACoS Tuesday special, where we talk to you about anything and everything Amazon PPC related. Today our guest is Chris Rawlings, who is a multimillion dollar Amazon seller and the host of Profitable PPC Challenge. He’s also the CEO of Sophie Society, which has become recognized as one of the most in demand PPC and conversion optimization agencies. There is. They regularly work with 6, 7, 8, and even nine figure businesses today. Chris is here to answer your questions. Let’s go ahead and get Chris up here. Alright. Hi Chris, how are you?

Chris:

What’s up? I’m good, I’m ready to go. Let’s answer some questions.

Shivali Patel:

I love that energy and PPC is such an exciting component of your brand, your business, building out your business, even reoptimizing later on. It can be a little bit nerve wracking. There’s so many different components and if you don’t know what you’re doing, man, man, oh man, that can really affect the bottom line of your business. So where are you now?

Chris:

I’m in Cyprus. I’m in Cyprus with my team and we’re actually doing like a PPC deep dive workshop here. So we’re going super deep on PPC every single day. Today we had a bunch of sponsored brand, defense campaigns up and we were talking about, you know, sponsor display retargeting and we had all kinds of wizardly things going on here at our PPC workshop in Cyprus.

Shivali Patel:

Well, that’s incredible. I’m excited for everyone that’s tuning in and listening in on this episode to tap into some of your knowledge and expertise that I know those of you, those of the people that are there in Cyprus right now are enjoying. But let’s just kind of backtrack into the beginning stages of an Amazon seller’s journey. Maybe let’s talk about what really goes on or how should somebody be approaching their ad campaigns or their advertising aspect of their business once they’re just getting started as an Amazon seller.

Chris:

So when you’re just starting, the key is to not make it too complicated. That’s the key. A brand new brand just starting on Amazon, can’t be running every ad type, every possible ad configuration, every targeting and you wouldn’t want to anyway. You’re gonna blow your budget and you’re gonna hear a lot of fancy things, different types of campaigns you can run and different types of features in in PPC and most of it you can just ignore when you’re just getting started. The most important thing during like a new brand new product launch is using PPC as a tool for ranking. So a lot of your ad budget is gonna go to campaigns that are specifically purposed for getting you ranking and mostly that comes down to single keyword, exact match sponsored products campaigns. So inside sponsored products, which is one of the three main types of advertising available to most sellers, you can target one single keyword in the campaign.

Chris:

And exact match means that it’s Amazon is only gonna target people who search that exact term and that drives ranking very powerfully. The next most powerful ranking driver is ASIN target, meaning you’re putting your ad on another ASIN on their listing rather than in search results. And you want to target the ASINs that are already ranking for the keywords you’re trying to rank for. And advertising on those ASINs gets you to rank better for the keywords that they rank for. So it’s like a rising tides raises all ships type of deal for that. You’re gonna wanna drive a lot of your ad budget to just those types of advertising. And really, if you want to keep it super simple, you could just do just that. And that makes it so much easier for someone just getting started where they don’t have to learn like the entire complex sophisticated suite.

Chris:

I will say like as the launch progresses and as the brand matures, you’ll get left behind if you don’t start to learn more and more sophisticated ad strategies, which some of which I’m sure we’ll go into during this hour, but in the beginning, keep it simple. Focus on ranking and sales velocity. Get to your review milestones as quickly as possible. The first five reviews, there’s a big increase in click-through rating conversion rate. Then there’s another big increase, another plateau after 21 reviews. And then once you get into the hundreds, that’s the next big jump. The thousands is the next big jump after that. So hit those milestones as quickly as you can.

Shivali Patel:

So when you talk about a plateau, could you go a little bit in depth with what you mean with that? Like the ranking itself or just in terms of reviews?

Chris:

Yeah, so review strategy is one of the factors that affect PPC. That’s not taken into consideration when looking at PPC metrics because it’s one of the few things that affects both your click-through rate for certain keywords and your conversion rate once they’re on the listing. So the two numbers that affect PPC that are not PPC metrics the most, ’cause we all know a costs average cost of sale. I spent $10 in advertising and I made a hundred dollars in revenue. I had a 10% aid cost rate and TACoS, which is what this whole session is named after total average cost of sale, which is I spent $10 total in advertising and I got a thousand dollars in in sales. So my TACoS is 1% because it’s in, that’s my all my total sales, not just my advertising sales.

Chris:

But there are other metrics that are super important that affect PPC that are not PPC metrics and click-through rate and conversion rate are the most important ones. So everything that you do to increase your click-through rate for your most relevant keywords and everything that you do to increase your conversion rate, more people that land on your listing end up buying, make your PPC more effective and make your TACoS and ACoS healthier and lower. And reviews is one of the few things that affects both click-through rate and conversion rate. So you get a double hit. So getting more reviews, number of reviews, that’s one thing. And then getting better star rating in the better average star rating in your reviews is the other main metric when it comes to reviews. So putting in place systems that increase your number of reviews at a faster rate, we call that review velocity.

Chris:

How many reviews do I get per a hundred sales? So if I get one review for every a hundred sales, that’s a 1% review velocity, a healthy review velocity is four, 4%. So that means every a hundred sales that I make, I get four reviews. That means you’re doing great if you have a review. Velocity of four. I know sellers that have review velocity up to 8% where every a hundred sales they get, they get eight reviews. And I wouldn’t really try to go past 10, I honestly wouldn’t really try to go past five. ’cause At a certain point you start to send red flags to Amazon, they might be doing something tricky, but the main things you can do to affect that are having a Amazon terms of service compliant product insert or packaging feature that gets people on into your ecosystem in order for them to get the warranty or something else that helps ’em with their product.

Chris:

Like how to guide and then get them on your email list and then later on down the line without offering them anything in return or asking ’em to leave a good review, just invite them to leave a review. That’s one of the primary things you can do to up it. But also helium tends tool that that allows people to automate the request review within Amazon is also a great way to do it. There are lots of ways to do it, but those milestones that I mentioned are where the, the, you see like the steepest drops in the steepest increases either in conversion rate or click-through rate or both. So the first five you get, it’s like big difference between when you’re between one and four and when you’re after five and then the first 21 you get, again, a big difference when you’re before 21 and after 21. And then once you’re in the hundreds, big difference again. So putting in place the systems to make sure you get to those milestones quicker is, is, is good.

Shivali Patel:

So let’s say somebody has gone through those steps and has really optimized those underlying factors you’re talking about, which is really interesting ’cause you don’t hear a lot of people talk about it. I feel like it’s, it’s kind of known, but no one’s actively thinking about it thinking, okay, well like what should I do to optimize these underlying factors? But let’s say somebody has gone through those things, well then when do you really start to begin adjusting or thinking about things like, well this keyword might not, I I should change out this keyword for my ad groups. Or even just considering that the click through rate or conversion rate isn’t what you want it to be, or you wanna change something out in your actual ad set.

Chris:

Yeah. So the main way to know whether you’re doing good or bad when it comes to these outside factors that affect PPC, like click through your click through rate and your conversion is by benchmarking them. So for conversion rate, for example, you can use the product opportunity explorer tool, which is inside Seller Central to benchmark the search term conversion rate of the entire space for that search term. So now, you know, for those sellers that are ranking for that keyword, what they convert at and each space is, is radically different. If I looked at the search term conversion rate of like vitamin D supplements, it’s gonna be totally different than the search term conversion rate of commercial hand blenders because one is something that people buy all the time, you know, over and over again and it costs less than $20.

Chris:

The other thing is a $300 item that people tend to shop around and, and do a lot of research for, right? So first you have to benchmark it by getting that data. And now you know, okay, is my product above or below that benchmark in terms of my conversion rate? Now I know some idea of if my conversion rate is good or bad. If it’s bad, then every dollar you put into PPC is not totally wasted, but in a sense wasted because you haven’t fixed underlying issues that are gonna keep your PPC from allowing your product to perform well. So once you’ve benchmarked it and you know whether it’s good or bad, if it’s bad, fix the underlying problems to make it good. If it’s good, then you do wanna shift your attention to proper PPC management and you’re in a good place to perform well with PPC.

Chris:

As long as you have everything dialed in, some of which we’re gonna. When it comes to click through rate, you normally, you’re you. So a big part of the benchmarking of this is benchmarking it against yourself. You do have the search query report inside brand analytics that allows you to see the whole funnel for your product and for the space which helps you benchmark your, your click through rate. And then you also get your own click, click-through rate inside your advertising metrics, inside the Amazon ads dashboard and in your search term reports. So now you know your click through some idea of if your click-through rate is healthy, and it’s the exact same thing with your click-through rate as it is with your conversion rate. So once you’ve determined that you click through rate is at least above is above average and your conversion rate is above average, now you know that you’re ready for PPC, but most people or a lot of sellers are not always gonna be in that scenario or they’ll dip in and out of those scenarios as time goes on.

Chris:

And that’s why it’s, those two metrics are so important to measure over time because once you dip below the benchmark for your space or for that keyword for that product, now you know you have an issue to solve. And there are a lot of ways to solve those two issues and we can, we can get into them now or later or whatever, but each of those has a diagnostic checklist that you can go through to, if I have a click through rate problem, there’s so many things I can try to solve it. And if I have a conversion rate problem, again, there’s so many things that I can try to solve that problem. So you really have limitless options available to you to solve those things.

Shivali Patel:

I think now’s a great time to get into it. Let’s, we’re already on the topic and I’m sure those people that are listening in would love to know. So what are those? What’s that checklist?

Chris:

So clickthrough rate and conversion rate, the two most important things that have to be healthy in order for your PPC to perform well. Let’s start with clickthrough rate. Let’s open up the box of clickthrough rate. What’s inside clickthrough rate? What is click-through rate? What affects it? Well, everything that the customer sees on your listing thumbnail is affecting whether or not they click through. So just talking about the listing thumbnail for a second, because there’s also the topic of the actual keyword relevance itself. But just to talk about the listing thumbnail, what elements, what makes a listing thumbnail? Let’s, let’s talk through it. So the primary image, first of all, again, getting everyone on the same page, listing thumbnail is what you see when you search Amazon. And those are the search results. Each one of those things is a listing thumbnail. You’re not on the listing yet, you just have a little preview of it, right?

Chris:

And what do you have? You have a primary image, which is the first image you upload on the listing. That’s the only visual piece of content that shows on both the thumbnail and the listing is the primary image. And that’s arguably the most powerful factor for influencing the clickthrough rate. That’s its own science in and of itself. So it’s primary image. What else is there? There’s the title of the product. So the title is like the main text that you see in the thumbnail. Then there’s the number of reviews, which we talked about before. So now we have three factors affecting click-through rate. Then there’s the review rating. Is it 3.5? Is it 4.5? Is it four 4.8? And there’s not just the number 4.8, 4.7, but the icons of the yellow stars, which is more important even than the review rating number.

Chris:

Is it showing as four and a half yellow stars or is it showing as four stars? Those are really the main, the main two options. Most products are gonna fit in one of those two categories. So we have that. Then we have the badges. Do I have a bestseller badge? Do I have an Amazon’s choice badge? Do I have some of the more exotic badges like climate pledge friendly or small business badge? Those, that’s the fifth factor there. Then we have the price, the price of the product influences whether or not someone clicks on it. Then there’s the potential to have a strikethrough price, which is independent of the price itself. Having a strikethrough price can affect whether or not someone clicks on it. Then there’s the size of the thumbnail itself. So not many people know this, but you can influence the size of your thumbnail.

Chris:

And if it’s bigger, it’s more likely to be clicked because of the random walk hypothesis. This is a hypothesis inside chaos theory and math. I majored in physics. I don’t think I’ve mentioned that to you ever, but I’m a math guy. So I think of things mathematically, statistically, as much as possible. And when a shopper who’s, who’s scrolling through search results, you know what we do on the phone? We flick the motion, the word of for what our thumb does is flick. We flick and it zooms through things and then we stop, we stop with our thumb and then we flick back up and then we stop. And it’s, it’s, it’s a random, you know, it’s a random motion. The bigger your, your listing thumbnail, the more likely someone is to land on it randomly when they’re flicking through search results.

Chris:

So that impacts it as well. So now we’re at, I’ve actually lost count, I dunno if we’re at eight. All those things affect click-through rate and each one of them is its own full science. So I could go so deep on testing different things on my primary image. I can go super deep on getting super highly relevant keywords by pulling data from my search terms to make sure that my title is highly relevant in getting me more clicks. I can go really deep on getting every type of badge. I can go really deep on maximizing the size of my thumbnail. There’s so many things that I can, I can do. So you could see how it’s like, yeah, there’s, you always have limitless options to improve when you have issues with these, these underlying factors. And then conversion rate. So conversion rate, we have some things that are overlapping, like the review rating, the review number.

Chris:

Those two things also affect conversion as well as the click-through rate. But then there are things that are completely independent that don’t affect the click-through rate at all that are very important for con for conversion. Like the secondary image set. Everything after the primary image is the secondary images. Do I have a benefits graphic? A features graphic? Do I have lifestyle shots? Do I have in-use shots? Do I have flourish shots? Do I have a competitor comparison shot? If you’re missing any of these things that might be affecting your, your conversion rate and making you below average for the space. Then you have the copy of the listing, the bullet points, the title itself as well affects somewhat the, the conversion, although it’s not the the biggest thing. Then you have the video on the listing. So this is also not the top of the list but it does affect the conversion.

Chris:

But the most powerful things that affect conversion are the visual content on the listing, which is the secondary images, the a plus content and the brand story content, the brain story section. And these are again, things that each one is their own science and you can look up on YouTube how to create the best version of it. There are lots of videos on it. I have some videos on it. The q and a section and then the top voted reviews. So this is a part that you can’t see in the click-through rate. So it doesn’t affect the click-through rate at all ’cause it’s not in the, the thumbnail. But the top voter reviews are actually arguably more important than any of the content because most Amazon shoppers, their shopper shopping behavior is actually to click onto the listing and they skip all of the content almost immediately. Go right to the reviews, read the top voted ones, and then if they’re satisfied they’ll read the rest of the listing and all of the content that you put out as the brand. And if they’re not, they’ll click back and look at some other things.

Shivali Patel:

It’s almost like you’ve been looking over my shoulder the whole time I’m shopping ’cause that is exactly what I do.

Chris:

It’s what I do too. I do the same thing.

Shivali Patel:

I’m just like, I don’t care about any of these listing description images.

Chris:

Yeah, I don’t care what you act to say about your product. I want to hear what people had to say. People

Shivali Patel:

Have to say about the product. Yeah, yeah. I mean speaking of clickthrough rate and conversion rate, this is I think specific to search query performance and product opportunity explorer. So is there anything you wanna add?

Chris:

Yeah, so what is the best way to CTR and CVR on search query performance and product opportunity Explorer? Yeah, so go to Product Opportunity Explorer, navigate to product opportunity explorer inside Seller Central. Put in a go to search term, then put in a search term and then you’ll see right in the Product Opportunity Explorer, the search conversion rate, they call it the search conversion rate, which is the average conversion rate for listings that are ranking for that search term. And that’s your benchmark right there for the click through rate. You don’t get the raw click through rate in the search query performance report. You get like your, your click share in the search query performance report. So you basically get to benchmark. You don’t see it itself, the actual click through rate, but you can see if it’s high or low.

Chris:

And if you’re getting more clicks, you, you see relative to the funnel, if you’re getting more or less clicks than your competitors that are ranking for that term. Relative to the other stages of the funnel, like if I’m getting lots of conversions but not more conversions than I should based on the, the space but less clicks than I should, then I know, oh that’s the part of the funnel that I need to work on is the click part of the funnel. So that’s what the search query, performance search query report helps you with. But the, another great way to benchmark CTR is just your actual advertising data. You see how you’re doing and how it changes over time with your, your search term reports and right inside the advertising manager as well.

Shivali Patel:

Awesome. I see we have some more questions here, so let’s jump into those here. We have Victor who says, had a few bad reviews, some trouble with the product, but I fixed it 4.4 stars. Do you think I should relaunch 46 total ratings? People still buy the product, but I can see that my conversion rate has dropped. So what would you recommend here?

Chris:

Yeah, so let’s see. 46 total ratings still pretty early on in the product’s life. I know that feels like a lot when you’re in the launching phase ’cause you’re like, yeah, I had to beg, borrow and steal to like get there. But 4.4 stars is not bad. You still have the four and a half star image in the gold stars. So you’re still showing us four and a half gold stars. Your conversion rate, so you’re saying your conversion rate dropped because you had a few bad reviews. So this isn’t bad enough for you to relaunch 4.4 stars and a couple bad reviews, 46 ratings. I mean, there have been way worse scenarios that have come back from this and without having to relaunch and and start fresh, that is an option if you wanted to try it. But you, it’s, you have to risk that you’re gonna have to deal with, you know, relabeling all the inventory and starting from scratch and doing a brand new brand new ace and getting, starting from zero reviews and all that stuff.

Chris:

So it is possible for you to come back from this. And basically what you wanna make sure of is that those negative reviews aren’t showing as top voted. That’s key. The main thing is the top voted reviews. ’cause Those are the ones that everyone is looking at. So the way to get them off of top voted, since you say your conversion rate dropped, I’m assuming that these negative reviews are showing it stop voted because otherwise it wouldn’t affect your conversion rate that much with a 4.4 star rating because that’s, that’s not bad. That’s, that’s pretty good. So the way to do it is get more reviews and the way to get more reviews is to get more sales and have review systems in place. So some of the main ones are automating the request, request a review button, which you could do with helium 10 in a smart way that doesn’t request it from folks who ask for a refunder or a return for instance, which it’s great.

Chris:

Also having a product insert in place has a follow-up sequence. So the product insert has like a URL or a QR code. The customer scans, it brings ’em to a landing page where they put in their information, they get put on a list and then later on down the line that you invite them to ask for to leave a review. So that, and then also there are things that you can do that are kind of like review triggers that you can pull at any time. So if you have a negative review, there are things that you can do to quickly bury it. And one of those things is keeping a sort of bank of customers who accidentally left seller feedback as a review, which happens to every seller. This is very common because shoppers just still to this day don’t really get the difference between seller feedback and a review.

Chris:

So I’d say it’s anywhere between one and five and one in three seller feedbacks is actually a product review, whether it’s negative or positive. And so this is kind of a bank that you can, you can like, it’s like a like a water tower that you can like drain at any time, like pull water from at any time because you can ask these people who left this feedback, you can let them know they left feedback as a review, they left a review as feedback mistakenly and to ask them to please leave a review and some portion of them will, especially if they’re actually really delighted by the product. So that’s a good way to quickly, quickly bury bad reviews that are coming in that are affecting your conversion rate. So yeah, long story short, I would say if it were me, I probably wouldn’t relaunch, although you know the situation better than me and it is an option for you. You still can come back from it, is ensure that the negative reviews are not showing up as top voted. And if they are, do everything you can to fix that and then push for ranking with your PPC hard for highly relevant search terms.

Shivali Patel:

Wonderful. What about this question right here, which is, do you do bid adjustment modifier percentages on top of search and or product pages?

Chris:

Yeah, that’s another awesome question. I guess I’ll have to get close for it ’cause it’s an awesome question. So yeah, the bid adjustment modifiers are super useful for all different reasons. So you can go up to 900% on your, your bid adjustment modifiers, meaning you’re giving Amazon a huge amount of leeway to adjust the bids the way that you want them to be. So every sponsored product campaign can show either in search results or on product detail pages. It’s kind of annoying because if you’re targeting search terms you think, well I’ll only show up in search. Well, it’s not the case. Amazon can show your ad either place whether you’re targeting keywords or ASINs. So if you really wanna show up only on product detail pages or only in search, you can up the bid adjustment modifier that Bradley is is mentioning, is referencing here to make it more likely that you show up where you wanna show up.

Chris:

So here’s an example of that is if I know that I need to drive search placements, top of search placements for a particular keyword that I wanna rank for and say I sell kids omega three gummies and I know that the highest relevant search term for me because I really focused on my particular customer demographic is non choking kids chewable omega three gummies because all of my branding is about how no, no kid can choke on it ’cause it’s circular and it has hole in it or something like that. I’m literally just making all this up. This isn’t, this isn’t a real scenario, but if I know that that’s my my a super high relevant search term for me and I really wanna rank for it, I’m gonna want to get a lot of top of search clicks for it because that drives ranking the most powerfully.

Chris:

So when I create that campaign a an exact match campaign for non choking kids chewable omega three gummies, I’m going to put a bid adjustment modifier on top of search to make sure that most of my placements are top of search. And I’m not showing up so much on random product detail pages because I know that that’s what’s gonna drive my ranking and I wanna show up there. And I also wanna segment my campaign so it’s easier for me to tell which campaigns are doing well and which ones aren’t for my ranking. So I’ll go, you could go super high on that. You could start with a hundred percent, you could go up to 2, 3, 4 or five, 600% all the way up to 900%. And it doesn’t necessarily mean that Amazon is still, even if you go 900%, it doesn’t necessarily mean that Amazon is still gonna gonna show your, gonna only show your ad there.

Chris:

It still can show in the other placement like product pages, but it makes it more likely and it makes, it allows you to control those ads more. And then the same way it goes the other way for product pages, if I know that I want to, like we were talking about earlier before target products that are already ranking for the keywords I’m trying to rank for and I have my list already and I want to just show up on those product pages, I will adjust the, the product pages up to make it more likely that I show up only on those pages and not as much in search. Oh, and then there’s one other related factor to this and that is there’s a type of campaign that’s super lean. This is another if, if people are trying to take actionable stuff out of this.

Chris:

And that brand story thing was one that anybody wrote down or, or thought, Hey, I could do this. Here’s another one coming at you right now. This is a type of campaign that we, we discovered, and it’s not complicated, I’m sure that other brands and and agencies have discovered it themselves, but we put a name to it and we called it a step campaign, a stealth targeted product placement campaign. This is a type of campaign, we apply it to every brand, every brand should be running this type of campaign. It produces a low volume of sales, but they’re highly profitable and they, well they tend to be highly profitable, not always, but they tend to be high margin, high profitable campaigns. And we have some of these that have been running for definitely months, quarters at least over a year. And they’ll produce week after week 8% ACoS sales.

Chris:

We have one that’s producing consistent average 5.1% ACoS sales, but a lot of times it’ll be 13% ACoS, 12% ACoS. You can get really healthy ACoS with these campaigns. And what it is, is you target, it’s ASIN targeting inside sponsored products and you target the same product that you’re advertising. So usually you’re targeting either other competitors’ products or your other products. Right? So that’d be sponsored product offense campaigns, ASIN targeting offense campaigns or ace in targeting defense campaigns. Either I’m trying to get on a competitor’s listing or I’m defending my own listing. Well this is even further in than that. It’s like inception. I’m advertising my listing on my own listing. So it’s like, is that possible? Is that a dream within a dream? Within a dream? Like and Amazon actually won’t do it, so they won’t show your ad for your listing on that same listing because it’s pointless.

Chris:

Like what would happen? Nothing would happen if someone clicked it. They’re already on the listing. Like it’s not, all it could do is reload the page. So what it does do though is it then takes anybody who’s landed on the listing and then not purchased and gone back to search results and it’s like instant retargeting. So it immediately starts showing the ad to them in search. And also probably on product detail pages, I’m not sure, but in search, once they’ve visited your listing, so everyone knows retargeting within sponsored display that you can do, but this is a site type of effective retargeting that you can actually do within sponsored products. So that’s a, that’s another application.

Shivali Patel:

That’s incredible. I yeah,

Chris:

It’s cool. It’s cool hack. Yeah.

Shivali Patel:

‘Cause you think a lot about retargeting and you have that when you’re driving external traffic, but I’ve always wondered on Amazon, so I I had no idea. That’s really cool. Thanks for sharing. Now one last question. How can people contact you if they’re interested in asking you more questions or working with you? I know you also have the PPC challenge that’s coming up, but how can people contact you?

Chris:

Yeah, like you said, if people want more actual one-on-one time with me, joining the PPC challenge that we’re hosting at the end of next month is the best way to do that. You’ll actually see me live every day. It is a commitment you have to show up every day. In order to join, you have to have the ability to do that or at least watch the replay daily. But it’s the most well-attended Amazon PPC focused event for sellers by sellers. And that is a five day event happening at the end of next month. I’d love to see you guys there live. So if you want to contact me live, that’s, that’s the way. If you want to contact me asynchronously, I’m hello@sophiesociety.com or my Instagram handle is @hippiemogul and you can hit me up there and I do check my DMs. Well,

Shivali Patel:

I’m excited for everyone listening in to hopefully implement all the things you learned today, and hopefully you did learn a lot. I know I did. I look forward to seeing you again, Chris, and best of luck as you go ahead and start this PPC challenge. I’m looking forward to hearing about it next time.

Chris:

Yes. I’m excited as well. And this was great to do Shivali, it was really, really fun and I hope we, I hope we do it again.

Shivali Patel:

Absolutely. All right, take care.

Chris:

Okay, take care.

Helium 10 Buzz 8/17/23: Big Amazon Review Changes | New Pinterest Amazon Ads | Walmart+ Growth

Today, we talk about the latest stories in the Amazon, Walmart, and E-commerce space. From Amazon review changes to how Walmart+ is ramping up pressure to Prime. Let's see what's buzzing this week!