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

#483 - Expanding Your Amazon Brand In Latin America

In the world of Amazon and Ecommerce business expansion, the Latin American market holds immense potential. Belen Bauza and Cecilia Meghirditchian, the dynamic duo from Nocnoc, come from diverse backgrounds that uniquely equip them for navigating this vibrant marketplace. Let’s dive into their journey and unveil the strategies for expanding your brand across Latin American marketplaces. Discover the top 5 marketplaces in the region, backed by compelling numbers that underscore their significance. Nocnoc emerges as a game-changer, simplifying the path to expansion with their user-friendly platform. Learn how to seamlessly set up your Amazon or eCommerce product catalog within Nocnoc, leveraging their brand awareness program, listing translation services, and their experience launching successful products on the Latam marketplaces. Uncover the success story of Project X Egg Tray on Mercado Libre and other prominent marketplaces. Looking for a good deal with Nocnoc? We’ve got you covered! Seize the exclusive Bradley Amigo Discount. The doors to Latin America’s thriving online marketplaces are wide open – it’s time to step in with confidence!

In episode 483 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley, Belen, and Cecilia discuss:

• 02:33 – Belen And Cecilia’s Backgrounds
• 04:24 – Expanding Your Brand In Latam Marketplaces
• 07:17 – Top 5 Marketplaces In Latin America
• 09:39 – The Numbers Tell It All
• 14:57 – Nocnoc Is Making It Easier To Expand In Latin America
• 19:05 – Setting Up Project X Products Inside Nocnoc
• 20:45 – Nocnoc’s Brand Awareness Program
• 22:38 – Project X Egg Tray In Mercado Libre & Other Marketplaces
• 23:43 – Nocnoc Helps In Translating Your Listings
• 26:15 – How To Get 3 Months Free Trial With Nocnoc
• 27:00 – How Much Does Their Services Cost?
• 28:00 – Get The Bradley Amigo Discount
• 28:15 – Bradley’s Experience With Mercado Libre
• 29:20 – Tips To Succeed Selling In Latam
• 31:05 – How To Reach Out To Nocnoc
• 32:40 – Your Favorite “Knock Knock Joke”
• 33:20 – Cecilia’s 60-Second Tip
• 34:25 – Belen’s 60-Second Tip

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Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

How would you like to potentially increase your sales on some products by 10 to 15% with no upfront cost or inventory requirements? You can do that by opening your catalog in minutes to Latin American marketplaces reaching 500 million customers. Today’s guests are gonna explain how, how cool is that? Pretty cool I think.

Bradley Sutton:

What was your gross sales yesterday? Last week. Last year. More importantly, what are your profits, after all your cost of selling on Amazon? Did you pay any storage charges to Amazon? How much did you spend on PPC? Find out these key metrics and more by using the Helium 10 tool Profits. For more information, go to h10.me/profits. 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 a couple of people who help serious sellers from all over the world get into a certain part of the world. And we’re gonna be talking about what that is in a couple seconds here. But let me go ahead and introduce our two guests. Now, I had said, you know, before to myself, I wanted to try to, to get the pronunciation right of both of your last names. So for first of all, like, like for example, Belen, I’ve never said your last name, but like I noticed on it, you’ve got an accent, like on the last part of your name, so is the way you pronounce it Bauzá or just so Belen Bauzá and then now Cecilia. So let me give it a try here Meghirditchian or something.

Cecilia:

Well, almost.

Bradley Sutton:

Oh my goodness. And guys

Cecilia:

Meghirditchian. Better than some of my coworkers. So it’s better.

Belen:

Yes, it’s difficult for us. So sorry. No worries.

Bradley Sutton:

It is spelled a lot worse than it. Even that sounds, guys like, it sounds pretty cool. And then you try and spell it like, like if that was the winning word for like, you know, some spelling bee. I was watching the spelling bee where these 14 year old kids in America, they spell these crazy words. They would never have been able to win the spelling bee if they had that. And anyway, we’re just going to we’re just going to call you Belen and and Cecilia here because that’s a lot easier. You are calling us now from Chile. Is it? Or what part of the world are you in?

Cecilia:

Uruguay, South America

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, excellent. Excellent. So what is that where you guys were born and raised?

Cecilia:

Sorry?

Bradley Sutton:

Is that where you were born and raised? Both of you?

Cecilia:

Yes. We are from Uruguay, but the, the team is distributed in Brazil, Mexico United States, China, also Argentina. So just the headquarters are in Uruguay and we are from here, but the team is from all part of the world.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, excellent. Now, what did both of you end up studying in university then?

Cecilia:

I studied business management because I was really interested with marketing. I saw like, it was like a good way to learn about how a company works and also all the different areas. So I ended up studying that and I really loved it. And now I am like specializing in marketing.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. So yeah, you’re kind of working in the field that you studied. What about you Belen? What do you study? Yes,

Belen:

I also study business and I have three degrees. I study also marketing and communications. It’s like corporative communications and yes, I also study digital marketing, but yes, I, I’m continue studying every year. I’m doing something new this year, for example, I study like some programs of digital graphics. I dunno if you have like that there. I’m learning to use some programs to make like additional photographs and all that things, but I don’t know, I’m always, I’m 30 years old and every year I’m studying something new.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, was your company here NocNoc, was that the first entry into e-commerce for both of you or were you involved in any way, like another company or for yourself? In e-commerce?

Cecilia:

Yes. It was the first time that I was so immersed in the e-commerce area because my best companies were like solution providers or software providers, but not in e-commerce. I mean, we had like retail clients, so I knew something about the retail market, but not like in depth like it is now. It’s like my first time really selling marketplaces and home marketplaces work because here in Latin America, e-commerce is not just e-commerce. E-Commerce is like marketplaces because it’s the, it’s a huge it has a huge volume of e-commerce sales. So yes, it’s the first time like I really started learning about that. And the market.

Bradley Sutton:

Do you also do other Spanish and Portuguese markets? You know, for example, Spain and Portugal like help sellers for their or only ones in North America and South America. Okay. Now is what you’re focused on is non-Amazon marketplaces. Like you’re not helping people to sell on Amazon Brazil, for example. It’s mainly the non-Amazon.

Cecilia:

We do. The Amazon Brazil, Amazon Mexico. But in LATAM America, Amazon is not the main marketplace. So if we only help sellers to sell in Amazon, they will only gain like five to 10% of the share potential e-commerce sales in LATAM. So what we do is to help them expand in the most marketplace possible. We have like 15 market different marketplaces that we have agreements, we have stores on them. So basically it’s not just, okay, I help you expand to Brazil to replicate your business in, in Amazon, Brazil. It’s like, I help you expand to all the market basis. Sure.

Belen:

If want to expand to Latin America, it’s important. They have to understand that it’s not the same like US that you throw your products in Amazon and you’re probably going to have a good performance. Because everyone knows Amazon is like the king in US here in LATAM, you have many, many marketplaces in all countries. For example, in Brazil you have more than 30 marketplaces and you want, and if you want to have real sales, you must be in most of these ones, for example, I know, but Mercado Libre is one of the biggest ones, and it has only a 12% of the share. So imagine the important to understand what is happening here in which marketplaces you have to be selling to have a good performance and to make sales. Yes. ’cause If not, if you’re in only one or two, marketplaces going to be quite difficult.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Now you mentioned, hey there, there’s 30 marketplaces in Brazil and we know there’s many n other countries. If you were to list the top five for GMV or, or for the most volume of sales, what are the top five marketplaces in all of Latin America?

Cecilia:

The first one, Mercado Libre, because it’s present in all countries, but also in ra, Brazil is the strongest one. So it’s the strongest.

Bradley Sutton:

So, so the specific one, so then is number one out of all the mecal libre, like for example, I view Amazon USA and Amazon Germany as number one. And number two, it’s both Amazon, but, but separate. So then number one, out of all the countries marketplace would be Mercado Libre. Brazil,

Cecilia:

Yes. Mercado Libre Brazil. Then I would say I think maybe Magalu, Brazil too.

Bradley Sutton:

Also the top two are from Brazil. Interesting. Okay.

Cecilia:

I believe the top fire for Brazil, because Brazil.

Belen:

Yes. But of course that it depends a lot in the type of product and the price you have. Because for example, maybe for your product, if you’re selling, I dunno, something, a small device of technology probably in Brazil is you, you’ll have more sales in Mexico because you can’t sell there, eh, a full price, more expensive. Or if you have cosmetics, it’s going to be better in Brazil because in this markets you have like more competition and more people are used to buy this type of products. What we have in Nono is like a special team that, first of all, we analyze a little bit your products to understand in which country you are going to have a better fit. Because it’s, we can say like, well, I think that Merkel live in Brazil and then Maga and then Merkel live in Mexico are like the, the biggest one and the best ones. But of course that it will depend a lot in the type of product. We have products that if they wait, I don’t know, more than, I don’t know, 10 kilos, maybe you can be in some countries, you have like different laws different prices and weights that we have to understand in each country. So more or less, yes, it’s like Mercado Libre Brazil Magalu, Mexico,

Cecilia:

Americanas too in Brazil

Belen:

Americanas popular.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, I never even heard of that one. Well, what country is that in?

Belen:

Brazil

Cecilia:

Americnas in Brazil too. Brazil

Bradley Sutton:

Also Brazil. Okay. Now, you know, before we go into too much details about selling down there, let’s just give, let help people understand the, the potential. So can you give some numbers from some customers, you know, where hey, you don’t have to say their name or anything, but I know one seller, you know, they started, they’ve been on there for one year and now they are doing, you know, $5,000 per month down there, they’re doing 10,000. You like what is the potential for somebody who is, you know, an Amazon USA or an Amazon Europe or like you said, maybe they’re from China and they open up in Latin America. What is the ceiling, I guess you could say for, for sales?

Belen:

More or less for you to understand? It’s like in LATAM you can have like the 15 or 20% of the sales you have in US. Every seller, every case is so different. And it would be depend in the disposal if there is a affluent communication. But yes, I think that maybe–

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, so I mean like if I’m selling a million dollars in Amazon USA, there’s a potential, yeah, hey, I could do a 100,000-150,000 or so in Latin America amongst all the marketplaces, but if my product is good for it, you know, like if I’m selling if I’m selling in in Mercado Libre and Magalu, I can’t be selling a shirt that says I hate Luis Suarez or something like that. You know, like, maybe if that’s my product, maybe it does good in America. It has to be kind of appropriate for the marketplace. Now have you ever seen a case where maybe there’s something that even sells better than somebody in another marketplace, but actually sells better? Like for example, everybody says something similar about Amazon USA and Walmart USA like, hey, Amazon USA usually 10 to 1, the sales, but you know, Carrie, who, who works with us here, she’s got a couple of products where on Walmart it actually sells better or the same as Amazon just because there’s more demand. Is there anything like that or usually it’s always less than than the other marketplaces.

Cecilia:

First of all some marketplaces have like their own special day, special sales. So it has happened to us that, for example, during a certain period of time, the seller had more sales in LATAM because of that special sale. That the hot sale, for example, in Mexico, that was in May. During hot sale in Mexico. That seller had like, I don’t know, three times, four times more sales in, in Mexico in LATAM than in the US for a specific product. And also, of course, I think depending on the marketplace because there are some marketplaces where we can push with ads on advertisings or maybe the keywords works better. And I don’t know that sales increase in the specific marketplaces. And we are always monitoring that analyzing the performance on each marketplace to push sales, to push advertising campaigns inside the marketplace. And of course that’s what we try to do, like to push sales in the marketplaces we see most potential.

Belen:

And also what happens a lot is, for example, when we start with a seller, they always tell us like, okay, look, this is my top selling product. This is the best sky you here in US. And when we expand their products, they can’t believe that, for example, a product that they don’t sell too much in US is the best opportunity here in LATAM. And the product that they are used to sell a lot in US is not that competitive here in latam because of course that you have a lot of factors that, I don’t know, season or sales, for example, when you finish a campaign in US, maybe then it’s going to be attractive here in LATAM market. So yeah, it is like, it’s everything different of what is happening in US, and these are good opportunity for sellers because maybe you have some products of summer and then here summer, so you can finish your size here. So it’s like we are always looking for different opportunities for sellers to boost their sales.

Cecilia:

Yes. last year the one of the top selling products in Brazil during Christmas was an outdoor game. So, of course, in the USA, an outdoor game won’t make sense because it’s winter, but here the beach, outdoor playing games. So we see that all the time during the different seasons. And I also remember, this is really funny, it’s like a funny fact. I think it was last year too, that Brazilian football player had a, the nickname? They told them pigion, like people told them that he was called pigion. I don’t know why. So a seller had pigion pledges toys. I don’t know why a Chinese seller. So during that time, the sales for that pigion plus boost in Brazil and seller said to us, what’s happening that this specific project had a lot of sales. It was because of that, of that nickname of that Brazilian football player. So those things usually happens. Yes.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Now the way that that you guys even exist is because it’s hard for, for example, Americans, Canadians to just open up and sell these marketplace. I know, like I did, maybe I want to say eight or nine years ago, I started Mercado Libre in Mexico, you know, when I was doing in a phone case business, and it was tough. Like I had to have someone local and just, you know, like thinking about the customs and making the listings, it was a headache. And I ended up stopping, like after, after a few months, I was just like, this is not, I could see the potential, but I’m like, I don’t have the time to deal with this. So, so if I understand correctly, like the thing that you guys do is you take all of that hassle away. Like nobody has to have entities or bank accounts or anything down there, and I don’t even have to ship to Latin America. I’m shipping my products to Florida, right? And then you guys take it from there, and then that’s how you deliver from there to the customers. Is that right?

Belen:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that NocNoc exists because we understand the headaches of the sellers when they try to expand. And yes, what we try to do is like solve all that problems. Like we make payments in dollars, we take care. You only have to give us like your bank account in US, and we transfer in dollars there. We make translations listing, we have customer service 24/7. We have offices in Mexico and Brazil, and if you have cancellations, we found returns, we’ll take care of that. We have our warehouse in Miami, so sellers only have to ship there to Miami for a seller. Imagine that is the same like selling in US. So they only ship there. It is like the first month shipping, and then we take care of everything. It’s like we ship to Mexico to Brazil, they have, if the seller has questions or problems, we’ll chat with them.

Belen:

We’ll answer the questions. It is like, I think that’s what happening with us. Our key in our business model is like we, we take care of the sales headaches and we try to solve all that problems because we have so many marketplaces here and to understand what is happening with each countries regulations are changing every day. So we understand the problems. These can be for a seller if they want to, to start selling by themselves. And yes, I think that this is like a whole solve problems. Yes, it is. Like what it is NocNoc.

Cecilia:

Yes. And also, and most important, we have the local team in all different countries that are experts in regulations, in compliance, in customs. They know which products can be sold in each marketplace, in each country. So that’s really like one of the, the biggest advantages, I think because you are talking with someone who knows the market, who already has been selling in the market for years and knows which products can or can’t be sold. And we do that like catalog analysis before telling a seller, yes, you can sell this, or no, we are really honest with them about everything, about pricing, about products. I think that’s the key of success, that we have a team that is really committed to customer success and to boosting sales in marketplaces. Well, yes, because

Belen:

No, yeah, that is really important. We have like a team and we have the experience and the knowledge of understand what is happening. When we have a new seller, we see that their catalog, and we know if with that price, they are going to be competitive. What is happening with that, that type of products in each country, we, we know in which marketplace is going to have more sense. It’s like we, we, we have offices in each country dedicated analysis teams that are always understanding which products are going to be better. So it’s like, I think that the, the knowledge is like, yes, really hard, but it’s really necessary here to make work side.

Bradley Sutton:

Now what I did, and you know, you guys know, I don’t like you know, talking about things I don’t have experience with. So I actually went through the process of getting set up here with NocNoc, and I took one of the Project X products, the, the egg tray. We figured that one would be a little bit more wide wide reaching as opposed to the coffin shelf, and it was pretty easy to get it set up on their website, you know, set the price of, you know, how I’m going to you know, the price before I ship it to them in Florida. And then what they started doing is going to the different places for example, Mercado Libre, right here, this is what it says. This is Mexico, I think. Yes, lib.com do mx.

Belen:

Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

And we’ve got this is not $805 even that’s pesos guys, so don’t worry. I’m not I’m not doing some crazy price. And we have the, the listing is translated and, and then you, since, since you’re selling it on a bigger account, you guys get this Mercado Libre gold mark because you’re a big seller, as opposed to me, if I was just getting started, I wouldn’t be able to have this, this badge. Right, exactly.

Cecilia:

We also have some stores that are like exclusive. So for example, company in Mexico is we have a store there, but we are the only international store available. So it’s the only way that any seller can like, have their products there in mere sellers, of course, can enroll by theirselves. It will be much more difficult and they won’t have like their reputation as we have, but we also have some other stores that, okay, the only way of selling is with NocNoc. So that’s a good point.

Belen:

Yes. And also when we have is like, eh, in some marketplaces we have like spaces, like banners, blog where we can push products. If we have new sales or marketing campaigns, we can like boost your sales, like you have spaces in the best marketplaces in LA town where we can publish your brand, your product. So that is really, we will be really difficult for a seller if they want to make it by their own to have like that reputation, that spaces in Mercado Libre or in Amazon or in Americanas, I don’t know. And yes, this has been like a work of years of NocNoc, and we have so good reputation in this marketplaces that for us is really easy to show your products, to help you have like a brand awareness to make your brand known here, because we work with brands that are new in, and right now we have like a new brand awareness program that for us, imagine that it’s really easy to make sale.

Belen:

I don’t know a small device of, I dunno, a computer, a Sony computer, okay, here in LATAM, we all know what it is, or a Apple, I don’t know any brand well known a perfume, a Carolina, a red perfume. I can make you say that tomorrow if you want, but what, what happens with new brands that want to start a growing latam and nobody knows the brands, their products. So what we do is like a brand awareness program that they can start, I don’t know, like paying $300 per month, and we can help them with influencers, with blogs with us, social media. We, we can make like an Instagram if you want. And yes, it’s like something new. We, we, we started working and it’s going really good because for new brands, it’s really important to, to get known the brands in the beginning. Yes.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. Okay. Now there’s other you know, I don’t I can kind of speak Spanish a little bit, but I don’t speak Portuguese, but I can tell this is a Portuguese, so this must be Brazil here. Yeah. So it’s called Bandha instead of or still called wait, which band? There’s both. So the, wait, the word is the same, or wait, I thought it was a different word

Cecilia:

In Portuguese and Spanish.

Bradley Sutton:

It’s the eggs. That’s a different word. Okay. So the same in Portuguese and Spanish. Okay. OBO is Portuguese for eggs, I guess. All right, interesting. So I can see here the listing is completely in Portuguese, translated here. Yeah. I cannot read any of this down here. Interesting. what one is this? Dot cl Is this Chile?

Belen:

Yes. Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. All right. So here’s another, the same listing I guess, in Mexico here. So yeah, you put it in a lot of marketplaces there. There’s another one here. The pictures aren’t loading for me, but this is that Magalu. Big Brazilian website here. And so now it’s in this place, and it was pretty easy. It was pretty easy to get this set up here in this, in this portal that I did. Now let me show people another screenshot here of, you know, I don’t have we, we just added this just a little bit ago, so I don’t have a lot of I don’t have a lot of sales yet, but here is a dashboard of I guess one of your other you know, customers and you’ll be able to see what’s the pending orders, products out of stock and wow, look at this. $3,400 worth of sales, the top SKUs. Okay, this is pretty, pretty easy to to to navigate. Go ahead. Yeah,

Belen:

No, yeah, there you have like all your information, your balance, your what, your job. I use dashboards, pending orders, and also in the service center, you can upload your products. You don’t need help of us. If you want, you can make it by your own uploading products manually, maybe then in your Seller Central, you can show that you can upload products manually or you can integrate via a p I and we can help you with our IT team or you can upload with your ASINs, your Amazon ASINs. We take all the information from there and we’ll get like descriptions, titles, photographs, and we’ll translate everything to marketplaces here in LA Town or your, with your SKUs information, you upload a, a template that you can download it from there. And it’s like really easy and friendly for sellers. It’s like you log in, you will have an account, you say, okay, I want to upload products. You upload it, and probably in two days your product will be published in these marketplaces. And once we start with communicating with the sellers, we can make marketing like actions, we have campaigns, discounts, adds a lot of things to help them have more sales. So yes, the process of uploading products and starting seeing your products in publications in marketplaces is really fast and really easy.

Bradley Sutton:

Is there a setup fee for any of this? Like, I didn’t pay, but I don’t know, is that just the Bradley Amigo discount or there’s no, there’s no there is, there is. Do other people have to pay to get started on the platform? Well,

Cecilia:

First of all, eh, we offer three months free trial for anyone to try. So if you don’t want, I mean, if you want to try your success in Latin America, maybe you are not so sure about starting with your owner solution, we will give you three months free trial. Okay? So during that time, we of course we’ll help you get sales and boost your sales we’ll do analysis for you to determine which product are most successful, how it went, and then if you decide to continue, we of course offer like a small fee, but it’s the land maybe can talk more about that, but it’s really, really small. It’s just for us to like operate and have your account open. Yes,

Belen:

Yes. It’s like, well, three months for free and then it is only a fee that goes from 30 to $90 per month depending on how many SKUs you have. So probably you can have like a hundred SKUs with us and pay us only $40 per month. Yes is a little small commission for all the things you can make here. And for sellers, it’s like they only give us their products with the FOB price that the amount of money they need get by any sale they have, and they will have that money in their balance in their, we are going to pay them in dollars. And yes, it’s only a small commission that we charge sellers, but they can trade for free. And we have like also a budget, a marketing budget that we can help them extra these with discounts, with ads once they start selling. Yes, we can help them with that marketing actions also, and if you’re Bradley friend, we can help you, like maybe we can make something like the first month, we can give you a 10% of discount by saying us that you are Bradley friend. So yes, tell this opportunity.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, there we go. Alright, we’re gonna have to make a NocNoc code Bradley Amigo discount will be the code that you enter or something? No, but yeah, just, just name drop me.

Cecilia:

We’re gonna make something. Of course, yes, of course.

Bradley Sutton:

Alright guys, just inserting this sound bite because actually we made this Bradley Amigo discount code happen. So make sure to stay at the end and I’ll give you the link on how to redeem this. Now, I mean, to me, this seems like a no-brainer, especially that there’s no upfront costs. I’m not having to send inventory, you know, in and, and then maybe it sit like, like I said, when I was doing Mercado Libre in Mexico, I sent you know, like 10 cases worth of phone cases that I ended up not selling, and I just lost it all because, you know, I couldn’t get it right. Nobody’s having to set it up. So it’s like a no-brainer, almost like, Hey, we should set up a call with you and then, and then maybe do you take a look at their, I mean you did, you did that with mine a little bit where you took a look at the products and said, Hey, you know, let, let’s start with this egg tray one where somebody could just reach out and then choose one. Just, just see how it goes. Maybe it works out well, maybe doesn’t, maybe you should try a different product, but I’m trying to see the downside here. There’s no downside, you know, since it’s free to start, at least

Cecilia:

We encourage all sellers to send us their entire catalog because sometimes they only send us, I don’t know, I want to try this product, and they send us one or five ASINs or SKUs. But we, we always tell them, no, no, send us your entire catalog because we can help you determine the products. We feel. We’ll have a lot of sales. Yeah. Not just the ones you want to try. So we always encourage them to sign up to our website or to schedule a free exploratory call and we can’t help them get started asap. So as soon as they reach to us, we’ll start the process. We’ll study and analyze their catalog expand all projects in the marketplaces.

Bradley Sutton:

Now how like for example, me, I’ve got my own warehouse here. And so like, you know, when I was calculating it out, like how it’s gonna ship to, to you in Florida, it was pretty easy. ’cause I have the egg trays right here. I know how many days it takes me to get to, to Florida, how, how long it’s, or how much it costs. But what about the sellers who maybe they don’t have a 3PL warehouse, they only have Amazon inventory. Are they Yes. Doing the, the, what is it called are are they just taking inventory out of Amazon and then sending ah, yes to you or doing the, oh my goodness, my mind is blank right now. What’s it, what’s it called? Okay. It

Belen:

Is like they have fulfillment with Amazon,

Bradley Sutton:

Multi, multi-channel fulfillment. Is that what they’re doing to send to you? Then

Belen:

We have sales that work that way, and once they have an order, they advise Amazon, they take the products from there and they should be to us it’s like, yes. Really simple for that. Yes.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. All right. Now guys, if, if you’re interested to, to give ’em a try, there’s there’s a couple different ways. Like I suggest going to the you know, our, our hub, they have been in the hub. We don’t just put anybody in the Helium 10 hub. So just go to hub dot helium ten.com and then right in the search you can type in knock, knock and it’ll, it’ll be the, the only one that comes up and then you can hit get in touch. How else can they, they find you out there like your website and, and

Cecilia:

Sure they find you website

Belen:

They can. Yes, they can sign that directly in our website or also they have the option to have an exploratory call by free with us and we can have a meeting with you a 15 minutes meeting and to explain a little bit more to talk about your products, to see like if there is a real fit or not. So yes, please don’t hesitate to to sign up or ask for an expiratory and we can help you.

Bradley Sutton:

Put another soundbite in here, guys. They did actually make this discount code happen. So if you want to save 10% cash back on your sales for the first month, go to h10.me/bradleyamigo. Alright, h10.me/bradleyamigo, no spaces, no anything. And that I’ll take you to the NocNoc page and then get you that 10% cashback. Alright, now one last thing before we get into your 30 or 60-second tip or strategy is, I’m sure you get it all the time, but because of the name of your company, I need to know what is your best knock, knock joke?

Cecilia:

Oh, I don’t know.

Belen:

Don’t know what, sorry,

Bradley Sutton:

You don’t know. Oh, but but you don’t know about this. You don’t know about knock, knock jokes. Yes, in America.

Cecilia:

I know that I know them, but okay, it’s

Bradley Sutton:

Alright. I’ll give you one. I’ll give you one. You guys ready? Yes. Alright. Knock-Knock. Who’s

Cecilia:

Who’s there?

Bradley Sutton:

Interrupting Kat,

Cecilia:

Interrupting Cat.

Bradley Sutton:

Meow.

Cecilia:

I’m gonna, I’m gonna make that joke to my boss.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, there we go. All right. Yeah. Sorry guys with the dad jokes, but all right, now let’s get serious your 30-second tip or strategy of the day.

Cecilia:

Okay. my strategy would be if we are going multi-channel and also multi-country, if you are starting to blind like a multi-country strategy to pay attention to your keywords, of course, because they will vary from country to country. For example, the keywords we use in Colombia are not the same one we use in Mexico, even though they both speak Spanish. So that’s a good way. Like searching the, the most popular and trendy keywords and to see which one applies to your products will be like a, a good strategy. And also, of course it’s not a literal translation. If we have something in Portuguese and we want to translate it in Spanish, it, we don’t have to make it little because for example, I don’t know, waffle machine in English will translate as Makina in Portuguese, but in Spanish is, it’s different. It’s like, yeah. So you have to pay attention to that. I don’t know, Berlin, your team,

Belen:

I think that everything visual in marketplaces is really important. Every day. We, we are dealing with that. You have a lot of competition, a lot of similar products, a lot of grants, and we are like trying to make like everything more, more important and put that to be in the top with a good photograph, a good title attractive to make it different from the competition. And look what is happening with similar products. Look to a competition, what they’re doing good that you don’t, or maybe, or it is like, don’t, don’t publish a product and forget about them. It’s like a day-to-day work to understand what is happening there.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Excellent. Excellent. All right, well thank you so much for joining us today. Are you going to be coming to America for any upcoming conferences? I know I’ve seen you at a couple of conferences before like Amazon Accelerate or Unboxed or anything The rest of this year,

Belen:

Yes. Maybe next month to Amazon Accelerate, we are going to be there and yes, we we’re like seeing month by month what show is going to be new to be there. But yes, we are always trying to be every month in a different show in US, so yes.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Alright. If anybody else is interested in Accelerate, I’ll be there too. You can go to h10.me/Accelerate. And I would love to see everybody there. Maybe it’s in Seattle. Maybe we could find a local Uruguayan restaurant there and you could show me some dishes. But healthy ones, yes. Not the online food that’s s eats there. All right guys. Thank you so much and we’ll see you soon. Thank you very much. Thank you

Belen:

Thank you very much. Bye Bye.

Cecilia:

Thank you very much. Bye Bye.

#482 - Seller Strategy Masterclass: Next Level Competitor Research

In this information-packed Seller Strategy Masterclass episode, Bradley dives into the world of advanced competitor research and alerts using Helium 10’s powerful features. From unlocking historical keyword insights for seasonal products to harnessing the trend-tracking prowess of the “Show Historical Trend” button inside Cerebro. Discover the strategic advantages of the Cerebro “Time Machine” and uncover hidden opportunities by examining significant drops in your competitor’s BSR. Bradley unveils the true value of these features, guiding you to reverse-engineer your competitors’ success on a month-to-month basis and offering insights into top-level competitor information.

Bradley also teaches your, how to set up tailored alerts from competitors’ listings, customize your notifications, and gain priceless insights into pricing and coupon strategies. Join us to grasp the immense potential of these new features and create an unfair advantage against your competitors with your own suggested insights. Let’s learn how to elevate your Amazon game today!

In episode 482 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley discusses:

• 01:31 – What You Will Learn In This Episode
• 03:00 – Using Cerebro History For Seasonal Products
• 07:31 – The Cerebro Show Historical Trend Button
• 11:51 – How To Use The Cerebro “Time Machine”
• 13:25 – Look At Big Dips In BSR
• 14:29 – Why Are These Features So Valuable
• 20:43 – Reverse Engineer Your Competitor’s Success On A Month To Month Basis
• 23:54 – How To See Top-Level Information For Your Competitors
• 25:19 – Getting Alerts From Competitors Listings
• 27:04 – How To Customize Your Competitor Alerts
• 28:07 – Getting Insights On Pricing And Coupon
• 29:21 – How Valuable Are These New Features?
• 32:36 – Suggest Insights That You Want To See In Helium 10

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

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today in our monthly Seller Strategies Masterclass, we’re gonna be going over some amazing features that you should be using that’s gonna help you see what your competitors are doing on keywords on a month to month basis, going back to yours, and allow you to get notifications on if they change their price or add a coupon to their listing and much more. How cool is that? Pretty cool. I think

Bradley Sutton:

You wanna know what keywords are driving the most sales for listings on Amazon. To do that, you need to know what highly searched for keywords the product is ranking for. Maybe at the top of page one, you can actually find that out in seconds by using helium ten’s keyword research tool, Cerebro. Now, that’s just one of the many, many functions that make this tool my favorite tool in the whole suite, and it’s the most powerful keyword research tool ever created for e-commerce sellers. For more information, go to h10.me/cerebro. Don’t forget to use the Serious Sellers Podcast, discount coupon SSP10. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Series Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s a completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world.

Bradley Sutton:

And today, we are going to be going over some kind of like game changing features of Helium 10 here, where these are strategies that you should, guys, should be using, whether you’re using Helium 10 today, or maybe you, you’re using another tool that might have the, these strategies. I’m not sure if anybody else can do what I’m about to show you today, but for some of you who aren’t elite members, a lot of this will be game changing for you because you’ve never had access to this. But I’m gonna be showing you guys how to look at the history of where somebody was ranking in a certain month. There’s a plethora of applications for it. We’re gonna be going over that today. You’re gonna be able to see what was like their Cerebro, or where were they ranking organically?

Bradley Sutton:

Where were they ranking in sponsored ads of a certain month of any time in the last couple of years? You know, where were they showing up in Amazon? Recommended what was the search volume of those keywords when they’re ranking for it? And this is going to be great if you’ve got a seasonal product that you’re just about to launch. It’ll be great to just look at your current products, to look at your competitors, what they’ve been doing in the past, just there’s a never ending list of, of kind of cool things that can come from this that you cannot get anywhere else in Seller Central. This is not something that you can get in Search Query Performance because it’s for your competitor’s products. And then I’m also gonna be showing you some ways to track your competitors that you’ve never been able to do before or that you had to do manually.

Bradley Sutton:

So let’s go ahead and hop into it. Now, the first the first kind of use case I want to give is, let’s just say you’ve got a seasonal product, like something related to holidays or maybe it’s, you know, like a Valentine’s Day product or Christmas or something like that. Now, let’s go ahead and just use something. Let’s pretend that we are gonna do Christmas straws. I used to do a lot of straws on, on Amazon for Project 5k. I still do a lot of straws. So let’s just say I wanted to relaunch on Christmas straws. So if I were just to type in Christmas straws here, I spelling this, right? Yeah, Christmas straws. You know, I’m not sure these products are not selling well, you know, like these two aren’t even selling like 50. Because, you know, here in, in August, people are not exactly ordering Christmas draws unless they’re really trying to get ahead of the curb.

Bradley Sutton:

So if I were to choose this and run cerebral on it, you know, would I know a lot of the main keywords? You know, probably, but, but they’re probably not even ranking for that many keywords. Let’s just take a look at some of the estimated sales here, but the, these products are probably not doing many sales at all. And so the keywords that they’re getting sales from, the keywords that they’re ranking for also will not be the kind of true keywords that they are getting their sales from during Christmas time, right? So what is the way that we can find out? Well, first of all, are these Christmas straws even in stock? Like I, am I even looking at the bestseller just because it’s page one, you know, position one and two and three and four and five are they the best seller?

Bradley Sutton:

So let me just show you how to do that. And yeah, look at this. A couple of them are only doing 109 hundred units of sales, but this is across the whole, across all of their variations, which they’ve got tons of variations in this listing, but these are not the best sellers necessarily at Christmas. So what you can do is you go to brand analytics, And I am going to look at, as you can see here, I’m gonna look at brand analytics, top search terms, and I’m going to go to reporting range monthly and select year 2022, and then I’m going to go to December of 2022, and then I’m gonna type here under search term Christmas straws. Now take a look. The number one keyword for Christmas straws was Christmas straws. And the, the rest of ’em are just long tail keywords that have Christmas draws in it.

Bradley Sutton:

And let’s just take a look at the second one here. Let’s see, how did they do? They had 6% of the click share and 6% of the conversions. This was the number two listing for all Christmas draws in December during Christmas time of last year. So let’s look at this listing now on Amazon. And look at this guys. It’s unavailable. This product is not even in stock. So if I was just looking at Cerebro on the top products right now, I wouldn’t have even seen this product on Amazon, right? And if I were to run Cerebro on this product, now it’s not gonna show me anything useful because it’s not even in stock. So it’s not even ranking right, right now, right? So this is what you can do. I’m going to take this and go ahead and, and I’m gonna go ahead and put it in cerebral, okay?

Bradley Sutton:

It’s gonna run cerebral. I can click on keywords right here inside of the actual Amazon listing. It looks like it actually was in stock recently. Just went out of stock a few weeks ago. But let’s go ahead and run Cerebro on this. And you’ll see probably not that many keywords are going to show up now because it hasn’t been in stock in a couple weeks. So we still have the history. It wasn’t stock within 30 days ago, so there’s still a lot of keywords here, but almost none of these have any significant search volume you guys see here. Almost all of these are like, you know, 200, 150, some of them zero search volume. So this is not really gonna tell me what the best keywords are, but watch this. What I’m going to do is I’m gonna hit this button.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, this is something that you guys who are diamond members and above now have access to Elite members have had this for a year. This is something that I, I’ve always wanted for years and years. We were able to launch it last year for Elite, but now it’s available for Diamonds. So you Diamond members. I mean, lemme just kind of preface this with, with how amazing I think this is. I would’ve paid for Elite membership just to get this. I would’ve paid the $400 for Elite just to get this feature. That’s how powerful. It’s now it’s available to Diamond members, you know, and you only have to pay like $150 more for it. More than worth it just for this feature, let alone everything else that the Diamond has. And you guys know me, I’m not like some software salesman where I’m, I’m gonna tell it to you straight.

Bradley Sutton:

That’s how valuable this is. Now, why? Let me explain, watch what happens when I hit show historical trend here, which is now the new thing that you d members have available. It’s gonna show me the history of this asin. And as a matter of fact, I wanna make, you know what? I wanna make sure that only this listing is th this might have had other variations in this. So I’m gonna hit exclude variations. That’s something important that you guys should do. Now, it might, it might, it might just come out with the same information. But whenever you’re in cerebral, if you are in a variation listing, and the listings are very different, like there are in the Christmas category here, or in the straw category, I should say hit exclude variations to make sure you’re only analyzing this ace. And sure enough, the number was different here.

Bradley Sutton:

But anyways, I’m gonna look at this show historical trend. And, and look at this guys, you could see how many keywords they were ranking for in history, In July, June, may, April. Obviously they, they weren’t even ranking for any keywords and they probably weren’t even showing up in the search results for many products. They probably weren’t even in stock. But then look here in December, you could see that they had 613 organic keywords and 618 sponsored keywords. So what you do is you then hit this month of December. ’cause Obviously that’s when they probably sold the most for this product. And then I’m gonna hit apply filters. Now, here’s where the magic happens. Now all of a sudden I am looking at Cerebro as of December of 2022. In other words, Christmas of last year. So now this top selling product per brand analytics for this keyword and this niche, I can now look at why were they the top selling product?

Bradley Sutton:

What keywords were they getting sales from? And so you can just take a look here. Let’s go ahead and search for anything that’s over like 300 search volume, where maybe their organic rank was between one and 15. Let’s go ahead and apply. And then right here I could see the top keywords for this product. Christmas straws paper, looks like they were even getting some action on Halloween straws for some reason. That’s kind of interesting. So yeah, I wouldn’t have expected that. Paper, Christmas straws, paper straws, there are one of the top ones. So they were getting a lot of sales just from regular paper straw keywords Christmas, plastic straws, Grinch straws, holiday straws, all of these keywords that probably have no search volume now or very little Now I can see which ones they were getting sales from. And now I know which keywords that if I am going to make Christmas straws, what are the keywords that I need to start ranking for now in August to get ready for December?

Bradley Sutton:

Alright, so there’s one use case. I hope you guys can see the value in that is if you got a seasonal product and, and you’re wanting to make sure that you have some special PPC campaigns, oh, by the way, speaking of PPC, I could see what, what, what were they putting their money in as far as PPC goes. I could go to sponsored rank one to 10 and just see what keywords they were paying for top of search placement. Let’s actually go one to five, so that’s more towards the top of the page and take a look. Now I could see which keywords that they were showing up for in sponsored results are very high, right? But that’s the first use case. You gotta, like I said, you’ve got a seasonal product. It’s, maybe it’s a summer product, maybe it has nothing to do with holiday, but it’s maybe something that’s only for summer or only for winter, and you are not in that time period.

Bradley Sutton:

You know, like, let’s say it’s a St. Patrick’s Day, or let’s say it’s spring decorations. Well, people are not usually buying spring decorations in August. So whatever’s showing up in Amazon right now is not going to be the best, the indicative of which products were the top ones and what their performance is, what keywords they’re ranking for in springtime, right? So any ASIN at all, even your own ASINs, you put into Cerebro and then hit the historical trend and now you can see Cerebro as of those days. Now, I could also do this for a multi ASIN search as well. The same way that you guys do multi ace in searches in cerebral. So I could see, hey, where is everybody kind of like ranking for overall? Alright, now that’s one use case. Now for another use case of how you can use this Cerebro historical data.

Bradley Sutton:

I call this time machine, cerebral time machine, how we can use it in order to analyze what the competitors have excelled on. Let’s go ahead and, and go into the niche of egg trace. That’s something that Project X has a lot of. And so maybe I want to take a look at one of the competitors here who have been selling for a while. Let’s go ahead and run. I’m gonna run X-ray right on this page, and I wanna find somebody who has been selling products for a while on here. Let’s take a look. So I’m gonna look for somebody who’s been selling for a while, at least like a year or two. And then let’s go ahead and see if I can find something that will show some kind of seasonality with their, with their keywords. So first of all, let’s go ahead and say at least estimated sales.

Bradley Sutton:

I want somebody who’s been selling at least a hundred units a month, okay? So of the ones who have sold from at least a hundred units a month we see here, here’s one that was made in 2021. So let’s just take a look at his listing, see if it’s relevant. It’s a egg tray stackable. All right, this is cool. So, so this guy’s been selling for a while. So what I might wanna do is I’m going to look at his BSR chart because I want to see when it, or if he had any kind of like really peak times of sale. So I’m gonna go to all time on his BSR chart, and then let’s take a look here at when he was selling really well. And there’s not too much, like this guy is not that his sales don’t seem that seasonal, all right?

Bradley Sutton:

But however, look here, there is kind of a dip here in a couple of BSR dips. So I’m looking here, let’s just say that he had a bigger dip here in March of 2023. So how I can use that information is I would go to, again, hitches this keywords button and now it’s gonna open up cerebral for what’s going on right now, which of course is, is valuable in itself, but what I’m gonna be looking for is how to tie in his increase or decrease in sales to keywords. Now, I, you couldn’t really see it. I’m just doing this live guys, so you know, I didn’t pick a great one right there, but you’d especially be mindful of your competitors who have big dips in their BSR or big increases in their BSR, meaning that their sales go way down.

Bradley Sutton:

So what you do is you run Cerebro, and then I’m gonna hit again the show historical trend. And let me look back at that month where he was doing a lot. Now look at this, I said March. Look, all of a sudden he went from 48 sponsored keywords to 401 sponsored keywords from February to March. So that’s in interesting in itself. So what I would do is I would go here and I would choose this month, and I would now look at his keywords that were from March of 2023, and then I would take note of what he is ranking for organically high. Now, what I would do in another window, let me just show you guys here, and now I, I probably download this there, there’s other ways too, I could do it. But what I would do is I would look at, I would open up another window and I would look at the month where he wasn’t really doing much.

Bradley Sutton:

Like in February, like let’s say that his, his keywords, his sales went up in March. So I would go ahead and open it up. Let me go ahead and do that right now. So I would open up another window of cerebral and let me look at their previous month where maybe their sales weren’t as much. And then I’m going to compare what is going on here between these two months. So here I have March, I’m gonna go ahead and put minimum, let’s just say 500 search volume and let’s go organic rank one through 10 for March. And let’s do the same thing. Minimum 500 search volume now that I’m looking at February and look at organic rank one through 10. Okay? Now let’s just take a look here at their main keywords would an egg holder, counter egg holder, et cetera.

Bradley Sutton:

And what I’m looking for is something that went up from February to March. So let’s see, wooden an egg holder, he was number one in March, but in February he was number one too. So we know that he didn’t get extra sales from that keyword counter egg holder, he was number four, he was number two before. But look, look here, there’s a couple of keywords I can tell already that is not even on here. And as you can see here, in March, he was ranking position six for this keyword egg storage for countertop. Let’s see where he was ranking in February, because I don’t even see that keyword here. So let’s just open this up to maybe rank 50. And then let’s look for egg storage for countertop. I don’t even see he was not even ranking guys in the top 50. So guess what?

Bradley Sutton:

If there was an increase in sales in February to March, which there was, we now know that we can tie some of that increase in sales to the fact that he was now at the top of the page for egg storage for countertop, wherein in February he was not even ranking in the first 50 positions for this keyword. So you guys see the power here you would do it the opposite way. Let’s say that somebody, one of your competitors had a really bad month of sales, you saw that from his BSR, like he normally gets around, you know, 5,000 B S R and then the next month his B S R was like 15,000 or 20,000, right? So his sales obviously went down. Well, now what I would do is I would do the same search that I just did right here, but I’d be looking at where did he lose keyword rank and now what does this do?

Bradley Sutton:

This is going to show me what are the keywords that I really need to maintain my rank on. You know, like sometimes we have this idea, hey, I need to be at the top of the, the search results for all these keywords, but you really want to be top of the search results for the keywords that have the best chance to bring you sales. So what can we learn from this, this lesson here? Look at your competitor’s listings or even yours. You know, if you don’t have Search Query Performance, you know, this might be the only way you can do this, but look at your competitor’s sales history on when they had super great months or super bad months, and then look at the previous month and compare it to the month that they did super good or super bad. And now see if you can tie certain keyword ranks going up or down, tie that to their sales going up or down.

Bradley Sutton:

And now you know, like, hey, if my competitor lost sales because he went from the top of page one to page two for this keyword, well, guess what? I better make sure that I don’t lose the top of page one for this keyword. I’m gonna make sure I, I bid heavily on sponsor ads or the opposite way. Now you know that, hey, during this month, this competitor increase in sales and it’s because they got to page one for this egg holder countertop keyword that I wasn’t even paying attention to. Now, you know, that’s an important keyword. So that’s another way that this is super, super valuable, this Cerebro time machine or historical trend feature. Now, let’s just say that you’re doing a multi ASIN search. Like for example, maybe I’m I’m back on that egg tray page. I’m gonna say, Hey I wanna run all of these stackable egg trays all together at the same time in Cerebro.

Bradley Sutton:

So I just select them all and then I hit run Cerebro. And now what I can do is, again, going back to the show historical trend, I can actually see at a very granular level this whole niche, like, look at this, these products weren’t even doing that much back in 2022, but I can see overall these products have gotten stronger on their organic placements. All right, if I hit this button products, I could see at the product level how many keywords they’re showing up for organically, right? Let’s go back to this keyword type. And what I can do is I can see, I can click on each of these ASINs, I could see that this product has only been around for three months, and then I could see how are they doing and sponsored and organic. So take a look at this one here.

Bradley Sutton:

I just clicked on this one ASIN, I could see that in December, for whatever reason in April, they actually don’t run any sponsored ads at all. So there’s another insight I can get like, hey, if my competitor turns off their sponsored ads in December and February, well now I know that I can go ahead and crush them on sponsored ads during, during this time. Here is another product that I clicked on. And as I’m looking over time, I can actually see that he is turning down his sponsored ads because of it. He’s actually losing his organic placement. Like look at this from July to August, I can actually see that his organic keywords have gone down and you could tie it directly to maybe a decrease in his PPC spend. I mean the, the, the possibilities go on and on guys.

Bradley Sutton:

The reason why I always wanted this tool was because I love Cerebro as is, you know, like I love to be able to look at where a product’s been ranking for somewhere in the last 30 days, but so many times I want to see what their situation was in a certain month of the year, like going back maybe two years, maybe I wanna look back at the last two Christmas seasons how they did. And now this is going to allow you to reverse engineer your competitor’s success on a monthly basis throughout the year. And also spot trends like maybe you see that your competitors, they’re increasing in the keywords that they are showing up for in search results. Maybe it’s decreasing. Maybe you could see are they spending more money on PPC? Are they spending less money on PPC?

Bradley Sutton:

There’s so much things that you can do. So again, if you have a diamond account, hop into cerebral and look at the historical trends ASAP. If you do not have diamond, you just have platinum. Trust me guys, the value you can get from this, I cannot even put into dollars how much value you can get. I mean, imagine if I was selling those Christmas straws how much money I can get by making sure I start ranking for the right keywords in August and September when it’s super, super cheap as opposed to waiting until December and then let me run Cerebro and see where my competitors are ranking for. I mean, you can’t even put a dollar value on that, you know, because it’s gonna cost so much less to get ranked for these keywords when the search volume is low because I have the visibility on it and not having to wait for this year’s information.

Bradley Sutton:

So guys, if you don’t have Diamond you can use one of our discount codes like SSP10 to upgrade and get a 10% off discount if you haven’t used a coupon in the last couple of years. So SSP10 will get you that discount, but guys, get this right away. Alright, the next thing we’re gonna be talking about today, we are going to go into Insights Dashboard, speaking of competitors for something that I think is really gonna help you monitoring what is going on in the competition. And again, this is something that you know, Diamond members can get full access to you Platinum, you have limited access to this, but you can also get some information here and enter some competitors. So if you look on your dashboard you have the, my product table, right? And I, I have all of my, my product families here.

Bradley Sutton:

You can see me. Here’s my coffin shelf and my coffin egg tray, my stackable egg rack and some egg trays here. But what I want you guys to do, and you might see this for some of your products, is click this down button and then click on competitors. And this is a section where you need to put your top five competitors who you think are the most, like your product that you are battling sales for. Now, some of you might have this already, and that’s because Helium 10 might have put some competitors here. But what I want you guys to do is, you know better than Helium 10 what, who your competitors are. So you can edit your list here and, and pick which ones are your top competitors. You know, maybe just drop the ASINs in here or, or just, you know, do a, a quick search for them.

Bradley Sutton:

But what I want you to do right now, you know, you can even pause this episode and do this and do this and pick this up later, is for all of your top products to put your competitors here. Now let me just show you the kind of fire that comes from this. If you do this, the very first thing is now anytime I can just click here and I can see some top level information for the comparison. Like what’s their current price, what’s their current sales, what’s their current revenue for the last 30 days, what’s their listing quality score? For the buy box, is it FB A or FBM? Does it have variations? Coupon this guy is running a 5% coupon. All right, this, this has never been available inside of Helium 10 before. Let’s take a look.

Bradley Sutton:

If he is running a coupon, lemme just take a look at this coffin shelf right here. There it is right there. You see he’s got a 5% coupon, right? So you can just see that instantly right in here inside of, of your competitor dashboard. The other thing I’m going to be able to do is if I have all of them selected, I can go ahead and run them all in Cerebro or I can one by one run them in Listing Analyzer. Or maybe I want to see, hey, for this product here what is showing up in the frequently bought together for this coffin shelf competitor, I hit analyze and then I hit product targeting in black box and it’s going to go ahead and open it up right here. And I could say, Hey, show me everything that has been show that is showing up in frequently bought together.

Bradley Sutton:

And now I have the full list of products that are frequently bought together with my competitor products. Those are great for product targeting ads, et cetera. Right now, that’s just, this is just the beginning guys. This is what you’re gonna start to be able to do. So what you’re gonna start seeing is you’re gonna start getting these insights and alerts for when competitors do things like, for example, I got one here that a competitor has updated their listing. So I’m gonna take a look at this and see what they actually did. And I can see here that, you know, this is obviously not my competitor, this is a shoe here, but we just threw in some random competitors. Oh, I can see that my competitor changed their title and now I’m gonna go see, well, what did they change it from? Two.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, so maybe there’s something going on there. I wanna look at that. Maybe they changed their image, maybe they changed their bullet point. You are gonna start to get these insights or alerts on your competitors’ products. I mean, we’ve always been able to do that on our own products, in, in alerts, the Helium 10 tool alerts. But now if you have specified your competitors in your Insights dashboard, you are gonna get alerts on what your competitors are doing. And this is something that hopefully you are checking on on your own, but maybe you had to hire somebody to go look at all of your competitors listings every day and say, Hey, who changed their their image, who changed their title? What’s going on? Now you are gonna get those insights. Other things you might get insights or alerts on is, for example, look at this, five competitors, BSR sales or review counts have drastically changed.

Bradley Sutton:

So let’s just take a look at that and let me go ahead and open it up here and then I can see, all right, well look at this. B S R they went from their BSR in one day changed by 5,000. Good grief. Alright their sales went to went down. So you can see these little like little magic buttons right here. That means that there was something that changed. Now here’s the thing. Maybe you don’t care if somebody’s BSR goes down by 25,000 because it’s not that big if they were at 277. So you can actually go in and customize how you want to get these alerts. Like maybe, hey, I only want to get BSR insights if their BSR gets better than myself. Or maybe their BSR increases by 20%, or maybe it decreases by 20%, or I just wanna know if the review count increases by a certain number percentage or decreases by a certain percentage, that’s what you want to get inside.

Bradley Sutton:

You know, maybe the reviews you know, Amazon takes away the reviews and you want to capitalize on that by going harder on your PPC. Like, you know, sometimes Amazon might take away all the reviews of a competitor, right? You know, and just, and they’ll give it back. But maybe that during that time you want to, you know, capitalize and pounce on it and, and go a little bit harder in PPC. Well now you can know when your competitors reviews are taken away. Maybe you want to get a notification if their sales drastically increase or decrease in a day. ’cause Maybe you know, something is going on. Another thing you are gonna start getting insights on is your, their pricing, right? This is super, super important for a lot of you is what are your competitors doing with pricing and coupons?

Bradley Sutton:

So you’re gonna be able to specify what kind of insights you get and when. So for example, for these coffin shelves, I see, oh, this one sourpuss Coffin Shelf, they raise their price. Oh, now this goth vanity, they had a coupon and now they don’t have a coupon, right? They don’t have a coupon going on. So you can get notifications, and again, these are customizable. So hey, a coupon was offered or it’s no longer offered. If the price increases by a certain amount or a certain dollar amount, or the price or the price decreases by a certain amount, all of this, you are going to be able to specify and say, Hey, I want to get notifications or insights on this. Guys, this is really powerful because hopefully you were checking some of these things before, but you probably, it was probably a very manual process to monitor when your competitors are changing their title, their image, when they have big peaks in sales if they start running a coupon that you are not and you are not running a coupon.

Bradley Sutton:

I mean, a lot of us, we like to match our competitor coupons, like, Hey, my competitor’s gonna run a 5% coupon for this week. Well I wanna do a 5% coupon. So this is gonna be powerful for you to stay ahead of the game so that you are not having to kind of play catch up or make some really long manual process to monitor what your competitors are doing. Now, this is just the beginning guys of the Insights Dashboard for competitors. Like I said before, what’s coming is we’re gonna start letting you know, hey, your competitor is getting sales from this keyword and you don’t even have this keyword in your listing, right? Your competitor is ranking high on, on sponsored for this product or for this keyword, and you’re not even bidding on this keyword in P P C. Would you like to add it?

Bradley Sutton:

Pretty much anything you could possibly imagine that you are doing now, either manually in Seller Central or Amazon to monitor competitors you are gonna be able to do without doing it because helium ten’s gonna do it for you and we’ll just give you insights or alerts on when these things happen. So what I want you guys to be thinking about right now, I just told you what’s definitely coming, that keyword one, a lot of those keyword ones, but you let me know or not let, don’t let me know that you have no way to contact me. Let Helium 10 know what kind of competitor insights are you looking forward to or do you want help on? I just told you a whole bunch that we are currently doing right now, like, you know, when the competitor changes their price and, and things like that.

Bradley Sutton:

I told you what’s coming as far as when competitors are ranking highly for certain keywords that they’re not May, maybe it’s a, a keyword rank. Hey, you want to know when your competitor drops or inorganic rank for a certain keyword. But what I want you guys is think of your best competitor insights that we could help you out on. Something that you are having to tediously manually do right now. But we can automate it for you. And then what I want you to do is on your dashboard at the very top, under send feedback, hit this button and then go ahead and answer this survey that comes up so that you can offer insight into what insights you want to get as far as the competitors go. Again, some of this stuff is not game changing in the fact that oh, nobody has ever thought to monitor your coupons, your competitor coupons.

Bradley Sutton:

It’s something that you’re probably doing, but it’s a manual process. We’re just trying to automate automate it. So let us know, help us help you, but in the meantime, all of your products that you’re currently selling, go in there and add your competitors. Now, one question I get is, Hey, I’ve got a lot of variations right now you can only add competitors at the parent level and it populates the variation Later on, you’re gonna be able to take like, Hey, here’s my five competitors for my black coffin shelf and I want five pink competitors for my pink coffin shelf, et cetera. So right now you have to select the competitors at the parent level, ASIN level or the parent ASIN level inside of insides dashboard. But don’t worry that’s, it’s coming soon where you’re gonna be able to do it one-to-one.

Bradley Sutton:

So all of your all of your child items have their own competitors, right? Really exciting stuff guys. This is just the two things that we went over today in Cerebro, the historical thing, and also these insights and notifications on what is happening with the competitors. This is stuff that does not exist in the industry today and stuff that you can start getting the leg up on your competition. A lot of it is maybe stuff you’re already doing, but instead of you taking five hours to do this stuff or paying somebody to do it, now we’re just gonna do it for you and deliver the results. So make sure you Diamond members are using this. And again, both of these things I mentioned are only on the Diamond plan. So if you want to test it out, see if it’s right for you, just use a discount code SSP10 and try out the diamond plan for a couple months.

Bradley Sutton:

And if you don’t find the value in it, go ahead and go back to the Platinum plan. But trust me guys, if you are not finding the value in it, you’re not using it in the right way because you cannot not get value out of these things and have it not be worth the $150 more that the Diamond plan is cost because these are super, super valuable. So let us know, give us feedback on these tools. How would you like it to be changed, both the Cerebro one and Insights Dashboard. Let us know what we can do and I hope you guys have a great time playing with these new tools and we’ll see you in the next episode.

Helium 10 Buzz 8/10/23: Amazon Seller Fulfilled Prime | Prime Big Deal Days | Helium 10 Academy

Let’s discuss this week’s buzzing news about Amazon and E-commerce. From Amazon Seller Fulfilled Prime is back to Amazon events happening in the next two months, and more!

#481 - This Amazon Seller Built 2 8-Figure Brands In Competitive Niches

In this episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast, we feature the awe-inspiring journey of Elizabeth Rivas, the operating mastermind behind two remarkable 8-figure brands. Discover her captivating backstory and how she soared to greatness in the Amazon space from humble beginnings. Unravel the secrets of 1P and 3P seller programs, and gain valuable insights into killer PPC and listing optimization techniques.

Dive into the fiercely competitive niche of supplement brands and learn how to thrive in a crowded category niche in the Amazon marketplace. Brace yourself for game-changing marketing initiatives and innovative strategies for Amazon brands who want to crush it. Elizabeth’s serial beta testing approach and her favorite Helium 10 tool will leave you inspired. Learn and take advantage of her ingenious launch tactics using Helium 10’s Market Tracker 360 data and the joys of an 8-figure seller while using the all-new Insights Dashboard. Plus, learn how you can grab a free demo of MT360!

In episode 481 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Elizabeth discuss:

• 01:30 – Elizabeth’s Backstory
• 02:57 – How She Got Started In The Amazon Space
• 03:43 – Started From Nothing To 8-Figures In Sales
• 04:46 – Amazon 1P And 3P: What’s The Difference?
• 09:05 – 1P Seller PPC And Listing Optimization
• 09:49 – Which One Is Best? 1P Or 3P Seller Program?
• 14:00 – Talking About AlgeaCal’s Amazon Brand
• 15:58 – Competing In A Very Competitive Niche
• 19:41 – Talking About Amazon PPC And Their CPC
• 25:59 – “You Don’t Have To Be The Cheapest In Your Niche”
• 29:26 – Marketing Initiatives And Strategies Inside Amazon
• 33:31- Serial Beta Tester And Other Creative Strategies
• 36:43 – Elizabeth’s Favorite Helium 10 Tool
• 37:33 – Launching Products Using MT360 
• 39:05 – Why She Loves The New Insights Dashboard
• 39:26 – How To Get A Free Demo Of MT360
• 40:48 – Elizabeth’s Healthy Habits Outside The Grind
• 43:46 – Elizabeth’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’re gonna talk to a seller who’s already brought one company on Amazon to eight figures of sales. And by next year. She’ll bring another company to over 10 million in sales. And it’s through using a lot of cool strategies she’s gonna share with us by opening up her products and listings to us. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think.

Bradley Sutton:

Are you an agency enterprise-level seller or an eight or nine-figure seller and need advanced analytics market Tracker 360 might be the product for you to get a demo of Market Tracker 360, go to h10.me/mt360. That’s h10.me/mt360. 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 a serious seller here from not too far away from me, but coming from Canada. We’ve got Elizabeth. How’s it going?

Elizabeth:

Hi Bradley. How are you?

Bradley Sutton:

I’m doing just delightful. Thank you. Now where in Canada exactly are you at?

Elizabeth:

Yes, so I’m located in the province of Quebec about an hour from Montreal. It’s called Mirabel. So I’m near the mountains here.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Now is that where you were born and raised, or did you go there at a later stage in life?

Elizabeth:

So my parents are originally from El Salvador in Central America and my mom came into the States and stayed there for five years in the 1980s. And I was born there. I was actually born in Long Island in New York. I

Bradley Sutton:

I hear a little bit of New York there in the accent.

Elizabeth:

Maybe because of my cousins, but I’ve never lived there actually, I came here to Quebec and I was like a year and a half. Okay. So I’m mostly Canadian although I have my two passports there. But yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

That’s kind of amazing, you know, like, Hey, you can be in New York when you’re seven months old and then it just sticks with you? So somehow I guess I lived there for a year only or two years. I still feel like, and I was like, more than 20 years ago, I still feel like a little bit of like a New Yorker, but anyways, been in Canada most of life. So then I’m assuming English, Spanish, and French? You speak?

Elizabeth:

Correct. Yes. So my mom talked to us at the house in Spanish. French came at school and English too. But I did have the opportunity to study at the HEC Montreal, which is in European university here in Canada.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. What was your major?

Elizabeth:

It’s a marketing and international in business.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. And then upon graduation, did you enter that field?

Elizabeth:

Yes. So part of of my career path here is a bit different because I didn’t really touch e-commerce before like 2018. Prior to that, I was actually selling to big companies in pharma, like Thermo Fisher, VWR 3M. I was a marketing sales director, so I have always been in the business field, but it was more B2B, it was not digital.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Alright. Interesting. Now, how, then, you know, in the late 2010s, I guess Yeah, you could say, how did you discover Amazon e-commerce?

Elizabeth:

Yes. so in 2017, I started working at a company called Pelican International. They’re the Canadian company, which is actually the largest manufacturer of plastic kayaks. And I had a particular mandate, which was to develop an accessory product line for them to sell online. So they usually sell out all of their products through big stores like Sporting Goods Costco, and Walmart. And they didn’t have any real presence with e-commerce direct to consumers didn’t exist at the time, and they wanted to start it with Amazon. So because it wasn’t an existing channel, I just like actually just arm myself with my enthusiasm, and curious mind, because I didn’t know anything about Amazon. Okay. and, you know, like even after now it’s been like five, almost six years that I am within this ecosystem, it always continues to surprise me every day.

Elizabeth:

It changes always. But at the time, just to go back there we were set up as an Amazon 1P. So we were not doing 3P seller. And after 18 months we lounge a full accessory product line in 2020 for paddles dry bags and many different accessories for nautical outdoor activities. And it was a whole process because Amazon helped out during the process of the lineup. I’ve actually read through it, like at the time I didn’t use Helium 10. So I’ve actually read a lot of all the reviews of different competitors and based off those reviews, we came out with the different models and concepts with our RND company I’m sorry, the department outsourced these models in China. And that’s how we came with, you know, like when I left in 2022 the brand alone was selling eight figures across a hundred different ASINs, and it started from nothing.

Bradley Sutton:

And what in particular were you responsible for

Elizabeth:

I was responsible for everything, so from A to Z.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. So then, you can take most of the credit then from that increase in sales?

Elizabeth:

Yes. Most of it, of course, I had like a team, you know, with me helping me out. Like just RnD and graphics and content and everything. But like the strategy, like the go-to-market strategy. Yeah. It came from,

Bradley Sutton:

Did you launch products as well, or just take their existing listings and, and, and try to just, you know, market it in a better way on Amazon? Like where did a lot of most of that growth come from?

Elizabeth:

We launched products, like all of them. For instance, we used to have five different models of paddles. When I left, we had five different categories and each of them have three to five different variations. So it was mainly like taking the small, small category of accessories that they had and just broadly coming with different subcategories and how do we sell these to the Amazon customer.

Bradley Sutton:

And a hundred percent of the products that were launched were all 1P or like through Vendor Central, where it says, shipped and sold by Amazon.

Elizabeth:

Yes. It was all through 1P.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, for those who might not be familiar, you know, we’re not gonna fast forward yet in your journey to the 3P side, but what are some of the biggest differences like things you might not have control over, things that are completely different on the process when you’re a 1P as opposed to 3P?

Elizabeth:

Yeah, so I feel like 1P it’s good when you have a good relationship with your vendor manager if you get to talk to him. The first year we didn’t have this relationship, so it was kind of hard. But basically what is different is that you don’t control demand. You don’t have all this access to different promotions that you do with the 3P seller side although I’m not really familiar of the changes that have been made in the last year and a half, ’cause I’m not anymore in the 1Piece. So maybe it is but just like brand analytics, like on the 3P side that it’s, it changed my life, you know, here as a seller now and the vendor side, we didn’t have access. I believe they do now. But at the time they didn’t.

Elizabeth:

One of the things also, it’s forecasting, the forecasting process the way they order for us, it was every Monday, so they actually just issue PO’s and you have to go to how can I say, the process of seeing if you can accept those or not if you have enough stock or not. So it was more how can I say a little bit more difficult. And also all the negotiation part, you know, with the percentages that they take for allowances and all of that. It gets very corporate. It is a B2B relationship when you are a 1P seller.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. How about Amazon advertising? Is that a very similar experience or are there differences there with how you run the PPC?

Elizabeth:

It was however I run it now on a very different strategy side, meaning that I do it with an agency. I do have the budget. I’m with a company now that has a budget for that. Pelican at the time didn’t do it that way. It was very sporadic and we didn’t really have like a strategy around it. It was more like a keyword base. So I don’t know exactly what they’re doing now. I believe they have somebody doing the the advertising part.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. what about listing? You know again, some of this is different to me ’cause I don’t have personal experience, you know, with 1P, how much control over your listing optimization do you have? Or is Amazon the one who is creating the listings or you have full control over the images and the copy and things like that? So

Elizabeth:

Copy and images, you do have full control. The only thing that you don’t have full control is pricing. That’s one of the things that we didn’t like. It’s like interesting. It was sporadic. Sometimes they just run like a deal or something on our, on our product listing, and we didn’t even agree to that, or we didn’t issue that.

Bradley Sutton:

But they still have to pay you the same, like if they decide for some crazy reason, Hey, we’re gonna give a 50% off discount. It’s not like there’s gonna, they can tell you, Hey, you need to give us 50% off, or something like that.

Elizabeth:

Exactly. So mainly, I believe it’s mainly for them to, they, it’s, I’m pretty sure it’s an algorithm doing that, so they have too much talk, it’s not moving enough. So they just like issue like a 10%. Our problem with that is that you know, it’s, we were an omni-channel company, so we had other retailers also where we cannot just run random promotions and having 1Price at Sporting Goods and another on Amazon, you know. We were a map company, but they don’t, like, Amazon doesn’t really go with the MAP policy, you know, so that, that was one of the things that was difficult for us. But it was more the, like the first, first 18 months, because after that, when we got our good relationship with the vendor manager, he did understand that we cannot be like, playing around with our prices.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Now, in retrospect, you know, my question is gonna be like, which would you choose? Like, so, you know, there might be some sellers out there, or some companies maybe they’re not on Amazon yet. I’ve heard this question before, it’s like, Hey I’m trying to get on Amazon. I actually have an offer from from Amazon. They wanna do 1P with me. They want me to go vendor central route. Or should I just start, you know, like, like most people and, and go full 3P and just, you know, set up my own seller central account and, and, and do everything on my own. Are there situations where that answer might be different or is, is your answer the same in all situations? And if so, what is which, which one would you choose?

Elizabeth:

That’s a pretty good question. I think 3P seller is just like the setup that you need to have to launch, and it just offers so much more opportunities and more control. Especially if you do it FBA the only part where I see it a little bit more difficult, it would be like when you do big bulk items like kayaks. Those are not profitable on a 3P seller program, you know? Yeah. So the fact that Amazon is buying those from you, stalking them, and you actually just giving in an allowance. Yeah. Mainly allowance is big, but it doesn’t cover for, what would it cost for you to send it out to an FBA center? Okay. So I would say that it depends on your product, depends on the dimensions. If it is for Control 3P all the way I do believe you do have much more capabilities within the 3P seller program. One, ultimately what we’d love to have, it’s like a 3P seller program direct, you know where you have all this infrastructure that can have a customer services and Sure. Where you have the full control and you own the Amazon customers data, that would be the ultimate setup.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Alright. Now, you seem to be riding pretty high, bringing this big brand to eight figures, but you’re not at that company anymore, so how, how did it come about that you were looking for another opportunity?

Elizabeth:

Yeah, so after five years with Pelican, I found a brand called AlgeaCal, and it really caught my attention. It’s a company based in Vancouver. They make supplements for bone health. They are experts in bone health and everything that they do is around both bone supplements. So it just call out to me because I do have my family all, almost all women’s in my family suffer from osteoporosis. So it’s something that their mission really called upon me, and I joined them, you know, to help them grow their Amazon business because they already had something going on there. They were a seven figure, very nice, healthy company. I just thought that my experience could bring them to the next level, you know? And since it’s been a year, almost a year and a half now that I’m there we’ve achieved a double digit growth. We launched–

Bradley Sutton:

So when you got to the company, what, what was like their annual revenue and about now?

Elizabeth:

It’s still seven figures, but we are, we are getting to like next year we, we’ll make the eight figures for sure. Actually this year is our most successful year in history. We also launched Amazon Canada, and we most recently launched walmart.com too.

Bradley Sutton:

Wait, isn’t this a Canadian based company to start with?

Elizabeth:

Yes, it is.

Bradley Sutton:

So before you came to the company, they had decided to, to start an Amazon U s a? Yes. Not even in their own home marketplace.

Elizabeth:

Just by the way, Pelican did the same.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Well, I mean.

Elizabeth:

They started with the US and then they went for.

Bradley Sutton:

I know people who go both ways. You know, obviously US is way higher demand, but then some people are like, Hey, this is my own country. I’ve already got my packaging, you know, for this. I’m assuming the you know, I have a little bit of experience with supplements in North America and it’s like completely different. Not completely, but pretty, pretty big differences in packaging for my US version and Canadian version, like the Canadian one, I think it had to be in French and English and I can only say some things. Is that similar with, with you guys too?

Elizabeth:

Yes. So supplement facts are different. The measurements there it needs to be bilingual. You need the NPN number too for your your products. And, you know, there’s also the formulation, like for instance vitamin D in, in Canada we cannot be above 800 I IUs on, on the supplement facts. But however, on in the us we have it at a thousand IUs. So it, it, it, it really depends on the, on what you’re selling. Part of the, part of al what it’s good, it’s that we actually manufacture in the US and in Canada. So that’s, that gives us much more leverage there to have our own formulated products for the different territories.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Now I’m just looking here, I’m just going to run X-ray keywords on here just to see some of your, your main keywords that, that, you know, might be driving some traffic. ’cause I’m not fully familiar with your brand, but I would’ve expected mainly branded keywords, which I do see here. You know, I do see your brand algae cal, you know, you’re ranked high and Algae Cal plus, but you’ve got like, you know, high search volume keywords that I would think is very like, competitive, like calcium supplement, 70,000 search volume keyword, tons of products. And you’re coming in at this price point of like $70, $80, I saw another product, you had a hundred dollars. Yes. You know, the traditional thought might be, man, it’s gonna be hard to complete compete in supplements at all, let alone with this like super high price point. So this is a product that, you know, according to Helium 10 estimations, you’re selling over, you know, between these two variations here, over 2000 units a month. So you’re obviously very successful. How are you able to compete in such a competitive niche at this nearly a hundred dollars price point?

Elizabeth:

Yes. so I think you got a great point here Bradley. It’s that our product is high end in the calcium supplement category. Part of it is because we have a unique formulation that most of the calciums comes from rock based calcium. Ours is actually plant-based. It comes from the south shores of Brazil. And it’s based from a red Algea that contains the 13 different nutrients that are proven. And that’s, that’s one of the things with AlgaeCal, we actually have three clinical supporting studies that says that our product will increase bone density within six months. So if a customer starts today and has osteoporosis, goes for a DEXA scan, which is a test that your doctor can subscribe for you to do, and we can see the density of your bones within six months, you will see an increase in bone density.

Elizabeth:

And if it doesn’t and you have proof of that, we’ll actually give you back all your money. That’s one of our guarantees that we have. So it’s like, yes, it’s an investment, but it’s an investment that works. And that is the message that we are trying to get to our customers as much as possible through Amazon. We do it very well on their D2C side. And my mission was to do the same on on Amazon. You know, we have today we have a community of over 25,000 members within Facebook. That is actually a community where we share recipes. We have lives with different doctors or bone experts. So we are not just selling a calcium supplement, we’re actually taking care of our customers, giving them all the support they need. Our biggest customer is going to be within the seventies, eighties.

Elizabeth:

They are hurt, their bones hurt. Most of them maybe just broke a hip. They can’t move anymore. They can’t do their activities as they did before. So we have this our customer service. We actually call them bone health consultants because that’s what they are. They actually provide support to these customers. And they are like our average call, it’s above 30 minutes. You will not have a call of five minutes. We actually want to understand what you eat, what are your exercise activities what other supplements or medications you are taking to making to make sure that our product is well integrating within your lifestyle. So that’s our difference and that’s what we’re trying to put out there. Within our PDP, if you look at it we have a lot of content.

Elizabeth:

I know that most of our competitors they do it more shorter bullet points and imagery for us. Yes, the imagery needs to be condensed straight to the point, but also it needs to have much mu much information around it towards why to take our product. We also have our A+ Content that has a lot of copy, I know. But the customer needs to understand at what stage of their li their life are their bones. So that’s one of the things that we are trying also to communicate through the the A+ Content. We also have all these documents. You know, we have spec sheets, we have a Bone Health Companion, which is actually a magazine that we release every two months with different recipes. And every two months we go in it and we change it. We have the user guide also of our products. So a lot of different content, and I know that maybe not all of the customers will read through it, but I wanna make it available to make sure that for those ones that really want to do their research, the information is there.

Bradley Sutton:

Interesting. Interesting. Now, again, I’m just looking at the, the main keyword here, and sure enough, I mean, I didn’t look at it before, but sure enough, it’s just what I thought. You know, like you look at who’s at the top organic position on some of these keywords, and you’ve got nature made $15 and Nature’s Bounty, $11 and $12 you know, another, another one here, $15. And then you could, you could just, now first of all, I’m just looking here, like your organic positions even isn’t even that high, but you’re still getting tons of sales from this keyword because you do have multiple, looks like you’re out bidding them on sponsored ads. I saw like, like I refreshed the screen and now it’s not there anymore. But I saw like you had two spots here in sponsored ads. I see you’ve had sponsored header, the Sponsored Brand Header, the headline ad there. But, and you can compete on this, on this, on this keyword. Now, I would assume, like, I don’t even wanna know, almost the cost per click on a keyword, like calcium supplement must be like outta control, like, I don’t know, $10 or something crazy, right?

Elizabeth:

No, not that bad. Calcium supplement is not that bad. The worst, we do have a product, which is an Omega three fish oil supplement that is just incredible. But calcium supplement, it’s around four to $5 a click. Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. I mean, that’s still, coffee shelf is like 50 cents. But for I guess at that higher price point, it allows you to bid high. You know, like sometimes, I mean, just imagine guys, that four and $5 price point is what these like nature made and these $11 products are having to compete at. They’re obviously losing money there, but they’re making the money back on the subscribe and save, because you get people into this product and you get them on subscribe and save, and now you don’t have to pay PPC on them forever. But if you go in at a higher price point, because it’s a higher end thing it’s important to get them and subscribe and save and make even more money.

Bradley Sutton:

And, and it’s not a race to the bottom guys. You know, we’ve had people on the podcast before Anne Ferris, you know, might be one that people are familiar with, and she’s in like the baby niche. And, and people sometimes go into their main keywords and they actually look for the most expensive. So her strategy is, Hey, I want to be the most expensive on the page because people, parents, they want to make sure they’re giving their baby the best. They don’t want to go cheap on that. And this might be one of those niches too, you know, like, like calcium supplements. I mean, this is like somebody in their twilight years, you know, it’s like, Hey, I want to make sure my last 20 years on this earth are as pleasant as can be.

Bradley Sutton:

I don’t, might not want to go ahead and get this $11 calcium that I used to get, you know, when I was young. So it’s a strategy that’s I think, important to understand that don’t always be thinking you have to be the cheapest in your niche in order to be successful. And here we have Elizabeth as an example. That’s not the case now. I guess while we were talking, I was running Cerebro on your product here. And I noticed you’ve got like a lot of sponsored brand Sponsored Brand Header. I see you’re running some, looks like some, some video on some keywords. And then you’re, you’re showing up in the, the highly rated section here. So you’ve got a lot of placements. What gives you the most bang for your buck? Is it your organic placement? Is it the sponsored video, your Sponsored Brand Header? Where do you think that you’re, you’re getting the best ROI? Yeah,

Elizabeth:

So at the moment, our ratio is still 60-40, so 60% of our sales comes from organic, 40% come from sponsor. Okay. Out of that sponsor. What is really working for us at the moment is definitely sponsor brand videos sponsor brands videos, and you do have to have, you know, the content and how can they say the different types of videos that you wanna have, depending on what it is, your strategy or what are your targeting. But it’s mostly for engagement. It’s, it’s the best. It’s the best placements that we’ve reached for the last, I would say, maybe two months since it has been available. And part of it is also because we tied it with our Amazon store our Amazon store. We recently did a full refresh on it, and we have different pages sub pages there.

Elizabeth:

For instance, we will have sponsor brand videos at the moment about adding to cart if we want. And once they click, they go on our subpage, which is for deals. So we make sure that the customer looks at a sponsor brand video ad, and then they go out on the right subpage where they will be more comfort. You know, we actually run a campaign for osteoporosis month in the month of May, and everything was around bone health, and we had this sub page called Bone Health that was built that is a half for conversion, but also half for content. And it did really, really good. We pair it out with subscribe and save coupon. We’ve managed to only that month get 550 new subscribers. So that’s one of the things we’re trying to leverage more and more.

Elizabeth:

It’s also our subscriber space. It is now 4% of our revenue and we are increasing at about eight to 10% every month. So that too, we need to make sure that we get that customer once, then we want it to be a loyal customer. Yeah. because we do know what is our LTv down the road, and we wanna make sure you know that yes, the cost per acquisition for that, that particular customer, yes, maybe during Prime day it was almost nothing, let’s say. But on the long run, it will bring you much more revenue.

Bradley Sutton:

Interesting. Interesting. Now I’m looking at just another key word. And I saw one of your Sponsored Brand Video comes up. It looks like it almost starts with like a UGC or Hey, this is like, you know, our typical avatar here and this customer submitted, it’ll kind of like get the attention of some people might scrolling here. Is that kinda like the route you went with this video? That is

Elizabeth:

Correct. We actually, like I mentioned before, we have 25,000 community members and we receive hundreds of testimonials every month. It’s incredible how our community loves our product and wants to talk about it. So our video team does a lot of different ads with these testimonials, and we just feel that it’s much more engaging. The message really resonate with our audience when it comes from a real life testimonial.

Bradley Sutton:

I see at the very top of the page, this is one of the first I’ve seen of a different kind. I mean, this is that same keyword, but this, you know, traditionally is just a regular, you know, Sponsored Brand Ad or Sponsored Brand Headline ad where there’s like 3 products. But then what I’m seeing here, it’s another video that auto plays and it almost seems like it takes a bigger section of the top of the page. Yes. But this one is going to your storefront. What kind of ad is this here at the top?

Elizabeth:

That’s the sponsor brand video. And it’s actually, you have, you can choose that per category or you can choose it per subpage. And that one is actually just going to our homepage, if not mistaken.

Bradley Sutton:

Interesting. So you have two Sponsored Brand Video ad placements on the same exact page. So that’s an interesting thing I haven’t even seen before.

Elizabeth:

Which try to get the more real estate that we can. And I cannot take credit for all of this. It’s our agency. They’re pretty, pretty innovative there. We work in pair, you know I draw the strategy, they execute. One of the things that really worked with us too is that it’s been maybe a couple of months now that we’re doing a lot of DSP and we are actually moving much more towards DSP advertising okay. Than sponsor just because of the capabilities of doing, really targeting with audiences. And that really just gives us much more control over what are we serving to the customer, depending on where on the purchasing journey they are. So for instance, we are pairing customers, let’s say upper funnels. It’s more about are these customers?

Elizabeth:

I don’t know. Let’s say for instance, one of the things, because I used to work with Pelican, I knew that their audiences on Amazon actually were about 50 plus because these are customers that didn’t really want to, you know, go to Sporting Goods, take out the kayak, put out on the car. They actually just rented out sorry, buy it, and it went out to the cottage. So what I did is we actually had an outdoor video where we see a couple just doing Kayak on the water, and we have all of this messaging around fortifying your bones to make sure that you can continue doing your activities and that video we are actually using it in the category for nauticals within the Sponsored, but we are also using on DSP so on DSP, we’re able to say, you know, like if they bought a kayak within the last 60 days and they are 50 plus we can do like a lot of more targeted audiences there.

Bradley Sutton:

Interesting. What other unique programs are you doing? We’ve talked about some common ones. We’ve talked about some more unique ones, like, like DSP any more unique things that you’re, you’ve, you know, programs that you’ve taken advantage of at Amazon or have we hit most of them?

Elizabeth:

I tend to be, I’ve been classified as a tester. I love to test everything. Every time I see a beta out there, I’m just trying to get my hands on it and see what I can do with it. And I think it’s part of the success because you can really try and test to see what’s resonating, you know with your customer. One of the things that we’ve recently have done, and I cannot tell you if it’s going to work or not, ’cause it’s fairly new, it’s actually, you know, these tailored promotions that came out on Seller Central. We can actually now serve an exclusive deal, let’s say, to a particular audience. For instance, we’re doing with brand card abandonment audience, which is perfect because Prime Day was just like a couple of weeks ago, you know and we are serving them a coupon for, to get them within the brand. But we’re also at the same time having this catchy add to card OTT video within DSP that is serving to that same audience the ads, so they can see that we have a coupon. So it’s just like making these connections between what you’re able to do in promotions, how you can pair it out with DSP or with sponsor. I guess just being very creative.

Bradley Sutton:

Interesting. And then now, now that first part that you mentioned, a lot of regular sellers have that, like the second part is definitely through DSP, but that tailored thing, I think, I think a lot of sellers now have access to that. So you’re combining both of it. I like it. What about in Helium 10? What, what are some of your favorite tools and, and functions that, you know, like you said, you know, back in the day you, you didn’t have Helium 10, like what kind of things are you using now for your brand that you’re probably thinking, dang it, I wish I had this in 2017 when I was, when I was trying to, to figure this out. Or something like that. Yeah,

Elizabeth:

So I have have a colleague of mine that he’s really the one that is using you know, Listing Builder, Keyword Tracker, Cerebro, all of these most of, for me within my job more a strategic level we actually use Market Tracker 360. So Market Tracker 360 is one of the tools that we, that I use a lot to understand actually how much of market shares are we actually getting every quarter what are our competitors doing that maybe we are not. And also for product launch. So we are launching new products in September and October and more part of the research is all based on Market Tracker 360 to see like, what is really our competitive advantage here. What is the market that we wanna target, what are we trying to aim, you know, with this product launch after six months, 12 months? So it’s just part of our strategical planning. But other than that–

Bradley Sutton:

Now for those who are listening, like, and they’re like looking at their dashboard like, wait a minute, I don’t have this. So Market Tracker 360 is kind of like, almost like separate from Helium 10. For higher end sellers. Now this is it’s not something that you have just like in your diamond plan or, or something. Even me, I haven’t used it. It’s for kind of big sellers like Elizabeth here. So talk to me about what, like one strategy, like you said you, you’re looking it at launch, so like before you get into the niche, what are the data points that you’re looking at in Market Tracker 360 to are you saying that you’re looking at that to even decide if it’s something you want to go in, or you’re like, Hey, we are definitely going in here. Let me just kind of like benchmark what the existing landscape is doing so that I can see taking market share from them, or, or how are you using it in this sense of launch, like you said? So

Elizabeth:

At the beginning it was more to, yes, we are launching this new product, what is the benchmark, you know on Amazon? Now it’s difficult for me to go into the details without revealing what we’re going to launch and I can’t do that. But one of the things now with time knowing that, okay, this is our market share, it’s more about how do we position the product so the product have different ingredients if we want in it. And with Market 360, for me it’s about, okay, what is the market for each individuals of these categories or these sets of keywords? So we have these different ingredients and or vitamins if we want within the same formulation, and we wanna see which one of them has the more potential for us. As far as sales and then serving within that category and say, Hey, by the way, we’re not just selling this.

Elizabeth:

Our formulation have this, and this for this price, actually. So it’s about getting more value to the customer within one category and made them switch from what they are already buy-in. But actually they are paying for something that if they go with our product, they will get much more value out of their money. So that’s the type of strategy now, like, but it’s more like go to market and yeah, I could maybe talk to you later on next year about how it went, but that is how I’m utilizing to Market Tracker 360. But another tool that for me as a director marketplace I love is your new dashboard, your new dashboard insights. I just go in, I have all the information I need and I saw this morning that now we have competitors there for each of our products. It’s awesome. So for me, it’s just going to 1 place and having all the information when I need it.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome. Awesome. So guys, if, if anybody out there is, you know, doing four or $5 million or more and think that Market Tracker 360 might be a fit for you, just just go to h10.me/mt360, You can get a free demo on that tool. As far as what you also mentioned, the insights dashboard, that’s what everybody has access or as long as you have a diamond and above and we got some cool things, Elizabeth, that’s, that’s crazy. You know, the competitor was just a start. But now, once you set your competitors, you know, like we’re gonna tell you, Hey, did you know that your competitor’s getting sales from this keyword? And you don’t even have it in your listing? I mean, theoretically you should have been, I mean, I’m sure you, like you said, you have a colleague’s using or that’s probably the his or her job to use Cerebro and try and find those.

Bradley Sutton:

But now, instead of him having to take 10 minutes to do it, you’re just gonna instantly get this notification that, that did all the work for you. It’ll be interesting to see. I wonder if your competitor is gonna feel, or your competitor, your coworker there is going to feel a little bit nervous. Like, man, Helium 10’s taking my job way. I gotta find some new strategies to stay to stay relevant here. Before we get to your last strategy like we always ask everybody for their 60-second tip of the day. Let’s switch gears. Somebody who’s in the kind of like health niche here. And might have some interesting insight, but what I ask all my guests is this year is on the health side.

Bradley Sutton:

Like, like we’re, we’re all entrepreneurs, we’re, we’re working for companies in the space. Actually, your story is similar to mine. Like before Helium 10, I used to work for a supplement a very popular supplement company. I didn’t sell on Amazon myself, but anyways regardless if we’re in the supplement space or we’re not, health is important and, and sometimes when we get in these kind of jobs and it’s, it’s fun for us. I’m sure I could just see, you know, from talking to you, it’s fun and sometimes we, we might overwork ourselves or, or, or just, you know, forget that we just work 12 hours. Like what do you do for hobbies to make sure that you get away from work and what are some like healthy habits that you have, that to make sure that you’re, you’re staying, you know, grounded emotionally, mentally, physically?

Elizabeth:

Mostly. One of the things that I do is to have like a routine. I’m a early person. I wake up at 5:00 AM I make most of my day in the morning, you know, reading I’m listening to either one of your podcasts or some something else about Amazon for sure. I go for a run. I love running. I’ve started out, at the beginning I couldn’t even have like half a K I couldn’t even do that. And now I run between 10k and 15 k every week. So I love to run. I run in trails nature. I love nature and just getting outside. So it’s something that really helped me out.

Bradley Sutton:

Alright, let’s close it with what’s a 30 or 60-seconnd tip? You know, you’ve been talking a lot about your strategies and things, but is there something you mentioned today you can say in 30 or 60 seconds or less that you think can help our listeners out there?

Elizabeth:

Yeah. So we’ve been talking about different strategies, you know, that could help you within Amazon marketplace. But one key takeaway that is, I think it’s crucial, and I did talk about it and during our conversation is content, but not just any content but the right kind of content. So we are using ChatGPT, I’m pretty sure a lot of our audience here. But we use it to dissect our product reviews, but not just to gain deeper understanding of our customers. We are really asking about their psychological, social, cultural factors within these reviews to try to understand, you know, their intrinsic and extrinsic values. So really what they are trying, what is driving the customer ths your product and what are they tangibly wanting to have, you know, what are the benefits that customers are getting out of the product.

Elizabeth:

And we actually had a lot of success with this understanding these various factors and values from our customers. We tailored our message. We actually, like, for example, on our analysis, it revealed that like a large portion of our products were actually purchased by adults for their agent parents. So we actually took this and we make it a, a caregiver campaign with Amazon DSP with tailored messaging around these adults, not targeting 55 plus, but maybe targeting 28 to 45, you know, with this message. About taking care of your parents, not just an investment for them, but also an investment for you. So these types of information you can get by utilizing ChatGPT with the reviews, but not just like, oh, what they are saying, no, no, no. Like go deeper. Ask them, yeah, ask ChatGPT, like really questions about what do you think their values are where do they find our products? Like for us, it was a lot recommended by doctors. So now we have a lot more, much more doctors or clinical types of imagery within our content. So these types of informations are very good to have.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome. Awesome. Alright. Well Elizabeth, it was great, you know, getting to know, you know, your story really inspiring and seeing all of the success you’ve had. Where will I be seeing you? Like, are you going to Amazon accelerate or maybe Amazon Unbox or any of these conferences coming up?

Elizabeth:

So I’ll be at Amazon Unbox this year.

Bradley Sutton:

Unbox. All right. I’ll see you there in October. And when we have you back on this show sometime next year hopefully you can be able to say that, hey, maybe you hit that eight figure mark already for the second time now in six years. So that would be awesome. So thanks a lot and we’ll see you soon.

Elizabeth:

Thank you Bradley.

#480 - Measure Amazon Listing Strength, Strategies, & AMA

Welcome to another special episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast which is our monthly training and live Ask Me Anything with Bradley Sutton. Our focus today would be how to analyze listings, whether your want to get into a niche or maybe compare yourself to your competitors. Bradley will show you a quick way on how to look at their keyword strategy, their listing optimization strategy, and most importantly their listing image strategy as well. Let’s hop into it!

In episode 480 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley discusses:

• 01:22 – Using Helium 10’s Listing Analyzer Tool
• 02:55 – Cool Features Inside This Tool
• 04:37 – The Category & Subcategory BSR
• 05:22 – Traffic and Conversions Graph
• 06:29 – Compare Key Metrics Across ASINs
• 06:47 – Listing Quality Score Analysis
• 13:03 – Media Comparisson Feature
• 15:28 – Export Images Of Your Competitor’s Image
• 16:52 – Another Way You Can Run Listing Analyzer
• 17:39 – Product Research with Listing Analyzer
• 21:18 – Q&A with Bradley
• 21:45 – How To Send Tool Ideas
• 22:19 – Profits Tool Questions
• 25:25 – Why Is Your Bullets Too Short?
• 25:50 – Draw Graphs For Product Sessions
• 27:26 – Compare Key Metrics Data Automation

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► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft
► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today we talk about how you can analyze your competitor’s keyword, listing optimization and image strength and strategies, along with answer all of your questions you gave live on the show. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think.

Bradley Sutton:

Did you know that just because you have a keyword in your listing, that does not mean that you are automatically guaranteed to be searchable or as we say, indexed for that keyword? Well, how can you know what you are indexed for and not? You can actually use Helium 10’s Index Checker to check any keywords you want. For more information, go to h10.me/indexchecker. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that is our monthly Ask Me Anything and training. So welcome one and all to the show. We’re gonna be going over how to analyze listings, especially maybe you’re gonna get into a niche or maybe you want to compare yourself to your competitors. So a quick way to look at their keyword strategy, their listing optimization strategy, and in my opinion, almost more importantly, or one of the most important ones is their image strategy as well.

Bradley Sutton:

Without further ado, I’m gonna, I’m gonna hop in here. Have your product in mind. Find your top keyword on Amazon where you are on page one. Alright, let me show you guys. I obviously picked Coffin Shelf, you know, for me, and I ran X-ray on the page. All right. Now the very first item you pick, I want you to pick your product. All right, so I chose our coffin shelf first and Manny’s Mysterious Oddities Coffin Shelf. You guys see that here? I put a check mark and then I want you to choose like 5 or 6, 4, 5, 6, whatever of your main competitors. All right? So I’m you’ll notice here that I am not choosing like these makeup shelves because to me, that’s not my competitor. Are they competing with me on page one for my main keyword? Yes, but I think that that customer avatar is a little bit different.

Bradley Sutton:

I’m just trying to hyperfocus what my direct competitors are doing. So, so black coffin shelves is what I’m choosing, and it has to be very similar and, and form function and price. And I, I want it to be selling a little bit. Like I’m not gonna, I’m not gonna choose, oh, I didn’t choose this guy here. I should have chose him. He’s selling like 147 units, but I’m not gonna choose some of these. Some of these others, matter of fact, I might run this again. The, some of these other guys are actually selling some decent amounts of units. Well, that gothic life, I already had, let me see, I didn’t choose this one here. Spooky look, spooky looky life. All right, come on guys. With these, with these, some of these brand names that people are choosing are, are not great.

Bradley Sutton:

All right? So once you guys have it chosen, let me know in the chat if you guys have about five or six or seven competitors. And then what I want you to hit is run Listing Analyzer. All right? Once you’ve got that hit Run Listing Analyzer, all right? And then it’s gonna open up Listing Analyzer in another window. So now you guys should all be looking at a screen that kind of looks like this. Now, if you had connected your Helium 10 account to to your Amazon account, you’re gonna have some extra information here, such as the Act, the actual sales of your product at the top of the screen right Now. Another thing that if you only have one sku, it’s probably gonna show up here. A cool thing that this is good for, but your Insights dashboard can do it too, is that it’s gonna track your alerts, right?

Bradley Sutton:

So it’s going to track the alerts of when things happen to this exact ASIN or this exact SKU. So like for example, if you change your price on July 4th, right? What you’re gonna see is a.here on July 4th, and then you’ll be able to see, oh man, my sales went up or my sales went down, you know, and then take action. Let’s say you did an image change and you want to know when it actually registered on Amazon and then how things happen afterwards. Well, that’s gonna show up. So that’s the benefit of having alerts set up on your account in Helium 10 is on this chart here in Listing Analyzer. It is going to graph out when these things are are happening. Alright, so now the next step that we are going to go over here is, lemme see if this other one went.

Bradley Sutton:

Alright, there it is right there. Let’s scroll down. Here is the subcategory and category B S R. Now, I don’t think I could see this on Amazon. Let me just double check and look at the B SS R in Amazon here. And let’s see, I don’t think, yeah, it’s not, when you look on Amazon and use your Helium 10 Chrome extension, it’s not gonna show you the subcategory B Ss R. So Listing Analyzer is one of the only places where you can actually see what your subcategory at the lowest level is. So it gives you home and kitchen 175,000 here on July 5th. And then it says floating shelves 644 here on July 24th. It says 281 and 1089. So it gives me a little visibility into my subcategory BSR. Now, if I had chosen the right SKU, which I didn’t, you guys should see under traffic and conversion, some really cool graphs, it’s going to show you the history of your sessions, page views, and unit units ordered.

Bradley Sutton:

So this is kind of important to see what your sessions rate is, what your average page view rate is. I’m gonna have to check this which data points it’s actually pulling from. And then your units ordered your average order session rate. That’s pretty abysmal as you can see here. 2%, 3%, that is no bueno. All right, that’s not good. All right, so this shows me like how it was over time, and I can actually choose different dates. So this is kind of cool because when you’re looking at this in your seller central dashboard, or perhaps other parts of Helium 10, you might not see it fully grafted out here. All right? So it’s really cool to see it graphed out, like what kind of conversion rate you are seeing. Again, this is on your product. You don’t need to have your own product to run listing Analyzer.

Bradley Sutton:

And I’m gonna show you guys how to do that in a couple seconds here because you guys are gonna give me an idea of what I should do. Alright, so now this is where we start getting into the nitty gritty here, where it is this section that’s called Compare Key metrics across ASIN. So these are all of the products that I had pulled in from X-ray. It has my product and the other product. So I can see, hey, what’s the listing quality score of these products? This is just the the Helium 10 algorithm that is based on what you know, users said was the best practices, right? I could say, Hey, where’s the seller region from? Wow, okay, I see three of these coffin shells and manufacturers are from USA, there’s actually an Australian one here, and then one from China.

Bradley Sutton:

I could see, hey, are, is everybody in the same category and subcategory? Look at this. Not all are, here’s one that’s in standing shelf units. So it might be interesting to, to see for this seller, do they have a better conversion rate or, or not a conversion rate, but a better rate of sales. You know, due to being in that other category, what’s the price? If I wanted to go in and say, wow, look at this guy who’s so cheap. Has he always been this cheap? Has he always had this price of $21 and 99 cents? Well, I can click this graph here and now instantly I can actually see how let’s go, let’s go all time. Let’s go one year. And I could see, okay, well, he was actually 23.99 before he went up to 29.99. He was 23.99 for months, and then starting in June, he dropped down to this 21.99 price.

Bradley Sutton:

So I could, I could see that if there is an inventory levels available, we’ll see that here. I could see the history of his reviews. I could see the size, this is a good one. Like, let’s say everybody was the same product as mine and I knew they were the same size. Instantly I’m gonna see like, wait a minute, why, how is this one person able to get their product in a box that is nine inches wide or something like that, you know, when everybody else’s is seven inches. So that’s gonna give you some, some insights there as well. Another thing that I like to look at is the age of the listing. I’m like, man, here, this guy’s brand new. He’s only launched this product two months ago, but everybody else is kind of mature listings. Hey, everybody’s got this number of images.

Bradley Sutton:

Now what I’d really like to see though, guys, is this one on the end here where it’s top 10 keywords and top 10 search volume. So if I’m looking at this, I can kind of see the strength of me compared to my competitors, right? And look at this, look at this. So I’ve got 31 keywords that are in the top 10, and if I add up those search volumes, it’s up to 9,000. But then look at this competitor. He’s top 10 for 63 keywords. And if I were to add up those search volumes, it’s 32,000. So maybe I wanna see which competitor is this. Now look at this guys, take a look here.

Bradley Sutton:

This guy is selling 212 units. He’s almost double a lot of the other competitors. And now instantly, I kind of know like, well, okay, now it makes sense. Look at him. He’s 212 units per month. But part of that has got to be because he is ranking for so many keywords in the top 10 for more than everybody else, all right? I’m doing pretty good. I’m ranked for 31. You know, he’s better than others, but these guys are getting probably a lot more visibility. So that’s how you can kind of see the strength of the niche. As I go here, I could see what’s the average listing quality score. All right. Hey, nobody, look at this, nobody it’s telling me that nobody has symbols or emojis in their listing. So everybody’s doing the right thing. Everybody’s got five bullet points. So these people obviously know how to make Amazon listings.

Bradley Sutton:

Everybody’s got the first bullet point capitalized. The first letter of the first bullet point, I should say. Let’s see, everybody’s got at least 1000 characters in the description or they’ve got a plus content. Only one of them though has video in their listing. All right? So there, there’s maybe some opportunity I see there, all right? Everybody’s got more than 20 reviews. So this kind of just tells you the strength of the listing and I could actually go in one by one and then take a look at some of these ASINs one by one a little bit more. All right? Now this is another part that I really, really like. There’s not much going on here in the coffin shelf, ’cause Coffin shelf is a very small niche, right? But this is this is showing me the total shared keywords of these products.

Bradley Sutton:

In other words, the number of keywords where at least two of these ASINs that I entered here are organically in the first seven pages. Now, here are some of the top keywords I believe to be listed here. It’s gotta be, you know, at least some of them are in the at least like three of them are in the top right or something like that. Or in the top 10, if I’m not mistaken. Now, this is where you can see the strength of your niche. So these are the top keywords in the niche. And now what I’m looking for is on this right hand side. Now, th this, this has been here since last year, guys, this is nothing new, but I think a lot of you guys haven’t been using this as much. But take a look. These numbers represent where we are ranking organically.

Bradley Sutton:

So what you wanna see is who’s got the most light green numbers, right? That means that they are really crushing it. Now, if a whole bunch of people have a bunch of dark numbers, then that means that they’re not doing very well, right? And then look at this. Look, look at this guy here of the top keywords of the niche. Every single one, he’s in the top 20. Look at that. He’s ranked seven, he’s ranked 8 7, 19, 19. So what you would want to see here is perhaps a bunch, a few of the competitors that maybe are not doing as well as the others, right? Like you want them to have a whole bunch of these non dark green ones or these dark green ones. And that means that for their keywords, they’re rank lower on the top. And then now you know, you have more opportunity because the more that the top competitors are not ranking for the top keywords, that means you’ve got a little bit more opportunity there.

Bradley Sutton:

So, so that is something that’s really cool about this. All right? Now almost all of this I think you can see if you’re a platinum member, let me go scroll up here and then kind of show you what you can do if you’re a a diamond member and above. All right, I’m gonna hit this button right here. You guys should see that here. Optimize, not, not optimizing. Let’s see, but whoops, I hit the wrong button. Media comparison. You guys see that under compare key metrics across ASINs. Find that, scroll to the right and then hit media comparison. All right? When you do that, what it’s going to do is it’s going to plot all of the images from these competitors on one page. I know those of you listening to this on the podcast in your car might have trouble picturing this, but this is super, super cool because this is the strategy we’ve been teaching for years about, hey guys, you’re trying to get into a niche where, where these competitors are, you know, have been on here for a year or two, they’ve probably been testing their images, right?

Bradley Sutton:

They’ve probably been been split testing using manager your experiments, or they’re like, man, you know, I got some complaints about this picture, or I got some bad reviews about something that people couldn’t understand, so let me just change my image and show it. And if these are the top competitors, you can kind of get a feel for what has been working for this niche, right? And it’s all right here. So for example, if, if I’m looking at this like this, what, what do I notice? I’m like, wow, you know, in the first few images, everybody has an image where it’s an infographic that has details of the size of the product. Everybody. So look at this, everybody, like in their first three or four images has this infographic. You guys notice that here, every single one has got a very similar image where it breaks down the exact size of the product.

Bradley Sutton:

So now if you’re making a new product or maybe you didn’t have that in yours, it’s like, man, I should probably think about putting an image like that. Another thing that I don’t notice here, you know, which could be good, could be bad, but I don’t notice any models in these, IM in these images. So maybe people being confused about the size of the product isn’t that much of an issue because if it is, what would you think that you would see? Right? You would see a bunch of lifestyle images where somebody is holding the product because then it gives perspective. So the fact that none of the top competitors have that could mean that nobody is getting, you know, some, some bad you know, nobody’s getting bad reviews on that, right? What else do you guys notice here? Almost all of these images have like little spooky trinkets in them.

Bradley Sutton:

You know, very few show the actual coffin shelf just completely empty. And so there’s just various different things that you can glean from this. Now, if this was a brand new image, what I would do with this information is I would ex, I would hit this export media button up here on the right and then it’ll make a PDF and I can actually share this with my graphic designer or photographer and be like, Hey guys, this is what’s working for everybody else in this niche. You know, how can we make sure our images have a similar vibe, but maybe we can do a little bit better? So this is one of my favorite buttons actually in all of Helium 10 guys. This is how valuable it’s ’cause back in the day. This is not a new strategy. I’ve been doing this strategy for five years ’cause I learned it from Tomer Rabinovich, but what I would do is one by one, I would have to go into all of my competitor listings, copy and paste their images into like a PowerPoint or a Google Slides, and then get, you know, print it all out and then try and look at it all in a printout and then, you know, send it to my, my designers and things like that.

Bradley Sutton:

But now I just took all of that work and it’s one click of a button. Alright, let’s go ahead and try this on another niche. Let me see if anybody puts something in the comments here. Castor oil pack wrap. I have no idea what in the world that is. Let’s look it up. Castor Oil Pack Rack that was given by Kate Marshall. All right, let’s look up that inside of Amazon. I think I kind of know what this product is. Alright, so what, let, let me show you the other way you can run listing Analyze. It’s kind of good that, that we’re doing it this way. I could just go to Listing Analyzer right here in my screen, and then I’m just going to go back to the search. So the other way I can run Listing Analyzer is just put in the competitor ASINs by copying and pasting the ASINs.

Bradley Sutton:

So let’s go ahead and do that here. All right. Now if you run Listing Analyzer, it’s gonna look a little bit different because I’m not selling castor oil packs, right? Okay. So it’s not going to put it into, you know, I’m not gonna be able to see those alerts and things like that. Like I could on my product when I was running coffin shelf. Which is fine. When would I use this part of the tool? Well, I would use this part of the tool guys. If I’m doing product research and I’m thinking about getting into a niche, I might go ahead and choose some of the top competitors. And now what I’m looking for is I wanna see what’s their image strategy, what’s their strength of the keywords, what are the top keywords that we are looking at here?

Bradley Sutton:

And that’s what is going to be helpful here. All right, so let’s take a look here. All right, so I see this main one here has a listing quality score of 8.2. Here’s a sales estimation overview of these products. Here’s the category B S r, history of it, and let’s go ahead and open up media comparison. First of all, we’ll do this a little bit backwards. All right, let’s see what we can find out. I have never looked at images of castor oil wraps before, but let’s see, do we see any differences? Right off the bat, guys, right off the bat, what’s the big difference that you see with these images compared to the coffin shelf? Every single one of these listings have models in multiple images. You guys see that big contrast we already found just by one click of the button.

Bradley Sutton:

Looking at the media comparison. Now I’m like, all right, for this product, obviously having it on models is super important compared to the coffin shelf. What else do we see? I see everybody has a detailed, just, here’s one that’s similar to the coffin shelf. Look at this. Everybody has a detailed picture showing the looks like the length and the height of the product, and an infographic about that. Look, all of these competitors have that same, that same vibe right there. Now I know that, hey, this is something that must be important to the customers because that’s why they have it. So I just got all of that information with just a click of the button looking at their image strategy. So really, really cool feature right there that you can see. Let’s go ahead and look down here at the listing quality score.

Bradley Sutton:

Not all of them have 150 characters in the bullet point, but for the most part, these guys are professional. Look, they all, they all have a thousand pixel images. They’ve got seven plus images. Only one has videos, though they all got 20 plus reviews. So for the most part, they’re doing pretty good on their listings. Now, take a look at this, these keywords here, right? Look at these keywords, and now all of a sudden I could see the strength of these competitors. So just by looking at this, like I’m not even looking at the keywords itself. I kind of know that this middle one here, they’re, they’re doing pretty well because look how many of these top keywords they are in the top 10. Remember I’m looking for the light green color. Now, compare that to this last competitor. Most of their keywords, they’re actually in the dark green, and you can see the number corresponding to it.

Bradley Sutton:

They’re ranked on the bottom of page one, or potentially on page two on some of these. So I can see, hey, what’s the relative strength of these competitors on the top keyword? So guys, you could do this for any you could do this for any listings out there comparing yourself to your competitors or you’re looking to expand into a new niche. You wanna see, hey, what’s the strength of the keywords of the competitors in this niche? What are they doing on their image strategy? How is their listing quality score working. This is something that I want everybody using this week multiple times. Some of these you can only do if you have a diamond account. But most, a lot of the stuff that I went over, you can absolutely see if you have a platinum account as well.

Bradley Sutton:

Alright, now let’s go ahead and open it up to any questions that you guys have about Helium 10 or about listing analyzer in general. Edison says, when off topic, when will AI feature listing builder be available for Germany? That’s not off topic. Edison, that is a Helium 10 question. So it’s absolutely on topic. It will come when enough people ask for it. So we always prioritize the, the functionality that we do based on how many requests there is. So every, if anybody, if you’re in a country where a listing builder with AI is not working yet send in a request you, you click let me show you guys where to click to send in request to, at the top of any Helium 10 screen, to the very right of the button that says what’s new, you hit the question mark, right?

Bradley Sutton:

And then you hit share your ideas and that’s where you would say, Hey, I need listen builder for Deutsche Bitta, right? Isn’t that please in German? I don’t remember. Alright, let’s see. Vaed says I need to, I want to see the manual cost, which I added by myself in the profits tool, It should absolutely work. So, so if, if you entered something in to your cost, there’ll be a record of it and it should be there. So if you’re not seeing that cost, you just a, you know, open up a ticket with support and then they’ll, they’ll they’ll help you out. Like I, all of my costs of goods sold, we is, is completely in there, even the ones that I enter with a flat file so that it has dates on it. So that should absolutely be there. Bain Kirk says, can we see more than 60 days for traffic and conversions? Yes, but not there. Listing analyzer. To do that, you would need to go Kirk into profits. Let me see if I can find it on the fly here.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. You would go into profits and then I think if you’re looking at it at the product level, I would go to product performance. Actually, you can do that from the dashboard too. What am I saying? You can actually do that on the dashboard. I’m gonna show you guys two different ways you can do this from the dashboard and from the product performance page. So if I’m in the product performance page, where I’m gonna want to go, Kirk is on the top right there is going to be a date range. All right? So this date range is where, you know, I’m assuming you want it to be outside of 60 days. So I would change this date range at the very top. I don’t know why Europe is showing April. I don’t even sell in Europe. Let me change that to u s a. You would change this date range, find the product you’re looking for, and then let me show you where to look for that, you would go right here and it’ll show that page views and sessions. You can see it from any time period, but it’s not gonna be a fancy graph like was on Listing Analyzer. But let me see what that graph looks like. Can I even see the graph from here? Let’s take a look. Page views sessions. I might be able to see that from the listing. Dashboard.

Bradley Sutton:

Let’s go down here. I’m at the child level again, you would change the date right up here on the top right, and let me hit listing. I think it’s an under listing down here. There we go. Let’s hit listing. Okay, and then there it is right there. You see unit session percentage sessions and conversion rate. You’ll see that right down here. All right, and then in product performance, I have, yeah, I can’t see the full one, but I can add a, a widget here that I can graph it out to in in profits, Kirk.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, let’s see more questions. Why are my bullets so short? Alright, you’re gonna have to stay tuned for that episode of why she changed some of our bullet points. But, but in a nutshell, remember Neil, that overall you can only index for a thousand characters total on your bullet points. So you should keep them where it it, it comes really close to a thousand characters on bullet points. Tunji says, is there any way to draw a graph for sessions in Helium 10? Well, outside of listen analyzer not necessarily, but let me show you one thing, what you guys can do on the insights dashboard. All right? Go up here to the top and at the very top right it says chart. All right, so you are gonna hit the chart and then choose. I’m gonna, I’m gonna show you, it’s not here because I already have it on mine, but you’re gonna choose the one that gives you your detailed percentages and that is called sales and traffic conversion.

Bradley Sutton:

Right here. UIs want to add the sales and traffic conversion chart to your dashboard. This is for you too, Kirk, and this is gonna show this graph throughout for all of your products. But I can go into individual products like for example, our coffin shelf and now for any time period. So yeah, completely erase what I said about 30 minutes ago where I said you couldn’t do this. You absolutely can. This is how like Insights dashboard, it has so much stuff that I even, I’m not keeping up to date with it, but look at that here. I could see what my conversion rate sessions, page views for any time period at all. How cool is that guys? Pretty cool, I think. Cool. I’m glad you asked that Tunji. ’cause I just discovered something about Helium 10 I didn’t even know was available or I knew it, but my memory is so bad. I forgot.

Bradley Sutton:

Kirk says on the compare key metrics data section, can we automate it to give us some keywords where we do better while others are selling and doing well? Absolutely. That’s what’s coming. That is exactly what’s coming, Kirk. That is exactly what is coming where you’re gonna set your you’re, you’re gonna be able to e eventually set your parameters and say, Hey, give me a notice when my competitor is in the top 10 sponsored results, but I am not advertising for it. Like, that would be an example. Or you’d be like, Hey, give me a notice when there’s a keyword with at least 1000 search volume where my competitor is organically in top five and I am not on page one. I mean, just random things that you’ll be able to do because everybody has their own, you know, everybody’s got their own strategies of what they wanna see and what they don’t wanna see.

Bradley Sutton:

This is what you’re doing already in cerebral, I’m assuming. Absolutely gonna be able to automate that so that we can just give you the results and you’re no longer gonna have to like run cerebral every, every other day for your products. Alright guys, that’s it. We’re at time here. So thank you guys so much for joining us on this. Serious Sellers Club members and elite members get this every single week, 52 weeks a year pretty much. And the rest of you, we, we like to open this up once a month and then we repurpose this as a podcast as well. So thank you all, all non-elite and Serious Sellers Club members for joining us. Hope you guys got some benefit of it and we’ll see you guys in the next episode. Bye-Bye now.

Helium 10 Buzz 8/3/23: Amazon Brand Tailored Promotions | Biggest Alibaba USA Event Ever | TikTok Shop Update

In this episode, let’s talk about the latest breaking news in the Amazon, Walmart, & E-commerce space. Amazon Prime’s record-breaking delivery speeds, angry Etsy sellers, WooCommerce x TikTok Shop, and the biggest Alibaba event here in the USA. Let’s see what’s buzzing this week!

#479 – Level Up Your Amazon A+ Content and Listings!

Join us on our latest SSP episode as we tackle the latest strategies on Amazon listing optimization, A+ content, and other marketing strategies. We start with Emma’s backstory, where we explore the journey of moving from Missouri to Las Vegas, sharing the challenges and adventures she faced. Then she shares incredible success stories from her clients, proving the power of her methods and strategies. Stay tuned as we discuss the numerous benefits of having an optimized listing and how A+ content can be a real game-changer based on Emma’s insights. Learn how Emma helped Project X products convert more and discover budget-friendly tips for creating compelling listing images. For aspiring sellers, we offer invaluable advice on exploring other niches, breaking down Project X’s A+ content, and how you can do it too! Curious about avatars in Amazon product marketing? Tune in to find out! And if you’re eager to learn more about her latest strategies for A+ content and the case study with Project X, we’ve got you covered with Emma’s New Freedom Ticket modules! Finally, we wrap up this episode with Emma’s explosive 60-second tip, leaving you inspired and empowered!

In episode 479 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Emma discuss:

• 02:30 – Moving From Missouri To Las Vegas
• 04:25 – Cool Success Stories From Emma’s Clients
• 05:45 – The Benefits Of Having An Optimized Listing
• 07:17 – A+ Content Is A Real Game-Changer
• 11:20 – Listing Image Creation On A Budget
• 14:12 – Breaking Down Project X’s A+ Content
• 15:00 – How Did Emma Help Project X Products Convert More
• 22:14 – Tips For Newers Sellers On Other Niches
• 27:50 – What Is An Avatar In Marketing?
• 30:00 – New Freedom Ticket Modules With Emma Tamir
• 31:30 – Emma’s Healthy Habits 
• 33:10 – How To Get In Touch With Marketing By Emma
• 34:35 – Emma’s 60-Second Tip

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

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today we’ve got a listing optimization expert on the show who’s helped hundreds of Amazon sellers, and she’s gonna show her latest tactics and also show how for one Project X listing, she was able to double the conversion rate. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think.

Bradley Sutton:

Not sure on what main image you should choose from, or maybe you don’t know whether buyers would be interested in your product at a certain price point. Perhaps you want feedback on your new brand or company logo. Get instant and detailed market feedback from actual Amazon Prime members by using Helium 10 Audience. Just entering your poll or questions and within a short period of time, 50 to a hundred or even more Amazon buyers will give you detailed feedback on what resonates with them the most. For more information, go to h10.me/audience. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I’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 I’m not going too far in the world away from me. About three, 400 miles in Las Vegas is where you’re at right now, right, Emma?

Emma:

Absolutely. Las Vegas, Nevada,

Bradley Sutton:

Trying to stay cool in that ridiculous desert heat We were just talking about. I’m melting here at 84, but what did you say it is where you are right now?

Emma:

A whopping 30 degrees more. It is 104 degrees Fahrenheit. Apparently my math is not mathy. This afternoon.

Bradley Sutton:

We’re gonna be talking about how to make your Amazon listings hot, hot, hot, 115 degrees. But, but yeah, it’s not in, in real life. I’m not about this life. Anyways, just to let people know, we had a little bit of your backstory in episode we did about a year ago, so if you guys wanted to check that out, go to h10.me/368. Or if you’re watching this on podcast or YouTube, just look for episode 360 8 from the podcast. Last year she was on with another friend of the show, Rich Goldstein. So that was a good episode to check out. But today we’re gonna be talking a lot about some case studies that Emma’s been working on with us, as well as some new content that this we’re gonna announce is gonna be available in Freedom Ticket. But before we get to there, let’s just talk about it. Vegas is not where you were born and raised. You just told me you moved from Missouri. So was that a difficult decision to ’cause Missouri to Vegas is kind of a geographically, and culturally, I think a kind of a big difference there. It’s

Emma:

Definitely a big difference. I’ve actually lived a lot of different places in my life, including out of the country. I studied abroad in Ecuador. I taught English in Spain. I lived in Israel for almost three years, so it actually wasn’t super difficult for me to decide to move to Vegas. I will say I wasn’t the most enthusiastic when my husband slash business partner eras first proposed the idea in my mind, Vegas was the strip and not much else. But as I’ve spent time here, I realized there’s a whole city beyond the strip, and it’s a really awesome place to get to spend my days.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, cool, cool. Have you been to any of the Vegas, Amazon events since you’ve been there? Like Prosper and stuff, stuff that before you would have to take about two, three flights to get to, but now you just hop into an Uber and, and go to it. Have you been able to experience that yet?

Emma:

Yes, and it is amazing to go to an event and then know that you get to sleep in your own bed, <laugh> not have to stress about,

Bradley Sutton:

Ah, that’s a good point. Yep.

Emma:

<Laugh> no stressing about packing everybody’s living in a hotel, you’re just like, okay, goodnight. I’m gonna go get a good night’s sleep without any noisy neighbors or whatnot to worry about. I can brew myself my nice coffee in the morning. Yeah, it’s a, it’s, it’s a great place for the industry that we’re in, and it’s a great place to enjoy all the fun things that Vegas has to offer.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, cool. Cool. We’re gonna be talking about some project, some, some Project X stuff here, but, but what about just your, your regular clients? Like any cool stories has happened since last year? I mean, obviously I know some people don’t want their products put on blast, but but any stories without, without burning somebody’s identity that you could say like, oh, you had one client and then you guys worked on this plan together, and oh my goodness, their sales doubled or some amazing story like that.

Emma:

A client actually, they didn’t know what was going on. Suddenly their sales were just going through the roof and they’re like, what’s happening? And an employee of mine noticed that they’d gone viral on TikTok and they didn’t know it. So they’re like, oh my gosh, what’s happening? So that was really cool just to be able to be a party to that whole experience, because that can really change a business and the snap of a finger and honestly create a whole lot of other challenges. It’s not all roses. It’s great to have lots of sales, but if you’re not really in a position to know how to manage it, it can definitely create some road bumps. But all the time–

Bradley Sutton:

Was that just random or, like just somebody randomly put it on TikTok or so you guys did that?

Emma:

No, I mean, obviously, well, not, obviously, they were most likely found originally by this person because they had a good listing that helped sell them on it. It wasn’t anything that was well known and then all of a sudden they just blew up. But all the time we have people contacting us about positive impacts that they’re enjoying everything from serious improvements to conversion on their conversion rates, to just completely changing the entire profile of their business. I think, obviously as many sales as possible is the really exciting part of what we do, but there are so many impacts that a well optimized listing can have on your business that go beyond just the conversions. So if you’re dealing with lower return rates or more enthusiastic positive reviews, all of those things kind of feed each other and create this positive momentum that can really strengthen and make a business more efficient so that it’s maximizing whatever spend you’re putting into it to get the most out of those investments. And then generating really positive returns. So I can’t even think of one in particular, but I just know that on a regular basis, we’re getting those messages of the positive ways that what we’re doing is impacting our clients’ businesses.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, cool. Now, what do you think is one of the biggest factors nowadays that obviously I’m sure when you, when you take on clients, you, you, you, you give complete once over and, and optimize everything. But, what is the biggest game changer for your, your clients that you’ve done where like, people are just doing things the wrong way. Is it, like, on the p p C side, is it, is it going from no A+ Content to A+ Content? Is it creating a brand story? Is it refreshing the images? Is it just the listing copy, what all of this works together? Of course, you can’t have necessarily one for the other, but if you would point to one of those things that really consistently makes a big difference what would you say it is?

Emma:

I don’t want to speculate just purely based on one particular part of the listing. My gut tells me that probably A+ Content is one of the most significant things that you can upload to a listing and have a positive impact. But I don’t have those, that exact enough data to be able to say with certainty. But the reason why I would say that is a few fold. So one being that Amazon comes out and says, A+ Content positively impacts your conversion rate, and they’ve clearly got all the data on that. Sure. Two, you’re gaining more space for SEO because you have the image keywords. So you have a lot of additional fields that you can fill in with keywords that you wouldn’t have previously. So we’re having an impact on SEO, we’re having an impact on the customer experience. You also have an opportunity to be able to upsell or cross-sell with with that comparison chart module, whether you have standard A+ or Premium A+. So it just is influencing so many different aspects of of what you’re trying to do that I feel like that has the most far reaching elements. So I guess that would be my answer.

Bradley Sutton:

Well, pre Premium A+. That’s kind of a newer thing for some people because like, like that wasn’t always available just to the, the masses. What have you been seeing, like, like would you suggest to everybody, Hey, get qualified for Premium A+ Content and 10 out of 10 implement it? Or have you seen cases where putting the effort and spending to get a video and this and that, like it really didn’t change conversion much? Or is it something that you suggest to everybody to get to do

Emma:

To me while it’s free? This, so originally, for those that aren’t familiar, premium, a plus used to only be something that was available to a very select group of very large businesses. It was invite only, and you still had to pay a lot of money in order to, to be eligible for it. So about a year ago, Amazon made it available to any seller that is brand registered, has had has uploaded a brand story and has had at least 15 pieces of enhanced brand content approved within the last 12 months. So you don’t, you no longer have to spend money in order to qualify for the program. Of course, creating premium A+ Content is going to come with a heftier bill, just because there are more dynamic modules, you’re able to upload more images, it’s wider screen. So even having better resolution images, all of that definitely matters, but if you are able to qualify for it, I think that there are so many of the modules that give you so much better ability to really present your product in a way that is more aligned with what a customer is wanting and expecting to see when they’re interacting with a website.

Emma:

From that perspective alone, it’s worth making the effort. You also, if you are low on budget, you don’t have to upload a video, or if you do upload a video, it can be something very simple. You don’t have to go have a super highly produced video. I mean, I think one of the interesting things, even with this case study that we’ve been working on, Bradley, is these are images that Shivali created, she didn’t go to some high priced photographer to get everything done. And, and so it really demonstrates the ability that no matter where you are budget-wise, there’s still a lot that you can do to make the most of the tools that Amazon is giving you in order to be able to sell your product to the best of its abilities. And then maybe as you gain more traction, as you add more products to your catalog, then perhaps it’s worth taking it to the next level and, and upgrading the quality of your images. But I, I wouldn’t let that be a barrier to you. There’s so many different levels of photography and design out there, and with AI you can do some good design work without needing to be an expert at Photoshop anymore. And so, yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, Let me just show the results. I know we’re gonna show the results and then work our way back and kind of reverse engineer what happened. But let me just share my screen here for those, watching this on YouTube, and I’m just taking a look at the product performance page in Helium 10 for this Egg Rack. And if I’m looking back at, when is this the first 10 days of May, which is before on our old listing we had a unit session percentage, as you guys can see of 4.93%. Now, sales were still pretty high because in those days we were the, like, all those days, as in all of two months ago, we were the only game in town as far as this particular kind of product for like a year.

Bradley Sutton:

We kind of had a stranglehold. Now it was interesting, went out of stock like for a couple of weeks, but during that time around June was tons of competitors, Chinese competitors came in and are like, I wouldn’t say half the price, but, but very, very cheap price. So like, theoretically you would’ve thought our sales would go to zero because our sessions were way down. But take a look at this guys. If I go up here, as you can see from the first 10 days, so a kind of apples to apples comparison first 10 days of July, and then we look at that same product, look at our unit session percentage now went to 11.24, so more than double my sales would’ve been dead because like, our, our sessions have gone way down, but our sales have not gone down as much as one would expect thanks to this much better conversion rate on the page.

Bradley Sutton:

So let me just show you the end result here of what what was done. We have new images here. What we’re gonna talk about your thought process here with these. We’ve got some new copy right here. We’ve got new bullet points and this listing did not have A+ Content, and now we can see some A+ Content here. So I know it’s been a couple months since you worked in this, but, but think back to the think back to the, your thought process when you saw the old listing, which was just thrown together, you know a while back as part of a Project X like episode or something we had done. But like, what was, what was the things that jumped off where you’re like, okay, yeah, we definitely need to upgrade this?

Emma:

There were a lot of things for, I mean, first of all, clearly there was no A+ Content, so that was a no-brainer for us. The images were just a few basic product images. So we, I don’t bel if I remember correctly, and I could be mistaken, there were minimal lifestyle images. I don’t think any of them really had text in them, which, we’ll, we can get into that and, and why that’s so important. And the bullet points were not the worst, but pretty bland, just sort of straightforward. They didn’t really have anything that helped to communicate why you a person would want to buy this type of egg rack in particular. Another thing that we noticed is that it was very limited in sort of how the product itself was being presented. And so that was something else that we really thought about as we were embarking on this revamp, was how can we think creatively of who’s going to be buying this, why they would be buying this, how they can make the most of it, and put together a strategy that’s going to address all of those things throughout the entire listing.

Emma:

So really bringing to it a clear sense of who the customer is, what they care about, and why this product is, is the best product out there, rather than just kind of a more basic explanation of what it is, and then allowing the customer to decide that.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, and we in the past I’ve worked a lot with professional photography studios and three d like AMZ One Step in others, but, but as you said sometimes sellers might not have a thousand dollars, $1,500 depending on what what kind of a shoot it’s done to, to really be able to, to, to afford something that extravagant. And we want to show kind of like, Hey, if you don’t have that kind of budget, maybe you could only afford hiring somebody from Upwork, perhaps to do some Photoshopping after you’ve taken some pictures with some decent pictures with cell phone or, or you have a nice camera. And actually all these pictures, guys, like, I’m pretty sure this is Shivali’s father’s hand. He’s got some bling here, some gold bling here. He is now a hand model.

Bradley Sutton:

Here, these are all pictures done, like with Shivali’s cell phone at her house in North Carolina. A hundred percent of these, this doesn’t look like Shivali. So I’m not sure if this was like a stock photography or, or something here, but everything, like how did you go about this? Did you like give her directions, like, alright, hey, I need a shot, like in a fridge, or, or did you just tell her to just take random pictures or did you give her like this specific direction here on this stuff?

Emma:

Yeah, so we gave pretty specific directions. That’s one thing in general, whether you’re working on a listing or a website or anything that has multiple professionals involved, and they don’t have to be contractors, they can be people on your team, it’s helpful to have someone taking the lead so that there is a clear unifying concept because otherwise everybody’s working individually and then trying to match that up and make something work is really difficult. So we gave a creative brief that suggested the different types of images to create so that those images would then align with the text that we were writing, so that it would be a very strong piece of marketing to gather when you combine those two things. So the image and the text are reinforcing each other. And so in those images, I think we have everything. I mean, some of these are even reflected in the keyword research, right?

Emma:

So kind of to take a step back for a moment, your research for creating a listing is really going to help determine the direction that you take. And so part of that is the keyword research that you’re doing. So seeing what kind of keywords are people searching for? That was one of the things that was really eye-opening for us because we realized, hey, there are a lot of competitors that are using terms like cake pop holder or all these little serving because it has these holes in it that make it so that it can be really great for single serving things if you’re hosting a party or wanting to display food somewhere. And so we didn’t want to stay so limited only to being an egg holder because there were all of these other ways that you can utilize it. And the keywords were really what illuminated that opportunity for us.

Emma:

And so then we wanted to make sure, well, if we’re using keywords like that, then we also need to be showing people what we mean when we say something like a cake pop holder so that they can visualize it and imagine what it would be like to be hosting a party. And this, this egg holder, it’s a more rustic design. It’s wood, it’s kind of a traditional and a little bit timeless too, where it’s very possible that the people that are buying this, they like things that are going to last that they’re also going to be able to maybe use in a variety of ways so that they’re not just buying something that only has one function in their household, but something that they have that they can use in different types of settings. So it really even expands what the possibilities are and even helps to justify the investment a little bit more since this is a on the pricier end of an egg holder. So that’s one example. It’s an, another set of keywords was talking about an egg holder for the refrigerator. This egg holder can be used either in the refrigerator or either on the counter. So being able to demonstrate those things in the images was really important so that people can visualize, okay, this is what it would look like if I put it on my countertop. This is how it would function if I put it in my refrigerator. And, and helping to create those connections for people makes the purchasing decision much easier.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. But what you said, it seems like without me talking to you at all during this process, what you, how you just described this egg rack seems like exactly the way that you, that you tackled that project as well. So this is kind of like a, a template guys of you, you could be in a gothic category, you could be in a kitchen category you could be in supplements, but the the principles are the same. Now that being said, what, or are there categories or kinds of products where your approach actually is different than what you’ve been talking about because something different works in different categories? Or is this approach that you’ve been talking about applicable to most and I’m not, of course, obviously I’m not talking about books or, or something like that, but just most regular products.

Emma:

Yeah, so I think the main difference is, so both in the gothic item as well as with the egg holder, these are a little bit more niche products. So they’re not as competitive as category of categories. And so you can go a little bit broader with how you position something. Whereas on the other side, if you are selling something that’s in a very competitive category, then it’s actually a much better approach, especially when you’re a new brand and you’re launching the very beginning to go hyper-specific. So you don’t want to expand out too and go in too many different directions because it’s going to be really difficult and very expensive to try to gain any kind of traction. So you mentioned supplements. If you’re just selling like a fish oil or something like that, which I’m not recommending that you sell fish oil, well, if you just try to sell general fish oil, like an average fish hold oil, that would be good for any single person to take.

Emma:

You’re not going to go anywhere with that. You’re gonna spend a lot of money and you’re just going to die a slow death on a, a page, whatever, a hundred. Yeah. whereas if you were to maybe identify through doing some keyword research that there’s are actually a lot of people that are searching for fish oil for recovery from knee replacement surgery. I’m just making this up, then it might be worthwhile to make your listing hyper targeted to people that are going through knee replacement surgery. So instantly, what is that going to mean for you? People that are getting knee replacements most of the time are older. And so you wanna make sure in that case that like the images of people that you’re using are older people that are, it’s going to make sense that they’re getting knee replacements versus if you have a bunch of young looking athletes, there’s going to be a big disconnect there.

Emma:

And so I think that’s one of the main elements that you would want to be using in order to determine your approach to how to go. It’s very easy especially as a new seller to kind of get starry-eyed and want to just sell to everyone. And I encourage people to really resist that urge and try to start off quite specific. And then if you eventually want to get a little bit more aggressive, once you have some reviews, have some good movement, demonstrate that this is something that has potential, then maybe you can get a little bit more aggressive with that. But yeah, I would say that overall, aside from that, the basic principles of making sure that the keywords that somebody is searching are also reflected in the content, and that I don’t think is always the most obvious thing.

Emma:

We think of keywords as the thing that gets people in the door, but if that’s what’s on someone’s mind when they’re going into the search bar to search for a product, and then you’re showing them, Hey, this is what you were searching, that’s going to help them understand like, oh, this is, I’m in the right place. I wasn’t just Amazon didn’t just take me to some random product that doesn’t have anything at all to do with what I was searching for, which as a customer, I’ve had that happen plenty of times.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. So now one of the big things that you, you tackle with this, like you said we did not have A+ Content. So I know there’s like different, different ways to, to kind of tackle A+ Content. Some people like to just have kind of like, make it seem like it’s almost all one image and, and that it just kind of flows, but it’s really different images. ’cause That’s what A+ Content makes you put it in modules. But what was your reasoning behind this kind of like, approach here? And I see a lot of like there’s like it seems like you’re, you’re focusing in on some of the features of it like, like the, the wood finish and then how it has these pegs so that doesn’t go over.

Bradley Sutton:

You show an actual chicken coop. I’m assuming this is maybe to go along with the branding here. And then you show some other use cases like, looks like some chocolate, I’m getting hungry as it is like you said, the cake pops, and then now you can also show how you can, I mean, so you’re saying a, there, there’s like a lot going on here. Do you always wanna focus on the features like this, or sometimes you, you tell a story more, it just depends on the product? Or is this kind of like your plan for A+ Content?

Emma:

I would say it all really depends on the product and what’s required. And the approach really is what do we feel that the customer needs to know? What’s really important about the product that we need to communicate? And also what are the things that are really going to resonate with somebody or make them care about something? And so there were certain design features that we felt like were very important to this product that we did want to highlight. So the fact that it’s solid wood showing the fact that it’s stackable and expandable, I am imagining this and sort of the, the avatar that we had in our minds, which for those that aren’t familiar with what an avatar is, it’s essentially sort of an imaginary person with a very detailed profile that is a potential customer of yours.

Emma:

And it can be a really helpful tool when you are creating any kind of marketing content so that you’re writing specifically to a person instead of just kind of to a whole blob of potential buyers. And so we’re imagining someone that either aspires to have chickens or maybe even has chickens. It’s actually a very popular lifestyle to to have some backyard chickens and raise your own eggs. But if you can’t do that, maybe going to the farmer’s market. And there’s a lot of different ideas that are kind of tied up in that. And so we wanted to draw that connection because it’s very different than if you’re purely just needing function and you don’t care about how it looks like and you don’t really care about the whole idea of everything, then you can just buy a cheap acrylic or plastic egg holder that you can put in your refrigerator and that’s that.

Emma:

But this is something that can be a really nice piece on your counter and is something that’s going to last and that’s sort of aligns with visually the look of that rustic homesteading lifestyle that might just be aspirational or is in fact something that they’re pursuing. And so thinking about, the host, the gracious host the person that’s wanting to eat healthy, all of the different ideas that are associated with that, and then wanting to present that in a way that is visually helping to communicate those ideas. And then textual textually reinforcing the key details.

Bradley Sutton:

Now you what you just said was just some of your tips for A+ Content, now you actually redid one of our older modules that needed some refreshing in, in freedom ticket. So guys go into a Freedom Ticket. And I want you guys those of you who have Helium 10 and we’re trying to always update ones that, that might need refreshing, but go into 8.11. It’s week eight, 8.11. You’ll see Emma’s new module here. And then around eight it’s not showing up here right now, but around 8.13, 8.15 About, you’re gonna see another module. And what was that one about? So it wasn’t about A+ Content, but what was the other one you made about?

Emma:

Yeah, so that one is sort of for a slightly people that they’ve, they have a listing and they’re trying to figure out do does it need work? So sort of how to think about is it worth it? Is it time to do some revamping? So thinking about really that optimization process of you have a listing, it’s existing in the world, how can you think strategically about that to really take your listing to the next level?

Bradley Sutton:

Cool. Cool. So good stuff there, guys. Make sure to check that out. And and once it’s once if you haven’t seen it yet, I might have a clip of it. I’ll try and throw it into the Weekly Buzz or something as well. Alright, now, now before we get into your last Amazon tip of the day one thing I ask people 2023 is my year of health and wellness. So like, what are some of your habits as far as like hobbies when you need to get away from, from the Amazon world what are some things that you’re doing to keep yourself physically, mentally healthy?

Emma:

Yeah, I would say the top one is an evening walk. It sounds really simple and basic. The evening walk is having to get later and later as the temperatures rise because 7:00 PM is still pretty toasty here, but it’s great. I would say for all health it’s fantastic exercise. Walking is still shown to be one of the best ways of, of exercising your body, but it’s also, it’s great to be outside. I think it’s very good for your mental health and I, I feel so much better when I am walking regularly. Also drinking a lot of water should not be underappreciated. And especially again, in the climate that I’m in, I feel like I’m in a losing battle, but most of the time when I don’t feel well, I’m thinking like, okay, what’s going on? And then I sort of run my mental checklist of how many cups of water I’ve had. And so often, either if it’s a headache or I’m feeling a little bit lethargic, it’s just because I haven’t had enough water. So two really simple, basic things, but I think that some of those types of things can have the biggest impact. So

Bradley Sutton:

I like it. Now before we get into your Amazon hacker, if people want to find you on the interwebs, one of the easiest ways is through Helium 10 guys. Just go to hub.helium10.com and just type in Marketing by Emma actually comes up right here in the auto complete, but Marketing by Emma. And then you’ll be able to reach out. And then if you’re an Elite member, you actually have some discounts, like I’m an elite member so I can get some discounts. If you’re a Helium 10 member, there might be different discounts that, that, that end up here. But make sure to hit the get in touch. How else can people find you on the interwebs out there?

Emma:

Yeah, so our marketingbyemma.com is probably one of the best places to go. And on our website you’ll be able to find, if you’re more of a phone person, you can call us, you can WhatsApp us, you can text us, you can email. All the things are there. We also offer a free listing analysis. So if you see all of this and you’re like, I don’t know, this is over my head, please take a look at it and tell me what I’m doing wrong, we can do that. Also,

Bradley Sutton:

I’m looking here, 92 5-star reviews. Good grief here in the hub. And guys, when you, when you see verified reviewer, that means they were signed into Helium 10 when they left the reviews. So you could, you could see lots of verified reviews here, just like on Amazon. My goodness, pretty impressive. I like it. Alright, now what’s your last 62nd or 32nd tip of the day or strategy that you can share with everybody?

Emma:

I think I just wanna talk about the importance of understanding your competitors and going super niche. I think that ultimately Amazon is getting more and more competitive. You are dealing with it yourself, with this a rack holder and fight the urge to want to go broad instead, go specific. Find those opportunities. They always exist. And the more niche you can go, the more opportunity you have to be able to really connect deeply with customers, get that fan that fan loyalty, that excitement around your product, and then you can just use that to build your momentum. So we see that in many of the biggest D2C brands out there, not just on Amazon. It’s a really effective strategy. And as AI becomes even more dominant, it’s, it’s more and more important to go specific to strategically position and to be clear about what makes you special, and then really highlight and celebrate that so that people have a reason to buy from you.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome. Thank you so much for joining us and thanks for your great work on this egg rack. And yeah, like if you, if you want to go tweak it now, after seeing it and knowing what’s going on, let’s work on it some more and then share results later with it, with everybody. Awesome.

Emma:

I would love to. Thanks so much Bradley.

#478 - Amazon Business Using Other People’s Money?!

Let’s catch up on the latest ventures of Crystal Ren, an Amazon seller from Singapore, after exiting her Amazon brand last year. She also shares how she successfully utilizes other people’s money for her new brand, while also addressing the intersection of consumer goods and mental health services. Get an exclusive insight into Crystal’s new Amazon business and learn valuable strategies for achieving consistent profits and income. Crystal divulges her Amazon launch strategy and her valuable sourcing and negotiation tips and learn essential lessons from Crystal’s recent trips in other Asian countries. Find out Crystal’s exciting outlook for 2023 and beyond.

In episode 478 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Crystal discuss:
• 01:30 – Remembering Bradley’s Trip In Singapore
• 03:05 – What Is Crystal Up To These Days?
• 06:01 – Using Other People’s Money For Business
• 08:08 – Consumer Goods & Mental Health Services
• 11:10 – Diving Into Crystal’s New Amazon Business
• 12:50 – Making Profits And Consistent Income
• 17:06 – Crystal’s Amazon Launch Strategy
• 19:09 – How To Win The Amazon Game
• 22:54 – Crystal’s Healthy Habits & Hobbies To Relax
• 27:28 – Sourcing & Negotiation Tips
• 33:51 – Lessons Learned From Recent Trips In Asia
• 37:02 – Crystal’s Outlook For 2023 And Next Year
• 39:07 – How To Reach Out Crystal Ren
• 40:01 – Crystal Ren’s 30-Second Tip

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

Let’s catch up on the latest ventures of Crystal Ren, an Amazon seller from Singapore, after exiting her Amazon brand last year. She also shares how she successfully utilizes other people’s money for her new brand, while also addressing the intersection of consumer goods and mental health services. Get an exclusive insight into Crystal’s new Amazon business and learn valuable strategies for achieving consistent profits and income. Crystal divulges her Amazon launch strategy and her valuable sourcing and negotiation tips and learn essential lessons from Crystal’s recent trips in other Asian countries. Find out Crystal’s exciting outlook for 2023 and beyond.

In episode 478 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Crystal discuss:
• 01:30 – Remembering Bradley’s Trip In Singapore
• 03:05 – What Is Crystal Up To These Days?
• 06:01 – Using Other People’s Money For Business
• 08:08 – Consumer Goods & Mental Health Services
• 11:10 – Diving Into Crystal’s New Amazon Business
• 12:50 – Making Profits And Consistent Income
• 17:06 – Crystal’s Amazon Launch Strategy
• 19:09 – How To Win The Amazon Game
• 22:54 – Crystal’s Healthy Habits & Hobbies To Relax
• 27:28 – Sourcing & Negotiation Tips
• 33:51 – Lessons Learned From Recent Trips In Asia
• 37:02 – Crystal’s Outlook For 2023 And Next Year
• 39:07 – How To Reach Out Crystal Ren
• 40:01 – Crystal Ren’s 30-Second Tip

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Crystal’s back on the show to talk about what she did after her big Amazon exit last year, and how she started a new brand this year with other people’s money. And she gives us her best sourcing tips and more. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think.

Bradley Sutton:

How can you get more buyers to leave you Amazon product reviews by following up with them in a way that’s compliant with Amazon terms of service? You can use Helium 10 Follow-up in order to automatically send out Amazon’s request a review emails to any customers you want. Not just that, but you can specify when they get the message and even filter out people that you don’t want to get that message, such as people who have asked for refunds or maybe ones that you gave discounts to. For more information, visit H ten.me forward slash follow up. You can sign up for a free account, or you can sign it up for a platinum plan and get 10% off for life by using the discount code SSP10.

Bradley Sutton:

Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host, Bradley Sutton. 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 speaking of different parts of the world, we are going right now, I believe. Are we live in Singapore? Is that where you’re at right now?

Crystal:

That’s correct, yes.

Bradley Sutton:

All the way back in Singapore. It was nice to be out in Singapore a couple times. Was it this year or last year? But I got to do the touristy things there, like see the gardens and look at some places. That was in one of my Korean dramas I was watching, so, so I love it out there in Singapore. But this is not your first time on our show. Crystal has been on the show. We’re not gonna go too much into her backstory because we have it in, I have it written here in my notes, episode 351.

Bradley Sutton:

So if you guys wanna find out her crazy story about how I discovered her from an Amazon YouTube channel and then found out that she had invested a hundred thousand dollars into her first Amazon business and brought it up to seven figures how to exit. And basically that was, you know, I don’t know about by a year and a half, or a little bit less than a year and a half ago. So now this episode, we’re not gonna be going into too much of the backstory, you know, but again, if you’re watching or listening to this and this is your first time listening to to Crystal, maybe maybe pause this. Go to h10.me/351, Get her backstory. ’cause We’re gonna be talking about it as if you guys know about it already. So, Crystal we were just talking like, I, I know you’ve been traveling a lot all over the world, going to weddings and going back home to, to China and everything, but I, I want to go all the way back to the last time we talked. And at that time you were not, I wouldn’t want, I don’t wanna say retired, but you were kind of like still in the aftermath of your exit and just kind of like kicking back and traveling and stuff, so That’s right. Was that pretty much your life for a year or so or what was going on after that exit?

Crystal:

Yeah, no, so actually when we talk, I believe it was pretty much exactly a year ago, I was, as you said, traveling and also kind of manage my finances at the time because you know, I think this should be in the 30-second tip, but I’ll say it now anyway. I think once after you have an accident, it’s actually better to have a plan before you even exit it, just because otherwise you’re gonna find yourself in a situation. And now this is not just for me. Like I heard other sellers saying the same thing, like, it will be a period of time when like, you’re just like, what am I gonna do next? And I heard, you know, people saying that, you know, for a few month or maybe like a year, they’re just like, oh, like, you know what’s next?

Crystal:

So I know people who have the plan before they make an exit, perhaps they already started another, the brand or like, they know, you know, they’re gonna dedicate a few months traveling. So they’re planning that already. Like, I felt like that will make your timeline more productive. And I didn’t do that. So like, I kind of regret it now. And another part that I should say, like I just didn’t know was like how much hassle it goes into manage your finances, because after you have an exit, like you kind of need to decide where do you want to put the money into, right? Like that also took some time for me to like figure out like, how should I allocate, you know, invest this and that. And I would say like, you know, doing business and investing is completely two different ballgame.

Crystal:

Yeah. Some people hire, you know, professional investment professionals for them. Like, it’s funny ’cause I actually had my CFA I used to work in investment bank, but when it come down to your own money, you still think about it differently and you are so much more like risk averse, minus so many. So I felt like that is actually worth some time into it, but I just unfortunately, like underestimated how much time that it would take. So it took me a few months to kind of get my things together. And I was traveling, you know, I think in Europe, in France going to, you know, weddings, I think I was in New York San Francisco. I was in Vegas for the prosper show. So I did a lot of traveling then. But then around August I started to start, you know, preparing for my second brand. So this time around I did a little bit differently. So I, last time I completely bootstrapped it which means I used a hundred percent of my own saving. But this time I actually looked for investors. So I talk to VCs, like I talk to individual investors family and friends. So like, I actually, this time around, I’m using other people’s money to

Bradley Sutton:

Well, let me stop you there and ask you about that, because the first time that was, I mean, that you had a lot already a lot saved up. Now you had to exit. So you actually had, I would even imagine more cash. Why the decision to use OPM other people’s money instead of instead of your own, like the first time, you

Crystal:

Know, the thing is that I could, right, but then I was kind of more thinking about exploring different options, and then I was thinking, I wasn’t sure what kind of values investors might add, you know, kind of what kind of perspectives they might give it to me. And you know, like what, they take me to a different height. So that’s what I was thinking, kind of ’cause a lot of friends around me, I mean, to be honest, I’m a rarity. Like most people I know, they start business with VCs or like other investors. So that’s why I was thinking, okay, maybe I should also explore that as well. But I’m gonna tell you about conclusion after that. But that’s kind of what I was thinking in my head, so that’s why I kind of spent a month just talking to different investors and see what they think, et cetera.

Bradley Sutton:

How did you approach that? You know, like, are these people that were already in your network or did you go to some kind of like website where, where you can meet them or, or networking events? How did you meet these, these people? I

Crystal:

Think those are mostly kind of in my network or like, friends, friends or like, you know, people introduce me to people. I think that if I’m not mistaken, when it comes to investors, it’s much harder to cold call. So like, if you got referred by other people and then then they already kind of, you know, you have that weak link. It’s much better to get the bonding from them and, and to kind of build that trust. And also you can like gonna sit down and talk about it in person, you know, like maybe have a cup of coffee together. Like it’s all about trust, right? For these kind of relationships.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Interesting. So these were people, you know, outside, I’m assuming maybe outside of the Amazon world, mainly?

Crystal:

Yes. Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

So I’m just curious, like what’s the impression of, of these, you know, these hardcore maybe investors Yeah. That had no experience on Amazon. You explain how Amazon works. Like, are they, like, what are you serious? Like, or did they pretty much, do they pretty much know the the game?

Crystal:

So I think and I felt like I wanted to get into it later, is that I never kind of positioned myself as a Amazon only business because I try to position myself as like, Hey, I wanted to do this brand and this is what I’m thinking about. And this is my direction, this is my track record. So I think if you were only talking about Amazon, then most investors these days think about aggregators and, you know, aggregators, you know,, let’s be honest. Like, you know, they don’t, a lot of them failed. So like, it kind of doesn’t give like Amazon, like a good rap on the street when it come down to investors. So like, I would just kind of tell them that, you know, this is my track record and yeah, this is what I wanted to do, you know, this is the gap in the market, et cetera. But,

Bradley Sutton:

And also, yeah, so I mean, it was, yeah. For somebody brand new, it might have been harder. First of all, they don’t have people in their network like that and then coming in with no tracker, but you, you can show them, Hey, you know, or first of all, you know me, you know, like, because these are people from your network. And second of all, Hey guys, here’s my resume of already exiting a and building a big business. So that definitely helped. I’m sure.

Crystal:

Yeah. I felt like it helped, but also in the meantime, like I felt like investors are naturally skeptical. So even if you have a track record, like they, they might be willing to take a call with you, but it doesn’t mean that they will give you the money, you know? So it’s like they always have this sort of KPIs where like they’re, oh, tell me about it while you hit this KPI or something like that. And my conclusion, by the way, even though I raised some money, but like, I kind of stopped at some point because my conclusion is that for a consumer goods business, if you do have a good product, you don’t need to raise a lot of investors money.. So I felt like investors put a lot of money into say something like a technology, because technology has a long process of RnD.

Crystal:

And that process needs a lot of funding because it’s gonna go through a period of time when that happens, there’s no return, you know, they don’t have any income or something like that. Versus for a consumer goods business the setup capital is much lower than a high tech company. And your product, if it does well, can fund your business going forward. So technically it’s kind of like a cash flow business. It doesn’t need like that millions of dollars to start off with in the first place, unless you are, you know, like I felt like in the, say 10 years ago when the D two C model was much more popular in investors’ world, where like they will spend a lot of money building like website, you know, putting in advertisements, money, like pr, you know, that kind of things where like they build a hype up. But that’s a different model, so that’s not Amazon, right? So and that’s kind of my conclusion after the whole, you know, experiencing fundraising.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. So for your new Amazon business, did you end up choosing somebody and, and saying, Hey, let, let’s work on this together? Or did you end, at the end of the day, end up using your own money again?

Crystal:

Yeah, so I did use some of their I, I use other people’s money to build this business. But I also put my own money into it.

Bradley Sutton:

And when you approached them, like, did you already have like did you already have the product in mind and, and the, the brand in mind? Or were you just like, Hey, let’s build something together and let’s work on it together and decide what it is? How did that work?

Crystal:

It’s funny because I felt like you know, we’re talking about there’s different wrongs in this world, right? Like, we’re talking about this like very early angel wrong and you know, friends and family wrong, like just super early, right? So I felt like for that wrong, it, it’s really just like people’s faith in you. Because if you’re talking about like seed wrong or like series A you already have a product that you have some, like product market fit, it can show traction. It’s a completely different topic. ’cause People was, they started to see a track record of this business, like, you know, oh, this is a product, you know, this is how market reacts to it. But like, when I first started off, like had a rough idea of like what I wanted to do, and I have a rough idea of like what my product’s gonna look like, but I had nothing, you know, like I hadn’t really built it. And I was just like, okay guys, this is what I wanted to do. So that was a very different conversation. I felt like people kind of bad on me because like, they believe in me, and obviously I pivoted at the idea later. So, so yeah, it’s interesting, you know, like to go through the process.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Alright. So actually no, I didn’t, I didn’t remember this but I was looking at the notes that our podcast director Mhel prepared, and one thing you had mentioned in the last episode, or the last year’s episode was, was you were perhaps thinking if you were gonna start another Amazon brand, you wanted to do something that was either consumer goods or something that actually had dealt with like mental health. Did you end up going that direction or what?

Crystal:

Yeah, so it’s funny ’cause I actually looked hard along to the mental health business, and I try to like kind of merge these two together where like I have a consumer goods business in mental health. And I honestly, like, this is what I discovered, okay. Like, you can do a consumer goods business, like the old D2C model where you have this amazing product, this shark tank, you know, it’s on Kickstarter and you know, whatever, right? Like the, the way the blanket in like 2010, 10 years ago where like they raised like $5 million the first like, you know, when they first got money from Kickstarters. Or you can do Amazon business. And it’s really hard to kind of merge these two together because the, the way to think about like a ground big breaking product idea and kind of do a lot of RnD in it, that is like the Shopify business, right?

Crystal:

And kind of create that desire and demand in the market, or that you just follow the market demand what you see on Amazon and the way to think about these two and the abilities you use is also different. So for Amazon, it’s a lot more, you know, data analysis, like profit and loss analysis and like do some incremental innovation. But you go with the market demand and the other one is like you completely just created, right? Like, you are like, okay, like I want the market to have this product. It’s amazing. So I felt like in my mind at the time, like I wanted to do mental health, but the, the products that, you know, like the market demands in that, in the mental health space, in terms of physical products, it’s so limited. Like mental health is always like a service and is extremely customized to each, at every one of them I have looking to Amazon.

Crystal:

And there are some products, like for example focus on autism, right? A very niche market, but like, it’s a good, it’s a good market, but it’s very li very, very limited. So at the time, I was say, okay, like I needed to broaden my hypothesis if I wanted to play the Amazon game. So that’s why I started expanding to wellness and beauty. So like, not just mental health, but like more kind of wellness and alternative heating methods. But that’s like kind of a technology, device products, right? So I end up going that route. So I end up, you know, I did create something like that, but it was just not like, you know, strictly in mental health.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Now again, last year, you know, the, the crazy stat from from your episode was that, you know, regardless of, you know, it was your money, but regardless of whose money it was, it was, you had invested a hundred thousand dollars, you know, into the company this year. Like you said, you got you know, some investors, but overall, regardless of whose money it was how much was your initial startup cost this time around? Was it also, did you also do a crazy six figure investment like that? Or did you start with less?

Crystal:

So the hundred thousand dollars investment I did at the time, that was the first year’s investment. So, which means those are the money I put in like over the time in the first year, right?

Bradley Sutton:

I thought it was like a hundred thousand before you even had one sale or something. I was about, that was why it was crazy to me,, I was like, what in the world? Yeah,

Crystal:

Okay. But, you know, I did put that a hundred thousand dollars aside, like, I protect it, you know? So I was like, okay, this is money for the business, right? Like, I’m not gonna, I’m gonna starve myself before I even use that money. So like, that’s kind of the spirit behind it. And this time around, it’s the same thing. I putting like, I would say a little bit less than that, but like so far, but still quite a bit, you know, into the business.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. All right. So when did you actually launch the product? Like what month?

Crystal:

Yeah, so officially, it’s month launched this year in January. It started in January. It’s a bit of a tricky category because it’s like kind of linked to medical device. So I got a lot of like you know, the, the restricted product and it got taken down, got taken down again, you know, so, so a lot of that kind of delayed the product launch.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. But and then did you start with one SKU, or did you have a variety of ones that you started with?

Crystal:

Yeah, so I did start with like two, three SKUs. So like, I kind of just go hard on it for a little bit. Instead of last time where like, I think even last time I was going a bit aggressive too, compared to, you know, some other people. Like I probably start with one, but then I added two the month after. So so far, like I have had three, four SKUs.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. And how has it has it done? I mean, obviously, like you said, you’ve run into some, some hiccups. Have those hiccups been resolved and Amazon is not restricting it anymore? And then do you have steady sales now? Yeah, I have any of the products failed already or have any of them taken off? What’s going on?

Crystal:

So I have I have I mean, I’ll say most of existing products, SKUs, they’re quite stable and they’re generating sales, but I constantly would have new SKUs that I wanna launch to be taken down. So like in this category, I think that’s just a constant struggle. And as far as I know, like, not just me, but like anybody in this kind of like medical ish wellness space you just need to be extremely careful of what you say, otherwise you need to have f d a approval, this and that.

Bradley Sutton:

What attracted you to, like, to make you pick this? Did you just see some, some, a lot of demand and, and the existing competition was you felt not strong and easily beatable, or is this something that you thought, you know, maybe the demand isn’t quite there, but you foresee the demand going up? Or what made you choose this?

Crystal:

Yeah, so I think my logic to play Amazon game is very similar. I think that Amazon is a very bottom of the funnel channel. So like, you know, think about Shopify or whatever, that’s like a top of the funnel channel where like people go there and it’s cold tropic, but like unless they know your brands and they go look for it. But like for Amazon, it’s the bottom of the funnel. So like you cannot be the market demand, in my opinion, right? Like, the easiest way to go with it is just to kind of flow with it. So I always take the approach where, like, I want to be in a market where there is demand and there’s less competition. So like, I think everybody does it slightly differently, but like, that’s just kind of my logic always. Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. What has been your best month? So far of sales?

Crystal:

My month of sales has always been quite stable, like, around, you know, five figures. So that’s kind of, because I haven’t really launched more products. I think last product launch was February, March, so that has been like, kind of constant stable figure.

Bradley Sutton:

Is it profitable already or it’s still trying. Well that’s pretty good. That’s, that, that’s not something that always can be, can be achieved. All right. So what was your strategy for launching? Did you just use PPC or did you build up a, a social media? Did you send outside traffic run any Google ads or anything like that?

Crystal:

Yeah, so like, I’m planning on Google ads later on. So far for the products I launched, I actually just used via PPC. And then but I think I’m gonna probably start running Google Ads very soon in the future. I think it’s also because at the time my website, I just built it and like, I didn’t quite like it, so I didn’t want it to, I guess you can run Google ads to Amazon, but, you know, like I was like, okay I’m not sure if you know, this brands look legit, you know, with my website. Like, I didn’t really feel like it was up for it. So I didn’t really wanna go outside of Amazon, but I think over time I’ll start to run those outside traffic as well.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. All right, cool. What are some other strategies that, that you utilize ’cause it’s like, not everybody can, can be making over $10,000 a month right Off the, right off the bat, you know? ’cause That means it’s already Yeah. Instantly six figure, six figure business. So what helped you you know, in this very difficult niche to already start, you know, having that kind of volume?

Crystal:

I think first of all, like, I always tell people, and, and I would actually like to, you know, talk to you about, you know, some insights I’ve noticed in my recent trips in Vietnam and China, talking to Amazon sellers there. But I think, and this is what I tell them, by the way is that like your product in Amazon business in not, we’re not talking about the Shark Tank, whatever, like Shopify business in Amazon business products, 80%, and the rest is 20%. If you have a great product and the like, in terms of it meets the market demand, the rest of things are like not as good. It doesn’t matter. People also gonna buy a product. So the product comes first, and that is your quality of products that will be measured by the, you know, your rating, right? And so if you have these two things, then you’re pretty much winning most of the game. So that’s what I kind of do too. I will only place an order if I’m a hundred percent confident in the product, and that’s what I will say, like I do. And then the second thing is I try to build my credibility for these kind of niches. Yeah, it’s very important to have credibility. We’re

Bradley Sutton:

Gonna close the episode with just a bunch of strategies from you of what you’ve learned in these last couple things. But before we, we get to that, I actually, you know, I, I didn’t do this last year, but my big thing this year is, is talking to people about what they do for mental health. And you’re somebody who can appreciate that. So, you know, I tell people like, Hey it’s important to have hobbies. As an entrepreneur, it’s important to know when to take it easy and have an escape, you know, because sometimes, as you said, when you first started, you were just working, you know, 20 hours a day probably, and then that’s not good for your physical or mental health. So I’m wondering, you know, you know, my hobbies is travel and stuff, so yeah, I’m wondering what’s, what’s your hobbies as far as what you do to kind of relax, and then what are some routines that you have for either mental and or physical health?

Crystal:

Oh, gosh. I feel like there’s so many. So, like, another reason, by the way, I actually didn’t get to that. But you know, this year I have also spent a ton of time developing my own, like, personal self. So like the kind of time where, like I used to spend on my business now, I took a lot of them back just to kind of work on myself internally, and we can talk about this for like another, like two hours, but my philosophy is that at some point, like, you know, money, it’s important, but like, it’s not going to buy you everything. And then, like, you know, when I first started Amazon business, I saw the salsa was, oh yeah, it’s so great. But now I saw, you know, I see the cells, you know, sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s bad, but I don’t want to get too carried away by the money because it’s, it doesn’t give me the same amount of joy as it used to anymore.

Crystal:

So like, I felt like you needed to look inside of you and be like, what makes me happy? And money isn’t the answer. It’s never will be. So, and there’s, nobody can give you the answer other than yourself. So I felt like that self-development is so important. So there’s a few things that I do. Like, first of all, I also write about, you know, topics on self-esteem for Asian, because I think that Asian as a, as a community, like we lack self-esteem because of the you know, everybody want us to be perfect. You know, let’s face it, growing up, you know, with Asian parents, they’re so strict at the education system and everything. So like it’s really hard for your mental health. You never feel like you’re good enough. So I write about these topics in a way, it’s also like self meditation for myself, where like, I reflect on the topic and it’s just so healing.

Crystal:

So that’s one thing. Like I talk about those things, you know, on TikTok and, you know, stuff like that, like on LinkedIn, write all those things. So that’s kind of my hobby. But also, you know you know, I meditate almost every day. Like, I have done hundreds of meditation sessions for the last two to three years. And I also read a lot of books you know, spiritual books, you know, ranging from Buddhism to you know, to, to mindfulness to like some kind of medical books in the medical area. And I, you know, I have my own like, you know, like obviously I have my own therapist, but I don’t just use one therapist. So like, for example, I also going to like, use energy healers, I go use a medium. So like, I go to that route? Yeah, yeah. To, to kind of make myself understand, you know, like the, the things in the spiritual world, because there’s things in the material world that we talk about. But in the spiritual world, there is such a rich world.

Bradley Sutton:

Sounds like you need a coffin shelf. I think, you might be the target market for for my spooky stuff here,

Crystal:

Oh my God. I was just talking to my quality inspector the other day in China, and they told me me that the most spooky inspection they ever done was like a two coffin, actual coffin company, and they need to inspect the coffins, and it was so great.

Bradley Sutton:

Oh, so they have to lie inside of it.

Crystal:

Yeah, they need to lie inside of it.

Bradley Sutton:

Oh my goodness. Nah, nah, I’d be like, nah, I’m good. All right. Yeah, this passes, this passes. Okay. So, so that’s some good, you know mental health and physical health you know, routines. But what about, what about some specific, let’s go going back to Amazon. Yeah. strategy or marketing, like, you know, specific PPPC strategy, specific keyword research you were doing? Listing optimization. I actually leveraging ai. Like whatever yeah, yeah. What can you tell us?

Crystal:

I will go back to a few sourcing tips.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay.

Crystal:

I like that. ’cause You know, first of

Bradley Sutton:

All, you’re definitely an expert on that.

Crystal:

First of all, I’m Chinese, right? I was born and raised in China, spent like 20 years there. So I know China like quite well. And so, so I felt like that I can give some advice on. And secondly, like, I felt like a lot of people you know, like, let me put it in this way, a few days ago, like I was talking to Amazon itself, and they said that they couldn’t find good sourcing service providers. And now if you do sourcing, like you probably need to listen to this because they need it. But anyway, so sourcing, I felt like it’s an area where like a lot of people struggle with themselves, especially if you’re individual sellers. So from China, like the first thing I wanna say, and I think that Kevin King probably said it in one of his courses with you as well, but said that you know, in China there’s different areas for sourcing different things.

Crystal:

Yeah. So if you want to like source for like wood you might need to look in one area. If you want to like source for textile, you need to look for another area. And if you want to source for electronics, some other area, so that’s a hundred percent true. And sometimes, a lot of times those materials and those products are like actually concentrated in one city. So that means if you source anywhere outside of that specific city, you are actually getting worse material, worse product, and and worse price. So like when you look for factories, like always try to, you know, like see where they’re located and see like whether they are in, you know, the the area that these products have, you know, like are concentrated in. So that’s number one. And number two is that be careful when you use sourcing agencies, because before, like I actually used one myself, like now I do it all my sourcing myself.

Crystal:

If I need help from another sourcing person. I used somebody I could trust, but sourcing agencies always be careful when they’re in China, because you needed to, first of all, sometimes they get kickbacks from the factories, so maybe they, they were like, okay, I’m gonna do a sourcing, this is a price, but they, and this is a money I charge you, but they also keep some money for themselves from the factory. So to be extremely careful of that. And then one way to get around it is that like, I would just have them to gimme a list of factories, right? If I were to be the person who use associate agency and be like, I’m going to reach out to them myself, right? Like, don’t reach out to them like, your work is down here, or something like that.

Crystal:

Or do like, project with them the end there. Or I will also go reach out to a few more factories besides the one they suggest me just to compare the price and terms and stuff like that to see if there’s no, like, no abnormalities there. And then you also need to always order maybe like few samples from the sourcing agency, but also some factory you choose. Because in the past when I used the sourcing agency every single time, the factory the sample, they give it to me. It’s always worse., the samples I found myself from other factories for some reason, you know, so quality is right. That’s why the price is cheaper. And perhaps they also, you know, you know, have a kickback themselves, right? So that’s something I wanted to, to say. Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. That’s, that’s good. I think that’s important to, to understand about that. What about on the negotiation side? Obviously, you know, not everybody is a native Chinese speaker and obvi, you know, you would have advantage over me, for example, or my daughter can speak Chinese, so I can probably get her a little bit, but for the average person from Europe or North America, yeah. You know, what are some tips on the negotiation? You know how can we get the best the best deal out there?

Crystal:

Best deal out there, man. I think it really depends on who you’re talking to. So it is funny because like some of the companies, they have like almost two divisions. So they have a international division and they have a local division. And if you are like a foreigner, a westerner, they give you a white person price. And if you are a Chinese, you talk to the main Mandarin, they give you a Chinese person price and the Chinese person price will be cheaper than, you know, the Westerner price. And this is validated, like, I know this because they told me. So I felt like, you know, it’s obviously better to have somebody negotiate on your behalf who’s Chinese, right? If you trust ’em, right? Because, you know, just based on what I just told you about the sourcing agency thing.

Crystal:

But also another thing is from my own personal experience, there’s, there’s certain times there’s benefits to use a trading company. Like people always say that, oh my gosh, I don’t use a trading company. Like, I don’t understand why, because trading company can give you such a good service that if you just negotiate directly with a factory, they’re never gonna give it to you because of, you know, like something that I mentioned before, like how, you know, they don’t see the you as like the Chinese person price or something like that. But the trading policy sometimes can negotiate on your behalf a better, much better payment terms that you can, you know, like, so for example, if you were to only negotiate on your, you know, with a factory yourself, you can probably get like a best case scenario like what, like 20-80 or something that you need to pay like a hundred percent before, you know, they ship out your products. But if you go with a trading company, sometimes they can give you a better payment terms, which extends beyond, you know, after you have shipped out the products and maybe like 30 days, 60 days, something like that. Because they have, you know, perhaps other clients that they don’t present as well, so they can negotiate together. And they also have that existing relationship with the factory that you don’t have.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, cool. Alright. So, so speaking of sourcing in China, again, I meticulously follow you your Instagram because I love living vicariously through others travels as well when I can’t travel. And unfortunately I haven’t been able to get back to China. And I know I saw you a couple of times, it seemed, went back to China, I’m assuming maybe checking with, you know, your sourcing or, or your factories. But tell me about your, your trip to China. Like, what did you learn? Because I think even for you, that was the first time you’ve been back in China for a long time, since the, before the pandemic, right?

Crystal:

Right. So I think yeah, I have, you know, it’s really o eye-opening experience recently traveling in different countries in Asia, China included. I also went to Vietnam, Amazon inviting me over as a speaker in, you know, I think like a huge big Amazon event in Vietnam where they recruit sellers from. And also got to speak on behalf of Amazon, China in Shanghai to the business there. So I, I gotta see, you know, a lot of different businesses e-commerce businesses and consumer goods businesses in China and Vietnam, and it’s such an like an eye-opening experience. And I felt like it’s two different worlds, right? Like China and the US. So first of all, China’s going through a transition. So first, you know, a lot of people are thinking, you know, like making China cheap stuff. Like they have made a lot of money on Amazon the past 10, 15 years because they are the supplier of the products, right?

Crystal:

So think about Amazon in 2012. You know, if you can sell a piece of cloth or like a mop or something, you make a load of money, right? Because they need those products, they had no products, and then the Chinese people make those products, right? So if they knew the opportunity on Amazon, they will make a lot of money. So that’s how they did it in the past 10, 20 years. But now they are forced to transition because they no longer well have the product advantage going forward because a lot of, first of all, a lot of manufacturings are transitioning into places like Vietnam, Mexico, et cetera. So things are going to be no longer made in China. In fact, I think yesterday India is going to be the first country outside of China to make iPhone. So secondly that Chinese economy currently is going, you know, pretty bad there might be a deflation risk in China.

Crystal:

So the businesses in China are also getting, they’re getting less orders from foreign companies. Their domestic economy is not doing it as well. They’re trying to find ways to expand their overseas businesses because it’s not as competitive as domestically. And now how can they compete? They need to look for ways to build proper brands. So China now is in Japan in the 1980s where it was transitioning from made in Japan, cheap stuff to made in Japan brands. So, so they’re going through that transition as well. I believe that in the future the competition you see from China is not going to be those like, you know, like, okay, like let’s go on a price for kind of competition. It’s going to be a stronger competition, and they’re also going to be building, you know, like western oriented brands. So that’s my observation there on my trips.

Bradley Sutton:

Alright. Interesting. Now, just in general, you know, you were crushing it on Amazon, you know, 2021, first part of 2022. Now we’re, you know, middle second half of 2023. What’s your, what’s your outlook? You know, ’cause it’s, I’m sure you’ve seen it’s not a hundred percent the same game as it was even just two years ago. So, so what, what’s been, you know, some of the biggest differences that you’ve seen and do you have any outlook on how it’s gonna be maybe next year?

Crystal:

Yeah, so I think because I have built a brand, you know, I started build one in 2020 and I built, started build another one in 2022. I have seen a lot of differences in comparison. So first of all, like Amazon in 2023, there’s so much more competition and I think everybody knows that. Because, you know, D2C brands are getting to Amazon retail brands are getting to Amazon, Amazon originated brands are getting outside investors. So, which means they are stronger themselves. Individual brands are got bought out by aggregators, which means they’re getting institutionalized. So, so the competition is in a complete different level. Like, let me put it this way, in 2020 for example what a plus came out. You know, there’s what, like less than 50% of people in my category are using a plus. Now everybody is using A+.

Crystal:

Like, that is a basic requirement, right? Almost to people. So, so it’s definitely getting very competitive. So I think it’s very important that you have a reason behind beyond making money to get into the game. So first of all, you need to have a, like either a good product, which means, you know, like a distinctive advantage in your product, like a patent, you know, or something that’s a differentiator that is harder to copy or, you know, in a good category. And either that or you are well founded. So you are able to do, you know, more on marketing more in product developments. And also you can’t just rely on Amazon as one channel. You need to go all channels. And I, I felt like I have heard this, you know, from other people too, but I think in 2023 it becomes a lot more important than before just because of the sheer amount of competition.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, cool. Alright, well you know, you, you know the drill since this is your second time around, what’s we, we always close with a 30-second tip, but before we get to there, how can people find you on the interwebs? Maybe they follow, follow your story a little bit, maybe reach out to you in the future?

Crystal:

Yeah, so I’m actually you know, if you are interested in for example, offer unique services that you think is suitable for Asian sellers, just because, you know, I do have a network here you know, in Singapore and in China and, you know, just because of what I mentioned before, where like they are trying to, you know, build, you know, actually Western brands. So if you do offer unique services in those areas you know, I am looking for good partners, service providers to work together. And if you have unique product ideas or you want to work together in any kind of capacity, you can always reach out to me on Instagram, my name is it is the, the handle is literally Crystal Ren but it is xtalren, so X T A L R E N, that’s my Instagram handle. You can DM me anytime if you wanted to contact me for anything.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, cool. Alright. What’s your 30-second tip of the date?

Crystal:

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

Crystal:

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

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. All right. I like it. I like it. So you gave us two 30-second tips. We’re at the beginning, one at the end. I like it. All right, well let you know, you’ve done a lot in the last few years and, you know, we’ll definitely have you back next year and who knows what you’re gonna be able to tell us. Maybe you’ve already exited this new medical brand then, or maybe you’ve, you’ve grown it to seven figures. I’m very excited to see what the future holds. Look forward to seeing you hopefully at at, at an event and wish you the best of success in your endeavors.

Crystal:

Thank you so much, Bradley.

Helium 10 Buzz 7/27/23: FTC vs. Amazon | Shein Wants Sellers | Get $$ Back from Amazon

It’s time for this week’s breaking news in Amazon, Walmart, and Ecommerce! Starting with the FTC vs Amazon lawsuit, Walmart+ benefits for members, AI-powered Alexa, and more!

#477 - From Rocket Scientist To Amazon Seller: Vincenzo’s Story & Strategies

In this episode, Vincenzo Toscano shares his inspiring journey, from being a literal rocket scientist to a successful Amazon seller and agency owner. Diving into the nitty-gritty, he discusses upcoming case studies with Helium 10 and explores the strongest Amazon marketplaces. Gain valuable insights as he unravels the differences between managing accounts in the US and EU, divulges his Amazon launch strategies, and reveals how to stay relevant on the platform. Listen in for Vincenzo’s top listing optimization tactics, utilizing Amazon’s Search Query Performance, effective product research methods, selling tips for Walmart, and a collection of both horror and success stories from his clients. Don’t miss this episode!

In episode 477 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Vincenzo discuss:

• 02:02 – Vincenzo’s Backstory
• 03:41 – Today’s Guest Is A Literal Rocket Scientist
• 05:11 – Selling On Amazon And Managing His Agency
• 06:47 – Talking About His Upcoming Case Studies With Helium 10
• 07:44 – What Are The Strongest Amazon Marketplaces?
• 08:43 – Differences In Managing An Amazon Account In US & EU
• 10:59 – Sharing Vincenzo’s Amazon Launch Strategies
• 15:06 – How To Know What Amazon Thinks Is Relevant For An ASIN
• 19:33 – Vincenzo’s Top Amazon Listing Optimization Strategies
• 21:48 – Utilizing Search Query Performance
• 23:56 – Vincenzo’s Product Research Methods
• 26:14 – Selling On Walmart Tips
• 31:19 – Horror Stories And Success Stories From Vincenzo’s Clients
• 33:50 – Find Ecomcy At The Seller Solutions Hub
• 34:31 – How To Contact Vincenzo Toscano
• 35:12 – Vincenzo’s 60-Second Tip

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► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft
► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today we’ve got a great story from somebody who went from being a rocket scientist to now running a large Amazon agency and running a lot of his own brands, and he’s gonna give us all of the latest strategies as far as PPC, Amazon Launch, and even Walmart. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think.

Bradley Sutton:

Wanna keep up to date with trending topics in the e-commerce world? Make sure to subscribe to our blog. We regularly release articles that talk about things such as shipping and logistics, e-commerce, and other countries, the latest changes to Amazon Seller Central, how to get set up on new platforms like Newegg, how to write and publish a book on Amazon KDP, and much, much more. Check these articles out at h10.me/blog. 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 somebody here who’s been helping serious sellers out there for years. Vincenzo. How’s my italian accent?

Vincenzo:

Thank you Bradley. How you doing?

Bradley Sutton:

How’s it going? You are actually in the UK right now?

Vincenzo:

Yes, I live in the UK in London, but I’m from Italy, as you can say, from my name.

Bradley Sutton:

Yes. Yes. I think I told you this before, but my favorite or one of my favorites, you know Korean dramas. I watch tons of Korean dramas. Like I probably watch a hundred in the last few years, but one of the top five is one from Netflix and it’s called Vincenzo.

Vincenzo:

I know

Bradley Sutton:

About a Korean guy who was born in Italy.

Vincenzo:

Yeah, actually I got a team in Asia, and, and they told me, they always tell me, oh, this is happening right now in the, in the series and all that. And it’s like, it’s crazy that there’s this guy that’s very famous called Vincenzo, but yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Yep. Yep. But so you were born in Italy, in Naples, you had said?

Vincenzo:

Yes, I was born in Italy in Naples. When I was around three, my family moved for business purposes in Venezuela, South America. That’s why I just speak Spanish.

Bradley Sutton:

That’s why you speak Spanish, because I know you’ve come on a Spanish podcast before. Okay. Now things are coming into a picture here.

Vincenzo:

Yeah. I went to Venezuela, lived there 15 years, and then unfortunately with everything that happened with the country, I left the country. And from there I went to the US. I lived close to one year in New York. Then from New York. I went to Toronto another year or so. And then from there I, I chose the UK to pursue like my undergrad degree and my master’s, which is completely different for what I do, which is Whoa, whoa.

Bradley Sutton:

What did you what were you studying?

Vincenzo:

So, I studied aerospace engineering and I specialize in everything in terms of control systems and computer science behind turbines.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. So then did you ever work in that after you got your degrees?

Vincenzo:

Yeah, so actually I, I used to work for Roll Royce. You know, roll Royce is very well known for cars, but actually their biggest one of the biggest revenue streams is making turbines for airplanes. And they had a, a manufacture ca facility here in Darby, which Darby the easiest way to find Darby in the uk. If you put a finger in the middle of the UK, that Zaby is the most centric city in the whole uk. And I was working there, I worked there for two years. Yeah,

Bradley Sutton:

That’s kind of like being a rocket scientist in turbine there.

Vincenzo:

Yeah. Okay. We could say that. Yeah.. So then,

Bradley Sutton:

You know, I’m sure that’s a good paying job. Yeah. What then inspired? Like, were, did you start doing stuff on the side while you were working there, like getting into e-commerce, or, or how did this this happen?

Vincenzo:

Yeah, so the thing is, I love engineering. I love everything when it comes to space, all that kind of stuff. But the thing is, because I come from a family that is very business oriented it reached a point that, you know, it was getting that I wanted more freedom in terms of location, in terms of time in terms of how much money I could do. And I remember looking online, that was around, around 2017 or so, you know, ways of doing money online. And that’s how I came into contact with Amazon. And then from there, I started using my part of my salary as an engineer mm-hmm. <Affirmative> to basically just try things on Amazon, sell products and so on. And from there I started selling multiple products. I, I did brands and everything and that.

Bradley Sutton:

Which marketplace did you open up in?

Vincenzo:

So I started first in the uk, the next one into Europe, and then also us. Yeah. Yeah. What, what was

Bradley Sutton:

The first product you sold?

Vincenzo:

So the first product, which then it was became very saturated. It was, you know, these elastic bands to do like exercise. Oh yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Uhhuh <affirmative>

Vincenzo:

Yeah, super saturated. And I will never advise <laugh> anybody here in this podcast to do the product. But, you know that time it wasn’t that saturated. That’s was one of the first products. And from there, you know I started selling products and eventually I was making more money by selling the, actually my engineering job. And from there, you know, that was also the period when all these Amazon events conferences were becoming a thing in, in Europe and the USA, so

Bradley Sutton:

What year are we talking about right now when you’re selling? So we’re

Vincenzo:

Talking 2018, around that 2018.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

Vincenzo:

Cool. And then from there, I started going to events or so, and then I realized, you know, actually I could also make money basically supporting brands and also business owners, because I realized there were a, a lot of people going to these conferences. They had an amazing product, amazing brand, which is difficult to do. They did the most difficult part, but they did not really know how to operate. Right. And, and from my experience of being a seller, then I say, oh, actually there’s a another opportunity here. And that’s how I also found that a comse where we’re basically a full Amazon and now actually also Walmart, a full brand management agency. So yeah, it’s been a journey <laugh>.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Now, have you all throughout this time, did you keep your own private label accounts going and still selling yourself, or you just switched a hundred percent to just doing the agency?

Vincenzo:

Yes. I keep selling, actually. I also doing a little bit of the wholesale approach as well, working with some direct manufacturers. And something I also very excited about which I’m, I’m on the work of doing, I also gonna explore the vendor work, so I’m working with some partners to also do the vendor program, like with some brands we’re working, bringing from overseas. So yeah, I’m still a seller, but I will say where I’m spending most of the time, to be honest, is with agency. We’ve been growing quite fast last couple of months, and now I’m more focused on building the teams, all the processes, and making sure we’re basically giving the best service and resource to our clients that trust us, you know? Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Now, from when you started on Amazon, you know, 2017, 2018, around there, did you start using Helium 10 from day one, or, or you started later in your career?

Vincenzo:

So I remember when I started, my first actually tool was viral launch from my close friend Casey Gauss. Yeah, Viral Launch started with that. And then I remember after, you know, listening many goats with AM/PM Podcast. Which was basically the biggest podcast at the time. And still right now, one of the biggest. Manny Announced that, you know, the, he was bringing Helium 10 and start playing with it. And to be honest, since then, I switched completely to Helium 10. And that’s the tool I use for all my businesses and also for our clients. And, and in fact, we’re actually working with Helium 10 to do some interesting case studies looking forward to that. But yes, we’ve been using Helium 10 for everything from every second.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Cool. Cool. Now in your experience selling where, what marketplaces have been the s strong, you know, you, you obviously started in the UK, but what marketplace would you say is strongest for you now?

Vincenzo:

So I would say the strongest are for sure the US and the uk. Those are the strongest. And I think if you talk to a lot of sellers, that’s u usually the norm because, you know, those are some of the biggest markets. Germany is also an interesting one. I’ve been seen traction, but honestly the US and UK are the, are are the ones we’ve seen the most activity, and also with some of our clients the same.

Bradley Sutton:

H how do some of your strategies differ? Because, you know I mean fortunately for people selling USA unfortunately for those in Europe, there’s a lot of features like in Seller Central, you know, that, that US has available, but that either Europe doesn’t have, you know, like I don’t think Europe has virtual bundles, right? That’s right.

Vincenzo:

Yeah. Yeah. So like the things though.

Bradley Sutton:

What are some of the big, the, the biggest differences you say because of things like that where your operations, you know, whether it’s your account or your client’s account where it, there, there’s some huge differences in how you operate an Amazon U s A account versus an Amazon Europe account.

Vincenzo:

Yeah, so I would say one of the, the, the big benefits of operating in the US and also in in Europe is that a lot of the strategies that right now we’re implementing, let’s say in the us, they haven’t arrived yet in terms of either in the form of knowledge to content or in the form of actually, you know tools through the Amazon platform itself. So the nice thing is that when things are happening in the us usually Europe is six months to one year behind in some of these things. And we can prepare our clients for that and make sure that as soon as they become available in Europe, we’re the first one to, to take advantage of some of those tools. So I think in terms of strategies, of course the US is a, is another animal altogether.

Vincenzo:

I mean, the US is much more a professional marketplace in terms of the players that actually selling there is much more complex. We see all these huge in, in influx of money that came during the basically aggregator space. And we have all these big companies with hundreds of employees, basically 24/7 when it comes to Amazon. And the US is, is definitely a very tough market would say right now to, to start selling from zero. Where in the Europe, that’s not the case. Actually, in Europe, we’re seeing much easier for some of our clients to penetrate certain niches than the US And that’s actually been a key for a lot of our clients and the way we actually structure the strategy, because what we’re doing with a lot of our clients is the ones that are struggling to the us, we’ve been bringing them to Europe, and we actually opened all the Pan-European program and so on. And with that approach of diversification and actually finding these on top areas, they’ve been seeing a better resource that actually only focusing in the US. Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Okay. Now you know, one of the, I was just looking at, at your listing on the hub.helium10.com, you know, that’s, that’s where we have like agencies and, and people who are part of our network and, and you guys are actually one of the very few Helium 10 certified agencies in the world. That’s right. I was, I was looking at your, your, your page on there and it says, you know, one of your specialties is Amazon launch. That’s right. So what are some of your, you know, launch strategy are, are you pretty much using PPC for launch? Are you relying on outside traffic? What’s, you know, I, we, we could spend a whole episode talking about this, but what are some of the, the highlights of your launch strategy?

Vincenzo:

Yeah. Something that’s been working very well for us is using brand analytics data to basically understand which are the main cues we need to focus towards launching. I’m gonna give you a very simple example for this. So the issue when it comes to launchings, that people sometimes thinks it’s all about generating sales at all costs and negative for X amount of time until you get potentially rank organically on certain keywords. But we have identified that lately Amazon has been very heavily focused when it comes to ranking in conversion rate, right? So what we’ve been doing when it comes to launch is that, first of all, we need to of course identify the top 10 keywords that bring the most revenue to our competitors. And you can easily do that with Helium 10 by doing a reverse ASIN with Cerebro.

Vincenzo:

We find which are the key, where these competitors are ranking on page one, because we know that 70 to 80% of revenue comes from those keywords. Once we identify those 10 keywords, we then also by using a brand analytics, we wanna identify what is the average for example, conversion rate of our competitors on some of these keywords. And once we understand the conversion rate, that’s when we start strategizing the, the launch phase. Because something that we usually do when it comes to PPC, and then I’m gonna come back, why the conversion rate is very important, is that we only start with exact match campaigns and we only start with the top 10 keywords. The reason for that is because when it comes to launch, and I see this a lot of people when it comes to content and events, and a lot of people are actually migrating towards this strategy is the idea of actually launching phrase broad automatic and all these broad campaigns from day on is actually not efficient.

Vincenzo:

Because first of all, when you’re launching a product for the first time Amazon has no data at all or doesn’t have any real relevancy history attached between certain keywords of the category and your product and what happens. And in fact, you can do this test by going to Amazon when you launch a new listing, if you go and create, for example, a campaign on, on for phrase a, abroad a and look for even suggested keywords, you’re gonna see the tab is empty. Right? The reason why Amazon cannot even suggest a cure in the first place because it has no history. So why would you give free basically a window to Amazon to spend your money around? By

Bradley Sutton:

The way, do you know how to do that? How to check that in Helium 10?

Vincenzo:

In what sense? The keywords?

Bradley Sutton:

No, the what a, the Amazon thinks is relevant to your listing for advertising. I’m gonna drop a knowledge bomb on those. It’ll give you a chance first. Drop

Vincenzo:

It. Alright, so

Bradley Sutton:

You put your, you put your ACE in once it’s done, once you have it active you, or even if it’s not active, you can do this. You throw it into cerebral and most people, you know, 99% of people who use Cerebro That’s right. They’re doing it in order to just see, hey, like, I just wanna see where it’s ranking organically or sponsor whatever. That there’s nothing that’s a hundred percent right. You know, that that’s what you should be doing. But fil when you have a brand new listing, it’s not gonna show anything for organic and sponsored. That’s right. ’cause It’s just new. So you filter it for Amazon recommended, and then sort it by the rank Amazon recommended rank, and the one that’s number one, we’re actually pulling that from the Amazon API. In the advertising API of what score it gives that keyword.

Bradley Sutton:

So then if you have trouble like, like getting impressions, it’s like, like you just said, it’s probably because Amazon doesn’t think you’re relevant. And so if you wanna know what Amazon thinks of your new listing put into Cerebro, we’re pulling from that Amazon advertising a p i, and then you could see look for rank 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, because that those are the highest keywords. And I, I did that I was launching this you know, one, one of these socks as one of these tests, and it’s about bringing me like coffee, right? And so because it’s a sock, like I couldn’t get anything for like coffee keywords in advertising, even though it was a, I mean, a hundred percent like the number one keyword for this is bring me coffee socks or something. So I threw it into Cerebro and I was like, there was nothing about coffee. It was just all like, just regular socks or men’s socks and so that’s how you can tell what Amazon thinks is relevant. Alright, go ahead.

Vincenzo:

It’s very interesting. And actually to also add on top of that tip, we also need to ensure, of course, to that work efficiently to make sure you have a very, very well optimized listing. Because if you didn’t do a very well optimization in terms of the keywords you put on the listing, or even choose the right sub category, which is a huge mistake we see all the time, then you could, Amazon will collect your, recommend the wrong keywords because you don’t have their right to categories or the right keywords in the list in the first place. But now going back to the PPC, yes. We do only m match a campaign keywords because we wanna make sure we force basically the system to build the relevancy between which are your top keywords and, and to Amazon. So Amazon understand and create that history link. And while we’re doing these very aggressive Excel match campaigns, we keep a very close eye on the conversion rate.

Bradley Sutton:

When you say very aggressive, like what is that like? Are you trying to make a bid that’s gonna get you only a top of search? Okay, cool. x

Vincenzo:

Yeah. And while we do as well to basically in our conversion rate, we cover a very aggressive coupon. So we do like a 30, 40% coupon because we need to understand that when the listeners see new and you have no reviews, you basically need to find a way to make it a no-brainer, a deal that somebody will say, okay, this product has, one doesn’t reviews, this one has zero, but what do I prefer to spend $50 or spend $20 on something very similar? Right? So that’s the thought process you need to do as a brand owner. And that’s what we do. And by making a very aggressive price reduction, then we keep very close AI owner conversion because then by using brand analytics, and we do this on a weekly basis, we wanna make sure that our conversion rate on a specific keyword is very similar to what the top sellers are doing those keywords, because that’s how Amazon understand, okay, these products actually a catching up or having similar performance at the top sellers and actually deserve a spot on the first page.

Vincenzo:

This is very important. And the reason why I keep emphasizing this is because I see a lot of people only focusing on sales and sales at all costs, but what’s the point of having all the cells that you want by being on the negative X amount of thousands of dollars? If your conversion rate is very bad, then you build a very bad history for your product, and it’s gonna be very difficult for you to then build that organic ranking back again. So that’s the per first part of the launching. The second thing that we do is we bring some kind of external traffic into the formula, right? So the way we do this is first a factor we we’ve been playing around is with influencer marketing. So usually we try to build like a group of five to 10 influencers that very basically have a very warm audience around that specific product.

Vincenzo:

And we try to come into some kind of agreement when it comes to bringing the extra traffic, especially if we have the brand referral bonus, because with the brand river referral bonds, we get up to 10%, which most of these influencers, if you use only the Amazon influencer product, they get two, 3% at max, and you can do a very nice setup where they make more money, and at the same time they rewire you with that external traffic. And by having a very warm audience, which by the way, what we do in between to filter the traffic we do a landing page, is to make sure that the traffic that comes from external converts very haly. And again, we spike that conversion rate. And Amazon also sees that as a way to rank your product higher. So by combining very aggressive PPC on very relevant queues, making sure you’re converting very high on those queues by being very aggressive with pricing, then con using external traffic, which is external traffic. I gave the example of influencer, but you can also do an email list, you can do even a Google advertisement. There are so many other ways, it depends on your niche, of course. I think those are usually the two approaches most people should be doing nowadays to rank your product higher organically as soon as possible. Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Now, you know, you talk a lot about conversion rate you know, during launch and after. And obviously the one that, you know, spikes in the first part is, is just having that super low price. You know, where makes a no brainer, but then obviously, you know, you could have that low price and if you have a garbage listing, your conversion rate’s gonna be low, and at the same time you raise the price to regular, you know, potentially your conversion rate could go down. So like what kind of listing optimization things are you doing to try and make sure that your conversion rate always stays pretty high, even at a regular price?

Vincenzo:

Yeah, something that we do a lot is we use the tool within Amazon to do split testing, and we play a lot mainly with the, with the main image. That’s the thing that we seen spike in the most, the conversion rate. And thankfully with AI, it is very easy now to come up with new images in a matter of seconds, right? Just by having the right prompts and using many tools out there. So what we do is basically we always keeps during the launch phase when it comes to let’s say we have a very aggressive pricing, and then slowly we are gonna start increasing the price because of course we wanna start getting the profitability, we start doing a little split testing with the main image and the title, which are usually the things that we see affecting the most, at least the initial results page, which is what people see the most.

Vincenzo:

And we do, usually the split testing could last usually between a window of one week to two weeks, periods. And we test different angles, different shadowing, size of the pro main image with the packaging, sometimes even the, the the, the contrast of the colors. And these are things that we keep testing on a week or two weeks period to see if the conversion rate spikes or doesn’t spike. And then that’s how we keep doing split testing. Then after we actually have found the best like image, because it reaches a point after doing a lot of split testing that you’re not gonna have a lot of fluctuation on your results, then you start testing other things such as the title, then you can even do split testing within the listing itself, and always keep an eye that your conversion rate is close to the standard of what your competitors are doing. Because if you keep their conversion rate within those standards, your organic ranking is gonna stay stable right. Than what most people have seen, which is they go to first page because they do all these hundreds of sales to maybe rebates, which is not allowed or external traffic and so on. But once they stick on first page, they don’t stick the landing because of what they don’t have the conversion rate, which is very important. Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

So to look at your competitor’s conversion, are you talking about like at the keyword level? So then are you looking at search query performance? So look at your competitors conversion rate. Okay.

Vincenzo:

That’s right.

Bradley Sutton:

How else are you using search query performance? You’ve mentioned a couple times, you know, now. Is there any other ways that you’re, it’s in your, your kind of SOP to manage the effectiveness of a listing?

Vincenzo:

Sure. Another thing that we have a close eye is the basket analysis. So we usually like to understand if people after buying a certain product are buying other accessories or things like that, because then if we identify a strong pattern when it comes to the basket analysis, what we can do with that is basically we can say, okay, these certain competitors keep getting a, a purchase in the same transaction. Let’s actually do some pro targeting, heavy pro targeting on this product because there’s definitely a link there and we can leverage that. And usually if you identify the right you know, matching between data, we have found a good use of that data. Another thing that you can use brand analytics tool is to also understand how your conversion rate throughout the, the funnel improves right from the impression to the actual add to card to the actual purchase.

Vincenzo:

So if usually throughout the whole channel you see that you’re having some kind of downwards in terms of conversion, like people add to card, but then for some reason then they’re not making a purchase, that’s usually a red flag because if they went all all the way to the funnel and then they’re actually converting approaches, it could be an issue of pricing usually. So then we start playing with pricing. But if the opposite happens, like throughout the whole funnel, impressions are relatively low, then actually from those impression, they conversion become higher in terms of add to cart. And from the add to cart, the purchase conversions much higher. That means the issues that we’re not pumping enough traffic into this listing in the first place. So that’s when we decide actually we need to put more money and scale our advertisement. So that’s usually some of the sort of process we do with brand analytics. Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Now, for your own brands or for your customers brands who come to you and say, Hey, we’d like to, you know, launch some new products. How are you doing, you know, what are some of your product research methods? Like how are you finding, you know, product line extensions or new opportunities whether it’s a brand new brand or, or, or looking at a brand where, hey, you know, we want to add a couple of SKEWs. What are some of your methods for finding opportunity?

Vincenzo:

Yeah, so one of the things well, Helium 10 of course, we using Black Box for that. So you can find amazing ideas there when it comes to accessories throughout the whole catalog tool that Black Box gives you in terms of funding competitors, so accessories and things like that. That’s one way of doing it. The second way that we do it is basically by using brand analytics. Just to make a quick point on this again, which is using the, the basket analysis and see if there’s some kind of accessory that people keep buying with your product. Like let’s say you’re selling vitamin, vitamin C and then you see every single person that buy vitamin C buys magnesium. This a correlation there, so maybe you’re missing magnesium, your supplement lineup, let’s try a magnesium. And then when we launch magnesium, we use, for example, sponsor display, a type of target advertisement, and we retarget vitamin sync clients because we have seen from data that people that buy vitamin C realistically could buy also magnesium.

Vincenzo:

So that’s usually a top process that we can also do. Then the third thing that we can use, we actually will be doing that a lot, and I’m gonna be speaking on a conference next week about this, is using AI. AI has been amazing for this because usually what we can do with AI as well is for example, one simple way of doing this, you can now with AI analyze the reviews of a specific niche, and you can tell, let’s say this AI, tell me what the top things people love about this niche, things that people hate about this niche, a specific product and things that people potentially would like to see on a product. Then with those ideas, you could try to come up with a new variation and maybe a new functionality, a new feature that is lacking on the market. And that’s usually been working very well because then once you have some ideas drafted that AI throws at you, then you could even keep using AI to give you ideas in terms of how you can even start the manufacturing process, the launch process, how you could do the branding. AI is been amazing for them.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, cool. What’s a Walmart strategy you can say? You know, a lot of people are reluctant, maybe, you know, sometimes to sell at Walmart but you know, Carrie even has some products that she sells more on Walmart than she does on Amazon. Of course, that’s more the exception, not the rule. But regardless of if a product is a home run or not, I’m sure you have, you know, a couple go-to strategies maybe you’re using for Walmart.

Vincenzo:

Yeah. So when it comes to Walmart, totally agree with you. So not all the products are, are working on Amazon will work on, on Walmart in the first place. So something that you need to do is first do a market analysis on Walmart as well. And thankfully, you know, Helium 10 has amazing tools when it comes to Walmart as well. So you can analyze the search volume of certain keywords, you can see where the relative revenue that some of your competitors potential competitors are doing Walmart. And then from there you can make a basically a strategy and an educated, basically projectional if it’s gonna be a good market or not for you. What I will say about Walmart, and this is something I’m very excited because you know, in the last couple of months we became official partners with them.

Vincenzo:

One of the only agencies top only 20 agencies are working directly with them, and we’re one of them. And because we’re having a lot of meetings with them and things in the backend, something that I feel people is missing where is, I understand that we come from the Amazon space and, and everybody is always in law with the seven figures, eight figures and all that kind of stuff. And because they don’t see that now on warmer, sometimes they, they step backwards and, and they don’t do it is warmer right now because of, of the patterns I’m seeing, the numbers I’m seeing and everything is like 2014-2015 Amazon, right? And I feel like maybe you’re not gonna do the same amount of money that you do on Amazon. And maybe you, you could imagine that yes, you’re gonna dilute your efforts by going to Walmart, but I can definitely guarantee you that Walmart, if you jump right now, you’re gonna have the early move advantage.

Vincenzo:

We’re talking about some of our clients that are paying two to $3, some C P A C P C on Amazon when bring it to Walmart, we’re paying sometimes 50, 70 cents, right? That’s a huge difference. The competition is much lower. And because we already have that, you know, brand Amazon brand that, you know, the Amazon brand is like a survival brand. We know all these tricks are already about P P C, how to some kind of media and all that. And Walmart is only in baby steps compared to Amazon. If you bring that experience and you bring that especially a very good product, I think you’re really set for success because Walmart doing amazing things in the backend, very excited things are coming, and I think it’s really the, the only one I see right now in the market that can compete with Amazon. So definitely give it a try for sure.

Bradley Sutton:

Alright, so what I wanna do now is, you know, as an agency, you know, you, you have so much experience with, with a a, a lot of sellers, so I’m gonna do one, one negative, and then we’re gonna go one positive, but the negative, you know, you don’t have to mention any names or, you know, throw anybody under the buzz here. What, what is the craziest, stupidest thing that you have seen one of your clients was doing? Like, like, you know, ’cause that always happens. You, you onboard a client and you gotta take a look at their account and see what their strategies have been. And you know, you gotta, yeah. I mean, otherwise you wouldn’t have a job if they were doing everything perfectly. There’s nothing, there’s no reason to hire somebody like Ecomcy, but what is the abs the most face palm event where you’re just like, oh my goodness, I cannot believe these guys were, were doing this. Like, they have never negative matched PPC keyword.. Just something crazy. Can you, is is there anything you can think of like a, a funny story that, that you noticed when you took on a, a client?

Vincenzo:

Yeah, there are many, but I, I mean, for example, one I can think on top of my mind is this guy that he was doing pretty decent. This, this guy was a, like a, a seven figure seller. And, when we went inside his PPC, I mean, usually when you’re doing seven figures, you expect people should have figured out how to do PPC, right? And we go inside and this guy had campaigns, manual campaigns, like this guy had a campaign with around 500 keywords on it, and the 500 keywords were all mixed between exact phrase and broth. So that he had the, he had the same key or exact phrase, and bro in the same campaign, and he didn’t have any negative match. So it was like a carnival all the, all over the place. What madness and, and yes, that, that’s a very is example.

Vincenzo:

I can think. Another one is like this sort guy also a very good product and, and branding. And they were doing also nice revenue only doing automatic targeting. They, and this, they’ve been doing fine selling since 2015. They only had automatic campaigns that never Tesla, like product targeting, sponsor brands sponsored display. We have seen even people without using anything in the backend, no search terms or having their own aria. I mean, these are yeah, crazy things like this all the time. And, and it’s, it’s crazy because when these people come to you and you see their revenue, you say how you, you came, you made it this far with all these mistakes and it’s crazy. Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. Interesting, interesting. All right, let’s flip it to that. Instead of the horror stories, what is some cool success stories? You know, like, you know, somebody, you, you know, you were able to help them with some strategies and they were able to, to double their sales or, or they just try this one thing and you know, they brought in all this, you know, new traffic or, or some, some kind of cool story that you can now share.

Vincenzo:

Yeah, of course. So we have this supplement brand that came to us. And when they came to us, they were doing like half a million or so in revenue. So they were not very big. And the thing is, this was like a, a client that bought the brand during the aggregator crazy period, right? There was a person that he had no clue about Amazon. They just bought this because his accountant say, oh, Amazon businesses are now hot. You, you should buy one. Okay? And the bought this Amazon brand, they had no clue about Amazon. They came to us like, we just spent all this huge amount of money on buying this brand, and we have no clue. We came in and we had to redo everything from scratch because all the listings were breaking compliance, doing claims that were in, right?

Vincenzo:

So we didn’t had to do all the images, listings, reapply for some of of, of their categories. On top of that, what we did is because they were doing only USA, we actually have them to expand to, to Europe as well. And now we actually also bring it into Walmart on a span of around, yeah, close to three years. They went from doing, as I say, close to half a million. Now they’re close to hitting 4 million in revenue because of all these crazy things that we did from scratch for them. So this is, this is literally the power of doing things right, because yep, these guys had no clue about Amazon. And we came in and we basically re remade the brand from scratch. And I think just to make an emphasis on this case study, one of the things that brought the bonds revenue for this brand was actually doing the international expansion.

Vincenzo:

This something, I know people is scared about that because of taxes, because of the languages and all that, but please, guys, if you’re the type of seller that you’re already controlling, 70% of a specific niche, even 60%, don’t lose sleep of getting the extra 10 to 20%. Use the extra, actual extra budget and effort to expand into other marketplaces. Because I feel Amazon, the easiest way to scale are two ways, either new marketplaces or more product. I feel they always this, this sort process for some cells that, oh, is I haven’t reached my potential because I haven’t found the perfect bit or the perfect keyword or the perfect placement. Sometimes the reality is that you reach certain level that, that sit on specific niche and, and the best way to keep growing, just diversify. Don’t, don’t lose sleep on, on having the perfect tacos, you know? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So that’s my advice. Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

I like perfect tacos, but I’m talking about the ones that I, that I eat

Bradley Sutton:

Anyways before we get into your, your final tip, your final strategy of the day I just want to show people like how they can, how they can reach out to you. So guys, just, you know, go to hub.helium10.com and then type in the search Ecomcy and make sure you’re signed into Helium 10 when you do it. Because I didn’t even realize this until I saw this. If you’re signed into Helium 10, you can actually qualify here for a 10% off discount with them and a free consultation. That’s right. But other than here, how can people find you like on the interwebs, you know, maybe and also your, your podcast too.

Vincenzo:

Yeah, sure. So the agency, if you look for Ecomcy in all the social media platforms, you’re gonna find us. My name Vincenzo Toscano on all the social media. I’m very active, ma mainly on LinkedIn, doing a lot of content there. And the podcast, if you’re interested, is the e-commerce lab. And we also do like two episodes per week, also bring experts from the field to talk Amazon related stuff and e-commerce. Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Alright, so now let’s close it off with your 60-second tip or 60-second strategy. What is something that you haven’t, you know, you’ve been given a strategies the whole day, but what is something you haven’t mentioned that that’s kind of like a quick hitting one that you think people can, can learn from?

Vincenzo:

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

Bradley Sutton:

Alright, well thank you so much for coming on here and you know, it was fun to come on your podcast. Now, now we, we’ve been on each other, so I’m sure we’ll, we’ll do it again sometime next year and yeah. And I’m excited to see about this case study you’ve been working on with, with the other team and, and we’ll definitely let everybody know when when that’s ready as well.

Vincenzo:

Yeah, it should be very interesting. And thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure. And until the next one. Yeah. Alright.

Bradley Sutton:

I hope to see you maybe in Italy if you, if you’re gonna come Yeah, when I go to this event in September, so let’s meet it in Milan. Alright, we’ll see you then.

Vincenzo:

See you.