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

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

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

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

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

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Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

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

Huy:

Going good.

Andrew:

Going good.

Bradley Sutton:

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

Bradley Sutton:

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

Andrew:

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

Bradley Sutton:

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

Andrew:

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

Bradley Sutton:

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

Andrew:

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

Bradley Sutton:

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

Andrew:

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

Bradley Sutton:

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

Huy:

Yeah, we were around that mark.

Bradley Sutton:

And how was last year up or down?

Huy:

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

Bradley Sutton:

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

Huy:

Everything

Bradley Sutton:

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

Huy:

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

Huy:

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

Huy:

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

Huy:

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

Bradley Sutton:

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

Huy:

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

Bradley Sutton:

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

Huy:

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

Huy:

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

Bradley Sutton:

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

Andrew:

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

Bradley Sutton:

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

Andrew:

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

Bradley Sutton:

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

Andrew:

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

Bradley Sutton:

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

Andrew:

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

Bradley Sutton:

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

Andrew:

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

Bradley Sutton:

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

Huy:

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

Bradley Sutton:

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

Huy:

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

Huy:

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

Bradley Sutton:

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

Huy:

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

Bradley Sutton:

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

Huy:

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

Bradley Sutton:

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

Huy:

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

Bradley Sutton:

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

Huy:

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

Bradley Sutton:

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

Andrew:

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

Bradley Sutton:

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

Andrew:

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

Bradley Sutton:

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

Andrew:

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

Bradley Sutton:

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

Andrew:

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

Bradley Sutton:

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

Andrew:

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

Bradley Sutton:

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

Andrew:

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

Bradley Sutton:

Delegating.

Andrew:

Yeah, yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

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

Andrew:

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

Bradley Sutton:

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

Andrew:

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

Bradley Sutton:

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

Huy:

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

Huy:

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

Bradley Sutton:

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

Andrew:

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

Andrew:

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

Huy:

Yeah, that’s a good tip

Bradley Sutton:

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

Huy:

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

Bradley Sutton:

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

Huy:

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

Andrew:

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

Bradley Sutton:

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

Huy:

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

Bradley Sutton:

Yep.

Huy:

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

Bradley Sutton:

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

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

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

#451 – Amazon PPC Ask Me Anything

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

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

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

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Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

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

Bradley Sutton:

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

Shivali:

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

Tom:

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

Shivali:

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

Tom:

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

Shivali:

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

Tom:

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

Tom:

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

Tom:

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

Tom:

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

Tom:

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

Shivali:

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

Tom:

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

Tom:

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

Shivali:

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

Tom:

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

Tom:

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

Tom:

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

Shivali:

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

Tom:

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

Tom:

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

Shivali:

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

Tom:

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

Shivali:

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

Tom:

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

Shivali:

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

Tom:

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

Shivali:

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

Tom:

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

Tom:

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

Shivali:

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

Tom:

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

Shivali:

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

Tom:

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

Tom:

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

Shivali:

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

Tom:

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

Tom:

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

Tom:

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

Tom:

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

Shivali:

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

Tom:

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

Tom:

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

Tom:

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

Shivali:

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

Tom:

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

Tom:

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

Shivali:

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

Tom:

Yeah, I use it. We use it.

Shivali:

Really wait, tell us about it.

Tom:

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

Shivali:

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

Tom:

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

Shivali:

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

Tom:

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

Tom:

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

Shivali:

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

Bradley Sutton:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

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

Bradley Sutton:

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

Howard:

I’m good. How are you doing?

Bradley Sutton:

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

Howard:

Thank you. I try.

Bradley Sutton:

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

Howard:

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

Bradley Sutton:

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

Howard:

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

Bradley Sutton:

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

Howard:

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

Bradley Sutton:

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

Howard:

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

Bradley Sutton:

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

Howard:

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

Bradley Sutton:

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

Howard:

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

Bradley Sutton:

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

Howard:

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

Bradley Sutton:

So interesting.

Howard:

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

Bradley Sutton:

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

Howard:

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

Howard:

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

Bradley Sutton:

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

Howard:

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

Howard:

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

Howard:

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

Bradley Sutton:

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

Howard:

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

Bradley Sutton:

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

Howard:

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

Howard:

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

Bradley Sutton:

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

Howard:

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

Howard:

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

Howard:

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

Bradley Sutton:

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

Howard:

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

Bradley Sutton:

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

Howard:

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

Bradley Sutton:

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

Howard:

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

Bradley Sutton:

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

Howard:

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

Bradley Sutton:

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

Howard:

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

Bradley Sutton:

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

Howard:

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

Howard:

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

Howard:

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

Bradley Sutton:

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

Helium 10 Buzz 05/03/23: Amazon Search Glitch | Alexa AI Update | Pinterest / Amazon Collab

In this episode, Bradley talks about Alexa AI Update, Pinterest / Amazon Collaboration and Amazon Search Glitch. 

#449 - Amazon Seller did $100K in a week on TikTok Shop?!

In episode #449 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley, Sharon, and Elizabeth chat about all they have been up to, including massively successful TikTok Shop campaigns, and even starting side hustles like wedding planning businesses!

Despite her success, Sharon has been struggling with motivation to focus on her Amazon business. However, instead of giving up, she has been exploring the idea of starting a new business venture after her time with Amazon. In addition, Sharon’s Amazon brand was making an impressive $1.7 million in 2022 while running on autopilot.

In episode 449 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley, Sharon, and Elizabeth discuss:

• 02:57 – What Are Elizabeth And Sharon Up To These Days?
• 04:15 – Joining Amazon’s Black Business Accelerator
• 05:56 – Losing Motivation To Focus On Her Amazon Business
• 09:16 – Starting A New Business After Amazon
• 12:15 – Still Making $1.7 million in 2022 While On Autopilot
• 12:56 – Building Her Brand In TikTok Shop
• 17:05 – Getting A Million Views On TikTok
• 22:18 – Close To $6 Million In Sales In 2022
• 22:48 – Using Amazon Skills For A New Business Venture
• 35:26 – Healthy Habits & Hobbies Outside The Business Grind
• 41:46 – Elizabeth’s 60-Second Tip

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

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today, we’ve got two of my favorite guests back on the show, and they’re gonna talk about a lot of things they’ve been up to, such as starting brand new offline businesses, and also being able to have a TikTok shop that did a hundred thousand dollars worth of sales in less than two weeks. 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, h10.me/cerebro. Don’t pay full price. Use our podcast discount code SSP10. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s a completely BS free, unscripted, and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And we’ve got a couple serious sellers back here on the show. I think this is like their third time. And two of my favorite guests we have here on the podcast, Elizabeth and Sharon, the dynamic duo. I’m not gonna say who’s Batman and who’s Robin? They’re both Batman and Batwoman. We’ll just say like, you’re the top of the top, both of you. No, no, Robins here. But anyways welcome back to the show. It’s great to have you guys back.

Sharon:

Thank you so much for having us, Bradley.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome. Awesome. Now we’re not gonna go completely into their backstory, guys, because they’ve been on the show before. So write this down. If you guys have never heard of them before, they’ve got, you know, some really inspiring stories. Their first episode was episode 206. So find out how they were able to 30x their income of what they were making in Nigeria before moving to the States and before selling on Amazon. And then check out episode 317. You can do that h10.me/317. And then you can find out how since that first episode, they were able to scale their sales from 1.7 to 6.4 million in 2021. So now I don’t know what they’ve been doing completely over the last few months. We keep in contact a little bit here or there, but I’m gonna find out with you guys how their 2022 was and what’s going on here in 2023.

Bradley Sutton:

So first of all right before we started talking, I had to stop Elizabeth. I’m like, she started telling Sharon about something. I was like, no, no, no, I wanna record this. I want to hear about this, you know, live from you. So the first thing I’m gonna ask you, Elizabeth, is you mentioned that you are part of the black-owned business program at Amazon. I actually, you didn’t know about this, but I had a podcast episode all about that. But can you tell me, like, what kind of benefits do you get from being part of that, that program?

Elizabeth:

So I do have an account manager that has manages 10 other accounts, including mine. Nine other accounts are including mine. So it’s more like a personal approach to account management that Amazon is offering. Small business owners, black business owners. I do have calls within every week to kind of go over my accounts, help you know, point me in the right direction, you know, talk about strategies on how to scale my business and stuff like that. We just started having these calls three weeks ago and it’s been so helpful, to be honest. So if you have the opportunity to register your business as a small black-owned business, you should definitely take that advantage because I know this type of personalized account management, Amazon charge premium fee for those and for them to give us for free is unbelievable. My account manager, I just believe is like maybe the one of the best, I don’t know.

Bradley Sutton:

Can you gimme an example of something that maybe you or he was able to help for you or you did as being part of this program that maybe, like before you wouldn’t have been able to, to do it, can you give like, maybe one example?

Elizabeth:

Well, mostly, but some of my products are like in the bachelorette party decoration niche. And I do have a lot of issues with like adults flagging and stuff like that. He’ll tell me, you know what, just call, just gimme a call. Like, I have this number basically on speed dial.

Bradley Sutton:

Phone number. You can actually click get him. Oh wow.

Elizabeth:

I’m not reaching to any what do you call it again? Selling support extension. Nothing like directed to him. I’m like, Hey, you know, I have this issue. I’m like, hold on Elizabeth, let me hop on this. It’s gonna hook in like an internet ticket for me. And that’s like over, like, I cannot under read that.

Sharon:

Wow. That’s amazing.

Bradley Sutton:

Sharon’s about to sign up right now.

Sharon:

Not adults, but keeps betting the adult flag. So I would definitely love that.

Elizabeth:

Yeah. And you know, he called me up, I was like, cause mine did expired cuz I registered like two years ago. It did expire, but at that point I wasn’t getting like, no personnel follow up, nothing. So I was like, you know what, maybe it’s not just for me. He called me and told me, Hey, I’m going to send you a link to register directly free of child three years license for the small business certificate. Like, he did that all for me. So like, I don’t know, maybe they, yeah. I’m definitely going to hook you up. It’s really cool.

Sharon:

All right. I like it. Now let’s switch back to Sharon. We keep things real here on the show, and I remember, I, I don’t know if it was last year or sometime you were telling me that, that there there were times last year where maybe you were neglecting a little bit or maybe your Amazon business or not as motivated as before. Am I just completely confused or was that you?

Sharon:

That was me. Absolutely.

Bradley Sutton:

Let’s talk about that. Vecause this is real.

Sharon:

So from the second half of last year, I just started getting like bored pretty much of Amazon. I do a lot of PPP C coaching personal students come around and I do, I teach PPC in my PPC clinic. So I have small meetings, it’s like a small group where I just like meet with students and then check their PPC account. We meet every week, right? So I just started getting bored and in September I’m like, okay, maybe it’s this PPC clinic that’s overwhelming me maybe. So I told other students do not renew because it’s usually like monthly. I took the whole of September of and half of October. By the second week of October I resumed PPC clinic, but I was just still not motivated. And then I have been trying to sell one of my brands, actually, I don’t know if you remember from our last meeting, so maybe that was part of it. I don’t know what was the problem, but I had all these I can’t accounts tied together in the same seller, central account, all those brands. Oh. And I was trying to sell one of those because I figured it, it had grown to a point whereby I didn’t feel like I could grow it any further by myself. So, so

Bradley Sutton:

You’re talking about one, you have one seller central account, and then you had started your own multiple brands, different private label brands.

Sharon:

And then two of the brands, we are doing much better than the other three brands. And it has gotten to a point where I believe that this brand had so much potential, it would be better off if I just sell it out that one brand so I can focus on one and sell the other one, which was good. I already connected with somebody I met, I think I met a company through the Helium 10 marketplace or something like that, forgotten what it’s called. And we were already working, but unfortunately the buyer or wherever they said they were gonna, they would need it with the seller central account. I’m like, no, that’s not gonna happen because I have all the brands and then Elizabeth or like Sharon, they want seller central account, open a new seller central account and migrate this brand before you sell.

Sharon:

I’m like, why didn’t I think of that? So I started that process and it was just being a headache because this was a product that was selling a lot. So I had thousands of inventory in my old seller center account. I didn’t wanna pull it because that would mean stopping sales and stopping revenue. So I had to wait to sell it true. And not other products were selling somewhere slow, somewhere fast. And I was trying to move to the new one and I ran out of stuff as the bestseller and just everything was going on at the same time with me just being done with Amazon that September, October. Then in November I just started a new business altogether. And that even then made, that was more interesting to me like,

Bradley Sutton:

Like an offline business, right?

Sharon:

Totally offline. Yeah. Like event the corridor, I’m an event designer, you know, it’s, I just started a luxury event rental business in November.

Bradley Sutton:

So like you use the money you’ve been accumulating from Amazon and then now you were able to start another business because you had this capital. I like it.

Sharon:

So I moved the capital that I had, I was using to, I would’ve used to like build my Amazon business. I move, and if you know about the luxury rental business, it needs a lot of upfront capital. So I put a lot of funds out of Amazon to just start this new business. And that again, took all my time and all whatnot. So as a matter of fact, only in the last two weeks did I finally, I think I should take a look back on Amazon and I’m just trying to get back into the grind.

Bradley Sutton:

I mean, you have like maybe virtual assistance or staff who are like managing inventory and things like that and Oh yeah.

Sharon:

I did not shut down my Amazon business because at the end of the day, Amazon was then like, my job. Sure. And then this new business was my side gig. Does that make sense? You know how we still have to go to work even though you don’t like the work, but you need the money. So, of course I continued managing my Amazon, but I would not do the extra stuff that we needed to do that put us above. I was like, I would go a week. I would not log to seller central, for example. I would only go there to check, do I need to send in more inventory for something. If there was any customer service thing, my VA team would handle it and all they would just message me.So I was not doing, so from September up to now, I’ve not been doing anything above and beyond. I have not taken any classes like to educate myself listening to any podcasts. I’ve not been active in any Facebook group as much. I have just been more focused on the wedding design business.

Bradley Sutton:

How’s that business going?

Sharon:

Actually, it’s going good. Basically, some of our Instagram posts and I was like, oh, that looks so cute.

Elizabeth:

Doing a good job, Sharon.

Sharon:

So, but in the last two weeks, I kind of feel like I just suddenly had space in my head come back to Amazon.

Bradley Sutton:

Did you ever finish that migration of that one brand out? Or It’s still in, so you’re still waiting to deplete the inventory from one?

Sharon:

I’m still waiting to deplete the inventory from there. Okay. And all the best sellers have been depleted, so that’s good.

Bradley Sutton:

So did you start on the new account, the replenishment of the best seller? I thought you like, just let it run out or something completely. Okay, that’s good. Yeah.

Sharon:

So immediately I opened a new account. The next order I created, I sent it to the new account.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, cool. Cool. What did you end your 2022 in sales, would you say roughly?

Sharon:

Funny enough, it was almost the same or slightly higher than 2021. I think I ended with about 1.7.

Bradley Sutton:

1.7 million. Okay. And then even that’s with it almost being on autopilot for like the second part of the year.

Sharon:

Yes, and in 2021 I had a Covid product that was really helping.

Bradley Sutton:

Ah, okay. Okay. And then without that, so that must mean you had some other products that, that increased in sales. Cause obviously that Covid product wasn’t doing well last year. Okay. Really cool. All Alright. Elizabeth’s falling asleep over there. So we gotta pair some attention.

Sharon:

All over the place?

Bradley Sutton:

Elizabeth, did you start some side hustles too or what was your 2022 like?

Elizabeth:

2022 no side hustle. It was all Amazon. Amazon by itself for me was like a lot, just because I have a lot of multiple brands multiple brands that I’m dealing with. I think about four different brands. So I was mostly growing out more brands within the Amazon space last year and this year I’m looking more into like the off Amazon part of the business actually, TikTok, which that’s another story for another day. But yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

So, for those you know who haven’t heard your other episodes. You’ve been very successful in getting like sometimes like viral products and you get inspired by TikTok originally. Did you also have some of that last year as well? Were you, or what was it last year or was it the year before where you had a, a few products that just like did crazy numbers, like a million dollars in a month or something like that?

Elizabeth:

Yeah, yeah. That was two years ago. And also last year same thing happened, of course. I wouldn’t say back to back, but it can happen like maybe twice a year. I could find those kind of products on TikTok or on Instagram. That would do crazy numbers. But of course like anything that’s viral, it has like a peak and then oof it slows down cuz every other person can see that product. You know what I mean? On Helium 10, thanks to you guys anyways. Thanks. But no thanks.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Well, but being the first to it, you know, still, you know, you get the most reviews and, and there’s, there’s something to be said about being the first now. You mentioned other marketplaces. So what marketplaces are you selling on now total?

Elizabeth:

TikTok.

Bradley Sutton:

So the TikTok shop?

Sharon:

I never completed my TikTok shop.

Bradley Sutton:

TikTok shop. Now how do is TikTok shop, is it its own marketplace or is it like pulling from Shopify or something? Nope,

Elizabeth:

It’s own marketplace. Oh yeah, you should definitely try it out. So last year I found out that TikTok did have a shop in marketplace, but that wasn’t in the US it was in just Indonesia and the UK. And when I heard about that, I’m like, that’s really interesting. I tried to open a TikTok shop in the uk, which I did. It was very hard. But yeah, I found a way around it and I did I put in my product the first day I got a sale, I was so excited. I was like, yay, this, you know, seemed nice. But to be honest, the reason why I did open the UK one was just to kind of get ahead of the trend, kind of understand it, digest it. And so when it comes to the US I’m like already a pro in it. I’m not trying to find, oh, what am I supposed to do here? You know what I mean? So that was the reason. And unfortunately for me, I then quickly realize that with TikTok you can only ship within that marketplace country. Like the country. Exactly. So you can ship from the US to the UK, you can ship from China to the UK, you have to be in the UK to ship to the customers that purchased your items, if that makes sense. Okay.

Bradley Sutton:

Yep. Yep.

Elizabeth:

So I had to cancel that order and I’m like, you know what, okay, maybe this is not for me. But, you know, and then when I got the invite to that the US marketplace was open on I think they were doing like the better stage. I got the invite, I was like, you know what, I’ve been waiting for this. I got that email, I believe at midnight. I was about to go to bed actually. And then my husband just saw me, you know, cuz I was so hyper when it comes to things like this. He saw me pick up my laptop and I run, I started doing, I was like, babe, this could wait tomorrow. I’m like, Uhuh, I don’t want them to change their mind.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. Wow.

Elizabeth:

But wait, long story short we started posting, I posted a lot of items. Well, I’ve moved all my items on there.

Bradley Sutton:

Hold on though. Like, until then, did you already have a TikTok account for your brand that you were just like posting content to? So it’s not like, oh, that you just randomly got this invites because you had a already a TikTok account and they’re like, Hey, do you want to join this program for TikTok shop?

Elizabeth:

I had a TikTok business account.

Bradley Sutton:

Yes.

Elizabeth:

Registered

Bradley Sutton:

For, for just one of your brands? Or was it like one account that you used for to promote all of your brands?

Elizabeth:

No, one of my brands. Okay. That’s my main brand. Okay. So when I did get that, I was like, oh wow, that’s cool. You know, so I put in all my products that I know that bestsellers and then there’s this TikTok live and you know, stuff like that. I started posting videos and boom, one of my video went viral.

Bradley Sutton:

You yourself or did you hire like an influencer or what?

Elizabeth:

To me, cuz I have UGCs, I don’t know. Maybe that’s another topic.

Bradley Sutton:

I like all these topics.

Elizabeth:

I don’t have UGC content creators that I work with. Almost like my sister do almost like a mini agency that she does like a UGC content creators. She’s also a UGC content creator and she has like group of friends that do the same thing. And then you produce content for e-commerce business and stuff like that.

Bradley Sutton:

So then you took some UGC that you created and then you, you posted it to your account? And then it like linked to the TikTok shop. And then you said one of these videos went viral. So what, what does going viral mean? Like how many views or whatever did it get

Elizabeth:

It was crazy. It went like 3 million views. Wow. And yeah I’m just recalling.

Bradley Sutton:

No ads. It was all organic.

Elizabeth:

Organic. And I’m just recovering from the sales and everything else. And that’s why you saw me on that vacation. Cause I had to run away for the weekend cause it was so crazy. Anyways. and unfortunately, unfortunately for me, I could only get 200 orders maximum a day because you have to be on like a probation period. And during those probation period, you can’t, they’re not gonna give you more than 200 orders a day. So I was selling out on my 200 space before I wake up in the morning. Can you beat that on TikTok?

Bradley Sutton:

It’s okay. How, how is it set up? So like you get a sale there, like how, what is the fulfillment? Like is it pulling from your warehouse or you, you’re doing it yourself or you’re tying it to your Amazon inventory?

Elizabeth:

So for me, I was fulfilling myself at the time because I did not expect for it to go viral. You know what I mean?

Bradley Sutton:

So every day you’re doing 200 shipments from your house?

Elizabeth:

Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Or should I say your husband is he helping?

Elizabeth:

Was like a whole family thing. My husband, my kid, my two year old, she was stopping the stuff and the being taking it to the UPN and stuff like that. So it was really crazy. So imagine posting something three days prior and then on the fourth days, like boom, 200 orders before you wake up. When I saw it, I was like, is this a glitch? You know what I mean? It was crazy. And then all my inventory ran out of, I think we sold about 2,500 units of the item until I ran out of inventory. And when I did the momentum, of course load down because when they click on the product, it’s saying sold out. And you can’t click from Amazon. It’s not allowed. You have to fulfill from the warehouse that is tied to your store. So how it works. When you upload the video you can link like a little icon to the video. So once when they watch the video, they just click on that link and then just purchase the item like right from the video literally. So it’s the, the conversion rate is still a little low obviously. Cause with 3 million views and selling 2,500 units is still relatively slow.

Bradley Sutton:

What was the retail price of the product?

Elizabeth:

It was $32.99. And guess what? I charged shipping with $5.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay So, that’s like almost a hundred thousand dollars, including shipping a worth of.

Elizabeth:

Oh my gosh, Bradley.

Bradley Sutton:

Ah, my goodness. Sharon, look at all the, you see Sharon, are are you re are you feeling revitalized about e-commerce yet Sharon?

Sharon:

I’m on my second screen right now, I’m on TikTok shop.

Bradley Sutton:

Accepting that beta invite, I hope.

Elizabeth:

Now it’s not invite only. You can just go on there, join

Sharon:

The email, I could not find it. I just went on Google and I’m literally on seller us.tiktok.com and right now I’m verifying my business information. I ain’t no joking.

Bradley Sutton:

You see, guys, I apologize. I forgot where you live. Sharon. But the Texas In Texas, yeah. I apologize to the wedding community there. You might be a little bit late in some of your wedding supplies. Cause Sharon is now revitalized in, in e-commerce with the black business program and now with TikTok shop. Okay. Wow. All right. That, that’s pretty cool, Elizabeth. So like what did you and your 2022 sales about?

Elizabeth:

It was close to 6 million for sure.

Bradley Sutton:

Alright. Close to 6 million. And, and so that’s on Amazon. And then probably, you know, not much, you know, TikTok I know is new for you. Yeah. Are there other market places that you are on? Like were you selling on Shopify or Walmart or anything like that? Yeah, there

Elizabeth:

There was not left coming from those medium to be honest. 99.99% was from Amazon.

Sharon:

Yeah, me too.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. All right. All right. Let’s go back to Sharon here. If you, if I can take you away from your TikTok registration. Talk to me about how you decided on the business, because I think this, this is what you did last year is something that is on the, a lot of seller’s minds. You know, they, they get a lot of money from Amazon. They’re like, Hey, I could just put it all back into Amazon. I could start other businesses. I could do like Bradley and do like sports cards and NFTs and things like that. But I think a lot of people, you know are intrigued by starting their own offline business. So like what, was it something you’ve always wanted to do or did you just do some like research and to businesses or how did you come?

Sharon:

I always loved events planning. Not just event, but wedding planning and party planning and just everything. Parties, I love parties, but the fun for me ends when the party starts, my social battery is like this. I don’t go to parties. I enjoy planning it. And then I wanna sit down and watch you guys enjoy the party.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay.

Sharon:

At that point, my social battery is just off. So in my church, I’m very active in my church. All the youngsters that are getting married is always, Hey, aunt Sharon, my wedding, we’re planning this person’s wedding. So I’ve always been doing that and stuff. And then last year one of my youngsters friends reached out to me. She was like, Hey auntie, I’m getting married. I’m like, congratulations. Thinking she was inviting me. She was like, yeah, well you’re gonna plan this. I’m like, no, I do not plan weddings anymore. Because in 2017 I was actually the official wedding planner for her brother. I’m like, I do not plan weddings anymore. I do not have time. Amazon is taking all my time. She was like, oh no, I see you’re planning my wedding. You know, and we got talking. I’m like, okay, here’s what I can do for you.

Sharon:

I can coordinate. Just pay me to coordinate. But for the planning itself, don’t pay me just go planning. But if you need any help along the way, I’ll do it. As long as it doesn’t involve me physically doing someone. So in getting that, I started getting excited again in about weddings when I’m discussing with her. And just the whole planning really got me excited. And that was when I was able to pinpoint it, like, wait a minute. It’s really not every part of wedding planning that I love. It’s just a design part. I don’t care what your dress looks like. I don’t wanna follow you to your dress rehersal. I don’t wanna go taste the food with you. I don’t care. I just wanna know what a food looks like when it’s plated. I don’t care if it’s gonna be chicken or fish.

Sharon:

I don’t care if it’s sweet. I don’t care if it’s too soft or too hard or whatever. I just care about the presentation. And that was when I’m like, this is the part that really interest me. And then when we got to the part of planning had decor and renting of luxury furniture, it was a new I did not, I was not aware. I guess I was, but I just did not know the, how it was about that part. Like, wait, I can actually niche this down to the part that I really do care about. And then I just told him and her fiance, I’m like, guys, look, I can sauce this inventory. Would you guys give me the job to provide a luxury furniture for your wedding?

Bradley Sutton:

So she was the fist official customer for your new wedding.

Sharon:

I guarantee you that you would see it in January. Your wedding is in April. In January you would have it because of my experience with China shipping and all that, it was so much easier for me.

Bradley Sutton:

So this is stuff that are you reusing it or you rental buying it just for one event? So rental. Okay. I was about to say, yeah, that would be kind of expensive to, so rental expensive. Cause So then did you have to get a warehouse for this style ?

Sharon:

I still have a warehouse now.

Bradley Sutton:

You didn’t have it for Amazon before?

Sharon:

My Amazon, I was using my garage other, now I finally just got a space. But for my Amazon, I was using my garage. But for the wedding business events, the locks is the name. It’s I got a warehouse because the first container that came was a 40 foot container and then some less than container here.

Bradley Sutton:

40 foot container of wedding supplies.

Sharon:

Think about your dining chairs. And I have two, 240 of those. Just think about that.

Bradley Sutton:

You invested a couple dollars into this. Wow. Okay. Now, now did you set up the business? Like did you use like the LLC from your Amazon business? Did you set up a completely separate entity?

Sharon:

Separate entity? I up a brand new LLC straight up to SO. Uhhuh, just so that I have all those set out right from the beginning. I literally registered with IWA and went to get accredited as an accredited event designer. So I’m just doing everything.

Bradley Sutton:

And then like did, did you hire employees? You just doing it with your, your family for right now or? Oh,

Sharon:

Right. Ah, my kids are too small. They can leave to finger. So when we do have events, I have, I, they’re not employees, they’re like contractors because the last event I did, I had 12 people working. I cannot afford that for full-time staff. Yeah, they’re contractors. I bought a box truck, and then the one,

Bradley Sutton:

How much did the box truck cost? I’m trying to buy one myself.

Sharon:

It’s a very old one.

Bradley Sutton:

No, that’s my style. Like I want an old one.

Sharon:

Okay. Okay. I actually got it off of Facebook Marketplace.

Bradley Sutton:

How much?

Sharon:

I got it out of Facebook Marketplace, it was 6,500, but it needed some repairs. So everything came out about 10,000. So it’s an old box truck. But it is working.

Bradley Sutton:

Are you gonna put like some fancy logo on the side?

Sharon:

Not yet. I’ve just had a lot going on, but I plan too.

Bradley Sutton:

So let’s say things go as planned. You continue to build it up for this year. Like what would you say, what do you think you would profit from this business for this year? L like this, this wedding business

Sharon:

Versus Amazon or on its own?

Bradley Sutton:

No. Just by itself not on its own.

Sharon:

Honestly, I don’t even know how to calculate that. Just because of the capital investor. Yeah, because remember furniture is upfront capital. So I don’t how to calculate.

Bradley Sutton:

How much gross revenue then? Like what are doing a month, like how many event, yeah.

Sharon:

Hopefully it gets better. But as of right now, I think I’m maybe about 70-80,000, I don’t know.

Bradley Sutton:

70, $80,000 you’ve, you’ve done so far? Yeah, in a couple, a few months. Okay. Hey, that’s some good revenue there. So, so guys out there you know, once you get into Amazon, that doesn’t mean that, oh, my whole life is revolves on Amazon. Oh no. So some, some people, hey, some, some people are and that’s, that’s totally fine. But, but for those of you who, who have like a itch to do something different, well yeah. That’s one way you can use your, your Amazon money is go with your passion, you know, so that’s something that Sharon’s been passionate about for a while. And yeah, it’s always cool to make money about what your passions are, and that’s another

Sharon:

What you can do for ree. You can make money of. That’s my mantra.

Bradley Sutton:

Alright. Going back to Elizabeth now how many videos did it take until that one went viral? Like, is it one out of 100 go viral, one out of 10, one out of 50? What would you say?

Elizabeth:

So, I honestly think TikTok portioning videos that are linked to product that are from TikTok shop my own opinion. But it was a third video that I posted that did, went viral.

Bradley Sutton:

Oh, good grief. Wow. That was pretty fast. Now what is do’s? Cut pn orders that go through the shop.

Elizabeth:

So right now they have a lot of promotions going on that they offer both the sellers and also the buyers for the sellers. I believe there’s zero fee for the first 90 days. That’s for the sellers, right. And then for the buyers, they’re giving them a 30% discount for their first order and also all shipping.

Bradley Sutton:

Hold on. So that $33 that you got plus shipping, TikTok was not taking a percentage from there?

Elizabeth:

No.

Bradley Sutton:

Oh my goodness. Sharo is even faster now. Registering right there.

Elizabeth:

They were not checking. And just because say like the product that I have on Amazon that is selling for $32 on TikTok, it’s like the first order that they make, they only paying $20, $21

Bradley Sutton:

Oh, is TikTok subsidizing you? Or that’s coming out of, so it’s not like you are only getting $20. Wow, okay. Yeah. My goodness. I wish Amazon would do that. Okay.

Elizabeth:

To somebody from TikTok and the person was telling me that TikTok did, am I saying this meaning not, okay, so let’s just scratch out.

Bradley Sutton:

This is fascinating to me. Now, now here’s a question. That product that went viral or the video, let me rephrase that. The product that was in the video that went viral, do you also sell that on Amazon? Did you see any increases on your Amazon sales for that product after that TikTok video, even though it was going to TikTok shop? So then probably it’s sold out. So then what people are doing is like, oh, let me see if this is on Amazon. So how did that, how, like, were you the only seller of it? Did you have competition at the time that this video went viral on Amazon? Did you have competition for it?

Elizabeth:

There’s a lot of competition.

Bradley Sutton:

So, how was it that they were still buying your product? Like were they searching by the brand, do you think?

Elizabeth:

So it’s on my TikTok page and on my TikTok bio, I do have the link tree that has all my products on there. So they just go in there, click and buy.

Bradley Sutton:

So how much would you say it increased on Amazon? Like what were you doing before the video went viral? Like, you know, like hundred orders a day, 50 orders a day, and then how much was it after? So that, you know that, oh, it must have been from this period.

Elizabeth:

It was almost like 30% lift. And so for sure.

Bradley Sutton:

Interesting. So how long is this probation period going to last for, for you where you have that limit of 200?

Elizabeth:

It’s 60 days. Okay. Painfully so, but they do have an exception when you sell certain amount of units and then you have a certain amount of ship through rates, tracking rates and stuff like that. Then you can request for early access to like the full thing.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Yeah. What are you using to fulfill the orders? Like me at my warehouse here or my house? I use stamps.com. Like do you have like a thermal label printer? And are you using a, a software in order to, to print like the addresses and everything? Or are you buying the postage directly from TikTok? How does that work?

Elizabeth:

So initially I was buying from I was using my Shipo, but I just switched to like the TikTok shipping thing method. Okay.

Bradley Sutton:

So it’s kinda like how Amazon works if you’re fulfilling your own. You can buy it at a slightly discounted rate, the Yeah. The shipping and then print out the labels. Okay. Yeah. I’m assuming, you know, you and your, your husband do not want to be, you know, shipping 300 products a day. So what’s your like, longer term plan as you scale this TikTok out for fulfillment? Like, are you opening a warehouse? Are you gonna use a three pl or are you gonna just keep doing it yourself with that two year old to work?

Elizabeth:

At the moment, we do have a big garage. It fits like a eight car garage that we have over here. So the thing is, you know, we had to pull a lot of inventory out of Amazon to be honest to the house, just so we have enough units to, to fulfill. And so we’re just putting things in place. I do have one person that you come, I think six hours a day now to help with you know, just getting everything organized and in preparation for the next video that might go viral. You know what I mean? So I do have one person coming to help with fulfillment, cuz that’s going to take a lot of time away from Amazon and I don’t want that.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. Okay. Alright. Last two questions for Sharon now. Something that we’re doing, we’re doing more this year. My theme of the podcast is also about like mental and physical health I think is important for entrepreneurs. Like, actually today is, is the one year anniversary from when I died for like 10 minutes and had my heart attack. So like, that’s why like this year’s my anniversay guys.

Sharon:

A year ago already.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, a year ago today. Like, exactly like, I even did a, it’s crazy. I was looking back and like, I remember like, I was doing a, I did a webinar that day and I had no, I have no remembrance of doing that webinar. I remember like when I woke up after being in the hospital, I was like, oh man, I remember I was supposed to do a webinar. I must have let the company down because I wasn’t available for it. And I look on YouTube, I’m like, there is me. I was like, I was like, that’s not me. I don’t remember this at all. Wow. But anyway, so, so, so Sharon, you know, like I’m sh you know, I I think I think part of what you were talking about, I think actually probably was good for your mental health. You know, you’re getting burnt out on Amazon, just so like you were able to go into doing something you know, to doing something else that, that gave you fulfillment. What else do you do for like, hobbies or maybe physical habits you know, special supplements. I don’t know what, whatever you want to talk about. Let me know.

Sharon:

So I am very active in church. I’m not a very social person like miss traveler right here. But, I’m very active in church and that’s pretty much what I do. I’m really close friends with my husband. We have a good relationship and we are both home buddies. We don’t go out. So I wish you could see where I am right now in this office. By the way, we just closed on this house. So in this office, this is my section and that’s his section and we’ll go to work from here.

Bradley Sutton:

What about physical health then? Because the, I think your situation’s very similar to me and, and my problem was, especially when we were remote, I’m here. I mean, this is my office, this is my podcast studio, but it’s in my house. And like I, there was times where I don’t get up, I don’t go to the gym or I don’t do anything because I’m just like, Hey, this is so comfortable, I’m just gonna stay my desk.

Sharon:

Actually one of the things that encouraged me to start this business, because my husband, when I started my husband, I was like, this is very physical. Like, are you gonna be able to do it? Because guys, I was weighing over 300 pounds.

Bradley Sutton:

Oh wow.

Sharon:

So I said I was gonna do it and like I said, I took the course. I plant so many things, and part of the things I plan in order to be successful in this business was I had a gastric bypass.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay.

Sharon:

On February 13th, I had gastric bypass. So it’s almost three months now and I’ve lost almost 50 pounds.

Bradley Sutton:

Wow. Very nice. Congratulations.

Sharon:

I haven’t been doing exercise though, but I’ll get there. I plan to actually, because now that my body, my muscles have been used to carrying around so much fat and now they don’t have that, so they’re gonna go to sleep and they will get weak.

Bradley Sutton:

So now you’re gonna be carrying around dining tables and chairs and stuff.

Sharon:

No, but for real though, I have to now actively challenge my muscle by going to the gym. Yeah. Otherwise, even though you look smaller, you’re gonna be weaker. So I just learned that. So now you gotta tell them. So don’t go to sleep. And actively train you now. So that’s the way I’m going to, but to be honest, that alone has really helped me mentally and just physically and, and because I have so much more energy than I had before.

Bradley Sutton:

Oh, that, yeah. I need that back. You know, I’ve probably gained like 60 pounds in the last three years, so I’m definitely the last year I’ve been working on getting that off. That’s alright. Excellent. Excellent. Very nice. Elizabeth same question to you. Sounds like you’re into travel from Sharon, making fun of you. Where did you go last weekend for like your de-stressing after that TikTok hundred thousand dollars?

Elizabeth:

Well, I just had to splodge and it put over Vita trip. It was nice. Just a three day trip Mexico. It was nice.

Bradley Sutton:

Next time you wanna do that, let me know. My parents have a house in Malan, which is very near, or this kinda like, not near, but like, so you can stay in our house over there.

Elizabeth:

That’s pretty cool. Yeah. Putto Vita was really nice. Weather was wonderful. We had like a really stressful weekend and then we decided to treat ourself on like a private, you know, little yacht moment.

Bradley Sutton:

I thought she was gonna say private jet. I was like, whoa. Okay. Elizabeth is really next level. Yeah. We took a private jet to Mexico. Okay. No private yacht. That’s just as good now. See us is cool. I like using splurge.

Elizabeth:

Yeah. It was like, I was, I was just putting the back of my mind. I’m like, yeah, TikTok pay for this. Tiktok pay

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, exactly.

Elizabeth:

So yeah, so yeah, you know, we like to travel and for us, you know, this business has really given us the opportunity to have that kind of lifestyle that we travel at least once every three months for sure. You know, and I know without, you know, having this type of I wouldn’t call Amazon a passive income, to be honest with you, because we do put in a lot of work, especially when you get to a certain level of sales, I would say. So, yeah, so travel is my thing. We are foodies. We like to explore when it comes to food and stuff. So yeah, that’s what we do for fun. I do go to the gym once in a while, although I have slats for the past couple of weeks. But I think I’m gonna get back in there because mentally for me, when I drop the kids off from school, I just head straight to the gym and then that’s how my days get started.

Bradley Sutton:

I like it. I like it. All right. And now last one for you Elizabeth you’re a 30-second tip of the day or 60-second tip. It could be about Amazon, it could be about PPC could be about TikTok, product research, TikTok shop, whatever. What would you say is, is your strategy for everybody out there?

Elizabeth:

Keep posting that content because you never know. Cuz in the beginning for me having the TikTok store, I mean the TikTok what do you call it again?

Sharon:

Shop

Elizabeth:

Not the shop. The, the account was just for posting product. It wasn’t even about the sale. Yeah. But the consistency from my posting was what gave me like, the initial edge of joining TikTok shop. And that’s what, you know,

Bradley Sutton:

What is your consistency or what’s your cadence?

Elizabeth:

So I do post every day for sure. I post every day.

Bradley Sutton:

How many followers do you have now?

Elizabeth:

I have about 5,600 followers. It’s not a last one, you know,

Bradley Sutton:

So, so from an account that only has 5,600 followers, that was the account where you had that 3 million views? Okay. Interesting. Wow. I like it. Yeah. All right. Well ladies, it’s always great to have you on the show. Very inspiring stories. I always get a lot of, you know, Facebook or Instagram dms with, you know, people are like, oh, wow, that was so inspiring. So like, you know, just know that, you know, keep on doing what you’re doing because you’re inspiring a lot of people out there. And it’s inspiring me. Like I can’t lose 50 pounds in, in three months. I wish I could. I I used to back in the day, I could do that when I was younger, but, but those days are gone. But by the next time, here’s my pledge. By the next time Sharon I have you on, I should be able to say hopefully I’ve lost like another 40 or 50 pounds, so, okay.

Sharon:

Hopefully, I’ll get more.

Bradley Sutton:

I’ll try and get you here. Yeah, I love it.

Sharon:

Still have a lot to do.

Bradley Sutton:

And then Elizabeth I think, you know, you’re well on the way to eight figures your first eight figure year. So look forward, look forward to that this year. So, so guys, I hope to see you soon. You know, one of our Elite workshops, you know, maybe in May if you guys can come out here, and then if anybody’s getting married in Texas, do you have like a website we can out your new business, Sharon.

Sharon:

Actually, eventsdlux.com.

Bradley Sutton:

I love it. I love it. All right, so if you’re in Texas and you want to really have a luck, luxurious wedding. Hit up Sharon, although she might take some time getting back to you because now she’s going back to TikTok and Amazon.

Sharon:

Yeah. Thank you Bradley.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, well thank you so much and we’ll be seeing you soon.

Elizabeth:

Thank you.

#448 - Building A 7-Figure Amazon Brand While Having A Day Job

In episode #448 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Robert chat about how he grew his Amazon and retail brand to over $4 million in revenue while working a full-time job.
 
Robert shares his backstory and how he got into entrepreneurship at an early age. He then talks about how he transitioned into e-commerce and eventually started his Amazon brand while still working his day job as a consultant and now, senior finance manager at Microsoft.
 
Robert also shares how he got started in the coffee niche and how good supplier terms and building a good relationship with them helped his business grow. He even managed to reach $2 million in sales in his first year!
 
Despite having a full-time job, Robert managed to run his Amazon business successfully and with the help of agencies for other aspects of his business. His ultimate goal was to get his brands into retail, and he shares the process of getting into 4,000 Walmart retail stores.
 
Robert also talks about lightning deals and a new emerging marketplace called Faire that he uses to market his products and get them into mom-and-pop shops across the country. And as for his goal for 2023? You’ll have to tune in to find out!

In episode 448 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Robert discuss:

• 02:02 – Robert’s Backstory And His Early Start In Entrepreneurship
• 05:48 – How He Got Into E-commerce And Amazon
• 08:32 – Working A Day Job While Starting An Amazon Brand On The Side
• 10:22 – How Robert Got Started In The Coffee Niche
• 12:20 – $2 Million In Sales In His First Year
• 14:13 – How Good Supplier Terms Helped His Business Grow
• 14:50 – Building A Good Relationship With Suppliers Help
• 15:58 – Running His Amazon Business With A Full-Time Job
• 18:52 – Working As A Senior Finance Manager In Microsoft
• 20:26 – Reached $4 Million In Sales In 2022
• 20:56 – Leveraging Agencies For Other Aspects Of His Business
• 23:06 – The Goal Was To Get His Brands Into Retail
• 23:45– The Process On Getting Into 4,000 Walmart Retail Stores
• 25:10 – Lightning Deals And Other Strategies Robert Uses
• 28:35 – Marketplace To Get Your Products Into Mom & Pop Shops
• 30:59 – What Is Robert’s Goal This 2023?

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Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today we’ve got a seller who’s still working his everyday full-time job, but on the side, he’s been able to grow his online brand to over $4 million of revenue. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think.

Bradley Sutton:

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Robert:

What’s going on Bradley? Thanks for having me.

Bradley Sutton:

Thanks for being here. It’s pretty cool that you’re here. We just had some technical difficulties. Made him wait for like 10 minutes as my audio was having issues, but, but he’s a trooper here, and that’s kind of like probably like part of the theme I should say, of what we were gonna be talking about today. Now I remember meeting you at the prosperous show. You know, you came by your booth and I was like, just learning a little bit about you. I’m like, hold on, say no more. Say no more. This sounds like an interesting story. I don’t wanna find out about it with the, with everybody else. So let’s start with your origin. You just told me a couple minutes ago you’re in the Georgia area right now. Is that where you were born and raised?

Robert:

No, so I was actually born and raised in Venezuela. So up to the age of 10 parents moved to the US and yeah, for the majority of, of the rest of so far we’ve been in Georgia, north of Atlanta.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, excellent. Now, upon graduation of high school what, like how long did it take you to learn English as a 10 year old? 10 year old is early enough to pick it up pretty fast, I would imagine. Like me, I’m trying to learn languages now and it’s like impossible.

Robert:

I couldn’t imagine, I couldn’t imagine learning a language. Yeah. So at that age is still early enough that you can learn it pretty fast, ESL classes and all that. But I always say it’s still, 10 years it’s been there my first 10 years. I still remember. And I still speak Spanish obviously just as fluent as as I speak English. So it was definitely somewhat tough. As I remember at those times, but looking back at it, obviously way easier than trying to learn as an adult, that’s for sure. So yeah, did middle school and high school here in the US and then after that obviously college as well.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome. All right. So after you graduated high school, did you, did you stay local for college or did you go to college? What did you do?

Robert:

So I was kind of one of those kids that from early on, I somehow like found a computer, found Photoshop, started doing design and like selling websites when I was in high school. And so I always thought I was gonna be an entrepreneur, but late high school, I basically thought, how,

Bradley Sutton:

How do you sell websites in high school?

Robert:

Yeah. Yeah. So I so I got into one thing led to another, basically selling design, like signatures for like $5 on forums that kind of hustle being a, a 13, 14 year old. And then that led to I saw websites being sold on Flippa, which used to be called SitePoint. And so I, I think I remember one summer I made almost $30,000 selling websites, and my parents thought I was doing something illegal and everything, but yeah, I was always just kind of tinkering.

Bradley Sutton:

$30,000 in a month. You were 15 there?

Robert:

In the summer, but yeah, that felt like I was rich. I didn’t know what to do with that much money at that time.

Bradley Sutton:

No, you were rich. If you make $30,000 as a 14-15 year old, a teenager, that’s rich.

Robert:

Yeah. Yeah. I felt rich. So that’s kind of what got me started a little bit into entrepreneur and stuff, so.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. So, so then did you attend a university or, or did just go straight into like doing business basically?

Robert:

I still had good grades in high school. I never really took it too serious I played baseball. I didn’t really like school. I honestly didn’t, I didn’t get too used to school when moving to the US I kind of struggled with it, to be honest. But then towards the end of high school, I figured I shoot, I need to like apply for colleges and go to college and stuff like that. And I was never really thinking too much of it first generation also here in the US it’s not like our parents really knew the, the way to how to apply and all that. I just felt like towards the end of college, I saw more people doing it, so I had to apply to college, and so I did. And so one thing led to another and, and I’d like finance, I like business. So yeah, I went to my undergrad in, in finance, and so that led kind of a, a dual path that I’ve been following ever since of kind of having a career in a corporate route, but at the same time kind of always wanting to be an entrepreneur and trying things on the side. So that’s kind of where the split happened.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. So did the website thing like stop being so lucrative, or, hey, if, if I was making $30,000 a month or two months or something, like, I’m not gonna stop that. So like, how, how did you migrate into to kind of more e-commerce and, and selling online?

Robert:

Yeah, so that happened. And then obviously being in high school, you take your eyes off of it, you don’t know what business really means. And then obviously that dried out after a while. And so it was one thing after another kind of trying little projects with friends and stuff on the side. But it wasn’t until 2012, which was basically a couple years after graduating high school while I was in college that I got into Amazon. And yeah, so that’s a whole nother story in itself. Didn’t get into it properly, but that’s kind of where my, e-com journey began.

Bradley Sutton:

What do you mean by didn’t get into it properly?

Robert:

Well being in college kind of not, not having a fully developed brain there. I started selling there was one weekend I found, kind of went online and found this equivalent of like Alibaba back in the day where you could find goods. And I thought I saw some OtterBox cases, not sure if you know what what those are, but those were total hit in the early 2010s. And so I bought a couple, and a couple turned into they sold out and more and more. And next thing you know, a couple months later, basically I had a copy of a lawsuit in the mail from auto products. They caught one of my accounts on eBay. And I had, I was suspended from Amazon and all that, so I didn’t really at the time put two and two together, like private label like this whole thing. I was just kind of trying to make a quick buck likely. And so, yeah, it took many years after that to be able to kind of open a new account and start off fresh as an actual business with my own brand.

Bradley Sutton:

So what year were you talking about when these things were happening?

Robert:

This was 2012 early late 2012, early 2013, that I got banned and went through all this and then back and forth with the lawyers and everything and took a while. And it wasn’t until 2016 that I think I opened a another account. And so like that late 2017 was when I really launched my first brand. So it took, it was a big gap in between there. Obviously my career-wise was going really well. I got some really nice internships. Started my career in finance, did a two year program where I moved around in the US and did all these things. And so ultimately got my MBA and all that later on. But at the time I was still doing consulting. My main client was Facebook actually. So I was out in the west coast a lot and on the side trying to launch an Amazon brand.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, interesting, interesting. Now throughout this tim, you’re still working full-time quote unquote for the man. Now what, what happened with that, that brand that you, you started on Amazon? Like, what was the peak of it? Like, like what kind of level did you get to with that notebook brand? Yeah,

Robert:

So it was kind of thrilling. You know, I had a really great job at this time, I’m late twenties already making six figures. But at the same time, there was this urge to kind of do this on the side. And, and so like, I was trying to do it. I always saw it as ultimately I want this to be a company and a business rather than like a side kind of hustle and just make a couple bucks. So from the get-go, I tried to take it a lot more serious, at least a lot more serious than the amount of cash I had to do it with. But yeah, at first I remember launching basically last days of October, it was holiday season, obviously, and I’m launching a planner, so think of a you know, a planner you write in monthly, weekly it’s undated, so you could kind of use it all year round.

Robert:

But I was launching in the holidays, and I remember the November, December, I think I sold maybe $20,000 my first month in like 20,000-30,000, like in December. So it was like, wow like right away you’re seeing like, that feels like a a ton. And so like, okay, launch more variations and everything at start of, as to start the year in 2018. And so what happened with that first batch is you, a lot of lessons learned there. You know, there was some manufacturing defects, so kind of ruined the reviews right away and had to relaunch to begin 2018. And so basically that whole year was kind of like at the, at that same kind of level, right? So I, I scaled it to 20, 30,000 a month in sales. It was good margins and all back then, obviously no ads <laugh> or anything like that. So it was great, great times, but I really always kind of saw it as like, oh, I need to maybe like branch out into a brand in the home and kitchen space or something that was more like high volume like I saw this as office products may be declining long term. And so like overall I just wanted to, to have a brand I could get behind and, and be in, in a more competitive category.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. All right. So then what was your next step?

Robert:

Yeah, so at this time, mid 2018, I’m still with this first brand. I’m thinking getting to another brand. I just started my MBA, so it was like, as part of my MBA in 2019, early 2019, we were going to China anyways, right? So it was like, okay, I was looking into another brand at the same time, looking for suppliers. So like what I could start and I see like kind of coffee products that’s kind of cool. It’s something I understand. I saw a couple other kind of niches, but like I was kind of set with this one supplier that I had met, and they had this product that they were developing. It was a coffee grinder. At the time I didn’t like their current model it was already being sold and everything, but they had this new model that I really liked.

Robert:

I told them like, no, thank you, but like maybe down the line once that model is finished. So it turns out like it was good timing as well. I was going to China and kind of trying to launch this cafe brand in mid 2019. That’s when I ultimately launched it. So I was in China in March for about a month. So I went two weeks with my, as part of my mba, and then stayed an extra couple weeks at the Canton Fair, met the supplier, and so ultimately decided to, to place a PO to launch this one SKU. You know, it was a coffee grinder, launched it mid 2019 and kind of just took it very serious by that point. I was determined to make it work. I saw it was a very competitive category, obviously. There were already big sellers, not just big sellers, but brands sold by Amazon one piece. And, and I just we took it very serious on the launch and just the branding and everything and, and everything was with the mission, kind of like to get it into retail one day or just kind of look bigger than it was and come out with a roadmap of coffee products. But yeah, that was mid 2019.

Bradley Sutton:

Mid 2019. So 2020 was your first full year with this new coffee brand, and what did you generate in revenue for that, for that year?

Robert:

Yeah, so 2020 obviously a crazy year cuz of Covid. But that year was able to do just about $2 million in despite being out of stock for long periods of time. You know, we were doing $600,000 in a couple weeks and then outta stock for a whole lot of weeks, right. And then on and off again. So it was a roller coaster of a year and definitely a lot of lessons learned there, growing pains, all those kind of words. But really like my second b a I call it was basically covid times and supply chain kind of crisis that were going on. So yeah, that was 2 million, you know yeah, at, at the time. It took a lot to be able to get there because if you think the year before we were doing just barely in, into the six figures, right?

Robert:

I think in 2019 when I had kind of both brands, but the the second one was new. I did maybe half a million dollars or so right to scale from there to 2 million. It kind of sounds easy, but a lot of things have to happen. And one of those things that had to happen was kind of the capital just the supplier terms, for example, right? So like before Covid I kind of had the standard supplier terms where you pay a deposit, which is normally like 30% or so, and then you pay the remaining 70% before the goods even leave China Sure. Before they get to the US right? And so given those terms, I would not have been able to scale at all because I just didn’t have the capital for it. Right. And being a consumer goods product business, you need more inventory, the better your product does, right? And so being bootstrapped that was just not an option. And so I had to negotiate really tough terms with the supplier that really allowed the risk to be kind of transferred to them and quite frankly for us to place bigger POs and be able to scale the products and and so on. So that was kind of 2020. Now,

Bradley Sutton:

Now this supplier was somebody you had met in person though, right? And like had a personal relationship with cuz you had visited them. So like you think that helped with this negotiation?

Robert:

I would say it didn’t hurt, that’s for sure. So I always tell people that are kind of trying to get in the space, you can always go to Alibaba, meet suppliers there and really kind of start fostering the relationship start messaging. But it’s not quite the same as I went to their factory, took a bullet train in the middle of nowhere. You know, he had me out to eat snake I ate snake that to them it’s like something you sit down and share like a delicacy I ate the gallbladder of the snake like that kind of relationship you can’t really do through. Yeah, it was terrible.

Bradley Sutton:

That’s some fear factor level stuff. Fear factor. Exactly. Exactly. I’ll be like, no.

Robert:

Everyone around the lazy susan, wow. Like, here you go the guest gets the gallbladder. So that was something, but that definitely helped. And you know, it’s a smaller factory, right? So it’s the owner, right? So I’m communicating directly with the owner. And so he saw us from the beginning, right? This was our first product. He saw it come from nothing to then, Hey, you’re getting POs and you’re getting all this traction, so we’ll grow our coffee selection through you as well. Right? So that was kind of like key and definitely a huge risk that I’ve seen huge sellers I know personally friends that are huge sellers and they can’t necessarily get those terms with their suppliers. You know, some suppliers are a lot bigger. They just simply don’t take those with their sellers.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. I don’t take the risk of eating snake gallbladder in myself .Hey to the victor of the spoils now, now 2 million, that, that’s still a significant amount regardless, but you are working full-time. So at this point, were you still doing everything by yourself or did you hire a staff, did you have virtual assistants or what was going on here?

Robert:

Yeah, so at that point I had a couple of maybe virtual assistants that I tried here and there, and it was always kind of like, ah, didn’t quite work out cuz maybe they were part-time or this and that, but I was essentially doing everything by myself. Yes. it was basically a one-man show. I had a couple people to help slightly, mainly on like the design part or things that I could do from back in the day, but like, I was just simply not gonna do. But certainly it was a one-man show on anything from sourcing all the way to,

Bradley Sutton:

So like managing your own PPC.

Robert:

Transfers to Amazon, setting up like channels outside of Amazon, setting up the infrastructure for that, setting up. Absolutely everything you could imagine I was the expert at, within the business. And that kind of, yeah, it took a toll on me. Okay. Thankfully COVID meant lockdown. So before Covid I was working for for a, a finance software company doing consulting. So I was traveling kind of a good bit. Like I said, Facebook was one of my main clients, so I was back and forth from the west coast, but Covid kind of shut everything down. And so that allowed me to really I was kind of cruise controlling on the corporate side for a little while at least. And so like this was right when everything was picking up with the Amazon stuff. So it was really a lot of long days and there was not much else to do cuz of Covid.

Bradley Sutton:

So 2020 2 million of sales, beginning of 2021 aggregator’s interest in your brand. What but fell through. What did you end of approximately 2021 in sales? Did you already increase on that 2 million?

Robert:

Yeah, so 2021 was probably toughest year on the supply chain side. You know, still managed with the same selection not really launching any new products cuz it was just so hectic hard to launch products during that time. We did almost 2.6 or so, so yeah, still increased it. The sales opened up channels outside of Amazon. I think that that year did you know, well into six figures, more than half a million or so in sales outside of Amazon, which was great great margins and all. And yeah, overall just got through it.

Bradley Sutton:

What were some of the main the main marketplaces that made up though, those six figures of, of sales? Yeah, so

Robert:

We were on all the dot coms. It took a while to open up like vendor rela, little vendor relationships like target.com macy’s dot com, home depot.com, qvc.com you know, walmart.com, it’s marketplace. But yeah, all the .coms they, they make a pretty even amount of the sales. And we have some like, pretty niche kind of channels like gift gifting kind of channels that are whoa and we just sell a whole lot through. And that’s, that’s great. But yeah, it was always a thought to kind of diversify from just Amazon to kind of an approach to being a company.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. Now was it in 2021, 2022 when you got this other job that kind of piqued my interest is what you told me at Prosper? Where you’re currently working now?

Robert:

Yeah, so what had happened was I had quit my consulting job probably I think it was late 2020 or something, right? Cuz I was like, okay, I, this thing is going either well or I’m gonna sell or whatever it is. Anyways I, I didn’t see long term in the corporate world, I’m gonna just quit and focus on this. And I did, I was that way kind of, it was almost nine months the deal didn’t go through. And so you know, recruiters are kind of always reaching out. You know, I had finished my MBA at the end of 20, 20 19 as well, so that was also happening. And mid 2021 I got a couple of recruiters reaching out. One was from LinkedIn and the other one actually was from Microsoft. So interesting enough, Microsoft owns LinkedIn, but I had two job offers for both companies separately. And yeah, ultimately it was a really good offer for Microsoft, fully remote. The team is in Seattle, but I’m here east coast and you know, as a senior finance manager. And so I took that and I’ve been there almost two years now that, that I’m coming around to finally leaving the position. Okay.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, now 2022. Now you’re working full-time Microsoft, and I’m assuming you’re scaling your business, so like what, what last year? No, that’s not last. Wait, it is last year. What year are we here? I worked in 2022. I don’t even know what year. Like yeah, time is flying by so fast. It’s already like middle of Q2 and 2023. I don’t even know what or when we are anyway, so then what last year did you end your, your sales with? Yeah,

Robert:

Last year was pretty good increase. We did almost 4 million. So that was good to be able to increase that while not necessarily increasing the, the employees or anything. You know, I’ve been essentially a one-man show. I do have, you know about 10 employees now, but really no one handling like the general managing of, of absolutely every aspect. Still I’m that involved.

Bradley Sutton:

So what are your 10 employees doing? So are they full-time or are they like part-time doing little different things here and there?

Robert:

Six or seven are full-time. Yeah, so think of one for fulfillment orders outside of Amazon, right? So we have a warehouse there’s one person that goes every day just to fulfill those orders cuz you know we have vendor relationships, so they pay for shipping, right? So we have to ship some of those products. We have customer service that is handled. We have one for logistics now we have one for obviously design which is very important. And then I think there’s a couple others. But the key thing is I try to leverage a lot our partners like agencies and stuff. So like and I can go further into all that with a new kind of announcement of how, how we’re going into retail and stuff. But yeah, we leverage agencies for supply chain production management, PR, influencers, affiliate management, all these kind of things that if you use ’em correctly, they lead to better than employees, right? Because they’re only in, they’re incentivized to kind of like do well kind of take care of their, their customers.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Interesting. So when you say 4 million, is that on Amazon or that’s across that all platform?

Robert:

That’s across all platforms. But outside of Amazon, it was still, it was pretty stagnant from the year before, maybe upwards of, of 600 or so thousand. So it was mainly Amazon over 3 million on Amazon. And then the rest there key thing is like we’re–

Bradley Sutton:

Only Amazon USA or other Amazon?

Robert:

Amazon USA. Okay. essentially with a small amount of SKUs you’re talking about basically 90 plus percent of those sales came from less than 10 SKUs so it’s, it’s a pretty good distribution there. And yeah, I think we’re trending a lot better so in December alone we did a million dollars and so that was great. You know, kind of like iconic moment that you think well, you would’ve never thought, like when starting a business right? Online, you’re, you’re thinking way too small back then. But yeah, that was, that was good. And we’re training a lot better and yeah, a lot of momentum outside of Amazon as well

Bradley Sutton:

So then you also said you got into retail. Talk a little bit about how that happened and then, and then what that process was like. Yeah,

Robert:

So like I said when launching cafe, the second brand I launched the goal was always to try to get into retail, right? So everything from, from the get-go, right? Way before we were even on Amazon, as I’m just thinking of the products, the packaging we were gonna use UPCB everything as small details as using UPC barcodes instead of the Amazon barcodes, right? From way back then, just because if you go into retail, you use the same barcodes, right? Just little things like that working on the packaging so that it’s kind of retail ready, somewhat, right? And, and just like getting certifications for it and just like reaching out to buyers with it. And so it’s been a lot of work. You know, we’ve gotten into a lot of the dot coms as vendors, which is still hard, but it’s not the physical retail.

Robert:

And so like thankfully last year after a lot of work visiting, you know Walmart headquarters a couple times, so we, we went to a line review with Walmart, and so we have a couple of our products now going into 4,000 Walmart locations. So essentially every Walmart in the US. And so that’s obviously a huge deal. It’s been in the works for a lot of months. But we’re finally delivering the products here in this next month, in in May. So that’s kind of an iconic moment for us. It’s awesome. It’s huge. A lot of work.

Bradley Sutton:

So have you seen the PO already?

Robert:

Yeah. It’s huge.

Bradley Sutton:

Is that like a seven, six figure PO? Seven figure PO?

Robert:

Six figures, but it’s only supposed to be enough for one po a couple weeks, so it should be a good time. Wow.

Bradley Sutton:

Mid six figures for a couple weeks of sales. That’s, yeah, that’s why I tell everybody, like once you get into 4,000 Walmart stores, that’s like, you know that that’s bigger than Amazon pretty much. Now I’m looking at your listing right now. So like, like right now it looks like you’re in the midst of a lightning deal looks like.

Robert:

Yeah, perhaps. Yeah. Yeah. Just a lightning deal one day or a couple.

Bradley Sutton:

See, I love it. You don’t even know what’s going on. You got a team who’s managing this stuff now. So is Lightning Deals something that you guys or deals of the day and things like that? Is that something that you guys do a lot or leverage.

Robert:

We do lightning deals, yes. They, they do help a lot. And we ran in trouble with those back in the day because those are guided by your last retail price or your, like your moving average price of what you retail at. So we used to run just like cut our price and try to run a lower price and then that would affect our Lightning deals and our seven day deals, and then we would have to run those deals at almost unprofitable at times back, back then. Right. So it took a while to be able to kind of gain some knowledge there and, and keep our retails kind of mapped out so that we’re able to run the deals at prices that still make sense for us.

Bradley Sutton:

Cool. Cool. Now what are some other strategies? You know, so we talked about lightning deals. I mean, obviously you have a well optimized listing these are just the basics things, but you know, frequent Lightning deals might not be something, something that’s a common strategy. So what are some other like maybe unique strategies you think that has really helped you get to this level where you’re at that, that maybe you can share with everybody?

Robert:

Yeah, certainly. I mean, we talked Lightning deals in seven day deals. I think if your product starts to perform well enough, you offer those seven day deals and that’s very important. You gain a lot of traction that week that you run those and obviously helps your organic ranking. We’ve kind of tried it all where we’ve tried everything from editorial recommendations. We try affiliate marketing, right? I think just today we were featured on the Kelly Clarkson show, so like you know, their Instagram has 1.5 million followers and they just kind of gain affiliate dollars from that, so when, once your listing starts to become more popular as well, more reviews, it’s more likely to kind of get picked up in different things, like people running videos, like UGCs and stuff, cuz they also kind of get affiliate dollars from it. Well,

Bradley Sutton:

How did you get on that show though? Like, like did you, was that something you did or they just like reached out to you? So

Robert:

That one was, they didn’t even reach out and yeah, we, we just found out by, I found out through a friend, they were scrolling their feet and saw it and sent it to us. So I, we literally had no clue on that one. Wow. But yeah now as of the past couple months, one of the things that we’re doing more of like I said with agencies is we have a PR agency and so they seek pr specifically like around our brand and, and our story and all that. And we also have an agency that handles influencers and, and affiliates. So they look specifically for like big media publications that are wanting to kind of feature our products and gain some affiliate dollars from it. So it’s kind of one of those streams where it, it can’t hurt but it’s about flowing sales from every direction Google ads, we’ve tried obviously, and, and all these kind of things to create the flywheel.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Now you, you’re on a lot of different websites you said and .com and things like that. So I think you would agree with the statement that, hey, start on amazon.com maybe number two Walmart and or your own website to start building your brand. And then obviously with a long-term goal of getting into Walmart stores. But if we’re just talking about online marketplaces, other than what what I almost call the big three is amazon, walmart.com, your own website, what would you say is the next couple of ones that you think give the most bang for the buck? Like are we like talking like Target or something or, or what website you think people might be sleeping on?

Robert:

I’ll give you the obvious ones. Obviously if you can get into Target, if you can get into Macy’s, all those are worth it just for the name alone, even if you’re not selling much, right? You associate your brand with being in those retailers, which not everybody can do. But I’ll give you a true sleeper and I’ll give you the quick story of how I found it. So I don’t know if you’ve heard of fair.com, have you ever heard of Fair? It’s essentially fair.com is a marketplace, it’s a like a unicorn startup. So it’s like huge I think value at like 10 billion or so. So it’s a big marketplace, but for like, think of like for mom and pop shops, right? So if you, if you own like a boutique or you own like a little coffee shop, you need to source goods for your store, right?

Robert:

And so you go to fair.com and, and that’s where you kind of buy them. But I came across because my my wife and I were on a road trip in Cali down the US one, and we stopped at this coffee shop and the coffee shop had like amazing items like all different brands, but they were like really nice. And I was like, wow, there’s no way that the coffee shop owner here is sourcing all these, or private labeling all these just no way, right? And so I, I, I asked the lady that was in the corner, I kind of do an inventory on a pad, like where do you you know, like, where do you source all these? And she said, oh, fair. And I was like, okay, note it. So I just kind of tapped it, went along with my road trip, got home, looked at fair, onboarded in there and essentially you’re selling to like physical locations so that’s the great thing. It’s like we’ve now sold over a hundred thousand dollars worth of products through fair after just kind of finding out randomly. And I get like pictures and stuff from friends from time to time like, Hey, I’m in this random coffee shop in North Carolina and I see your products here. Like how’d it get here? Or like, Hey, what is your product doing in the middle? You know? And so that’s amazing. And, and so like we have over a thousand customers.

Bradley Sutton:

So I mean, not only are getting sales from there, but you know, like customers who are just going to coffee shops and they’re like, man, this tastes good. Or they’re looking there and then they might be going home or just right there going on their Amazon app and looking up your brand. And so who knows what kind of residual benefit it is. I like it. Yeah.

Robert:

And sales are easy to fulfill their, their repeat purchase because you know, they’re buying for their coffee shop or their little store. And so like once they sell it, they’ll buy again. And so yeah, it’s one of those things where it’s it’s a little unlock and it’s, it’s worth a lot more than just the money it brings in, but rather your product having distribution and being out there spreading out your brand. And so that, that’s means a lot.

Bradley Sutton:

Cool. So it sounds like throughout this time you’ve been working full-time, you’ve hired staff though to, to help you, but is is 2023 the, the year that you’re gonna, you’re gonna retire from working for the man and now go all into your business and like, what’s your goals for your brand?

Robert:

Yeah, so it’s, it’s really good timing cuz I’m actually in the process of that, of, of quitting my job. It’s just coincidence that, that I’m on the pod and we’re talking about it. So, yeah being on Amazon, being on Amazon seller a lot of times and most Amazon sellers, like you said, we’re behind the curtain and we don’t care to be behind the curtain. We kind of hide behind our brands historically because who cares to know the, the founder, right? Like but with the whole Walmart thing where we’re now starting to be reached out for press or like interviews and, and just like overall you’re on the shelf. So like the brands kind of need a customer facing sort of name. And so like, it’s kind of the time to, to do it just because it, it’s kind of grown to the point where it also doesn’t make sense to stay.

Robert:

I almost wish my job wasn’t as good and didn’t pay as well or didn’t offer as much. Cuz then it would’ve made it a lot easier to, to quit a long time ago. But it’s allowed me to kind of really scale the team and just kind of go as long as I could before making that leap. So it’s not the first time I make the leap I did quit like I told you back in in the 2020. But this time hopefully it’s for good. And just to be able to fully take care of and run the company.

Bradley Sutton:

Cool, cool. Well definitely want to reach out to you maybe in a year or so and see how retired life is suiting you probably you’ll find that you’re actually probably working more than.

Robert:

Yeah. I wouldn’t say retired life

Bradley Sutton:

When you’re working full-time,

Robert:

Retired life. Yeah, you can word that differently. I would say committed to the game life.

Bradley Sutton:

There you go. There you go. Love it. Alright, well thank you so much for joining us and, and telling us about your journeys. Very inspiring and there’s people out there who, who might be in the similar shoes as you a few years ago. They’re still working full-time and they might have thought, man, I, the only way to scale my business is by quitting my job and just giving it full-time, right from the get go. But I think you’ve proven that, hey, no, there’s, there’s, there’s different ways to do it. You could still scale a business as long as you have good help while you’re, while you’re still in you know a great job that, that you might have, that you might like and find success. So it’s really great to, to see what you’ve accomplished and I look forward to seeing what you accomplished in the next couple of years.

Robert:

Appreciate that, Bradley. I hope I’m able to be back and tell really good stories by then.

#447 - Walmart Launches, PPC, & Getting Reviews

In this special Serious Sellers Podcast episode, Carrie Miller and David Milstein of SellCord discuss all things Walmart.com. David shares his expertise and strategies for PPC, seller requirements, launch strategies, customer reviews, and listing optimization.
 
The episode starts with a discussion on the common mistakes sellers make when launching on Walmart and how to avoid them. David also sheds light on the improvements in Walmart’s PPC and how Adtomic is a game-changer for Walmart PPC.
 
You’ll get insights into what new features they should look out for on Walmart, and the requirements to become a Walmart seller, and the common reasons why sellers get denied.
 
David also answers the question of whether gated and un-gated products are the same as in Amazon and whether Walmart’s Brand Portal defends brand owners. He further elaborates on how to get reviews on Walmart and whether supplement selling is competitive on Walmart.
 
So, if you’re looking to expand your Amazon business and sell on Walmart, this is an episode you don’t want to miss!

In episode 447 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Carrie and David discuss:

• 02:35 – Common Mistakes Sellers Make When Launching On Walmart
• 06:44 – Improvements On Walmart PPC
• 10:15 – How Adtomic Is A Game-Changer For Walmart PPC
• 11:20 – What New Features Should We Look Out For?
• 18:30 – Requirements To Become A Walmart Seller
• 20:12 – Read Carrie’s Blog On How International Sellers Can Start Selling On Walmart
• 20:35 – Common Reasons Why Sellers Get Denied
• 22:32 – Gated And Ungated Products The Same As In Amazon?
• 24:02 – Does Walmart Brand Portal Defend Brand Owners?
• 26:51 – How Do You Get Reviews On Walmart?
• 31:35 – Is Supplement Selling Competitive In Walmart?
• 33:31 – Can Google Ads Be Used Instead Of PPC In Walmart?
• 35:17 – Should I Launch A New Product In Amazon Or Walmart?
• 37:29 – Watch David Milstein’s Modules Inside Freedom Ticket
• 38:02 – How To Get In Touch With David And SellCord

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

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today we’ve got an expert on the show who’s gonna answer all of your top questions about walmart.com, everything from launch strategy to customer reviews, to listing optimization and more. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think

Bradley Sutton:

If you guys would like to network with other Walmart sellers, make sure join our brand new Facebook group called Helium 10 Winning with Walmart. You can actually just search for that on Facebook, or you can actually go to h10.me/walmartgroup, and you can go directly to that page. So make sure to join, you can tag me and carry with questions, and ask questions of other Walmart sellers or even share your own experiences in that Facebook group. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s our Walmart Wednesday show of the month, where we bring on an expert guest each month to talk about all of your questions that you guys are giving live and also through the Facebook groups on Walmart. So this month we are bringing onto the show David, who’s gonna be talking about, you know, product launches and how they’re different listing optimization strategy and migrating reviews over to Walmart. I mean, I think a lot of us who sell on Amazon, we would love to be able to start off an Amazon listing with reviews already, but did you know you could do that actually on Walmart? They’re gonna be talking about that. So as always, we have Carrie as our host of this special show. So Carrie and David, take it away.

Carrie:

Hello everyone, and welcome to Winning with Walmart Wednesday. I’m so glad to see you all here again on this Wednesday to go over some Walmart content with you today. We have a very special guest today. His name is David Milstein. He is from SellCord, and I actually have learned a ton from David. He actually taught me quite a bit of just the technical aspects about Walmart. So he is a wealth of knowledge, so I’m very, very excited to have him on today. So I’m gonna go ahead and bring him on.

David:

Hey, Carrie, great to see you as usual.

Carrie:

Thanks so much for joining us. I know you’ve got a lot of great info to share, so I’m excited. All right, let’s go ahead and get started, David, because I think we have some good questions to ask you. And then I really wanna get into questions that people have. We get a lot of questions in our Walmart groups, so I definitely wanna just answer any questions that people have. Alright, so let’s go ahead and start with my first question. You know, when people are launching, I get a lot of questions about, you know, launching and people, you know, starting off successfully on Walmart. When people launch, what are some common mistakes that they make when they are launching on their Walmart account in general, or just their first products? What do you think are the most common mistakes?

David:

For sure. So it’s definitely a really big topic. You know, these days you’re having more and more Walmart sellers. By the day it’s the fastest growing marketplace. So everyone jumps on the marketplace and then there’s a common, you know, you make the mistakes, then you learn from it. So what are some things that, that I try generally avoid? A very common thing that people do is they’ll use their Amazon content and just expect that to work. You know, there are plenty of tools that will be able to mirror your content over to Amazon, from Amazon to Walmart rather, but unfortunately, Walmart doesn’t want that. And that’s really going to actually give you problems. I’ll give you just a brief example. Copy is a very common thing. You know, Amazon has these long winded titles, you know, a lot of keyword stuffing, a lot of repetition there.

David:

And using those on Walmart are just gonna cause issues. You know, Walmart themselves, they give you a listing quality score, which you guys should all be familiar with, and they give you some general guidelines on how to get there and we’ll discuss a little bit more on about the listing quality score. But they’ll even tell you immediately if your, if your title’s too long, you should cut that down to 75 to 120 characters max. It does depend on the category and they give you some pretty good information in what to do. But in the end of the day, it is very generic and category specific, so you will have to do more research. But just using your Amazon copy is a big issue that a lot of people have because firstly, your titles are way too long. And then your bullet points on Amazon are very concise and bullet pointy.

David:

You want a nice long description that’s well actually broken down instead of having bullet points, which is maybe what you would do in a key feature, which is a little different than what you would have in your descriptions. Additionally, make sure you put in the work, a lot of people assume that Amazon, oh, I do so well on Amazon. It’s crazy, you know, you see with so many of these sellers, even these eight figure sellers that they put in all this effort into Amazon and they just assume that Walmart, oh, it’s the same thing. You know, I don’t really have to like, I just take my Amazon effort and it works on Walmart. That’s so far from what it is. Yes, there’s a lot of research and you understand your product and there’s so much on the product side and maybe on the fulfillment side that you need, that you already understand.

David:

But the same way that Amazon algorithm is so complex and we need to understand how it works. So too with Walmart, this is a whole complex algorithm that you need to make sure that your content on your listing, not just the copy, but also the images, also the attributes, the category, the category path, the product that there’s so many specifics that you need to audit and make sure are correct. And people that don’t do that, you could have a beautifully written listing, but just having an incorrect product type can cause you to not rank at all. A lot of categories, paths don’t even get selected automatically. Walmart, Walmart will put it in an unavailable status, it’ll be missing and your product’s just not ranking and you’re curious as to what’s going on because your copy looks so good. You have to do the same audit and the same level of work that you put into Amazon, into Walmart.

David:

And what some people are kind of adverse to that because, oh, Amazon makes me my money now, but you have to understand Walmart is a marketplace of the future. And having that understanding that also Walmart’s very much in a growth phase. It’s some, it’s a marketplace that it’s gonna only grow with time. And we’re seeing it grow tremendously compared to Amazon. We’re growing exponentially, right? Just in the past three years, Walmart’s had about 100% year-over-year growth continually in the past three years, cu cumulatively for Amazon, it’s been about 30%. That’s a huge, a huge change. And obviously, Amazon is growing, but Walmart’s growing at such a faster speed that if you think the future, you understand that this is a marketplace that you do have to put your time into and God just throw up your listings and be like, oh, I’m not making sales anyways. Cuz that’s a big mistake. Treat it as a marketplace, give it the respect deserves and that’s what’s gonna help you succeed.

Carrie:

I’m glad that you pointed that out and I learned a lot of all that stuff from you. And I’ve, I’ve been preaching that quite a bit. Also, I wanted to talk a little bit about PPC and just like some of the impro improvements that we’ve seen with PPC So what are the improvements that you’ve seen? Just, I don’t know, we’ve been working together probably for a year and a half or so, or you’ve been on Walmart for longer than that. So what have you seen as, you know, some of the improvements for pay-per-click on Walmart?

David:

So it’s very evident that Walmart, Walmart does know that PPC is obviously such a huge factor, and if Amazon had the amount of growth in terms of their changes to PPC as Walmart had, it would be like, it’s just not possible. Walmart has made such incredible changes just over the past years that are so, these huge changes. For example, two big ones I like to focus on are second price auction. That’s such a huge concept that like, is such a constant and obvious thing in Amazon was not there in Walmart, and Walmart recognized that and they implemented it and that’s now something that has been running for something like 8-10 months at this point. And similarly at about the same time they did two placements for your organic and your advertising, your promoted placement, your sponsored placement.

David:

And that’s just so beneficial to sellers because previously, like it was very difficult to track your organic rank and you had to turn off your ads and then you had to like use, let’s say you wanted to use day partying to check when things are going on. There’s so many things it was just not conducive to an easy like to, for a solid to have a good time. So Walmart’s been doing such huge changes. Just those two things are such, so huge just on top of all the changes that they, that all the other smaller changes, if you will. I know they’ve added in, in the past year to the self-service platform being able to do bulk operations, which is another huge thing. You know, that previously things were done a little bit slower. I know it’ll take you more time now I do have some suggestions for how to run your ads better, but just it’s great to see the changes that they’re doing and I would still say there is still a while ahead to get to that point where it does become as intricate as and as complex as Amazon’s.

David:

Like there’s no negative targeting, for example, right now in Walmart. And that’s something that potentially that they’ll add in at some point, which could help with some, with how you do some of your strategies. And there’s a lot of things that will come with time. Now, I will say this, if you are looking to sell on Walmart, you gotta advertise. It’s so basic. I would say even as little as a year and a half ago, you would be able to just rank your products well with just good content, which would get you, you know, get you somewhere. And you can make sales like that organically. Even now in some categories, you rank your product as long as you are in WFS have somewhat even a few reviews is fine. And if you don’t have reviews, that’s okay.

David:

Walmart does have review accelerator program to help things out, but as long as your listing has good shipping and is price matched to Amazon, you follow the listing quality score to get yourself to a good place. You could make some sales organically, but if you really understand the potential that Walmart has, throw some money at some ad spend and learn, succeed and fail. Now you could go a few different avenues here. If you’re just want to go very simple, Walmart does have their advertising ad center, you could apply advertising.walmart.com, go ahead, sign that seller, you could fill out the application and use that portal. It’s very nice, has some decent reporting and you could do some work through there, but there’s definitely limitations in what it does offer. What I would suggest is Helium 10 recently launched Adtomic fantastic. If you kind of have a little bit of an understanding with the PPC even if you do have some questions, but you wanna rely, they have a great AI that figures out, it looks at your campaigns, it tells you how to structure them, it shows you what edits you should make to your campaign and it will do what you need to know.

David:

If you’re not so advanced with PPC and you want to kind of just like, I want to run ppc, I don’t really know how to run PPC, you put your products in there, you have a basic understanding and you’ll be able to optimize from there and make sales and that that’s the goal. But for some of the more advanced users, I would definitely head towards Pacvue. It’s a great tool, extremely robust, like it’s something we’ve been using and been being able to work with and have launched thousands of campaigns. We’re able to do so much more work than just the basic self-service platform. Just from the huge list of automation of rules that you could set up as well as well as any sort of just, just bulk operations. So much more than that of the Walmart self-service portal.

David:

There’s so much you could do with the reporting. You could have multiple accounts in there. And I do wanna mention the reporting is huge. You know, if you wanna be able to really grow your PPC as you would, whether Amazon or Walmart, you gotta be able to look at those reports and the Pacvue reports that able to download really clean, you’re able to see. I was just looking at some basic things I’ll give an example here. I was looking to launch Rich Media for one of our accounts, which for those of you that are unaware, this is a great way to help boost your listings conversion rate, which has ads in right now. Videos and feature sets, which is Walmart’s version of PPC in general Rich Media is Walmart’s version of A+ content.

David:

Unfortunately, unlike Amazon right now, it’s a paid service. You can’t just put it directly on your listing to a regular picture, but it is, it is something that you could get on your listing through third party service providers. Now I was looking into doing this for one of the, one of the council manage, and what I want to see is I want to see my conversion rate between not impressions necessary to clicks because the impression doesn’t show you if it has rich media, but the clicks to orders, that’s gonna be the best place where I can see, oh, the lower conversion rate, obviously there’s something in my listing that’s not working and just downloading your report from Pack View, I could see that information and that helps me now determine, okay, here I have a 2% conversion rate, I wanna be better, I wanna get a close a 15% conversion rate.

David:

Let me see if adding rich media for a month. And I test that out and it’s just, that’s just one example you could see. I just identify from there where the problems lie. Oh, I just see that this has a really little conversion rate. Maybe it’s cuz my WFS it’s out of stock and WFS maybe the reviews, maybe I have two bad reviews on it. Maybe the copy just says some very basic three lines. You know, being able to use the data from all these different sources, the reports Walmart gives you, the reports that you could download from an ad platform. Putting all that data together will show you, here are your problems. And in the end of the day with Walmart, there’s no reason your listing shouldn’t succeed. Aside from a very few points, you’ll notice it’s either out of stock, which is a low stock issue, you have very bad reviews, or your pricing is much, much higher than the standard for your main keywords.

David:

And that’s something you should definitely be taking a look at competitive, look at your competitors and see where you fall in price-wise. One reason where you might see a little bit of issues with succeeding is if you’re in a really niche product. Niche products tend to not do as well on Walmart as they do on Amazon. And more generic products do well on Walmart, which is, it might sound bad if you have let’s say a very niche product than brand, but as a seller, the way I would go about it is this actually means that there’s opportunity to make a more generic product who doesn’t wanna sell more generic product. It’s much easier to source. And I could just put that on there. And if I can make sales on Walmart, that’s crazy. I’ll just give a brief example here. If you go to Walmart right now, look up a garlic press, which on Amazon it’s, it’s known to be like the most generic product that everyone is on.

David:

You could see that Walmart ability for you to be able to sell that product. Like you could look on the front page. How many of those listings are under 10 reviews? How many of them don’t have two day shipping? How many of them are overpriced for the market? Like yeah, there are some really hot, solid listings, but you could be on the front page in, in Walmart within, I would say a month or two if you have a quality listing that you put up over there, which just, it’s crazy to show the opportunity that exists there. And with the proper setup for your listings and the proper structure with your advertising to be able to push sales, get some eyes on your listings, you could really succeed.

Carrie:

Yeah, I think that you guys have actually launched some home products, right? And did pretty well. That’s kind of one of your strategies is finding those opportunities on Walmart and just launching directly on Walmart. So that’s, that’s a really good opportunity. All right, so my last question before we get into the questions. What are some things that you think we have to look forward to on Walmart? Any insights about what Walmart might be coming out with soon?

David:

For sure. As we’ve mentioned a few times already, Walmart’s had such crazy things over just the past year, a year and a half, just from the launch of WFS. That’s even been a relatively newer thing that Walmart has. And from when we started, we were one of the first sellers that were g able to get in with the program and then it launched, it was like one warehouse, two warehouse. Now they’re gonna be launching this year. There’s even been some accounts in beta, they called it previously the ICC program. Now it’s the ITS program, inbound transfer service where because WFS fulfillment centers are located all across the US and it’s an algorithm for how they assign you to the warehouse. Sometimes it’s a very high shipping cost to get it there.

David:

So what Walmart has done now is to have these inbound transfer centers where if you send your inventory to their first, it does have a little bit of an extra fee, but it’s definitely worth it and they’ll then send that to the FCS accordingly. So that’s something that is debuting for all sellers starting May 15th I believe. But you might have already gotten to beta and maybe some emails about that. Some other great things which we have heard some speculation about but don’t necessarily have saw launch dates for, which we’re very excited for firstly is the subscription model. We all love our subscribe and save, you know, that recurring revenue is fantastic. We all love it. So the fact that that is something that Walmart’s been hinting and alluding that it’s coming soon, we are super stoked for that. It’s already live with the Walmart business side of things, which just shows like it’s in testing just to see how they could figure it out in terms of whether it’s fulfillment or just internal system structures.

David:

Some other things we’re looking forward to is, we’ve heard some rumors about virtual bundles. It’s something that will be coming to Walmart, which is another great way for, to boost your catalog, build your catalog. You know, right now the way listings work is you need to have unique UPC for every product. So if you wanna sell a multi-pack or if you wanna sell, let’s say two different listings together, you would have to then send it into WFS bundle together with the same with the new UPC. And this kind of makes forecasting very difficult. You’d have to really figure things out with numbers and you might end up having, being stuck with a two-pack or a three pack, cuz that never sells because the single pack on the four pack itself, it just causes all sorts of issues by having to figure these things out right now.

David:

And the fact that virtual bundles is something that we hear are coming is just, that’s a big relief. You know, it lets us really help. Okay, I can have a bunch of new listings live on the platform that will could succeed now and I can just use my old data to see that. So that’s gonna be very exciting. And the last thing I’m really excited for is stores additionally here. We, we believe this is something that will be coming soon the same way we have our Amazon stores where we get to pretty much have our own website within Amazon that beautifully displays our products and so many different ways. I can’t wait to see what Walmart does with that.  I’m sure it’ll be amazing.

Carrie:

Yeah, those are some really cool updates. I’m really excited. I think a lot of people will be pretty excited about, especially this subscribe and save a lot of people’s selling supplements or just things that you wanna buy on an ongoing basis that’s gonna be really great for them. So, alright, I think that’s a lot of great content and we do have some really great questions in here. This first one here, it says from Jay, he says, I know the questions will be answered later on, but I wanted to see if you can give some insight on the requirements to becoming a Walmart seller.

David:

For sure, for sure. And Walmart used to be a little bit more restrictive of who they allowed as sellers. This is actually, we, we referenced this earlier about having counterfeit sellers that Walmart sees that issue within Amazon and wants to avoid that. Now they did quote unquote open the floodgates last, I believe last August to additional sellers to make things a little bit less restrictive. But there’s still a business verification process. So you could go ahead to Walmart and now previously it would be that you had to apply and they would get back to you. Right Now you could actually create an account and you go into the business verification and as long as you have a legitimate LLC there’s a couple of other things I would suggest is you wanna have a real website. You don’t want to just have your products only on Amazon and have a legitimate website.

David:

And this is actually a great tip over here. Do not have an application with an @gmail.com that, yeah, like that kind of doesn’t show validity to yourself, you know, and okay, it’s $12 a month, just pay the extra money to get that nice @mybusiness.com and that will just to show Walmart that you’re legit, you’re real company and you’ll get there. Yes, star accounts that I’ve gotten approved with at Gmail. It happens. But this is just something that will help you with getting your application approved because you’re proving that you’re a real seller. So make sure you have all your legal docs in order and you do the business verification. If you are like an international seller, there are some restrictions into which countries you’re able to do that. All that information is, is really readily available and Walmart’s actually really good in terms of communication on that front.

Carrie:

I actually wrote a blog about it. So if you go to the Helium 10 blog, you can see each country the exact requirements that you need. So this is a continuation I think of that question. I am currently an Amazon seller, did three 70k last year with an LLC and applied, but was denied and they not give a reason. So do you wanna give any insights about, you know, if you were denied in the past, what to do kind of to reapply?

David:

So I would say if you applied before August of last year when they kind of got a little bit laxer on who they accepted, the first thing is don’t apply. Again, that is a surefire way to get stuck. Walmart system does not allow you to apply twice. If you do an application twice, it gets stuck and it just makes it impossible to ever come back. Not impossible, it’ll make it more difficult and you’re gonna just leave your account rep with, with much more issues. What I would suggest is just a shameless plug, you could reach out to me and I could help you out with that. But there are also resources within Walmart to reach out to them to have them help you out with checking into your application and see if there’s something that could be done there. But definitely don’t apply a second time.

David:

You want to really reach out to Walmart support. They have a lot of great members that will help you, help you get your account approved if you’re an actually a valid seller. Now, if you did apply more recently and you got denied, there’s probably some reasoning behind that. They’re not just a deny, they’re, they’re accepting a lot more sellers. So if you got recently denied, it probably means that possibly some of your legal documents are not an order. Make sure your addresses aligned from what you’re putting into Walmart compared to your LLC documentation, your SS-4, all that good stuff. You wanna make sure that it’s clean. The second Walmart smells something is off, they shut it down. Walmart doesn’t do nonsense. Walmart needs you to be legit and if they smell that something’s off, they’re not gonna allow you. Cuz they realize that’s very common and people are very shady in this, in this, in this industry. We all know it. We’ve all been hit by different things here and there. Whether our listing’s been taken down for the wrong reason, someone tried to try to do something to us, Walmart doesn’t like that and they’re trying to cut it out as much as possible. So this is kind of one of the reasons they’re denying more accounts and are more restrictive about it.

Carrie:

Awesome. And yeah, I mean, and you, you guys have some more insights as a service, right? Like you, you can help people with that kinda stuff at SellCord.co. Alright. The next question is about gated and ungated of products the same as in on Amazon.

David:

I do mostly focus on the private label side of things. That’s really where I would see a lot of success on, on Walmart and that’s generally the direction of a lot of sellers can take. But in terms of like resale and wholesale, there are a lot of brands that are not as restricted. You really have to do the research and just kind of see, I would just say like this, the main difference between Amazon and Walmart when it comes to these types of listings is look, if it’s a 1P listing on Walmart, cuz if it’s a 1P listing on Walmart, I don’t care how cheap you are, you’re not gonna win that buy box. Walmart is taking those sales cuz that’s just how it works. So if you’re looking to sell, let’s say like Dove soap and Walmart has the buy box sold and shipped by walmart.com, don’t bother.

David:

You’re gonna be able to add yourself as an additional seller, but you’re very rarely gonna be making sales over there. You could pretty much see by brand and if a brand’s selling the products themselves, then probably stay away from it. But if a brand is is being sold by some third party that has like 29,000 seller reviews probably means it’s being sold by some other distributor. And you could probably get in on that in general on this front, a lot of brands are very behind in terms of being on top of their brand portal, but it really is it comes down to the product. But in general, I’m not such an expert when it comes to the retail arbitrage or wholesale side of things.

Carrie:

The next question kind of goes into what you were saying is, does Walmart brand portal defend brand owners? Like, I think brand, what you were kinda mentioning is like one P but maybe you could just do a distinction between 1P and 3P there.

David:

Yeah, sure. So the brand portal has to be maintained at another of the day. You know if you just have an account that doesn’t do anything, you can’t, just having an account with Walmart just shows them that you’re registered. It does help you if you’re trying to do stuff with your listings but that’s gonna act as protection for you. There are are a shorter list of brands that actually have the protection from Walmart to restrict other sellers. But as a standard like just private label brand or even even some of the bigger brands, you have to actually do the work to protect your brand. And this is a very common theme. You know, we see so many listings that are hijacked and that could be as an additional seller on a listing or just taking the content, even sometimes they’ll take the pictures and just remove the branding.

David:

All of these things are cases that you need to be on top of as a seller, you need to go on to Walmart, look up your brand, and you very easy to search your brand. You can go into your listing, click the brand, or you can just type in the brand name. There’s branded searches, there’s regular searching for the brand. And just get those, get those item URLs, go into brand portal, make sure your brand’s registered and just start filing claims away. Go to town. You know, it’s, it’s a great way to take down all these listings and they’re, they’re very quick to get down these hijacked listings. Again, Walmart understands there’s a problem in the e-commerce space that there’s a lot of nonsense that happens and they hate that. So anytime any hijacking is a very common, easy to do problem that people will be facing. So Walmart’s trying to be on top of that to help out sellers to remove these these issues.

Carrie:

I yeah and something else I wanna kind of mention, and I have mentioned this before, is that you need to own your UPC codes. I know back in the day on Amazon, a lot of people were just like buying random third party, I guess UPCs where they would just, you know, cuz you would have to buy in bulk, like 500 or a thousand at a times. So people would sell their extras and then, you know, those UPCs are tied to the brand name that actually bought them from GS1. So if you don’t own your UPC code, then you’re gonna have a lot harder time with the brand portal and the ownership of your listings. So make sure that you own your UPC codes and they have your brand connected to them on that.

David:

Great point.

Carrie:

Next question. How do you get your first reviews on Walmart?

David:

Reviews is a huge strategy. You definitely, it’s gonna help you with your conversion rate. I just do wanna point out, unlike Amazon where sales volume is the number one driver of ranking on Walmart, it’s the conversion rate and there’s two conversion rates that reflects, it’s the impression to click and to click the sale. And aside from price and basic content, the best way to get that conversion is through reviews. Now, how do you get reviews on your product? I’m going to suggest two strategies. You have reviews syndication, which is a free program from Walmart that I don’t know why people are not as into finding it. Maybe they should probably run a promo, Hey, sign up for reviews, indication, maybe send emails. If you have reviews on your website, Walmart allows you to bring them to the program. Two platform for free. This is a free program.

David:

Now you have to make sure that it’s legit and you’re not bringing in only some of your five star reviews. You have to bring in all your reviews to the program. Additionally, you cannot have your Amazon reviews on Walmart illegal. Amazon is against terms of service. They technically own their reviews. Technically you shouldn’t even have them on your website in the first place, but that’s none of my business. But Walmart is not gonna let you take those reviews to Walmart. You could try and they’re gonna say, Hey, those are Amazon reviews, you can’t use those. But it’s a great way if you have reviews on your website, sign up for reviews syndication hopefully you’ll get accepted as long as you answer the case correctly. Don’t, don’t try a lie and try to cheat the system. They’re just gonna shut you down and potentially suspend your as a seller.

David:

No one wants that. And go ahead and bring in your reviews. Legitimately A second program, I would su strongly recommend, this is a new launch from Walmart, which is the review accelerator program. It allows, it’s similar to I guess the Amazon Vine, but I think it’s actually cheaper. It’s where you enroll certain listings. There is a bit of a restriction on what is allowed and there’s up to, you’re allowed to get up to five reviews per product and it doesn’t recommend, it’s not necessarily gonna get you a five star review. This is important to note, it’s just gonna get you a review. Walmart does claim that five reviews on a product increases the GMV by 75%, which I think is that’s pretty crazy. So there’s just two restrictions. You have to have a sale in the past x amount of time, I think potentially 30 days.

David:

And you have to have under five reviews and therefore that will make your item eligible for the program. And it costs you $10 per view that you get regardless of the rating. And the incentive to the seller, or to the customer rather the shopper is that they will get $3 credit towards their next purchase. So Walmart sends out an email to them, Hey ’em, hey some li review and you got $3 credit and you will get up to five reviews per product. It’s a great way, the only thing is it’s kind of a bit of a cash 22 cause you’re like, I need to get sales in order to get into the program, but I can’t get sales cause they don’t have reviews. Advertising is key folks. With advertising you’re guaranteed to get at least one sale as long as you’re not extremely priced. That’s as simple as it is.

Carrie:

That kind of, this is something I was I’ve been thinking about is because when you syndicate your reviews it’ll say, you know, it’s been syndicated by, it’ll sometimes put your website, but then it doesn’t have necessarily that verified purchaser, whereas the Review Seller Accelerator program does have the verified purchaser. Do you think people should maybe just do the paper click and do the review accelerator program until they get five reviews and then syndicate reviews so that you’ll have both? Or what are your thoughts on that?

David:

I think, I think that review syndication is the first stream that you should go through. The reason for that being that you could be a brand new seller and immediately have 500 views on your listing, obviously legitimately, right? And that’s huge. You know, it will help you with that initial conversion and it’s free, you know, you’re, I mean it takes you time to fill out the template on whatever. You might have to go back and forth with Walmart until you get it right. But still it’s free compared to having to pay $10 per review, that’s gonna cop out to about $50 per product. It could, it could start to rack up, especially if you have a larger catalog. I would say if you don’t have review syndication, then push for the View accelerator. There’s no currently no evidence backing that if you enroll your products in Review Accelerator, that Walmart’s gonna try get you a sale because they’re gonna make the few $10 off or the $7 difference.

David:

There’s no data to support that. I mean, if you want to come with conspiracy theory, sure, but I don’t believe that, I haven’t seen this happen, I’ve from many accounts that have enrolled this, it doesn’t increase their sales. The thing that increases sale is pushing PPC and actually having their reviews there. So that’s my, yeah, the verified purchase does help, but having three verified purchases compared to 150 unverified purchases is still 155 star reviews that hits different, and yeah, just to note Amazon compared to Walmart, very different to interview numbers. You’ll see, it’s very rare. You’ll find that Walmart something with five figure reviews, like there’s a couple and those are obviously syndicated or a product that’s been on Walmart for 10 years. You know, that’s just been a really old 1P listing. But for the most part, you’re not seeing, you’re not seeing that many. Even having legitimately 10 reviews could get you. I’ll challenge anyone over here if you could find me a keyword that on the front page, there’s no products that have under 10 reviews. I’m just telling you there’s a hundred percent is like that. So 10 reviews is even a great start.

Carrie:

Awesome. Okay. Supplement selling is very competitive on Amazon. How is it on Walmart?

David:

Great, great question. In general, supplements are the hottest thing in, in e-com. You know, it’s obvious because I guess the cost isn’t so high and it’s repetitive. This customer’s coming in monthly. So it’s still, I would say it’s the most competitive category on Walmart as well. But even though that is the case, I will not say, I’m not gonna dissuade you if I’m trying, as I mentioned before, every category can sell. I don’t necessarily recommend that this is the one if you’re gonna start a brand hit supplements on Walmart cuz there is staunch competition. But, and you’re gonna have to spend money to get in there and stay there. It’s gonna cost you, but I believe you’ll win in the, in the end run. So if you have, if you have the the pockets, definitely do it. I’m not saying it’s nowhere near launching a supplement brand on Amazon.

David:

So if you wanna do it, I would hit Walmart. It’s definitely worthwhile. But I would say there’s so many more generic products that you could get into that just sell. Well, there’s plenty of data out there that shows you which are the best selling categories on Walmart and ding ding ding, next Walmart hack, go to Helium 10 and search volume, look up, search volume. It’s, this is such a simple thing. Just look at the search volume, plug it into Walmart, look how many competitors you have. Look at the pricing. That’s how you do your product research. Just look up the search volume and that’s gonna be your biggest metric to see also just look percentage-wise, Amazon to Walmart search volume. You could see which products will do better. So there’s definitely competition there, but everything pales in comparison to that of Amazon. And I think it’s, everything has opportunity for you to be able to grow.

Carrie:

All right. Can Google ads be used instead of PPC on Walmart?

David:

You can use Google Ads in some way to drive your traffic to Walmart. I’m gonna be straight up here. I don’t have the most familiarity with the Google ads side of things, but I believe there’s capabilities over there. But why are you doing that instead of just use Walmart right now. Don’t try be so oh, I’m gonna be super creative and think of these great ways to get sales to Walmart. Gives you opportunity at Walmart itself has so many things. I wouldn’t say right now is the time to go to these outside venues to get your traffic, to come to Walmart. Focus right now on what Walmart gives you because that has opportunity there. If you’re failing there, then there’s probably some other issue, not your ads.

Carrie:

Something I wanna add here too is that they actually do what Walmart, when you start advertising with Walmart, they’ll put your products in Google shopping. So you’ll see your products like available on walmart.com in Google shopping already. So you kind of already have Google Ads provided by a Walmart for you. So I’ve seen my product when I’ve searched the main keyword on Google already without me running ads. And another thing is that I have run ads just to kind of test it out from Google and it did not help with ranking or anything. Cause I know for Amazon right now, it really does help with ranking when you are sending outside traffic. It’s not really the same on Walmart right now. So I would suggest, again, like David said, to focus on the Walmart paper clicks so that you rank much better with that.

Carrie:

I haven’t seen any, you know, direct correlation of, you know, any benefits to utilizing Google ads. And you already have the Google search with Walmart. So just wanted to add a little few tidbits there and now we can take a few more questions cuz we’re running shorter on time. Let’s see here. This next question, new products you wanna launch. How do you decide where to start on Amazon? There’s a lot of sellers on Walmart. No competition, but too many. Okay, I guess basically the question maybe is where do you start when you’re kind of deciding what products move to Walmart first?

David:

So we touched on this earlier, it’s the difference between launching as a new seller on Amazon and Walmart. I would say it’s easier to launch on Walmart because of not only because of the limited competition, but because generic products succeed. I’m gonna, this is, this is, if you get this and you understand this so you could succeed, generic products do better on Walmart because in Amazon they’re so saturated. You look up the main keywords and they are just flooded with listings with thousands, tens of thousands of reviews and sales. And they’ve been there on Amazon, they’ve been at the top for four or five years. Yeah, if you have the ability to win there, you’re gonna be making a lot of money today. But think of Walmart as an investment over here. You have the ability to take a generic keywords, something like we said, as simple as a garlic press go, as simple as anything, any of these basic home items.

David:

You could sell a utensil set. Maybe that’s not the best thing you could sell in the pet products. You could sell in the baby products. So many of these huge categories which on Amazon people are spending millions, hundreds of millions in ads to, to win on Walmart. You spend pennies and you’re able to win and get to the top of that ranking. You wanna know which products to pick. It’s not gonna be the same as the ones that you’re gonna be picking for Amazon. I would say it’s actually gonna be a little bit difficult to find products that would succeed on both Amazon and Walmart, because Amazon, there’s such a pull to be niche because that’s what differentiates you and helps you get those little small keywords and you can win over there versus all Walmart, those small keywords don’t really have that volume behind it. So you could go multiple ways if you’re trying to have a brand that grows on both, you could just go with the bigger with, I would say Walmart has a bigger potential for the future. If you’re trying to make the big dollars today, maybe take a more niche product and hit Amazon with it. But in the long run you’re gonna end up losing out because you just missed out on a huge opportunity of Walmart in two years when you could be the number one seller for a huge keyword.

Carrie:

Awesome. Well as you can all see, David is a wealth of information and if you didn’t know, he actually is a one of the main stars of our Freedom Ticket for Walmart. He goes through in detail a lot of the technical parts of Walmart, so you know, like flat files and WFS and all kinds of great information. So if you haven’t checked that out, you should, and you’re a Helium 10 member. This is free for Helium 10 members. It’s in week 11 on Freedom Ticket 3.0. So make sure you check that out And otherwise thank you so much for joining David, I think we got a lot of great information from you, so thank you so much.

David:

Of course, thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure.

Carrie:

And where can people find you if they wanna find you?

David:

For sure. So I’ll drop my personal email if you’d like over here. You can message me at david@sellcord.co. You could find me on LinkedIn as well, David Milstein look on their SellCord. You can probably find me at some other places as well if you look hard enough. But those two ways would be a sure way to find me and in general find out some more information about us at sellcord.co.

Carrie:

All right, yeah, thank you so much again and hopefully we’ll have you back and, and I’m sure we’ll do some more content with you so you know, make sure you’re all in our Facebook groups and you know, hopefully you’ll have David back and do some more great Q and A sessions cuz he obviously knows so much about Walmart. So thanks again and we’ll see you all later.

David:

Of course. Thanks for having me, Carrie.

Carrie:

Bye.

Bradley Sutton:

All right guys, thank you so much for that and for tuning in and thank you to Carrie and David for that information. Don’t forget guys, you don’t have to wait every month for the answers, just some of your questions, go right into our Winning with Walmart, Facebook group, Winning with Walmart. You can look it up anywhere on Facebook, it’s open to everybody. Hop in there, ask Carrie questions. David’s in there, you can tag him and ask him questions as well. But we really want you guys to have success selling on the Walmart platform. If you’ve got inventory already here in the United States, it’s a no-brainer guys. Make sure to get on Walmart.com and start getting those extra sales. We’ll see you guys next month in the next episode.

#446 - Amazon PPC and Review Request Strategy Session

Join us in this special Seller Strategy Masterclass with Bradley Sutton. Today, we dive deep into the world of Amazon advertising and how to automate your review requests.

Bradley, who once hated Amazon PPC, but has since learned the ropes and with the help of Adtomic, how he found success managing hundreds of PPC campaigns. Bradley stresses the importance of learning Amazon PPC for yourself in order to gauge the success of your brands PPC campaigns. He also offers his unique features inside Adtomic like, viewing metrics such as TACOS over certain periods of time, as well as seeing your PPC performance by day of week and hour of day.

Bradley also shares tips on setting up PPC dayparting, viewing old PPC data up to years in the past, and instantly seeing if you have search terms you should negative match. He also shares ways to view your PPC performance by product and feed newly found keywords from broad and auto campaigns to exact manual campaigns. Optimizing your PPC campaigns bids is essential, and Bradley shares how to do this in seconds.

Additionally, he offers insights into automating the Amazon request a review process, complete with special time delays and other filters using Helium 10 Follow Up. For those without automation, he also shares how to bulk request a review to orders that you didn’t have automation set up on. Finally, Bradley offers tips on checking your review velocity for your products over time. Don’t miss out on the valuable insights this SSP seller strategy masterclass has to offer!

In episode 446 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley discussed:

• 01:50 – Bradley Hated Amazon PPC In The Beginning
• 02:18 – You Need To Learn Amazon PPC Yourself!
• 04:08 – How to View Unique Metrics Such as TACOS Over Certain Periods of Time
• 05:36 – How to See Your PPC Performance by Day of Week and Hour of Day
• 08:30 – How to Set Up PPC Day Parting
• 09:53 – How to See Your Old PPC Data Up To Years in the Past
• 11:54 – How to Instantly See if You Have Search Terms You Should Negative Match
• 14:18 – How to See in Seconds if You Have Search Terms with Unfavorable ACoS
• 15:57 – How to View Your PPC Performance by Product
• 17:51 – How to Feed Newly Found Keywords From Broad And Auto Campaigns To Exact Manual Campaigns
• 24:55 – How to Optimize Your PPC Campaigns Bids in Seconds
• 28:50 – How to Automate The Amazon Request a Review, With Special Time Delays And Other Filters
• 31:41 – How to Bulk Request a Review To Orders That You Didn’t Have Automation Set Up On
• 33:03 – How to Check Your Review Velocity For Your Products Over Time

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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’s another one of our Seller Strategy masterclass, where we’re gonna go deep this time into advertising. I’m gonna teach you how to do day partying and how to manage all of your bid suggestions just in seconds instead of hours. 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 or 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 h10.me/followup. 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. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s a completely BS free, unscripted, and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world.

Bradley Sutton:

And today is another one of our seller strategy masterclass that we do once a month where we go deep into tool use. All right, so this is going to be using Adtomic by Helium 10. Now, whether you use Adtomic or not, these are principles and strategies that you should be using, whether you do your own PPC, whether you’re using another software, whether you’re using an agency, you know, you need to be checking up that they’re doing on this stuff. But this is, this is gonna be important for, for listeners no matter what stage of the game you guys are at. Now, for me, you know, you, some of you guys know my story. I hated PPC in the beginning. You know, when I was launching hundreds of products for my clients before I worked at Helium 10, I was like, hands off on PPC.

Bradley Sutton:

I’m like, I don’t wanna learn this stuff. This stuff is like way above me. You know, like, I’m just gonna focus on launch, listing optimization, keyword research, product research, stuff like that. Somebody else please handle a PPC. And then when I started selling myself, you know, after I started working at Helium 10, I’m like, okay, I need to finally figure out how to do PPC. In the beginning, it was rough. You know, I was, you know, happy to download all these spreadsheets and I didn’t know how to do pivot tables and, and all vlookups and all this stuff. And then finding the campaigns in Seller Central and the ad groups, it was just like a mess. And then that was right around the time that Ads, Helium 10 Ads came out, which is the predecessor Adtomic. And then I was like, okay, finally, now you know, something that helps me learn PPC, make sense?

Bradley Sutton:

And now, you know, I’m running over 200 campaigns, probably closer to 300 now all using this software. So I’m just gonna be going over some of these strategies using Adtomic. I’m gonna be showing sharing my screen, those of you watching on YouTube. But again, don’t tune out even if you don’t use Adtomic, because these are strategies that hopefully you guys are using. And it’s important, I think, in order to run efficient PPC. And, and I’ll, I’ll tell you guys right now, those of you who are newer sellers, if you are one of those people who’s like, oh, yeah, I need, I need a consultant, I need an agency, and you’re new, no, guys, please stop with that nonsense. Very important to understand how PPC works yourself before you ever even dream about outsourcing it. Now, hey, if you get to be too big and, you know, you can’t do everything yourself, of course, you need to hire people, maybe outsource some things here or there, but that’s after knowing how to do it yourself.

Bradley Sutton:

Because think about it, how could you hire somebody and be able to judge what they’re doing and, and their output and make sure that your ROI, you know, what you’re investing to pay this company is working out if you don’t even know what is good PPC strategy and what is bad. So, so anyways, just keep that in mind. Why don’t I have pet peeves I see in the Facebook groups, you guys can do it yourself if, if you’re new, for sure, as long as you have the right strategies. And that’s what we’re talking about today. So like with all seller strategy masterclass, how I do this is I just give you guys like problems to solve and then I’m gonna show you how to solve it. Problem number one, or strategy number one, how to use or view unique metrics such as TACoS over a certain period of time.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, TACoS is something interesting that is not a metric that’s in Seller Central, and that means like you’re total ACoS. So how does your advertising spend relate to your total sales? Right? So, you know, one, the way to do that in Adtomic is on just the dashboard. That’s actually one of the key metrics here is TACoS. And I like comparing different time periods. So for example, right now I’m looking at April one to April 16 here, and it’s 12.76%. And if I just take the previous 16 days, it actually dropped over 10%. You guys trust me, you, you’re gonna see stuff today that are like, what are these numbers, Bradley? You’re you’re PPC skills suck. But no, I don’t suck that bad. It’s just because everybody at Helium 10 uses this account to kind of like do their tests and things like that.

Bradley Sutton:

And so that’s why my ACoS and my TACoS are, are really bad. But anyways, this is just a simple way, guys. Compare what your metrics are, your total sales, your cost per click, your PPC sales over different time periods. It’s important to know how you’re doing, especially if you had a bad month like I did last month. You wanna know if the changes that you’ve implemented are working. So make sure to do that time over time. Next step is how to see your PPC performance by day of week or hour of day. Now, this is interesting. Some people call this like day partying and before people were always saying this like, Hey, I wanna be able to pause my PPC campaigns at the times of day that doesn’t work out for me. And they would like look at their PPC throughout the day and then make decisions based on that.

Bradley Sutton:

That’s completely wrong. Cause that’s not how PPC works. Somebody could have clicked something four days ago at 5:00 PM right? But maybe today at 8:00 AM is when they actually make the sale. Now, you might be looking at your PPC data and say, oh man, 8:00 AM is a great time for me because look at this low ACoS or whatever, right? But no, the actual click happened a few days ago at 5:00 PM So I hope that makes sense. Oh, before, or if you’re just looking at your Amazon data in Seller Central, you cannot base performance by time of day if you’re just looking at it live because of the attribution window. So what we have done in Adtomic is take a look at over time of day or which day of week campaigns are performing well. So I’m just gonna pick a campaign here the large coffin shelf product targeting ad cuz I know that’s like a big spender for us.

Bradley Sutton:

And then take a look, I’m looking here at the last like two, three months, and I can see that, look at this, at 12:00 AM to 1:00 AM 1:00 AM to 2:00 AM I’m spending some decent chunk, like actually for some reason, the highest chunk of sales for the day, or the highest chunk of spend for the day almost. And I’ve gotten zero sales at these times of day in two months. Zero sales. Compare that to, let’s just say here we go at 3:00 PM I’m getting 10% ACoS. Here’s another one at from two to 3:00 AM well, two, 2:00 PM and 2:00 AM sounds like or it seems like it’s a good deal. I’m spending $9 on average and 7% ACoS. So you can see here that different times of day performed differently. So what the fact that I haven’t gotten one sale in all this time from this time period of period of time that would show me that I need to maybe stop something.

Bradley Sutton:

I’m not gonna do ads from 12 to one. So this is important to think about because, you know, you could be wasting money by just keeping your PPC on all day. Now, I’m not saying you definitely are, but, and I’m not saying every campaign has these gaps where like performance is bad, but start taking a look at your high spending campaigns if you have history of campaigns not doing well at certain times a day. So in this one, let’s just say this is true. Like, what, what would I do? All right, so whatever software you’re using, you know, if I have like a time of day where I never get sales, but crazy spin, well, what I’m going to do is I want to make sure to pause perhaps that campaign during that time of day.

Bradley Sutton:

So that’s what I’m gonna do here. You know, guys, click on Schedules in Adtomic and then select the campaign. I selected that large coffin shelf, product targeting campaign, and then I’m picking this timeframe between 12:00 AM and 2:00 AM and I added it right here. And then I’m saying I want the status to be paused. So in other words, hey, pause this campaign from 12:00 AM to 2:00 AM, let’s just say starting on the 18th of April and never expire, and then hit next. And then it’s just going to confirm, hey, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, do you want to pause this campaign during this time of day? Absolutely, I do. I just hit launch and then it is pretty much done. So again, other software has definitely do this. This has been something that only Amazon sellers could do, probably in the last like six months or less, I think is when Amazon opened this up, or maybe a little bit more.

Bradley Sutton:

But this is definitely something you guys should be thinking about to potentially save you some money if you’ve got some bad performance at certain times. Now strategy number four, that was number three. Strategy number four is how to see your old PPC data up to years in the past. So if you’re just going into Seller Central, I think you can only go like six months back. Now, you might have had some great months that you were doing well in performance. You know, like if you’re using Cerebro and you’ve got the Helium 10 Elite account, you can actually look back in history and see where you were ranking on sponsored ads, right? And then be like, wow, look at this month I was just crushing it on sponsored ads, right? So this is important to know that you don’t have access to that data in Seller Central, but if you’re using Adtomic, this is where I want you to go.

Bradley Sutton:

Go to the analytics page and you can select any campaign you want, Or just go back in time to see everything, right? So like, hey, I wanna see what was going on. I had a great month overall in a certain timeframe. Let’s just say, you know, April of 2021, this is like even up to two years ago, April 2021, all the way up to May 2021 and Helium 10 is going to put up that data for you. So guys, this is a great way to look at old performance. Like oh my goodness, these campaigns were actually terrible back in, in these days. But here’s one. My Project X broad campaign was at 20% ACoS. So now I can see what was working for me at that time of day. This is also good, especially for if you’ve got a seasonal product, all right?

Bradley Sutton:

You probably do seasonal campaigns and you want to do a look back at a year, you know, like you’re not, you might not be able to do that unless you have downloaded that in Seller Central. So, you know, like for example, if you have some products that really pop off during Christmas maybe you have some special campaigns at Christmas. Well, I would wanna look back at last year’s Christmas and the previous year’s Christmas to see what my campaign performance was, and then I would use that to gauge this year’s. So that’s a strategy. Make sure to look back at your old campaigns if your software has access to that. Strategy number five here is how to instantly see if you have search terms that you should negative match. So I think you guys know how to do this.

Bradley Sutton:

Just if you’re just downloading Excel files, right? If you’re do downloading Excel files, you’ve just gotta run, you know, some formulas and, and sort it out to have like minimum number of clicks or minimum spend or something like that. And then just try and find it. So if you’re using Adtomic, here’s the strategy of what you should use, and it’s probably something similar in the software that you’re using. I like going to the analytics page, and then I hit search terms. And then what I enter is PPC orders zero to zero, meaning that, hey, this is a search term that has gotten me zero orders, but in the spend field I put minimum $15. Now, this is not just like a one size fits all number, you know, maybe some of you have a different threshold you want to use or whatever.

Bradley Sutton:

I like just doing 15. And then sure enough, I can see all of these keywords here or ASINs where it’s been showing up as search terms zero spend here, there’s a few hundred dollars worth of spend. And so what I would do is I would just negative match these. Now theoretically speaking, I should have caught these earlier if I was doing my PPC correctly. But if you just want to quick, like if this is like day one and you’ve gotta Adtomic or day one and you’re downloading reports, that’s the number one easiest way to save potentially hundreds of dollars is immediately stopping spend where you’re just spending hundreds of dollars potentially, and you are getting no, and because you’re getting lots of clicks, but you are getting no conversion. So now on the flip side, something you guys should probably do is if it’s a very important keyword for your niche and you’re getting lots of clicks, right?

Bradley Sutton:

But no sales, there’s obviously some buyer intent. So people are seeing something in the search results, right? That makes ’em think that they might want your product. So if you got a hundred clicks, there’s buyer intent there, right? Why are they not buying it? So that might be something that you could, you know, try and figure out, but in the meantime, I’m still gonna pause that target negative, match it for now, or just pause if it’s an exact target match just stop the bleed and then maybe on the back end try and figure out, okay, why, why are people not buying this after they click on it? And try to figure that out. And then maybe if I change something, maybe I can go ahead and restart that target. Now how to see in seconds if you have search terms that have unfavorable ACoS.

Bradley Sutton:

Alright, unfavorable. So maybe there are a couple of sales, but the ACoS is just bad. So same page, I go to my analytics page, I go to search terms. And again, you put what works for you, like what you don’t want to see as far as ACoS. I’m putting a minimum 80% ACoS here, And then I could see there’s not that many here. I’m kind of doing the right thing, I guess you could say. All right, so here are some search terms that have come up where, here’s one, I’ve spent $80, here’s one I’ve spent $50 and one of them was 80% ACoS, 140% ACoS. Now, I could do a couple of things here, right? I, I could just go ahead and negative match this. I’m like, Hey, you know, at this ACoS, you know, I’m not gonna make any sales.

Bradley Sutton:

Or I’m not gonna be able to bring this down to, to 20% ACoS, but maybe you were just looking at this and you did one for 50% and your target is 30%. Well, hey, it’s doable. So maybe I just write there, go in and start you know, adjusting those bids down to try and get to my target ACoS. But if you just want a quick snapshot across your whole account of all of the bad ACoS, then this is the, the way to do it. And of course, you can do that if you’re downloading reports, it just takes a little bit more time, just, you know, sort it by the, you know, in your search term report sort it by the, the high ACoS and try and filter those out. Like use a Excel filter in order to see what ones are over a certain spend and over a certain ACoS.

Bradley Sutton:

So that is number six. Strategy number seven is how to view your PPC performance by product. This is something I think you now can do inside of Seller Central as of a couple of months ago. Those of you use Adtomic, just go on the analytics page to the product tab, The product tab and scroll down, it has a list of all of your products. You know, you might have 5, 6, 7 campaigns, sponsored brands, sponsored display, sponsored product, broad match auto for every product. And you just sometimes might wanna see what is going on as far as you’re advertising. Like here, I don’t even know who set this up, but we have this stackable egg rack and the bottom rack, like, you would never buy that by itself, because it’s, it’s just meant to add layers to this stackable egg tray, egg rack that we have.

Bradley Sutton:

For some reason, I was running ads, I gotta shut this off, but I didn’t even know I was running to this one. And of course, look at this, ACoS is 150% for this target. So I’m gonna probably pause this as a as a target. And I might wanna see what are my good performing once here, maybe I wanna see, you know, what, what about buy campaign, you know, so I would just hit this campaign button, and now I can see all of the campaigns that a certain product is being advertised for. And this is important to understand, hey, where is all of this spend? Is $4,000 of spend for this one product. What are the good performing campaigns? And sure enough, the ones that you see that are really bad are the dang test that my product team was doing to ruin my ACoS here.

Bradley Sutton:

But most of the ones that I set up are, are doing pretty good, like auto campaign with 20% ACoS. That’s pretty darn good. All right, so now I can go in campaign by campaign and then see what are the good performing ones and what are the ones that I might need to kind of optimize a little bit more. The next problem to solve here is how to feed newly found keywords from broaden auto campaigns to exact manual campaigns. Let’s talk about this strategy as a whole, because this might be the one of the most important ones I’ve talked about today. And it’s something that applies to everybody. Doesn’t matter what software you’re using, but super important guys that you have a strategy to migrate or at least copy keywords from one campaign to another. Let’s talk about why you’d want to do that.

Bradley Sutton:

So if you are running I always suggest running multiple campaigns multiple different match types of campaigns. So a match type is how Amazon decides what keywords to show you for. If you’re doing an exact manual, what we call performance campaign in Adtomic, that means you, you give Amazon a keyword coffin shelf, and Amazon is only technically gonna show you for coffin shelf, might show you for a plural like coffin shelves or something like that, right? That’s important. Cause like, hey, these are the keywords I know I want to show up for constantly in PPC I want you to just, you know, show me for this keyword right now. Then you’ve got broad and phrase match where, hey, let me enter the word coffin shelf, and then, you know, maybe coffin shelf decor large coffin shelf, red coffin shelf, Amazon will start showing you for all these others, if you have a broader phrase match going on, the broad is very loose these days.

Bradley Sutton:

So you gotta watch out for that. And then you have an auto campaign where you’re just like, Hey, Amazon, take the wheel and you just show me for whatever you think. Now, the reason why broad and auto are good is that Amazon can show you for keywords you are not even indexed for. And if you start getting sales for, you’re gonna get indexed potentially for these keywords that you don’t even have in your listing. So for example, you know, like in an auto campaign, Amazon might show me for gothic bedroom, let’s just say, because whatever the algorithm is thinks that you you know, my coffin shelf is relevant to it. Well, I can’t target that in PPC myself if I don’t, if I’m not index sport and, and I wouldn’t show up in organic search results. So this is the potential for me to show up for other keywords that I don’t even have index.

Bradley Sutton:

Now here’s the thing, when you have the auto campaign going, it can show you for ASINs like on product targeting campaigns. It can show you for keywords. And then what’s important is that it’s just kind of like throw, you know, like, think of a big bucket of water and then they just like throw it all, all over the place. It just sprays all over the place. And then we’re just trying to see what, where, where it ends up this, this water. Well, if the water ends up in this one place that works out really well, you kind of wanna do that purposely going forward, right? So for example, like, hey, they’re showing me for this gothic bedroom. I get like three or four sales, that’s great. I’m like, wow, you found a keyword. Well, I don’t want to wait and cross my fingers and hope that Amazon shows me for this keyword going forward, which is what happens to the auto.

Bradley Sutton:

Cause a in an auto campaign, Amazon could, should be showing you for hundreds if not thousands of different keywords. And it’s not doing it consistently cuz it’s just, just trying to see what’s going on, right? So in this situation, if you have good performing keywords that Amazon has discovered in a broad or auto campaign, you don’t want to wait for Amazon to keep showing you for that. You want to tell Amazon, show me for this ASIN, show me for this search term 24 hours a day if possible, right? And that’s why we have exact manual campaigns or performance campaigns, right? So if you’re, if you don’t have software, you’ve gotta download all of these like maybe every week or every couple weeks and see what you have, like maybe two or more sales on, and then find your manual campaign that it corresponds to and then get it in there.

Bradley Sutton:

Now that sounds like a mouthful, that is because it’s a very tedious and long process. And so let me show you how to do that in Adtomic here. All right, so what we’re gonna do is you are going to go here and set rules up. And this is like the core part of Adtomic, guys is setting rules. So here I’m looking at our egg tray rule set, and I have, as you can see here about five, six campaigns that I’m having all talk to each other. So I’ve got my performance campaign, that’s my exact manual campaign. I’ve got a sponsored display campaign that’s for targeting other products or other ASINs. I’ve got an auto campaign, I’ve got a product targeting campaign. I’ve got a research campaign, which I actually have broad going. And so basically what I do is I put these all into this one rule group and then I say, Hey, under my sponsor display campaign, I put match type ASIN.

Bradley Sutton:

What that means is, is I’m telling Amazon, or I’m telling Helium 10 or Adtomic, Hey, if you find an ASIN a good performing ASIN in your, in the auto campaign, I want you to create the new target or suggest to me to create this new target right here in my sponsor display and in my product targeting campaign, right? Those are two different types of product targeting campaigns. And if I have an ASIN that I know is converting for me, I obviously want Amazon to be showing me for there. Same thing, my performance campaign, my research campaign. If I find something in the auto campaign, hey, let’s test it out in my broad campaign, let’s test it out in my performance campaign. So this is like game changing as far as the time that it takes you to manage your PPC because now all of a sudden, you know, if I start getting good performing keywords, what’s going to happen is that now Adtomic is gonna give me these suggestions and say, Hey, we found this keyword that hit your criteria.

Bradley Sutton:

And by the way, I didn’t show it to you guys, but you also gotta put what your criteria is. My personal one is, I like doing, if it has two conversions, I don’t like doing, if it has one conversion. Cuz every now and then you might get a complete fluke where, where somebody hits something and then they just happen to buy your product like six days later and it has nothing to do with the original ad, right? So I like getting at least two conversions on an ace in or a keyword and under like 40% ACoS because I know I could adjust in the future. And then if, so, what Adtomics is gonna do, as soon as that criteria happens, it’s gonna pop up something to me and say, Hey, you got two conversions, 35% ACoS on this one keyword from this auto campaign.

Bradley Sutton:

Do you want to put this in the manual campaign? You just hit yes or no, and then it automatically does it. That’s it. One click and you’re done. You know, the amount of time that thing saves like that, that literally takes me three seconds to do. It would take at least, you know, maybe three minutes if not 10 minutes just to be able to make reports and fi find that and then go back to seller central, et cetera. If I really like how Adtomic is, is taking care of it, I can actually even put automation on and it takes zero seconds. I just say, Hey, Amazon, add this to, you know, these campaigns, you know, I personally don’t do automation on anything in Adtomic because I like to control and know exactly what’s going on in my PPC and be able to just say yes or no.

Bradley Sutton:

It only takes me a few seconds more. But if you’re just like, Hey, I’m super pressed for time, I just want automation to do it, you can absolutely do that. All right, so really, really important. Now the last strategy for Adtomic, I’m gonna talk about today, and there’s probably like, you know, 50 more that we can do, and these are just some of the cooler ones that I wanted to bring out is how to optimize your PPC campaign bids in just seconds. So another thing that I put as far as my rules and Adtomic goes is I put it like a target ACoS for my campaigns, right? It really goes down to my target level. So I say usually let me just show you guys for a lot of my campaigns, I put the target like 20%, sometimes I put 24%, sometimes I’ll have 30%.

Bradley Sutton:

And then basically what’s going to happen is on these targets that I have, if it’s overperforming or underperforming, and that’s something that’s important. Adtomic is gonna gimme suggestions. So let’s say my target is 20% and I’m getting 3% ACoS, that is not time to just like jump up for joy. You might be like, oh, this is great, I must have done the right thing. If your ACoS is only 3% and you’re maxing out your bid, you’re probably, you are leaving money on the table, Because unless you’re at the very top of the page, you know already which by the way, Adtomic links with your keyword tracker, so you can see where you’re showing up on the page. You know, it’s not, it’s, this is not good because maybe you could be doubling or tripling your sales if you increase your bid and you’d still be under your target bid.

Bradley Sutton:

But so don’t think that if you have this tiny number of ACoS that you are just crushing the game, you’re probably leaving money on the table. So if you have super low ACoS, you might want to increase the bid to test if you can get some wider reach, more impressions, higher placement, right? The flip side is what you more normally think about, Hey, my target ACoS is 20%, I’m paying 40%. Well, I, I need to get that bid down to try and get to my target. And so that’s basically what Adtomic is doing is calculating based on what your ACoS is, what you might need to do. Like for example, here’s a broad match target wood egg holder. My target is 20% and it’s at 44%. So it’s like, hey, drop your bid 13 cents in order to get a little bit closer to your target.

Bradley Sutton:

And so if I wanted to go ahead and do that, I just hit this approved suggestion and boom, it’s done. I don’t have to go into Seller Central or anything. Here’s the one that’s the opposite, good grief. Here’s one where my ACoS is 0.77%. Man, that’s pretty crazy. 0.77%. So in this case, obviously it’s telling me to increase my bid. Who knows, maybe I can get some more play there. Here’s an ASIN one that was only 4%. So again, it’s telling me to increase my bid, and potentially I might be able to get some more play. So this is super, super important guys, that you guys get these strategies done, whether you have Adtomic or not. If some of this stuff I intrigues you and you want to check Adtomic out, go to h10.me/adtomic to get more information, you can add it on to any account.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, even if you have a Platinum account, you can add Adtomic for, I believe it’s $199 a month, but I mean a hundred, what do you value your time at? You value your time at $50 an hour. Adtomic will save you more than four hours you know, a month, guys. I mean, it saves me like probably like 50 hours a month of time. What I can do in Adtomic compared to what I would have to do if I was just downloading reports. Now let, let’s quickly switch over to Helium 10 Follow-up. Follow-up is something that is very, very important, you guys need to be using this goes to all levels of Helium 10, and this is for increasing your reviews, And I guarantee you, 80% of you probably don’t even realize some of these things that you have complete access to without having to pay 1 cent even more, right?

Bradley Sutton:

So number one, how to automate the Amazon request review with special time delays and other filters. Now, this is important because the request review is what Amazon has on their order pages where you just hit the button request review, and then Amazon sends a predetermined message out. This is the easiest and safest way to ask customers for a review because it’s a hundred percent terms of service compliant because all you’re doing is triggering an Amazon message that they have provided as a means to get a review. So it’s like, this is from Amazon. So before we used to have a Chrome extension that would trigger those for you. And when that went away or that, you know, became like not used, people thought, oh, Helium 10 Follow-up doesn’t have that Helium 10 Follow-up is only about doing emails, right? No, that’s not it.

Bradley Sutton:

We are triggering this, and this is what I actually suggest doing. So the way to do it is just go to Follow-up in your account and even like the base plans of Helium 10 have this guys, all right, then you go to email automation. So I’m going to hit here an email automation, new automation, and then this is the one that you guys want to pick. Send a message to request or review. This is not, oh, make a new email so that we can request review when, whenever you read request review inside of helium 10, that’s what it is talking about. It is talking about the Amazon request review. And you add filters here. I like putting this discount of less than 30%. I don’t want a request review going out to customers who have gotten discounts or sales or coupons or things like that.

Bradley Sutton:

I like also doing it by ASIN. You can do it by product name, you can do it by the price, you can do it by the SKU, and then you can put here how long to wait after the order is placed for the review to go out. And then that’s it, it’s done. Like you set this once and then forget it. Literally, set and forget it. And now every single order that is from that ASIN or from that product that doesn’t have a discount and now you have to wait a certain number of times after chips, and then the person is gonna get a request, a review. So this can definitely increase your review velocity. And it’s really good to put this timer on it, you know, because like if you have a supplement, I suggest waiting for like 20 or 25 days after shipment in order to send a request review because somebody needs some time to be able to know if they like the product or not, right?

Bradley Sutton:

So but if you have another product like party supplies, maybe they have a party right away. Usually, people who do party supplies get their stuff like kind of late in the game, right? So you want that review to go out as soon as possible. So that’s why it’s cool to kind of put that delay on there. But guys, that is like the easiest possible thing you can do. You need to set that up, ASAP. Now, let’s just say you’re setting it up now and you’re good going forward because you’re gonna have all of these, you know, request reviews sent out automatically, but you’re like, wait a minute, in the last month I’ve got like a thousand reviews or a thousand orders. I’ve sold a 500 orders, whatever.

Bradley Sutton:

What do I do for all of these? Because the automatic request review is not gonna start until new orders, right? Well, watch this. All you have to do is you’re going to hit orders on your Follow-up page. And you can do this manually too, at any time. Maybe you don’t have request reviews set up for all your products. I go to orders, find the ones that don’t say that they have one, like a message queued or sent, right? Because you know, that’s gonna be for most of you guys. If you’ve never used Follow-up, it won’t say queued or sent for anything, and then you just copy or select all of them you want and just hit this button. One button guys request a review, Like watch, I’m gonna do it for one of them right here.

Bradley Sutton:

You guys can see how easy it is. Let’s go ahead and do this one here, and I’m just gonna hit request review. Do you want a request review for this order and just confirm it? Now, this one I can’t actually do because it’s beyond 30 days old, but you guys can see how, how kind of easy it is. So that’s just a way to bulk request review orders that you don’t even have an automation set up for yet. The last is to how do you check your review velocity for your products over time? How do you check your review velocity for your products over time? This is something that’s important because if you’re requesting reviews, you kind of want to be able to know, Hey, is this working? So first of all at the account level on your Follow-up dashboard, you’ll be able to see all of your tracked product ratings.

Bradley Sutton:

Like, look at this order rating, conversion rate is 16% on all these products, Because I requested 103 ratings and I actually got 11 of them of the 66 orders that were, that were delivered. So 11 out of 66, That’s 16%. And then based on the number that I requested, it’s about 10%. I could see how many reviews were requested, how many message were sent, et cetera. If I want to keep drilling down, I would go here into the product ratings tab. I hit product ratings, and then I could see my products here. Let’s just look at this egg tray one, or this egg rack. All right, I’m going to hit this graph right here. And this graph is going to take me to the details of what’s going on in this products reviews.

Bradley Sutton:

So I could see my average rating. I can see how many five stars I could see in the last seven days, how many ratings I’ve received, how many reviews I’ve requested. Look at this here. I’ve gotten over the last 30 days, six ratings received out of 79 reviews requested. That’s, that’s pretty dang good, right? That’s almost 10% of what I asked for. I was able to get a review, right? So, and I can see, I can graph it over time. I can see my, my review velocity over time. A lot of data here I get, I bet you 90% of you guys didn’t even realize you have access to, but this is something that we all know how important reviews are, and most of you guys are already paying for Helium 10. You don’t need a Diamond account for this, you don’t need an Elite account.

Bradley Sutton:

This is on the base plan, guys. You have access to all of this information. And so it’s just a no-brainer to activate this and then Follow-up, no pun intended, with how your Follow-up is doing so that you can see you know, how your review requests are going. Cuz maybe you wanna, like, maybe it’s not great, your review velocity compared to how many of you reviews you’re requesting. So maybe you wanna move that date, you know about when you actually send the email. Maybe you wanna make it slower, maybe you wanna make it faster, but start experimenting with these guys, guys or have your team do it. All right guys. That’s it for this seller strategy masterclass. We went over Adtomic today. We went over Follow-up. I hope you guys were able to get some benefit. Remember, most of you are using Helium 10.

Bradley Sutton:

The few of you who aren’t, I guarantee you’re probably using another software that probably has similar capabilities, not as great as Helium 10. Obviously, nobody is as great as Helium 10. But whether you’re not, whether even if you’re not using Helium 10, make sure that your software is using these kind of strategies in your business. And if not, yeah, might be time to make the switch over to Helium 10. You know, I rarely give out this code, but anybody who wants to switch over to Helium 10, just use SSP10 and you’ll save 10% off for life. All right guys. Hope you enjoyed this episode. We’ll see you in the next one. Bye-Bye.

#445 - 8-Figure Seller Listing Teardown

In this episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast, we had the privilege to interview Jason McLellan, an 8-figure seller on Amazon. He generously shared insights into his Amazon brand Vitacup, including his launch strategy, coupon strategy, and his use of AI advertising partners.
 
Jason also allowed us to see his listings, storefront, and Amazon activities, so we could all learn from his successes. We talked about his unique strategies like using emojis in your bullet points, checking other parts of his listings, and even shared insights on cool widgets inside his A+ Content.
 
In addition, Jason shared his Amazon Posts strategy, the widgets present on his listings, and how to he uses influencers to boost his brand’s sales. He also gave us tips on how to get tons of reviews for your Walmart listing and why he has 100 different variations in one listing.
 
Towards the end of the episode, Jason shared his favorite Helium 10 tool and revealed a secret that 90% of Amazon sellers are not doing a critical activity. He also offered a 20% discount on Vitacup this coming April 25!

Tune in to this episode if you want to learn from an 8-Figure Amazon seller.

In episode 445 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Jason discuss: 

• 03:19 – Jason’s Backstory And How He Got Started On Amazon
• 04:25 – $13 Million Dollars In Gross Amazon Sales
• 06:29 – Talking About His Coupon Strategy
• 08:04 – Jason’s Amazon Launch Strategy
• 13:32 – Using Emojis In Your Amazon Bullet Points
• 15:15 – Why An AI Advertising Partner Is Important
• 18:08 – Checking Other Parts Of His Listings
• 18:58 – A Cool Widget Inside You’re A+ Content
• 19:59 – Inspiration From This Brand – Amazon Posts Widget
• 21:24– Influencer And Amazon Posts Strategy
• 23:17 – Getting A Ton Of Reviews For Your Walmart Listing
• 30:03 – 100 Different Variations In One Listing?
• 33:48 – Jason’s 60-Second Tips
• 36:11 – His Favorite Helium 10 Tool
• 38:27 – 90% Of Amazon Sellers Are Not Doing This
• 41:40 – Get 20% Discount On Vitacup
• 41:58 – How To Contact Jason McLellan

► 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, for the first time on the podcast, we’ve got an eight figure seller here who is completely opening up his brand and allows us to completely tear apart his listings and storefront and all of his activities that he does on Amazon so that we can learn from it. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think.

Bradley Sutton:

Do you wanna see how your listing or maybe competitor’s listing rates as to best practices for listing optimization? Or maybe you wanna compare a group of ASINs or Amazon products to see how they compare to each other. Maybe you wanna see within seconds the top keywords for a single listing or a group of listings. You can do that and more with the Helium 10 Tool Listing Analyzer. For more information, go to h10.me/listinganalyzer. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s a completely BS free, unscripted, and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. So, welcome to the show, this is your first time on the show. So what I always like to do is kind of like get your superhero origin story. Were you born and raised around this area, or where do you come from?

Jason:

Yeah. I was born and raised around the Kearney Mesa area, so deep into San Diego. And then over

Bradley Sutton:

What high school did you go to?

Jason:

I went to two. I went to a private school, Claremont Christian. And then I switched over to Madison.

Bradley Sutton:

So Oh, Madison. Yes, I know the, yeah, we played them in basketball sometimes. Okay, cool. Cool. And then did you go to college after that?

Jason:

Yeah, I did. I did my first two years up in the Bay Area, Marin in county at a college called Dominican University, and then I switched, came back to San Diego, went to and finished at USD.

Bradley Sutton:

So you like doing this two year and two year thing throughout your Scholastic career, huh?

Jason:

Not even that man. Like my first like, big job was on the East Coast with Liz Claiborne. So I stayed out there two years and I came back and settled back in San Diego.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. All right. Us, you were a Terrero then, right?

Jason:

Yes, I was a Terrero.

Bradley Sutton:

Excellent. Excellent. So what was your major at or your USD

Jason:

The business emphasizes international trade.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. And is that upon graduation, is that what you kind of got yourself into, or what did you do?

Jason:

So, the first company I worked with was a candle manufacturer. And ya I was doing some international customer service, and then I was running the logistics after that, and then totally something completely different. Got the opportunity to join Liz Clayborne and I ended up part-time in their vendor manage inventory department and part-time in their business re-engineering, and then rolled full-time into their business re-engineering department. So I was there for two years and did a variety of projects.

Bradley Sutton:

What does that mean? What do you say? Business re-engineering?

Jason:

Business re-engineering was big term back in the late nineties, mid-nineties, late nineties. You’re basically looking at how to make your business efficient. Going through, doing process breakdowns, looking at how you could just collapse steps, tasks writing a lot of SOPs

Bradley Sutton:

Now, how did you get into, what was your first entry into the Amazon world?

Jason:

First entry to Amazon World funny enough is second company after I worked for coming back to San Diego, I stuck in the apparel industry. Then I ended up getting into book wholesale as a, as a buyer. And we were a this was back when Amazon was only booked and they did have some, you know, key strategic partnerships like toys or us and other ones that they ended up putting out of business. But my last probably six months, I inherited into my buying responsibilities. Amazon is a customer, we’re a wholesaler.

Bradley Sutton:

But on the books, on the book side,

Jason:

On the book side, yeah. So trying to figure out missed opportunities and other things, making sure we’re buying accordingly. So I was getting there. When I took over, they gave me their the missed opportunity speed. So I was just, it was amazing, just like the sheer amount of volume of books they were looking for. Huh. And so that always stuck with me.

Bradley Sutton:

Just fast forward to the end. Like what, what did you guys end like last year in sales? You know I can just see in Helium 10, just the first page of your storefront, you know, looks like there’s about, you know, 2-3 million dollars worth of worth of sales there on the first page. And you’ve got like, you know, pages and pages more products. So around where are you guys? What kind of revenue are you guys doing a year?

Jason:

We did almost 13. We’ll do somewhere between 15 and 16 this year.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. All right. So

Jason:

A million to be,

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. Excellent. Excellent. So like what was it when you started, when you got there?

Jason:

It was three mils and change. Okay. So it’s been a great, it’s been a great journey. I mean, there’s, I mean, it’s been this crazy journey, crazy experiences. I mean, Amazon is always evolving, always changing, never stays stagnant. So it’s been,

Bradley Sutton:

I don’t tell, tell me a little about the brand though. Like, I know who you know, some major brands are, but was this a brand that is, is in brick and mortar a lot? Is it purely an online brand?

Jason:

No, we’re a mix. So we, we do D2C through our own website. We are in brick and mortar, target, Walmart sprouts since you’re in the area. And some other regional grocery chains. And we’re on Amazon, Amazon, Canada, Walmart, USA as a 3P seller in addition as a 1P.

Bradley Sutton:

I see you have a climate, what did you have to use to apply to get climate pledge friendly here?

Jason:

I didn’t have to apply for anything. It was by the nature of our package design you know, Amazon how we package things smoothing on our ground how we package our ground coffee and the, the compact size, the weight and the dimensions. It just automatically gave it to us. I’m not complaining at

Bradley Sutton:

All. Yeah. Yeah.

Jason:

Badges or badges, they catch attention.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. I like those. I also noticed just here that you utilize 20% off coupons on a lot of your things. So like I, I’m assuming you’ve tested a lot of different things. Discounts and coupons And things and, and this green tw thing and the, this 20% number seems to, to perform best for you?

Jason:

It does. Kind of the, you know, hopefully none of my competitors are listening to this, but I mean, we get a 20% conversion on a 20%, and that’s kind of the math on it. We’ve tried lower and the conversion doesn’t pencil out.

Bradley Sutton:

Hmm. Okay. So, and so this is like an evergreen thing you kind of have on, on o your skews, huh?

Jason:

It’s an evergreen thing. I call it the drug cuz we can’t get off of it. Slowly trying to whittle, whittle down. I don’t we’ve on some things we’ve slowly removed, but for the majority, yeah. You know for everyone who doesn’t have Vita Cup, we’re a functional coffee. We’re, we’re our in functional means that we’ve infused our, our product with vitamins and super feeds. To give you something a little bit more so we’re a premium product within the coffee ecosystem. And so we need to entice the consumer for trial, and that’s what the 20% does. We’re consumable product, so we’re, we’re always trying to build a flow of, of people coming in and moving them from trial to subscribe and save. Because as a consumable product, that’s where they’re really the the money is And how you make yourself profitable.

Bradley Sutton:

Talk to me about your launch strategy, you know, as an established brand and you’ve got so many SKUs and so many customers on subscribe and save. Like do you promote to an off Amazon audience like, Hey guys, we just launched on Amazon. Are, are you just doing launch like a regular Amazon seller who’s starting from scratch, you know, like, you know, doing some discounted PPC or since you’re such a strong brand are you just able to launch at regular price and, and nothing’s, you know, no special campaigns and, and you can get to page one for the keywords that you need to,

Jason:

You know what I’m gonna say is, is thank goodness for the honeymoon period you get on launch I mean if you start, I mean, it’s kind of a loaded question even for an established brand. Sure. Within that has relevancy within the space, in which you’re always launching to. If you start looking at how many paid spots versus organic spots within your organic search. You have, you have to have a PPC strategy there, you’re not gonna succeed even with that honeymoon period because the honeymoon period’s gonna push you up in organic ranking. You might, and you’re gonna have first page, but start breaking down the, the rows. You got sponsored brand, then you got the first four rows of the supposedly search results are all paid. And then the fifth one is organic, and then below that you have more paid. And then you have highly featured, which is all paid to play. And then, so really it’s like when you get that fifth and sixth rows, that’s when you start getting organic search. But how many people really scroll down there? So yes, we launch with a very strategic PPC strategy knowing what keywords that we want to target on. We bake those keywords into the listings title below points A+ content.

Bradley Sutton:

Looks like you have premium A+ content.

Jason:

Yes.

Bradley Sutton:

So amazing.

Jason:

Yeah. So I don’t know if the offer’s still going on, but we, we saw that the if you applied the brand’s story to all of your products, it unlocked A+ Content for you. And we took advantage of that. And I really love it because there’s different components, video and other stuff that you can get.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. I didn’t even realize..I mean that’s how I figured this was premium because I was like, wait a minute, I don’t remember videos being a regular A+ content being a thing.

Jason:

Yeah. What I have to say is you really want the premium A+ content. Cuz it really then goes back down to the how the consumer is searching for product and it’s not desktop. The majority of searches are going through mobile. And if you look at that, I’m not a hundred percent happy of how the layout is, but if you take that look, that same layout on mobile device is so much, the experience is really great.

Bradley Sutton:

Interesting.

Jason:

So that’s what you want. You know, we’ve been, we’ve been optimizing our search experience for mobile for probably the last three years. We had a gut before they released the data you can get, get out of business reports on what the percentage of experience was via mobile, via desktop. And it’s been like, and so as Amazon’s releasing this stuff to catch up to that, we’ve been trying to take advantage of it.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. I’m just like trying to break, you know, it’s rare that we have bigger companies on here who they, they don’t care about competition because it’s like people there’s not gonna be somebody who’s like, Hey, let me go ahead and start a $13 million here tea and coffee pod brand. So you have nothing to fear here, but yeah, I’d like to take advantage that you’re opening your brand here. So I’m just, I just wanna get behind some of your strategies. So we talked a little about your coupon strategy here. You’ve got great images and, and videos and things. So are you doing these in-house? Are you outsourcing these assets?

Jason:

We’re doing, we’re doing it in-house. I mean, I’m very blessed. So you gotta go back to the founding of Vita Cup. Vita Cup was founded by our CEO, Brandon Fisherman. Brandon Fisherman, before this owned one of the largest, it was 150 employee internet marketing agency in California. He incubated this company Vita Cup out of that company, sold the other company off and focused on this a hundred percent. Coming over with him was the head creative director of that digital marketing agency. So I have my head creative Irene at Vita Cup who’s just a rockstar, is a hundred percent digital marketing experience. And so I’m just very fortunate, like we get a deep discussions on like, what we should do for ads, and then on the flip side, I’ll tell you like, I have her, she’s so in tuned with it. Like, we have the philosophy, you can always do better. She’s like, Hey, you know, what can we throw up and manage by experiments? Or can we run an AB test on creative? Like, let’s try something new. You know, everything’s always continually influx and changing and like, what can we do? Just eek out a couple more conversion points.

Bradley Sutton:

So like, I mean, video editing everything’s in-house,

Jason:

Everything’s in-house. I think there’s a couple services we might use for like, video that we outsource, but layout direction is all done in-house.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Cool. Here we go. Like I know you’re dialed into to Amazon and you have good connections in Amazon too. They, they don’t get mad that you’re using emojis in your bullet points. Like nobody’s ever frowned on that.

Jason:

Let’s not talk about that, I don’t want them watching this. Like, we haven’t been slapped yet. I mean, anytime we do an upload, I know it gets flagged.

Bradley Sutton:

Oh, when you upload it, there’s a message that says, Hey, what’s up with these emojis?

Jason:

Yeah. That’s not compliant.

Bradley Sutton:

But it still lets you do it though, huh?

Jason:

It still lets me do it.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. I mean, to me, that’s kind of like the thing, like if you’re in a category where you’re selling white coffin shelves or something, for example, you know, it’s really hard to see on a white background. So, so I’ve noticed that in those categories, like Amazon kind of doesn’t mind overall if you don’t have complete white background where it’s kinda like, you know what, on, in that case, it’s like the worst that could happen is just they, they give you a su suppression, you have to fix it right away, but it’s not like it’s gonna get your account suspended. So I wonder if this emoji thing might be, might be similar to there where Yeah, it’s technically not not you know, compliant, but Amazon knows that in some categories it actually performs better, you know?

Bradley Sutton:

And so they’re like, you know what? We’ll, we’ll just let this slide unless somebody we would agree starts putting a bunch of eggplant emojis or something, you know, on here. But, okay. So yeah, I really like the way you have your bullet points set up here. I see that you are doing some defensive product display ads potentially over here. Yeah. So how do you know, do you just like, experiment with bids to see, hey, what, what, what’s gonna get you the, the position or, or what do you do there?

Jason:

So we, we have partnered and have been partnered for the last four years with an outside AI agency. But we have a very successful partnership, and their AI has, has done this great service and growth over the years. You know, I, I do recommend there’s, there’s only so much you can humanly test especially when you’re, you’re scaling at certain levels. I’d recommend to anyone to really check out an AI advertising partner as a human, like trying to test all those placements, what’s working, what’s not, and then getting rid of the stuff that’s not working. It”s not humanly possible. Yeah. At the scale we’re working at it’s, it’s just too much. So, it’s been great. It’s saved me a ton of time.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. Next thing I see, moving down the listing here, definitely using some virtual bundles. Like you haven’t done them all, but like, at least you have this slot here so that it’s pushing some of the ads down. I like that strategy. What made you just do one here? Like one bundle?

Jason:

So it depends. Like some have all five slots. Some have only one. I came up with a matrix on how we were creating ’em, and I looked at visibility and which ones I started aligned to. That would make sense. And then since then on some of these, we’re actually starting to create physical items, bundles, which we’re doing through fulfilled by merchant. And so we’re peeling those off as a virtual bundle. But yeah, some of our, some of our top performing ASINs, they’re gonna, you’re gonna see five come across. And I, we’ve been doing that. I don’t know what virtual rental’s been around since

Bradley Sutton:

It’s been a couple years at

Jason:

Least. Yeah, a couple years. Yeah. We were first introduced to it, I think either through launchpad or SAS. And we yeah, immediately, like it’s free advertising for yourself. You fill up another space.

Bradley Sutton:

No cost per click or anything on there?

Jason:

No. And then some we just started to peel on how we can do through FBM, because then we can start running a little more advertising a little bit. There’s, there’s a little more strategic things we can do to push ’em that we know that that’ll cause more growth.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Again, with the defensive ads, so like you do defensive product targeting ads, and you’ve got the entire row here of products with all your own brand. That’s super cool.

Jason:

Once again, I had to give credit the AI. They have a really great methodology on that

Bradley Sutton:

To be able to check what it takes to get there. Now, you know, you know, obviously you’re gonna have to, you know, bid very high. Are you actually getting conversions in virtual bundles in your defensive ads and things, and is it still worth it?

Jason:

It’s still worth it overall. Our, our whole category, we’re a very commoditized competitive space. And so, and I suspect that the CPC, the bit amount on it is not that much for the virtual. If pure competitor, please don’t target it my ACoS, but I suspect it’s, it’s not that much because we have all of ’em failed. If you look at some other high performing listings, we have a good portion of them fulfilled, but not all.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. What is this you know, just for those who don’t have this or don’t know, like, what, what section is this? You know, people know about description, people know about A+ content, but the from the brand. So where can I go in Seller Central if I’m looking at this for the first time, and where can I, you know, get this kind of cool widget?

Jason:

So that is what they call your brand story, and that’s what unlocked all of our A+ Content during the promotional period. And if I remember correctly, when we put this together you access it through your A+ content section. Okay,

Bradley Sutton:

Cool.

Jason:

And it’s, once again, it’s another piece of content graphic in which you can fill up space, tell a great story, it’s gonna run across all of yours. I think graphic is important for engagement with the in consumer. It allows one more touchpoint to keep them longer on your page from breaking concentration and going, trying to find something else.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. Scrolling down here. We already look at your premium or the top part of your premium plus content. You know, the cool video that you have there. Since you have over a hundred products, do you have a rhyme and reason as far as what you choose to be the one that you have under, under this like product grid here, under your featured product section here at the bottom?

Jason:

Yeah. That’s a great question. We actually put a lot of thought into that. New product launches, some of it’s actually gut. But over time we actually update and refine these. We, we start looking under like what’s frequently bought together not just in what Amazon’s showing us, but what we’re, we’re pulling out and hashing through the order files and looking at what people bought together. What makes sense, what do we think that in addition to that, what do you think people are gonna also has a high repeat rate that we want them to introduce them to? So some of it’s partly we know there’s our affinity for it. We wanna highlight something that we know that has used as an advertising spot to promote another, another product that has a high repeat rate, which if they bought purchase, there’s a higher propensity that they’re gonna repurchase it, which will lead ’em to sms.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Excellent. I noticed this is in the unique finds category. So like how did, how did you, I don’t know. Is that on purpose or

Jason:

No, no idea. Amazon bots. We don’t know why some things like that occur. As long as sales aren’t going down, we’re okay.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. Makes sense. Inspiration from this brand. So, wait, are these, these, these are your Amazon posts or these, these are from.

Jason:

These are our Amazon posts. Okay. So we’re we’re, we’re a very big believer in Amazon posts we were fortunate to be a beta tester on it. And so we embraced it early on. We saw, well, you know, no idea where the posts actually get posted to. It was all random. It’s still random. We still have no idea. But we really did see that it was a great way to once again, hit a touch point in which we can engage with the in consumer in a meaningful way. And we, you know, we, we enjoy looking at how much we, we continue to grow on followers, and we and so we know customers are actually ingesting the content

Bradley Sutton:

Now how many of these are your, you know, own in-house? I mean, some of these look like UGC, some, some user-generated content here. We,

Jason:

We repurpose a lot of our UGC content for it.

Bradley Sutton:

How are you getting the UGC?

Jason:

 have a whole social, I have a small social media team they engage with. We have some brand ambassadors and some influencers. And so we have rights to it. And then we also have some rights through some other programs we participate that they, we participate in that we get the UGC content. And then there’s just stuff that we probably requested that we have rights to. So having engagement with brand ambassadors really helps on the UGC side.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. have you done the what is it called again, you know, now that Amazon Post came first, but then you allowed, you know, Amazon Post allowed you to get brand followers and things, and then isn’t there a new thing, I forgot what it’s called offhand, but now you can reach out to those brand followers.

Jason:

So customer engagement tool.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. That’s the one.

Jason:

. Yeah. So yeah. And that was yeah, we’ve, we’ve participating in that since state one. I love it. Absolutely. Love, love it. If anyone wants to really stay engaged with a brand, they’re, they’re, they really love on Amazon go and click follow. Please go and follow ViCAP and go to our brand store and on Amazon and click that little follow button. We will send out a weekly email. It’ll be highly graphic. It’ll contain two graphic images. And we utilize it to, to not just hit our brand followers, but they rolled out when was the Helium 10 Sell and Scale?

Bradley Sutton:

Around September of last year.

Jason:

So around September of last year, they rolled out three new product groups that you can launch too. And some of them are over the last like 365, you’re people who’ve bought high repeat, and then there’s another, I forget the other segmentation. And, and two of them, maybe three can only hit every two weeks. Brand followers you can hit every week. And so we rotate through it. And, you know, it’s, there a call to action anywhere there that you’re allowed to do? Or is it mainly just kind of informationat with, yeah, so here’s the thing. You can’t have a call to action. Okay. So you have to, so you have to be creative in your wording. Everyone, if you wanna know how to be creative, go and follow me. I need more followers on and you’ll, and start, start reading on our call to action. But you can get creative on it that makes it very terms of service compliant. You just have to td and you have to think about your product. But yeah, I love it. Like, there’s, everyone complains has been complaining, there’s no way for me to reach out to my customers. There’s no way for me to engage into it. It’s very restrictive in what you can and can’t do. Cuz let’s be honest, like over this course of a decade, two decades that Amazon’s been there, I mean, people have, sellers have abused, like there’s a small portion, but they have abused. So they’ve had to put rails on. And it’s always been that way. I mean, from eBay, people, sellers were abusing to try and make a sale. Sure. And a lot of that meth methodologies have shifted over. So I get why Amazon’s done a lot of stuff. I get why they have rails on it, but it would be I, I’m just hopeful they’re gonna start loosening more and more up as they gain a little more confidence in how sellers are utilizing their tool.

Bradley Sutton:

Well for you then, you know, like obviously if there’s a call to action. Like let’s say you’re doing Amazon attribution, you’re doing a off Amazon campaign, you could see the kind of impact it’s gonna have, you know, PPC, you can see the impact, you know, with Amazon posts and the engagements and stuff. There’s not per se an ROI tool where you can see, so how, how are you gauging success and how are you gauging the attention you need to give? Because like you just said, you’ve got this weekly cadence now where you’re sending this out, but like, how do you know that effort is worth it? Like, what kind of metrics are you even looking at?

Jason:

So we look at, like, for Asen, especially on one of the bigger engagement groups, or like, did we see a spike in sales on the product that we’re featuring in there? Is here, cuz we’re always trying to test out different creative. Like, is there a creative, like it popped, okay, what creative was it? Let’s log that in. Next time we send that creative out, did it pop again? Is there certain creative types that the consumer’s engaging more with? Amazon posts, one of the metrics we always have looked at is just followers. How is our followers group growing? And the same we’re doing with live Amazon Live it’s, it’s, you know, have we seen an above average, normal growth in followers when we do an Amazon Live? So there’s, there’s not these hardcore KPIs you can, can like ingest in and how successful it is. But I think if you can grow your co who’s, who’s your consumer group on who’s following you you can track it. I think that’s a good KPI because the broader the group, the more you’re gonna be able to retarget them in customer engagement and the more people you know, are gonna see stuff about your brand.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Are you in charge of your Walmart listings as well?

Jason:

Yes. And we’re continuing to go and try and refine that.

Bradley Sutton:

You’ve got like 7,000 reviews on one of your Walmart. Did you use that one thing where you can migrate reviews over, or, or are these 7,000 actual Walmart reviews?

Jason:

No, we engaged with a couple different companies yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

That are out. The ones that can, can take reviews and wouldn’t it be nice if Amazon offered that?

Jason:

It it would, it would be great. So yes, we’re able to port all of the mortar over. Yeah, we’re still really trying, we’re still young in the in the Walmart three piece space. We’re still how

Bradley Sutton:

How’s sales on Walmart, you know, at the same, you know, 13 million on Amazon, how about Walmart in that same time period?

Jason:

No, I’ll do a thousand dollars a day. You know, so we’re looking at about 30k. But, so it’s, it’s not much. I, I really like the way they’re going. I really equate, you know, you know, history tends to repeat itself. You know, I, fortunately I gotta live between the eBay to Amazon transition and I really see that going on right now with Amazon and Walmart. Amazon’s still gonna retain major relevance, unlike, I mean, eBay definitely has the snitches. I still sell stuff some collectibles. I’ll flip collectibles on eBay, and I think it’s a great platform for that and some other stuff. But you know, Amazon came to all sellers and was like, how dare eBay give you non-US customer support? How eBay hates your sellers, they abuse you. And it was, in the early days, Amazon was incredible. You’d always get someone on the US on the phone.

Jason:

It would like, it would be easy to get through issues. And you know, now Amazon’s become what they scoffed at eBay. You know, there’s only it in the online marketplace. No one has really figured out how to really scale and manage that growth to, to mass. And I think that’s what we’re going through now. And I think it’s interesting that we’re seeing, seeing Walmart at this point in time, really starting to scale up. It almost feels very strategic. It almost feels like, you know, what Amazon did to eBay. And I think they have a huge opportunity to have long-term growth. And definitely we’re starting to invest more time and energy into the Walmart side.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. Going back to Amazon, I just noticed one of your listings here looks like it’s got like 100 different variations here. So Yeah. What’s the thought process here? Because that green tea that we were breaking down only has like two or three and a couple of others, and I’m just looking like Yeah. At a million variations here. So like, what was the thought process to have so many here as opposed to splitting some of these out?

Jason:

So part of the thought process is, is we have, we found, and as our catalog’s grown, this has grown, like variating it together people if they click initially, and, and I’ll do like thought process and funneling ’em in. If someone clicks on our listing, they’re like, they’re intrigued about a functional coffee. They’re intrigued about finding some type of improvement that they can get through their day, through their, their morning cup of coffee or afternoon cup of coffee, whether it be our genius blend or slim blend. Our focus blend, you know each has different super foods addressing different needs. It allows them for discovery. They might click in on Genius, but they might end up on focus blend, which is a mushroom and coffee blend. Or they might go towards our extra shot, which is a dark roast coffee with a shot of espresso in it plus some B vitamins, which I’m drinking right now.

Jason:

Like if you need to pick me up, that’ll do. It’s, it’s my afternoon picking. Pick me up for me. And so it allows us, and then I’m gonna, I’m gonna be honest, like it gets us, you know, you look at it, we have 20,000 reviews because of it aggregated together gets us up higher on the bsr. There is some visibility being in the first page of bestseller ranking. People shop that, you know, the closer you can get to the top, the more draft you’re gonna get.

Bradley Sutton:

So yep, you’re number 54 and single-serve coffee capsules. This is where it comes in. Like most of us, or maybe I’m thinking from Helium 10 standpoint, but from most, a lot of other sellers too, like didn’t, like when Amazon changed to give one single BSR for a whole variation because then you can’t really.

Jason:

Screwed. It’s screwed up. It’s screwed up how you guys are scraping stuff, like you’re formula scraping, but like you’re calculating off. Yeah,

Bradley Sutton:

I, nobody can calculate. No, you know, nobody can calculate, you know, overall, like, so, so the, but the number refers to, you know, the, the estimated sales is for everything now put together, but, you know, without looking at reviews, you don’t know which one is selling. But now all of a sudden, you know, you might not have had one SKU that could crack the top 100 in a sub bsr main BSR category right now. Now you’re showing up. So now, but all these variations that you have on this one do you also have standalone listings for like this flavor or something so that.

Jason:

No.

Bradley Sutton:

So the only way I can find this Vita Cup extra shot coffee plus espresso is in this variation family here.

Jason:

Not necessarily. We’re also running PPC against it, so for search and, and we do rank an organic search for each individual one under keywords. So yeah, like, yeah. And then when it comes up, you’re gonna, like going back to, you’re gonna see that 20% coupon, you’re gonna see the total number of reviews, so, and you’re gonna see a great image that clearly says what the product is. Our images are very strategic on how we design packaging for Amazon.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Cool. Now this is just a bunch of stuff that I can see, you know, looking at your, your storefront and things, but what haven’t we talked about? Like what are some strategies that you guys are utilizing that you think, you know a lot of sellers, you know, might not, might not be, like, do you have any unique things that you’re doing that we haven’t

Jason:

Mentioned? No, we, I don’t know a lot of the stuff’s. I mean, I can kind of go through some high level stuff that we, we do and, and I think we really take a really hardcore approach is we’ve, we’ve maintained our data since 2017 when the company’s was created. So we really understand our cohorts and how we grow it, and making sure that the customers that we continue to add to it are repeating through that and the percentages is going. And then we really have been focused on understanding what our product repeat rates are. And then you can get into one of our business successes is striking a balance between short, what I’d call short-term revenue versus long-term revenue. You can have a product that is going to, the bids are cheap, has a lot of people searching for it.

Jason:

You can sell that thing all day long, and you can fund a lot of funnel, a lot of advertising money into it. And you can have great short-term sales, but you’re building no long-term revenue because repeat rates is much lower on it. Versus where you have a product where the repeat rate is phenomenal, like people are, the odds are people are when they, like most of the people are gonna buy it, they’re gonna repeat. It might be small, it might be a slower mover, but you’re then we’re fine-tuning our advertising to how our products perform and on that basis, and then still balancing out, we need short-term revenue to grow. And then from that, it allows you to grow. You start putting the people in a funnel to get them into SN s and then SNS is just reoccurring revenue, easy money, that, and then,

Bradley Sutton:

So, so are you taking, you know, like, like most people in groceries and other categories like you take in a loss on your initial paper click, but then un completely fine with it because knowing that you’re making it up on, on the subscribe and save or, or you’re still even profitable on that first, that first touch,

Jason:

You know I would say we are not profitable on new product watches. That’s where we take the loss on building that segment. But at this point, we’re in its established product, even on the first collect we’re about that you know, is beneficial for people?

Jason:

You know, I understand your business and, and the market and what you’re operating. I live in, and we’ve talked about this, you and I offline. Like, live in product Opportunity Explorer and there’s like, there’s a lot of stuff I get to garner from there, and there’s a lot of stuff I bang between product opportunity Explorer, looking at listings and pulling stuff in for the refinement through X-ray when I’m on, on those competitor listings, listings that they’re identified, and then stuff taking in and, and aggregating data through Helium 10 when I’m looking at you know, the reverse ASIN lookup. And

Bradley Sutton:

It’s so product opportunity Explorer, like looking for new potential flavors or, or things that people are, are looking for, or what,

Jason:

Yeah, looking, looking for innovation and also just the ecosystem can change over time on Amazon and just looking at what keywords are being searched. Is there a switch to that? I can tell you on some certain categories that we’ve, we’ve seen different keywords switch over the last year and you know, we were able to, to, to jump on that and, and launch some new advertising to specifically address that. And also to then, excuse me to then further bake those into our, the back end of our listings on, on the search, the backend search terms and some meta places on A+ content and bullet points. I mean, it’s, it’s, you can continually improve. Like there’s nothing about setting and forgetting it. Like you’re, you, you’re always gonna have competition out there who’s gonna try and be better than you. So you better be on your A game and try and be better than them.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, for sure. Favorite Healing 10 tool?

Jason:

Right now, X-Ray Chrome extension. Awesome. I probably use it every day. Like I’m in product Opportunity Explorer every day I’m looking at competitors. It’s very tactical, functional, easy to use. You’re right there. You just, you click on it pops up what I need to digest really quickly is something changing. It’s something I’m wasn’t figuring a keyword that they’re, that they’re probably on. And it gives me, you know, understanding that gives me, I can go out and take immediate action and do something.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome. Awesome. Love it. All right. So last thing, like maybe is there something that you think a lot of sellers are kind of like maybe forgetting about or they’re trying, you know, because it’s, it’s too tedious or, or it’s just like, seems like a no-brainer that you think people are, might be leaving money in the table. Like, is there something that you do with like, just general reports that has given you insight and actually made you take action on something that you probably think that 90% of the sellers out there aren’t doing?

Jason:

Yeah, I, you know, I would say the brand analytics report, you got, you got two, you got the search query performance and you got the, the catalog like search query performance is great just to understand what you have relevancy on. First functional coffee, we actually saw some keywords in it that we really weren’t addressing in a functional way. We actually launched a product based off that a couple of years ago. And then second was Cala Performance. Like two days ago. Boss and I we’re like, we had, we had some time and on a regular basis, we’ll go through and look at how can we, once again, how can we improve our performance. We went to Kellogg’s performance. We extracted out large number of weeks data and we to get a trend line on, on the clickthrough rate to see is there are any, if we have products that have high repeat rates, but low clickthrough rate, what can we do?

Jason:

Like let’s review those products on their images, their titles is a coupon, right? Is, yeah. Is, you know, all those different things. Because if you can get someone to click in, it means a whole lot of world. You, you have them and then what you do with them on that real estate that you have on your product page, you need to convert ’em. So it’s like half the battles Get ’em com is, get ’em to click in. So we’re able to make some quick changes and some messaging. We reallocated how some of the wording to make sure that some of the things we’re trying to communicate were in probably in the first 72-75 characters of the title. So that would pick up more on mobile. So since that’s where the majority of the shopping experiences. And, you know, then we’ll go back in about another two weeks and we’ll take a look again, on the CTR end and see did, did that, did, did that work out? Did the CTR go up?

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome. Awesome. All right. Well, cool. It’s this has been cool to kind of you know, I don’t think I, I’ve done something this deep, like as far as like going through the anatomy of somebody’s account or somebody’s listings like this in the last quarter.

Jason:

Hopefully I don’t get any calls from my boss, doesn’t get any calls from our board of directors. You gave too much information out

Bradley Sutton:

Nah, it’s good. I know you as much as he gave out guys there, there’s stuff that we can’t even talk about, you know, that they do. Here that he’s got plenty of his leave. I’m sure they’ll be, they’ll be fine. So this is, this is kind of cool. Thanks for opening it up and, and you know, I know you’ve been offering to me, I guess actually while I was on this call, I shared it in my little group chat with my family, the link to your store, because there, you know, that green tea has intrigued me. And then you had a couple of other ones that I think we might wanna try for whatever reason, I didn’t realize that you guys had pods and the packs too. So I’m definitely going to try some of these products. Everybody else out there, invite a cup on Amazon, follow them and take advantage of that 20% discount that they’ve gotten all their products. Support a local Helium 10 member here.

Jason:

And if you want a great deal, something we just got approval on yesterday April 25th, we’re gonna have a top deal. And it’s gonna be a minimum 30% off.

Bradley Sutton:

And if people want to find you on the interwebs is LinkedIn the best place?

Jason:

That’s gonna be the, probably the only place. Unfortunately.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome. All right. So look up or can you spell your last Jason, and then can you spell your last name? Sure.

Jason:

Last name’s McLellan.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, Jason, thank you so much for joining. I’m gonna be inviting you. I know you’re not an Elite member yet. We’ve been trying to get you to see the light, but I might invite you to our next workshop in end of May. And so you can come check out what you’ve been missing out on.

Jason:

Ah, thank you. I appreciate that.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, we’ll talk to you later. Okay.