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

#631 - Amazon Financial Planning Workshop

In this episode, the author of Profit First for eCommerce Sellers shares strategies to calculate, manage finances, and ensure profitability to fund your Amazon business and lifestyle.

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What if you could dramatically enhance your e-commerce business's profitability by making a simple shift in your financial strategy? In this episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10, we sit down with Cyndi Thomason, the mastermind behind "Profit First for E-Commerce Sellers." Cyndi opens up about the intricacies of cash flow management and the vital principle of paying yourself first, a step often neglected by Amazon sellers. Drawing from her extensive experience at Books Keep, Cyndi provides an in-depth analysis of the current e-commerce landscape, highlighting an intriguing scenario where revenues are climbing, yet gross profits dwindle due to rising costs. 

We unravel the secrets of proactive financial planning, diving into the innovative use of multiple bank accounts to streamline your business finances. By establishing separate accounts for operating expenses, inventory, and profits, you can achieve a crystal-clear view of your cash flow and tackle the unique hurdles of inventory management. Cyndi guides us through the practicalities of this method, emphasizing the importance of setting aside funds for future inventory needs in the ever-changing market conditions.

As we dive deeper, the conversation shifts to the transformative "Profit First" model. Cyndi passionately advocates for entrepreneurs to reward themselves with regular profit distributions, likening this practice to the enjoyment of dividends from stocks. This not only celebrates success but also builds financial discipline. We also explore strategies for funding inventory and product development while keeping operational expenses in check. From understanding the nuances of real revenue to maintaining a healthy balance for taxes and owner pay, Cyndi equips us with essential tools for sustainable business growth and personal financial well-being.

In episode 631 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Carrie, Kevin, and Cyndi discuss:

• 00:00 - Maximizing E-Commerce Profitability Strategies
• 01:28 - Profit First for E-Commerce With Cyndi Thomason
• 05:36 - Impact of Ad Spend on Profitability
• 08:38 - Understanding Profit First Behavioral Strategy
• 11:55 - Optimizing Profit Through 3 Bank Accounts
• 13:31 - Setting Up Multiple Bank Accounts
• 18:46 - Implementing Profit First Financial Strategy
• 20:00 - Building a Profit Reserve for Business
• 24:52 - Credit Cards in Business
• 29:00 - Financial Strategies for Business Growth
• 30:56 - Mindset Shift for Business Success
• 36:25 - Strategies for Business Financial Growth
• 37:20 - Managing Expenses for Product Development
• 40:45 - Cash Flow Management and Profit Maximization

#630 - 9-Figure Amazon Seller + TikTok Shop Expert Strategies

This episode is a two-in-one special, with two guests for the price of one. One is one of the world's top experts on TikTok shop, and the other has sold hundreds of millions of dollars online and is even an accomplished DJ who plays at music festivals.

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Join us for a fascinating conversation as we welcome Ali Grey, a remarkable e-commerce expert and globetrotter, to our podcast. Ali shares his journey from London to living in Taiwan, after having worked from an impressive 70 different countries. Discover how he started his entrepreneurial journey at the young age of 15 by coding his own dropshipping website, which led him to leave school and pursue e-commerce full-time. Ali talks about his success on Amazon and his early investments in Bitcoin, which were driven by his interest in cryptography and a desire to break away from traditional financial systems.

In another exciting chapter, we explore Ali's creative side as GRY, a DJ who transitioned from organizing underground raves in London to performing at major festivals around the world. He reveals the four key strategies that propelled his e-commerce business to impressive revenue growth, including acquiring ASINs, leveraging affiliate marketing, building a strong community, and creating patented products. Ali emphasizes the importance of community and patent financing while sharing his personal preference for social media platforms.

Finally, listen in as Bilal Sirbuland, a trailblazer in the TikTok Shop space, joins the discussion to share his journey from Amazon to becoming a top seller on TikTok Shop. Bilal highlights the simplicity and opportunities TikTok Shop offers, and shares strategies for launching and scaling a business, such as focusing on viral products and leveraging TikTok's algorithm for advertising. This episode is packed with valuable insights and strategies from both Ali and Bilal, providing a comprehensive guide for aspiring e-commerce entrepreneurs looking to thrive in the ever-evolving digital selling marketplace.

In episode 630 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley, Ali, and Bilal discuss:

• 00:00 - E-Commerce Experts Discuss Success Strategies
• 06:39 - Teen Entrepreneur's Million-Dollar Gaming Venture
• 12:32 - From Raves to Festivals
• 17:43 - Value of Building Patents in Business
• 19:58 - Successful Transition to TikTok Shop
• 21:50 - Selling Brands on TikTok for Virality
• 26:27 - Selling Brands Without Influencers
• 32:47 - TikTok Shop Strategy and Pricing
• 39:52 - Selling Products on TikTok Shop

Helium 10 Buzz 1/10/25: Amazon Retail Ad Service | TikTok Shop New Country

Amazon changes the game for retail advertising. TikTok Shop is opening in a surprisingly new country. eBay makes a move to join a popular social media network. These buzzing stories and more on this episode!

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

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

We’re back with another episode of the Weekly Buzz with Helium 10’s VP of Education and Strategy, Bradley Sutton. Every week, we cover the latest breaking news in the Amazon, Walmart, and E-commerce space, talk about Helium 10’s newest features, and provide a training tip for the week for serious sellers of any level.

Amazon aims to expand advertising business by letting retailers use its ad tools on their stores
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/09/amazon-to-expand-ad-unit-by-letting-retailers-use-ad-tools-on-stores.html

Title Rule Clarifications
https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-forums/discussions/t/3c9f0b3c-4594-4efc-a05f-0f8d371fa466

How TikTok Shop is changing the way brands reach customers
https://www.retaildive.com/news/how-tiktok-shop-is-changing-the-way-brands-reach-customers/736726/

EBay shares soar after Meta allows listings on Facebook Marketplace in U.S., Europe
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/08/ebay-shares-soar-as-meta-allows-listings-on-facebook-marketplace.html

Conversion Path Reporting (beta)
https://advertising.amazon.com/en-us/resources/whats-new/ad-touchpoints-drive-sales-with-conversion-path-reporting/

TikTok expands e-commerce operation into Mexico amid potential US ban
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/tiktok-expands-e-commerce-operation-093000468.html

Switching gears, we explore the new features in Helium 10’s Magnet and Cerebro keyword translations, designed to aid sellers operating in multilingual marketplaces. The training tip of the week highlights Helium 10's exclusive Amazon Recommended Rank feature in Cerebro, which evaluates how relevant Amazon considers specific keywords for your product, scoring them. This tool helps sellers identify potential ranking, indexing, or advertising issues, especially for new products, by analyzing the top 20 keywords and ensuring Amazon correctly understands your product's relevance. Listen in for these crucial updates and insights that will help you stay ahead in the competitive world of e-commerce.

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

• 00:54 - Amazon Retail Ad Service
• 02:27 - Title Rule Clarifications
• 06:46 - TikTok Shop Stats
• 08:50 - eBay x Facebook
• 10:02 - Amazon Conversion Path Reporting
• 11:07 - TikTok Shop Mexico
• 12:24 - Helium 10 New Feature Alerts
• 14:19 - Training Tip: Amazon Recommended Rank

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Amazon changes the game for retail advertising. TikTok shop is opening in a surprising new country. eBay makes a move to join with a popular social media network. These stories and more on this week's Weekly Buzz. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that is our Helium 10 Weekly Buzz. We give you a rundown of all the goings on in the Amazon, TikTok shop and e-commerce world. We give you training tips of the week and let you know what new features that Helium 10 has. That will give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Let's see what's buzzing All For serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Let's see what's buzzing All. Right, this is the first buzz of the new year, or second buzz of the new year, I should say. Let's go ahead and hop into it.

 

Bradley Sutton:

The first thing we're going to talk about is an announcement they made at CES this week. The one who's reporting on it is actually CNBC, and the article is entitled Amazon aims to expand advertising business by letting retailers use its ad tools on their store. So some of the TLDR here is that Amazon is letting other retailers now use its own homegrown advertising tools to run sponsored ads on their own website. The service is designed to make it easier for other retailers to run targeted ad campaigns on their online stores. All right, so, as we know, ads has been big, you know, for Amazon over the years. We know that as Amazon sellers. But this is this is different. All right, so basically, like, let's say, I've got my own retail website, I can now use Amazon's advertising console to use the ad tech or the technology the advertising technology that Amazon has to run ads on my product pages on my website, on search, and this is going to help Amazon. You know like build it's like and how it can anticipate buyer behavior and things, but it's going to help. You know retailers as well, because you know, obviously, amazon's advertising system is very robust and you don't even have I believe you don't even have to be selling on amazon to take advantage of this service. So, uh, this is going to be interesting to watch as it rolls out and how this this changes the game for retailers. Perhaps you know, like, how many are going to adopt the amazon advertising um, as opposed to whatever they were using before. How many might start advertising more because of what's going on be definitely worth taking a look at.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Now, last week we talked about the new title requirements and there was an Ask Me Anything in the Amazon forums a few days ago that kind of clarified some things and even some things that I was confused about. I'm not sure if I said it wrong last week, but like I probably read it right, but for sure I understood it wrong last week. But like I probably read it right, but for sure I understood it wrong. All right. The way I understood the title was that you can't duplicate words in the title. Did some of you guys get that too out of what their announcement was? But actually the fine print says you can't have more than two. All right, it's not, it's not. You can't have two or more, it's more than two. Little bit of dyslexia there, um. So basically that means if I have the word in the title you know, coffin shelf uh, for home decor, something, something coffin, blah, blah, blah, blah. That's okay. Last week, when I read this, I thought that wasn't okay, um, because I just must've switched the words when I was looking at it.

 

Bradley Sutton:

But that's the first big thing that came from this AMA, but let's go ahead and open up some more of the questions and answers. There's some things that you guys might have had that I think are notable. Here is one question that I know a lot of us had. It said are the plural and singular versions of a word considered the same and count towards the maximum? And this seller said for example, if I had cake pan, loaf pan and muffin pans, is the word pans counted as the same as pan? And then that would make it three times, meaning that it's above two, meaning that that's against Amazon terms of service. And Jim from Amazon replied plural of the same word would be considered redundant. In the example you provided, pan and pans imply the same and thus it would be considered duplicate. All right, so there's the. I know people are asking about that. How are plurals considered? That's the answer, right there.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Another question was from what impact will it have if we don't update? Changing the title like this could significantly affect our search traffic. And Jim says if the title is not updated, amazon will modify the product title to comply with a new policy, while retaining all relevant information. All right. So there you have it? It like you're not going to get your listing suppressed per se, but amazon's going to go in and change your title. Sounds like Another question by PTC Tim Do words that are part of the brand name count towards the count of reusing a word?

 

Bradley Sutton:

For example, if the brand name is Muffin King, could they have a title such as Muffin King Beginner's Kit includes chocolate chip and banana nut muffin mixes and a 12 muffin pan. All right, so muffin is there three times in singular version. So you might think, oh, that can't be allowed. But Jim from Amazon says no, this will not be considered a policy violation, because the word or phrase is considered duplicate only when there are three or more instances in the same context. But muffin, the first instance is a brand name and the other two describe the product. So if you have a word that's part of your brand like maybe my brand was Manny's Coffin Shelves that first coffin doesn't count as the use of the word coffin in the title. That makes sense.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Another person asked a question and says you know, there were some punctuation marks that were listed, like dollar sign, question mark, underscore, et cetera, and it says are these the only special characters allowed? What about dash colon, open parentheses, close parentheses, et cetera, and Jameson actually answered. He said hyphen, colon and regular brackets are allowed as they often have functional value. Uh, there actually were some other uh characters not allowed that Amazon didn't announce. And these are the tilde, you know, like the little ñ that goes over the N in Spanish when you say baño right. The greater than and less than symbols, those are not allowed. The semicolon is not allowed and the I don't know how you describe it, but it looks like a top of a house, the roof of a house. That symbol is not allowed. There were more different kind of like specifications and questions that people had that you might want to look at. So make sure to check the link in the comments to see some of the more the other clarifications on this new title policy.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Next article we have here comes from Retail Dive and it's entitled how TikTok Shop is Changing the Way Brands Reach Customers. All right, so there's I brought this up because there's a lot of just interesting kind of like factoids here, and one of them it says 70% of TikTok users say they discover new brands and products on the platform 70%, that's crazy and 83% report TikTok playing a role in users' purchase decisions. I guarantee you we're not seeing that kind of stuff on Temu, right? The company also reports that three in four users are likely to buy something while using TikTok. Think about that, guys. How many users of TikTok are there? And three in four are likely to buy something. You might think, well, that's not something that you know. All marketplaces everybody should be buying something. But remember, TikTok is not a marketplace, TikTok is a social media. If you think three out of four people on Instagram are buying something, three out of four people on YouTube are buying something, it's like I don't know what the number is. It's probably like less than one in 10, one in 20. So this is like kind of an astronomical number.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Now, why is TikTok so powerful? One reason is here. It says nearly three in five Gen Z consumers say they trust recommendations by local or micro influencers. Per a survey, over a quarter of US consumers who responded to the survey reported buying a gift directly based on an influencer's recommendations. That's kind of crazy and that's what drives, you know, TikTok shop sales is influencers and micro influencers. So, guys, if you're not selling on TikTok shop, you know, get out and do it. We have some, uh, some training on how to get started. We're going to have some more training. We're going to have, like, different tools that, uh, you guys might ask for that that would help you sell on TikTok shop. But, um, I was trying to. I'm starting to ramp up. I launched a couple more products on TikTok shop last night. I'm going to keep launching some products and let you guys know what I find, but I really think that TikTok shop is going to be one of the major marketplaces moving forward.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Speaking of different marketplaces, let's switch gear and talk about a marketplace that I barely ever talk about but I actually personally sell on. That's eBay. All right, so this is articles from CNBC. It says eBay shares soar after. Meta allows listings on Facebook marketplace in US and Europe. All right. So in Germany, France and the US. What's going to happen is eBay listings are now going to be able to show up in Facebook marketplace. All right. So like that's going to give eBay listings a lot of visibility. So let's say I'm browsing on Facebook and I go to the Marketplace or maybe, who knows, maybe there'll be some way to put ads like in my Facebook feed. I'm going to be able to click on that product and then purchase it by signing in on eBay, I believe right there on the Facebook app still. So imagine being on Facebook, going to the Helium 10 members Facebook group, because you're getting all the good information there, and then you see an ad or something for an eBay product and while still on Facebook, you go ahead and purchase. I mean, if that's the way it's going to work, that's going to be, I think that might be a little bit successful for eBay. I'm definitely going to look into it for my eBay listings that I have. How many of you guys sell on eBay out there? Let me know in the comments below.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Going back to the Amazon marketplace, last week, in case you missed it, there was a new conversion path reporting, a beta program that Amazon has. It kind of like reminds me of how AMC is set up, but now you're going to be able to see the ad touch points on a customer's 30-day path to conversion, starting with the purchases. All right, so this is available in sponsored ads and DSP. Make sure to check the link in the article below for more links on where you can find it, but like you'll be able to see oh, they saw the streaming TV, then they went to a sponsored display ad and then they went to a sponsored video ad. They saw a sponsored product ad. Now, this is good information, but there's definitely some things missing. Like you can't see the ACOS, like all right, great, I see that this kind of ad is what drove my sale, but my ACOS on that exact ad was like 400%. It's not exactly viable, right. So I mean, it's not perfect, but this is great, you know, step in the right direction as far as visibility goes with your advertising.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Going back to TikTok, now guess what? TikTok is opening up a new marketplace and it's right here in North America. It is opening to Mexico. Per Yahoo Finance says TikTok expands e-commerce operation into Mexico and it says that they've already started inviting merchants to open stores on the platform ahead of the expected startup transactions in February. Now, who can sign up for Amazon or TikTok shop Mexico? Merchants with a locally registered entity are eligible to sign up. Now, that's interesting, because what's the requirement for USA? As we know, you could have a local entity being a US corporation, but if you're a foreigner with no US employees and nobody with a social security number, you can't sign up. But if this is to be taken at face value, you maybe can be a foreigner, but as long as you have a Mexican entity or business, it looks like you might be able to sign up on the platform and the first 90 days of activity for TikTok shop Mexico zero commission, zero commission fee in Mexico, or have a Mexican entity. Make sure to go ahead and consider starting up on the platform.

 

Bradley Sutton:

All right, let's go into our new feature alerts now. This one is going to be for, I believe, all plans, Platinum and Diamond. It's been for elite for a while because it was actually elite members who first asked for this, but this is going to be in Magnet and Cerebro, um, at the start. It might be in other tools, but what sellers were looking for was a way to translate keywords. All right, like this could be, for, let's say, you're in the US marketplace and you see a whole bunch of Spanish keywords and you're just curious what it means. Well, what people were doing is that they would copy the keywords from Helium 10 and then put it to Google Translate or something like that.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Or let's say you're doing keyword research in a marketplace that is not your native language, like maybe you're trying to make a listing for Amazon Japan. Of course, you can use Helium 10 Listing Builder to make a listing in Japanese, but you want to make sure you're feeding it the right keywords and you don't know what the keywords mean in Japanese. Well, this is what you can do. If you go into Listing Builder or into Cerebro, there will be a translate button right here, all right. So if you got the results in Magnet or Cerebro, just hit that and then you can go from, like English to Spanish, to German, to Chinese, et cetera, and you're going to have an option Like I'm going to pretend that maybe I'm somebody from China and I'm not. I don't speak English that well. Well, I'm going to go ahead and translate these English results into Chinese by default. It's actually going to show up right underneath the actual English keyword or whatever keyword or language you're looking at, but I can also change it where I can have it in a separate column, all right. So here now, all of a sudden, side by side, I've got the English keyword and the Chinese translation side by side. So this definitely helps English speaking people who are doing research in other languages or are curious what kind of meaning some of the keywords that are coming up in your own marketplace that are in different language, or if you speak a different language and you need just some quick translations, this is going to help. All right.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Now let's talk about the training tip of the week, and this is actually. I'm still going to stay right here in Cerebro, actually, and I want to show you guys something again. Only Helium 10 has this, and what it is the Amazon recommended rank. So actually here in Cerebro, I've got my coffin shelf here Now. This is especially helpful if you ever start getting ranking issues like you start losing your rank, or if you maybe like lose indexing somehow, or maybe there's some keywords that you know you're relevant for in your index for, but you just can't get PPC impressions. This is especially helpful when you are first launching a product. As a matter of fact, you know, like this is what I've been teaching for the last two years, where if you launch a product, I say that you almost should always do a test listing first that you're not really going to sell, but just to check this metric and this is Amazon relevancy.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Everybody always uses the term relevant and we can kind of insinuate hey, what is relevant for a product due to the keywords that are ranking for it. But until Helium 10 had this, you never knew what is really relevant to Amazon. What does Amazon think the product is? This Helium 10 is the only tool that's tying directly to Amazon to give you how relevant Amazon thinks a keyword is for your product and it's called Amazon recommended rank. It's listed from like a score of one to 900. The number one means it's the most relevant according to Amazon, et cetera.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Now is the number one and number two and number three keywords always the top keywords for your product? No, but looking at the top 20, I always sort it in helium 10. And I look at the top 20 ones and it will tell me is Amazon confused about my product, especially if it's a brand new product, right? So let me just show you, for example, this is my coffin shelf here and if I go to this column of Amazon recommended rank and I hit it, it's going to sort it by the top ones and like look at this number one keyword that Amazon says I'm relevant for coffin shelf wall Manny's mysterious oddities coffin shelf coffin shelf small. So just by looking at these top you know 10 keywords, top 20 or so. Um, I can tell that. Hey, amazon pretty much knows what my product is. Now, something concerning is the actual keyword. Coffin shelf is the only the 28th keyword, so you know what that tells me. I might have some issues with advertising on my product. I might have to look at what's going on, but at the very least Amazon isn't very confused about my product.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Now let me give you a contrast here. I went to the search results of coffin shelf and obviously my product is on page one. But here I scrolled all the way down to page four and then I saw just some random coffin shelf. Where did it? Here's a coffin shelf very similar to mine Pachyon floating shelves, coffin shape, shelf, wall mouth. This is a terrible title, but you see, their BSR is like 7 million. They are not selling any units at all of this, and they are right, even though this is one of the few coffin shelves. I mean, page two and three and four don't even have that many coffin shelves, because there's not even seven pages worth of coffin shelves.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So you might be wondering why in the world is this product ranking so low? Well, outside of listing optimization, one of the reasons is the relevancy. Take a look when I run this product in Cerebro and I sort it by Amazon recommended rank. Let's go to that column right here. Look, do you remember what my mind was? Let's just look back here. Remember the top ones coffin wall shelf. Coffin shelf small spooky hanging coffin shelf Halloween decor indoor home. Look at the top keywords of what Amazon thinks is relevant for this poor. Selling coffin shelf. Floating shelf wall. Floating shelf. Selling coffin shelf. Floating shelf wall. Floating shelf. Wall shelves, room wall. Do you notice something? These are just generic keywords. So, for whatever reason, they must not have their listing optimized. Or maybe there's a category issue. But Amazon is not even picking up the word coffin in the top keywords that it is saying it's relevant for. So this product is probably never going to rank very well for coffin shelf. Nor are they going to be able to advertise if they wanted to.

 

Bradley Sutton:

You can see right here with Helium 10, they're not advertising. But this just kind of like illustrates what can happen if you, if Amazon, gets confused about your product, you're going to have some issues. So make sure to check that out. All levels of Helium 10 can access that platinum diamond and above. Go into Cerebro. Run it on your own product, especially your brand new products. Or if you ever have trouble ranking or indexing and check sorted by the Amazon recommended rank, take a look at those top 20 keywords and see hey, does Amazon kind of like have a good idea about what your product is, or is it confused? And then you can take action from there. All right, guys, that's it for this week's Weekly Buzz. Hope you enjoyed these articles and also these new features and training tips. We'll see you next week to see what's buzzing.

 

#629 - How to Sell on Amazon UAE in 2025

Let’s learn everything you need to know about two of Amazon's fastest-growing marketplaces UAE & Saudi Arabia, plus a bonus story of somebody who learned from Project X strategies and now has a thriving 6-figure business.

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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

Unlock the secrets to thriving in the blossoming Amazon UAE and Amazon Saudi Arabia marketplaces, where a remarkable 12% e-commerce growth awaits eager sellers. Journey with Bradley and Krystel Abi Assi of Amazon Seller Society to the bustling city of Dubai, as we uncover how international brands are leveraging early market entry to build a strategic edge. Supported by the WorldEF Conference and Dubai Commerce City, we discuss how Dubai is cementing its status as a global hub for innovation and e-commerce, providing unparalleled opportunities for global sellers looking to make their mark.

Gain insights into the essential steps for international sellers aiming to conquer Amazon's Middle Eastern markets. With minimal barriers to entry, you can seamlessly utilize existing business structures without requiring a local presence, while understanding the nuances of VAT registration. As Saudi Arabia's platform evolves with Arabic language enhancements, the potential for sellers is rapidly expanding, offering fertile ground for those ready to adapt and seize the moment in these vibrant regions.

Join us as we introduce our next guest Abdallah Hesham, an inspiring Amazon seller from Egypt, who shares his compelling journey from failed products to discovering success in car accessories. Abdallah's story illustrates the power of adaptation and innovative research methods inspired by watching Helium 10’s Project X Amazon Product Case Study series on YouTube, such as Pinterest and ChatGPT, in finding profitable niches. We emphasize the critical role of precise keyword selection in representing products effectively on Amazon, with stories and strategies that underscore the transformative potential of this approach for ambitious sellers worldwide.

In episode 629 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley, Krystel, and Abdallah discuss:

• 00:00 - Amazon UAE and Saudi Arabia Insights
• 03:07 - Emerging E-Commerce Market in 2025
• 05:31 - Selling on Amazon Middle East
• 10:12 - Arabization of Amazon Platform
• 15:53 - Amazon Sellers in UAE
• 19:40 - Success in Amazon Business Strategies
• 22:23 - Discovering Hidden Product Opportunities
• 27:34 - Amazon Sales Strategy With Niche Product
• 30:22 - Amazon FBA Content Strategy Discussion
• 30:27 - Effective Keyword Selection for Amazon

#628 - Top 20 Amazon Seller Strategies Of The Year

In this episode, we're giving you the best Amazon and Walmart strategy clips of 2024 so that you can start off 2025 with a leg up on your competition.

► 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

Welcome to this special annual recap episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast, where we bring you the most impactful strategies from the past year to give your e-commerce business a competitive edge in 2025. Join us as we explore the essentials of selecting verified manufacturers and the importance of third-party verification in ensuring accurate information. We'll discuss the advantages of trade assurance for payment protection and the significance of management certifications like BSCI and ISO, which indicate high-quality factory standards and social compliance. Additionally, we touch on regional manufacturing specializations, exemplified by the production of egg dispensers, and the importance of measuring the halo impact of ad strategies on total sales and rankings using metrics like TACoS and cost per customer acquisition.

Listen in as we discuss strategies for international Amazon success, highlighting a thriving American brand's expansion into Amazon Japan. We'll explore the strategic benefits of entering the Japanese market, such as lower PPC costs and favorable tax conditions, which contribute to higher profit margins. Patience, quality products, and strong supplier relationships are emphasized as key differentiators from competitors. We also explore optimizing Amazon PPC campaigns with lifecycle-based rules and the power of using index images with numbered benefits to effectively communicate value in product listings.

Discover effective strategies for online marketplaces as we recount past challenges and successes in sourcing and selling products in the U.S. market. Learn about creative approaches to finding less visible suppliers and the importance of clear communication and relationship-building. We also highlight the effectiveness of Target's marketplace and the strategic advantages of being indexed on Google to enhance Amazon rankings. Finally, we'll cover the critical importance of using correct HTS codes to avoid costly import tariff mistakes, sharing a personal experience that led to significant cost savings. Tune in and equip yourself with these valuable insights to kick off 2025 strong.

In episode 628 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, we discuss:

• 00:00 - SSP Top 20 Strategies of 2024
• 02:02 - Selecting Verified Manufacturers for Trust
• 09:53 - Keyword Analysis and Visibility Tracking
• 12:25 - Strategies for International Amazon Success
• 19:36 - Effective Strategies for Online Marketplaces
• 20:06 - Leveraging Google for Business Growth
• 23:43 - Optimizing Amazon Listings for Google Images
• 25:40 - Optimizing Amazon Listings for Sales
• 32:12 - Enhancing Amazon Listings With COSMO
• 33:29 - Avoiding Costly Import Tariff Mistakes

Transcript

 

Bradley Sutton:

Today we're giving you the best strategy clips of the year so that you can start off 2025 with a leg up on your competition. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show. That's a completely BS-free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And, like we do every year and we have been doing this since we started in what was it 2018, 2019? we do a recap episode where I handpick some of the best strategies of the entire year. Every year, we go through about 100 episodes a year, not including the weekly buzz, where we have a lot of guests and everybody has great strategies. It's really hard to pick some of the top ones, but what I did is me and the team got together and pulled out some of the top strategies that you guys had talked about in social media and such that you liked, and we put it together so that you could get a leg up on the competition now that we're at the beginning here of 2025.

 

Bradley Sutton:

And so these are strategies that are not out of date. They're still valid. There are some that already, within a few months, became out of date. They're still valid. There are some that already, within a few months, became out of date. We're not including them here. So, guys, I hope you enjoy this episode. Get your pen and paper out. I want each and every one of you to make it your homework to pick five, at least five of these that we're about to get. I think we're doing about 20 here, but do five that most apply to you and your business. Not everything applies to everybody equally. Pick five out of these and implement it this month in your business, or at least make a plan for it. All right, so let's go ahead and see the top strategies of the year.

 

Kian Golzari:

So the first thing you did was you selected verified manufacturers. And what's that for? It means any information that they provide on their listing, whether it be number of years in business, how many staff they have, what certificates they have, what patents they have, what products they have, what does their production line look like, the images and videos in the factory. That's all been verified by a third party, meaning InterTech, SGS, TUV. One of these very reputable companies have gone in and verified all the information is true, whereas if we didn't work with verified suppliers, then whatever information they want to put there, we just have to sort of take their word for it. So verified is the most important thing to search for first. Then, on the left-hand side of the page, you'll see trade assurance right, I would always click that as well and trade assurance just means that your payment is protected. So if you've ordered an egg dispenser which holds, you know, 20 eggs and you do the production and you receive one which only holds 10 eggs, then the trade assurance will protect you and it will refund your order because you've selected that right. That's just a little bit of a safety net important for, like you know, new sellers, right. And then, as you scroll down on the left-hand side of the page, you'll see something that says management certification, right. And if you scroll down a little bit more, yeah. So you see like BSCI and you see Zedek, you see ISO. I always like to select BSCI and ISO. So BSCI is your business social compliance initiative and ISO is just a really high-quality standard and this just basically means these are factory certificates that they have. So, uh, BSCI will go in and they'll check, like you know, um how many years you've been in business. Do you have, like, fire extinguishers? Do you have adequate lighting? Do you have safety exits? Like we've checked the dormitories, we've checked like the canteen where the workers eat. So it's kind of like gives you confidence that you're working for a very, very good factory, right. So now, if we go back to the top of the list, right, we've. Now we've searched by manufacturers, we've got verified manufacturers, we've got trade assurance and we've got factories which have, you know, BSCI and ISO certification. So now, as I'm scrolling down the list, like if you zoom in on the company names, like the first word in the company name is always the city or the province in which that factory is located.

 

Kian Golzari:

So sometimes, like the factories, like electronics are made in Shenzhen, backpacks are normally made in like Shenzhou. Like furniture, like steel tubing for furniture, chairs is made like Yongkang. So I'm just trying to get familiar. Is there an area which specializes in egg dispensers? Maybe not because it's such a niche product, right, that maybe you could make it, make it anywhere. But as I scroll down, I'm trying to see, like, is there one name that pops up more frequent than others and in that area which specializes in that product? But I see Ningbo has probably popped up a few times, right? So, but anyway, it doesn't matter. If Ningbo had popped out like eight out of nine times, I would say, right, well, that's the region we need to be ordering from.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Interesting.

 

Gefen Laredo:

You know ACOS is great, but obviously this is TACoS Tuesday and TACoS is the metric of your total sales.

 

Carrie Miller:

Yes.

 

Gefen Laredo:

And so when we're looking at total sales something that we brought in and I know it's a little vague, but we really looked at the halo impact of ad strategies and how they impacted ranking and total sales, right. And so when we focused our ad strategy, maybe on a cost per customer acquisition model, maybe on a TACoS model, and we look to really prioritize, hey, where are we showing up, right? So, if, if, if we're driving all this traffic and we have a 20 percent conversion rate, let's say, on this keyword, are we tracking using, using uh, using a Helium 10, of course, um, are we tracking that ranking properly? To say, hey, we started running these ads aggressively on August 1st and if we have been tracking ranking on that keyword for the last two months since going aggressive on that term, where are we ranking now and how have sales changed? and are there broader KPIs that we're measuring outside of just direct ad revenue? And that worked really well for us because we centered that around tentpole events and this is a really big strategy of ours. That is incredibly complex, it takes a whole village to actually execute. But when we focus our customer acquisition and ranking models around major times in the year so think Prime Day, think Fall, Prime Day, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, holiday and then, of course, if you're a one-off brand, if you I don't know are ski related, then obviously your season is January to March. You know like there are differences, but really peak seasons. If you're able to focus your growth model around the times that are going to give you the most reward, then that worked really well for us last year and we expect to see a lot more of that this year, especially as we all expect people are going to be more deal oriented. It's a constant battle for margins, so the better rank you are, the more organic sales you drive, the better your TACoS is.

 

Ben Webber:                          

Several years ago we were about to stock out of as you know, we sell a lot of fourth quarter products and kind of joke toy products and we're about to stock out of one that we sold between 800 and 1000 units a day of which is a fairly substantial issue. So we actually loaded up a cargo van and drove the cargo van to Amazon, talked our way through the front gates to deliver it and they took it, and so we did that once, then we did it again and we got through again. The third time they're like no, you can't do this, and so like okay, but somehow, like no, you, you can't do this, and so like okay, but somehow, we have to be able to do this. So we looked into carrier central and figure out how we could become a last mile rider, which is incredibly easy it takes about 15 minutes to fill out a form and then you have to show that you can back in and out of a parking spot incredibly, incredibly easy. But so in that January we bought a truck and the rest is history from there. But it came about because we were about to stock out and panicked and we're like, well, what's the worst that can happen?

 

Silas Moestrup Pedersen:

And one of the things that I recommend to every time that we have a new client or meet someone is to narrow in on fewer skills. It sounds quite simple, right, but what we do every time is that if you have a big catalog A, B, C and D products and then A products they get a special treatment compared to B, C and D. It could even be, if your catalog is massive, you only focus your ad spend on A products. Same thing from a content perspective. Those are the ones that get the most love in terms of title, bullet point, backend attributes, et cetera, descriptions. So it's just having that focus on fewer products, I think, is number one. Then, if you can automate your reporting, we have that in Looker automated so that you don't have to necessarily sit and look at the data and pull Excel spreadsheets et cetera it just saves you so much time. If you're capable of doing it and spending time on it, then I think. Thirdly, we talked a little bit about it, but I think taking the time to do super solid keyword research from the get-go Like get into Magnet, get into Amazon's data sources, get into Cerebro, look for all your competitors' keywords et cetera understand what those A keywords are, and those A keywords are the only thing that you focus on in the start. Those are the ones that go into your rank campaigns, that they go into your manual campaigns, et cetera, and that those are the ones that just like where you track everything through Like a little hack could be for your A products. Every week you use a repro. Every other week you put in your A product and then you export all the data for that. You take a spreadsheet. In column A you say this is the date when I pulled the. This is the date of either. I pulled the data, this is the ASIN you put in the ASIN that you pulled the data for. Then you make a formula.

 

Silas Moestrup Pedersen:

You can just ask ChatGPT where, based on the paid and organic rank, you say whether you classified the keyword as being on page one, two, three or four, and then you pull this data in this way every single week for maybe two months when you're running a new test or something like that. You take all the data, you put it into a pivot table and boom, then you would have an overview and a graph of how many like your all your page one, two, three, four positions across your entire catalog and you could even put a filter on up in the top and then you can sort by ASIN and then you basically have your own visibility tool where you can see your paid on your organic visibility on a weekly level at an Asian level. And you can use that to take all those keywords If you're ranking let's say page three or two or something like that put them into a rank campaign. If you feel like they're good, you can take all the keywords where you're on page two, maybe put them in the title, et cetera. So, like building those systems, that allows you to scale something consistently.

 

Bradley Sutton:                          

What was your gross sales yesterday, last week, last year? More importantly, what are your profits after all your cost of selling on Amazon? Did you pay any storage charges to Amazon? How much did you spend on PPC? Find out these key metrics and more by using the Helium 10 tool Profits. For more information, go to h10.me forward slash profits.

 

Cara Sayer:

So one of the biggest things was the fact that I do think a lot of Amazon sellers don't really have a brand. They just have a name for a business or a name for something that they use and they don't really have a what I'd call a true brand. And they don't always. I think sometimes also, existing only on Amazon makes you lose perspective on you know how normal businesses work, like businesses that aren't based on Amazon, and so you know a lot of businesses. I mean, I think throughout life, people buy from people and I think that's so important to remember that, even on Amazon, one of the reasons why Amazon focuses so heavily on A plus listings and now they're bringing in the premium A plus and all the rest of it because Amazon knows right. You know me quite a few years now and I've always banged on about brand. I've always banged on about having a story. Tell your story. It doesn't have to be your story necessarily, it could be the product story, but you need to have something that differentiates you. And even then, I was chatting to someone at the conference earlier on and I was saying the thing is that sometimes it's not even the fact that you're selling different products, it's the way that you curate them right. So it's the collection of products that you've chosen to sell under your brand name says something.

 

Nick Katz:

So one of our clients is an international brand. They're an American registered company and they last year they cleared seven figures and we're definitely looking to do a lot more this year. That's in two years. They're doing very, very well in America, they sell in Europe and they sell in Canada. But the Japanese sales are now almost comparable to the to the us sales, but the profit margins are a lot higher.

 

Bradley Sutton:                          

That was about my second question.

 

Nick Katz:

Yeah, because you know things like the PPC is a hell of a lot cheaper. The ACOS for the account is about uh, I think it's about eight, nine percent now. The TACoS is about three or four percent. It's the kind of figures you can't really get in the US. So actually in theory you could sell a lot less in Japan and still end up with the same kind of profit as you could in the US. But obviously if you're getting sales close to the US you're probably going to have much, much higher margins. Japan generally is cheaper. It's cheaper tax as well if you are off the threshold to pay tax. But if you're under 10 million yen, which is probably about 60,000, 70,000 US, if you're under that in sales, you don't have to pay consumption tax. There is no tax. So anybody like me selling in Europe who gets absolutely lost by the tax authorities there, paying 19, 20, 21, 23% in some of the regions in Europe, you could be selling 50, 60,000 US in Japan and not have to pay any consumption tax whatsoever. So there are definite advantages to selling in Japan.

 

Bradley Sutton:

What are some of the things that set you apart from maybe the 10 other matcha people who maybe have started and gone out of business, you know, because they didn't have your strategy? What do you think set you apart from others?

 

Sam:

Well, I think a handful of things. The first one is okay, so I think you can use. You can rely on Amazon PPC. You can look at your search term impression share reports, you can look at your keyword ranking and all that kind of stuff and that will help you in the short run. But honestly, the thing that really helped us the most was patience and making sure that your product is on a sensory level it's actually good and people like it. Once you have those two things covered, then you just need to get people to try it, get them to tell their friends, and then their friends who are interested in Marchable buy. Then they are buying again and then this whole thing kind of grows by itself. Your PPC and all of these other tools that you have are really just like fuel that you add to this engine.

 

Singchuen:

And on the other side of things is, obviously you kind of need to make sure that you treat your suppliers well as well. Make sure that they understand what you're going through and make sure that you try to understand what they're going through. If language is a barrier, hire an interpreter, right, it's not too difficult. Decency goes both ways. So you may be pressed, but you've got to recognize that the factories themselves, they are pressed as well. So working together for a compromise, understanding each other and not throwing too much Just to be a little bit more understanding towards each other, goes a long way. A bit more understanding towards each other goes a long way. I think what tends to happen is that if you're not patient, as Sam has mentioned, you may cut off communications with factories that may help you in the future, and you don't want to do that.

 

Destaney Wishon:

I think the biggest things that we look at is we create rules for the different outcomes we want. If we're launching a brand-new product, then we're creating rules that are based off sales. So we're going to be taking a deep dive into, hey, what is the conversion rate and what is the sales? And we're going to build rules for maximizing that increased bid when I have a certain conversion rate. On the flip side, if our goal is profitability, we're going to work backwards from our ACOS or RoAS goal. We're going to say, hey, let's build rules that are based on lowering bids when our ACOS is too high, and maybe layering in our conversion rates also low, let's go even lower, right. So those are the two simplest ones that we look at, but it really needs to be strategic. You can create rules that are based off the phase your product's in, whether it's launch, consistency, profitability, organic rank. You can create rules based off your overall business outcomes. Which is always an important one is what is that key RoAS that you're going to optimize for all of your campaigns, but just making sure not to overcomplicate it in the beginning, right. Once you start to understand the correlation between CPC and RoAS, then you can start building in a little bit more customization around lifecycle and things like that.

 

Kevin King:

This is how you been converting like crazy with what? what do you call an index image? This he calls it the uh, it's the image in your listing that will be the top reasons why your product is the best. This is not your main photo. This is not your photo number one. This is what he calls this photo number two and it's an index of of your products is why I think it's why he calls it the index image, and what he says is you need to number the benefits. A lot of of people are using call-outs, they use infographics, but they don't number them. So you want to actually have numbers like this. So this should be something like this should be your second image the five reasons you love, or the seven reasons or the three reasons.

 

Odd numbers are always better than even numbers. Three, five or seven or nine always work the best. But here he's got the five and look, there's big, there's numbers. That's important. He just doesn't list them. People like order and when they see numbers, their mind can sort it and they can read it quickly and it makes sense to them. So the numbering system here is critical, not just the fact that he put the main point, the main benefit and capital, and then explained it in. I mean in bold and a little bit larger than explained everything else below it in light blue, but he's got these numbers. That's the critical thing is numbering it.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Maybe this is a little bit of the sexy side of patents, but you've talked before about how patents doing patent searches can actually be a form of product research and finding a product to sell on Amazon. How in the world is that possible?

 

Rich Goldstein:

Yeah, absolutely it's true, because the way that the patent system works, once a patent expires, it's fair game for anyone to use it. So a utility patent lasts for 20 years and a design patent lasts for 15. But once that patent expires, anyone can make that product and, at the same time, keep in mind that a lot of people have an idea for a product, they get it patented, but they never do the research, they never learn about the process enough to actually get that product launched, and so there are a lot of great ideas that have been patented that are just in the patent archives and they've never actually been put on the market. There are some lousy ideas, but there are also some great ideas, and so if you know how and you search the patent record for expired patents, you can find ideas for really great potential products.

 

Tom - Honest FBA:

We dabbled with the US a few times in the past and Thomas Net is really popular. You see, it's spoken about quite a lot as a place, as a resource. Honestly, we never had any success there. There was a time when we were the MOQs are always insanely high and there was a product previously that we agreed to the MOQ. It was something like 10 or 20,000 units. It was pretty high. And there was a product previously that we agreed to the MOQ. It was something like 10 or 20,000 units. It was pretty big. And we were like, okay, we'll go for it, but can you just repackage them into a different kind of mix? And they just said, nah, nah, don't fancy it. And we were like, right, okay. So we kind of banged our head against the wall. So now a little-known site called Google is honestly the best bet, so like, but I'm not talking page one at Google. You've got to dig. So put on a VPN. If you're somewhere like we are, like in Spain, put on a US VPN and then get down to like pages five, six, seven, eight, get in there. And then I just hammer a lot of emails out, but a lot of the websites that you find down in those stages or those pages. They're not good at SEO, they're generally kind of old sites, but you're finding older, established businesses so and often you'll find a phone number. So one of the best lessons I say is like get on the phone and just ring them up and you can save months of time, like the guy who ended up.

 

Tom - Honest FBA:

One of the guys who ended up working with had a phone call with him on the first day. I found it and we ended up. We're now doing two products with him already. We've got another three lined up and he had nothing to do with the niche we're in. He was in so we're in pets. He was in humans. He was in food. I just gave him a call, explained the brand vision, what we're trying to do. He got really excited. He's now helping us source new ingredients. He's coming to me with product ideas. He's now going to do a whole range of products for us. So that was one of the beauties is like having that communication line and being able to really explain yourself has been massive. We are still sourcing in China, by the way. We still think it's a really viable option, but having this US option as well, there's so many benefits to it.

 

Grace Kopplin:

In terms of Walmart, that's always been a strategy for us. Transparently, Walmart just hasn't been a volume driver for us. It's been steady but it hasn't really been a place that's warranted a ton of focus for us. But another marketplace that has been great for us is actually Target's marketplace, target Plus and that's been a key, key piece of our success, especially with working with brands who are looking for store placement at Target. For example, we've had a few items that we've listed on Target's marketplace that have done really well, that have gotten the attention of a buyer and actually got store placement, which is really exciting. And, at the end of the day, getting an item placed on shelves most of the time can drive more volume than a mid-tier listing on Amazon. So we tend to try to use that strategy.

 

Bradley Sutton:

How do you get on target these days? Wasn't it invite only back in the day or now that Target is adding that 360 or some kind of like yeah.

 

Grace Kopplin:

I think it might still be invite only, but I know they've been actively adding a lot of sellers. I know that their backend is still quite archaic compared to what Amazon is. It's probably what Walmart was like four years ago. But I think it is still invite only, but definitely something to reach out to your connections and see if you can get a connect with a Walmart e-comm buyer.

 

Leo Sgovio:

So there are a few reasons why you want to be indexed on Google, and for the most, let's start from the most advanced ones, right? Advanced sellers they normally try to send traffic to Amazon, especially during the launch period, using external traffic, right? So Google, we know, is a good referral that tends to help your rankings, and so Amazon tends to reward you if they see traffic coming from Google. So if you're not indexed, you lose a chance to show Amazon that you are getting traffic from Google. Now, I have a theory that paid traffic has a little bit more weight than organic, but the reason why you want to be indexed and the reason why you might want to be indexed for certain keywords is so that when you drive traffic through the URL to Amazon, you can actually give attribution to that keyword. That's number one, right? So you can actually use these URLs as your two-step.

 

Leo Sgovio:

Number two if you do a good job with your indexation and your listing is optimized, you actually also appear in the images, right? And so if people are looking for specific products, sometimes I search on Google using images because I'm looking for specific products that might be hard to find on Amazon. But if I look through the Google images and I find the product, then I go to Amazon and so if you're not indexed, you're also not going to be able to be found there, and Google images actually gets a ton of traffic. So here are some of the reasons why, two of the reasons why. I can think of many more, but the most important are these ones. Google is still one of the largest search engine, and so missing out on that opportunity search engine and so missing out on that opportunity, I'm afraid it causes a lot of missed visibility for an Amazon seller at a listing level.

 

Carrie Miller:

I think one of the things that sets us apart is that when I've created our listings, or whenever I create our photos, I think about what are the main benefits of the product, the main selling points of it, and I realized this isn't something that everyone can easily do, and so the way I kind of have been teaching it is that you can take your competitor's listing, download their reviews, download their best reviews, their five-star reviews, and say ask ChatGPT, like, what do people like most about this product? What are the benefits of this product according to reviews? What do people like? Basically, ask a bunch of questions to ChatGPT and you'll get a bunch of kind of selling points and you'll kind of see a trend of like the top selling points or top benefits of your product. And that's what you want to focus on is like what's in it for the customer? You've got to kind of appeal to their emotions. How is it going to make their life better, easier, are easier, are they going to be more beautiful? Are they going to you know what? What is it, what's in it for them?

 

Carrie Miller:

And I think that that is going to be the key that sets you apart, and I know it's. It sounds pretty basic, but I've actually been doing some looking at different listings. People have been asking me hey, can you take a look at my listing? And when I look at the listing, I'm like, well, these aren't, these are not actually selling points or benefits. Like, these are features of the product. Right, you can always put the features in right later on, but how are you appealing to the person when you were? If you're telling somebody about your product, are you being like oh hey, the dimensions are 14 by 14. Like that's, that's like an afterthought, right? You, you want to. However, you would even just sell to a person, like talking face to face. That's how you're going to do that. Your first image shouldn't be a dimension photo. It should be a selling point, your main, like best selling point, main benefit in that first image. So I think that's a huge thing that a lot of people are kind of missing.

 

Bradley Sutton:

What would you say is the most actionable things from search career performance? That kind of closes out like, hey, this is actually something that is not just, oh, it's good to know, but hey, I'm actually going to take action, uh, on this. 

 

Mansour Norouzi:

Taking action. I would say, even when I look at my own brand one is that for the main keywords, what I actually I do this on a weekly basis I have a list of the main keywords which is for my, for one of my aces are like 10 uh, 10 uh keywords and actually I go into the detail of week over week what is happening to my click share for those keywords, because they are very important for me and I want to be on the top and like top five for these turns. I want to be aware of what is going on with my competitors and what's my need. So if I see I have a track of my click share for the keywords, if I see it is going down, right away I'll figure out what's going on and maybe push with my advertising, for that for me would be our main keywords and what's going happening for my click share rate, conversion rate and click share just on my top keywords. Honestly, I will go, I think, by myself going with all for all the keywords, just like top five to 10 keywords, what they are, and I'll keep it very close overview and monitor them to see exactly what's going on, because you see that search volume going up or down, but I want my click share and my conversion share that I have I'm generating. Either they are consistent or going up. So if I see this trend is down, right away I start doing maybe I run coupon code or I push with my advertising to make sure I'm getting them back into track.

 

Bradley Sutton:

What is your favorite? Helium 10 tool Ksenia or function of a tool.

 

Kseniia Reidel:

Probably the audience. That's the one that I use all the time. Is it called audience?

 

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, the split where you ask the questions to the people and say, how are you using that Like for your images, or just for product ideas, or what are you using that?

 

Kseniia Reidel:

Honestly for everything. For both for the product ideas, for your images, or just for product ideas or what are you using that? Honestly for everything. But both for the product ideas, for the images, because I just think it's so easy. You know, when you're thinking about like the product we find, then I usually do um, like the drawing and uh, 3d, you know the 3d image of the product that doesn't exist yet. Then usually all my products are like, really designed differently, that's what's on the market right now, and I just upload the image there and I see what people say and ask them would you buy this product? And if you wouldn't buy this product, why, why not? Or what would you change in this product? And sometimes I see the things that I didn't even you know, I didn't even think about that.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So you're launching just the 3d rendering and just asking a question on that image, or you're launching it like, or you're launching it, you're putting it in a poll next to like existing products and asking them, or which one are you doing?

 

Kseniia Reidel:

I'm doing both. Actually, the first, I just do the rendering and ask them would you buy this product? And if you would not buy this product, what would you change Like? How would you make it better for you? And then sometimes I also compare it to the other products that are on the market and ask them which one would they buy?

 

Bradley Sutton:

Interesting.

 

Kseniia Reidel:

And a lot of times I do the changes on the product based on what the people say.

 

Bradley Sutton:

What was the results of those search, find, buy in order to send those relevancy signals? Again, not for rank, but to send those relevancy signals to Amazon. Take a look at this when I ran in Cerebro on June 19th, just three days after they did that relevancy single, you know, push those three coworkers here at Helium 10,. Take a look now at the Amazon recommended rank. Remember how it was only showing two keywords for Amazon recommended rank. Now it was showing multiple ones and it put that keyword that I sent the relevancy signal for egg holder countertop. It had Amazon recommended rank number three, which basically means that that was the third most important keyword according to Amazon for this product. Now do you remember what I was getting for impressions in PPC? Like 200 total impressions over three days. What did sending those relevancy signals to Amazon do for my PPC impressions? Take a look at this. To amazon, do for my PPC impressions. Take a look at this.

 

The next three day period from June 19th when my relevancy got fixed to June 21st instead of 200 impressions, 5 000 impressions, 4 000 of that. How? What keyword was it for? Egg holder countertop, that one that I sent those relevancy signals to Amazon for? This works, guys.

 

Ryan King:                         

So Walmart has the equivalent would be brand portal, and I would absolutely recommend, if you're the seller, if you're the brand, to register through brand portal, and the main reasons are there are certain advertising opportunities that are only available to brand registered brands, so sponsored brand videos, sponsored brand ads that go across as banner displays. Another major one would be brand shops, brand shelves we can talk about later as well and then IP protection, and so the advantage of being registered in Brand Portal is that you can file IP infringement claims, and in this case, the most successful one to do is to file claims against those alternate listings for using your copyrighted imagery, and so we see success of getting those pulled down within 48 hours, typically when that happens. Now you can still file that IP claim even if you're not registered through Brand Portal. There's a link to file that claim, but you can't track its progress, you can't see the history, all those kinds of things. So it just gives you greater credibility in those and greater ability to look back at the progress. And the last one I'd say is if you're a registered brand, it's going to give you the highest content ranking for your listing. So even if there are other sellers that have tried to change that listing content. You're going to outrank them as the registered brand and chances are you're not going to have to deal with things changing on your listing in that regard.

 

Kevin Dolan:

Cosmo is a specific tool and I think that the function that it performs is valuable to enhancing Amazon's understanding of a listing. So I certainly would not be surprised to see Amazon implementing this in a production capacity on a large swath of searches. That would not be surprising to me, but it's not as massive as the shift that we've seen into semantic-focused search. Cosmo in particular discusses essentially a mechanism for enhancing Amazon's understanding of a product by taking into consideration things that aren't expressed in the query and things that aren't expressed in the listing. The example that they use in the paper, the canonical example, is if you're looking for shoes for pregnant women, a listing might not literally say shoes for pregnant women. It might produce a specific type of open toed shoe that has good support, good comfort. That might not literally be listed as a keyword in the listing, but it might be something that the system can infer based on its knowledge of the universe, about what it's like to be a pregnant woman and the types of products that they might benefit from.

 

Norm Farrar:

Out of everybody that we've looked at, it was up to 80. But 70% of Amazon sellers do not have the proper HTS code. They let their Chinese seller set an HS code and it's wrong. So when they get in here and guess what, nobody, nobody is calculating that as a part of your cost of goods. So they're going out, they're sourcing in China, they're not calculating, and this could be as high as 400%. Now, I've never seen it that, but it can be. So you know you're 25, 40% of your cost of goods. Is that not something that should be calculated? And like for me, I was doing natural soaps and I was paying 17%. So we were taking a look at it and Afolabi says can you consider this Castile soap? And I said yeah, it's olive based. And he goes well, how about I give you some good news. Pay zero. I just stuffed 17% back in my pocket. So out of the 70% of people that are missing the boat, they don't have the proper tariff code and the average person that gets the proper tariff code on an order the average that we've been able to calculate has been $7,800.

Helium 10 Buzz 1/3/25: BIG Amazon Title Policy Change | Temu Banned for Amazon Sellers?

Amazon makes a big title policy change that could cause some of you to have to update up to half of your listings. Is this move that Amazon is about to make, essentially not allowing sellers to sell on Temu? These two buzzing stories and more on this episode!

► 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

We’re back with another episode of the Weekly Buzz with Helium 10’s VP of Education and Strategy, Bradley Sutton. Every week, we cover the latest breaking news in the Amazon, Walmart, and E-commerce space, talk about Helium 10’s newest features, and provide a training tip for the week for serious sellers of any level.

New Amazon product title requirements effective January 21, 2025
https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-news/articles/QVRWUERLSUtYMERFUiNHNEJGOUZIUUs4SFBXWkRV

Amazon effectively bars sellers from Temu marketplace
https://channelx.world/2025/01/amazon-effectively-bars-sellers-from-temu-marketplace/

TikTok Shop Order Cancellation, Return and Refund Update
https://channelx.world/2025/01/tiktok-shop-order-cancellation-return-and-refund-update/

Prime-exclusive discounts are moving to the Price Discounts tool
https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-news/articles/QVRWUERLSUtYMERFUiNHQzRCMkFMNkdLNTZSRVNT

Mexico unveils new tariffs, popular e-tailers like Shein, Temu may be in crosshairs
https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/mexico-unveils-new-tariffs-popular-e-tailers-like-shein-temu-may-be-crosshairs-2024-12-31/

APEX – An Alternative Patent Resolution Procedure on Amazon
https://natlawreview.com/article/apex-alternative-patent-resolution-procedure-amazon

Get more details on image issues with Compliance Issue report updates
https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-news/articles/QVRWUERLSUtYMERFUiNHODdFWE1BQ0pTREVCQVpG

The Year (2024) in Amazon vs Walmart, and a Look Into 2025
https://www.pymnts.com/news/retail/2024/the-year-in-amazon-vs-walmart-and-a-look-into-2025/

Lastly, we share insights from Helium 10 on product misclassification alerts and provide upcoming training tips on how to use our Amazon Inventory Heat Maps to maximize your e-commerce success.

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

• 01:19 - BIG Amazon Title Policy Update
• 08:48 - Amazon BANS Temu?
• 11:24 - TikTok Shop Refund Change
• 13:56 - Prime Exclusive Discounts Moving
• 14:50 - New Mexico Tariffs
• 16:32 - Amazon APEX Procedure
• 18:11 - Image Compliance
• 19:03 - Amazon V Walmart
• 20:56 - Helium 10 New Feature Alerts
• 23:23 - Training Tip: Amazon Inventory Heat Maps

#627 - Amazon Ranking Strategies

In this episode, let’s talk about Amazon’s A9 algorithm with Brian Johnson and all the details about how to rank on Amazon based on his research.

► 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

What if understanding Amazon's A9 algorithm could transform your Amazon-selling game? Join us in a captivating conversation with Brian Johnson, Co-Founder and CPO at DeepM AI, as we unravel the secrets to mastering Amazon’s search rankings. Brian shares the essential strategies sellers need for maintaining and regaining their positions in Amazon’s fiercely competitive marketplace. Discover how data-driven approaches can offer powerful insights into tackling ranking challenges.

Explore the nuanced world of Amazon's A9 algorithm and the myriad of factors that shape product search rankings. From sales velocity and inventory issues to the surprising influence of TikTok-driven search term trends, we cover it all. Brian provides a deep dive into the phenomenon of search term bleed and how emerging platforms shift consumer behavior. Learn how to leverage these insights to stay ahead of competitors and adapt to shifting marketplace dynamics.

Finally, we discuss practical tactics for optimizing your Amazon listings and advertisements to boost sales and profitability. Understand the critical metrics—like click-through and conversion rates—that drive success. With a focus on competitive analysis and innovative metrics like "tacos sauce," we highlight how to comprehensively monitor and enhance your e-commerce performance. Whether you're a seasoned seller or just starting, these insights will empower you to optimize your strategies and thrive on Amazon.

In episode 627 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Carrie, Kevin, and Brian discuss:

• 00:00 - Ranking on Amazon Algorithm Strategies
• 02:39 - Decoding the A9 Algorithm
• 06:31 - Improving Amazon Search Rank Control
• 09:36 - Factors Affecting Amazon Search Rank
• 11:46 - Influencer Impact on Search Terminology
• 14:02 - Amazon Search Rank Factors Analysis
• 15:45 - Understanding A9 Algorithm Factors
• 21:47 - Amazon Ranking Algorithm and Conversion Rate
• 25:28 - Amazon Search Ranking Optimization Strategies
• 28:59 - Product Profitability Analysis Strategy
• 33:54 - Commitment Required for Amazon Success
• 38:37 - Analyzing Past Ad Performance for ROI
• 40:21 - Competitor Monitoring and Metric Analysis
• 42:29 - ACoS Sauce Concept and Visibility 

#626 - Why YOU Should Be Selling on TikTok Shop

What is the hottest marketplace in the world right now? TikTok Shop. In this episode, we bring one of the world's foremost experts on TikTok Shop success to help you get started on the platform.

► 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

What if exploring the latest trends on TikTok Shop could redefine your business strategy? Join us as we unpack the secrets of thriving on one of the world's fastest-growing marketplaces. We welcome a top-tier expert in TikTok Shop success, Michelle Barnum-Smith of TTshopsellers.com who lays out a complete roadmap for navigating this dynamic platform. From leveraging powerful tools like Helium 10 to hearing firsthand success stories—like a couple whose sales soared after adding TikTok Shop to their go-to online marketplaces—you'll gain insights that could transform your approach to e-commerce. Plus, we tackle the buzz around a potential TikTok ban, sharing insider reassurances to keep your mind at ease.

Our discussion takes a strategic turn as we explore the mechanics of integrating TikTok Shop with platforms such as Shopify and Amazon. Discover how to tap into the "halo effect" where viral TikTok products can boost sales on Amazon. We also highlight the importance of abiding by TikTok's community guidelines, especially when it comes to directing users to Amazon, to ensure your shop's integrity. Listen closely as we share content strategies that don't rely on going viral but instead focus on crafting engaging, quality content that resonates with your audience and amplifies your brand's presence.

And if you're wondering how to spark impulse buying, we've got you covered. Learn the art of balancing ads with organic content and the power of influencer partnerships, which can yield substantial returns. We offer practical advice on starting with small-scale affiliate efforts and building robust creator networks that align with your brand's ethos. With tips on aligning your marketing efforts with trending events and using AI tools to supercharge your outreach, this episode is packed with actionable strategies designed to elevate your TikTok Shop success. Tune in and revolutionize your approach to this exciting marketplace!

In episode 626 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Michelle discuss:

• 00:00 - TikTok Shop Success Strategies
• 01:30 - TikTok Ban Not a Concern?
• 03:44 - Rapid Growth on E-Commerce Platforms
• 08:31 - Steps to Start TikTok Shop
• 11:43 - Navigating TikTok Shop Strategies
• 12:50 - Impact of TikTok Virality on Amazon
• 18:07 - GMB Max for Ads Optimization Strategy
• 24:32 - TikTok Shop Sales Strategies
• 29:57 - TikTok Shop Affiliate Strategy Tips
• 37:30 - Content Performance Metrics and Strategy

Helium 10 Buzz 12/26/24: Top 10 NEW Amazon Strategies To Use in 2025

In this episode, we discuss the top 10 newest strategies for leveling up on Amazon, including one brand-new one that maybe only 10 people have used so far.

► 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

We’re back with another episode of the Weekly Buzz with Helium 10’s VP of Education and Strategy, Bradley Sutton. Every week, we cover the latest breaking news in the Amazon, Walmart, and E-commerce space, talk about Helium 10’s newest features, and provide a training tip for the week for serious sellers of any level.

In this week’s episode, Join Bradley as he explores the latest strategies and features designed to supercharge your Amazon selling experience. This special episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast highlights the top 10 innovative strategies and tools released by Helium 10 in the second half of 2024. We kick things off with a groundbreaking PPC strategy that can enhance your campaign management by focusing on optimizing auto, broad, or phrase campaigns. By negative matching keywords that generate clicks without resulting in sales, you can prevent unnecessary spending and ensure a more efficient budget allocation. This approach is not limited to Helium 10 users, as even those employing other tools can benefit from these actionable insights.

As we continue, discover how Amazon influencers can seize new opportunities by leveraging video reviews to earn affiliate commissions. By utilizing Helium 10's Chrome extension and influencer tool, content creators can identify chances to get their videos featured prominently on product listing carousels. Additionally, we delve into the revamped keyword tracker that offers advanced features like heat maps and keyword harvesting. These tools, along with Cerebro, allow sellers to track competitor keywords and optimize their listings effectively, saving time while maximizing sales potential. With these insights, you can uncover valuable market dynamics and boost your Amazon performance.

Finally, explore the exciting updates from Helium 10 that enhance product analysis and sales estimation. With features like keyword sales estimates for European Amazon sellers and detailed insights into sales at both parent and child item levels, you can strategically target high-converting keywords and identify top-performing variations. Learn about the reintegration of Adtomic into the Helium 10 Diamond plan, which offers AI-driven advertising capabilities to streamline campaign management. With accurate sales estimates and superior competitive analysis, Helium 10 equips sellers with powerful tools to navigate the ever-evolving Amazon landscape. Don't miss this opportunity to gain practical strategies and make the most of the latest features available to you.

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

• 00:45 - Top 10 New Helium 10 Features
• 06:19 - Automating Helium 10 Adtomic Strategy 
• 08:55 - Amazon Influencer Program and Profitability Calculator
• 14:17 - Keyword Tracker for Competitor Analysis 
• 19:23 - Keyword Value Comparison in Amazon
• 23:15 - Helium 10 Sales Estimates Accuracy
• 29:11 - Amazon Brand Analytics Key Features

#625 - Off-Platform & Amazon PPC Strategies

In this episode, our expert guest answers your Amazon PPC questions. Learn how a seller scaled from $200K to $4M during Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Get actionable tips to optimize holiday sales and achieve remarkable growth!

 

In this episode, our expert guest answers your Amazon PPC questions. Learn how a seller scaled from $200K to $4M during Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Get actionable tips to optimize holiday sales and achieve remarkable growth!

► 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

What if you could transform your holiday sales from hundreds of thousands to millions? Destaney Wishon of BTR Media, our expert guest, reveals the art of crafting your own demand and skyrocketing sales with strategic off-platform investments, such as TV and video ads. We dissect the tactics that took one brand from $200,000 to a whopping $4 million, focusing on differentiating branded and non-branded sponsored product campaigns, and structuring these campaigns based on search intent to maximize their impact.

We also break down Amazon advertising strategies for those looking to boost performance and profitability. Discover how to make the most of tools like the Search Query Performance report and Amazon Marketing Cloud for comprehensive insights into conversion rates. Learn to balance profitability with traffic through dual campaigns, explore the potential of DSP for bigger budgets, and navigate the nuances of keyword targeting. With Destiny's insights, you'll be equipped to optimize your strategies using metrics like TACoS and tools like Helium 10 Adtomic for periodic assessments.

As we explore the intricacies of Amazon PPC campaign optimization, we cover everything from keyword volumes to match types. Learn how to effectively manage budgets with keyword volume, and understand the importance of automatic and manual campaigns, especially for new product launches. We also touch on the importance of influencer collaborations and product targeting to improve conversion rates in high window-shopping categories. Join us as we conclude with a special Q&A, where Destiny continues to share her expertise and engage with our community.

In episode 625 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Carrie and Destaney discuss:

• 00:00 - Strategies for Amazon Holiday Sales Success
• 00:35 - Welcome to TACoS Tuesday
• 06:17 - Optimizing for New Product Launch Strategies
• 10:26 - Optimizing Amazon PPC Campaigns for Higher Sales
• 16:56 - Amazon PPC Campaign Optimization Strategies
• 17:57 - Optimizing Keyword Match Types in Campaigns
• 21:14 - Influencers and Organic Sales on Amazon
• 27:02 - More Q&A and Follow-Up Questions

Transcript

 

Carrie Miller:

In this week's episode of the Serious Sellers podcast, we have expert Destaney Wishon with us and she's answering all of your questions, and we're going to be talking a little bit about Black Friday and Cyber Monday and how one of her clients actually went from $200,000 to $4 million this holiday season. This and so much more on today's episode of the Serious Sellers podcast. 

Bradley Sutton:

How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think, think. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show. Well, 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 this episode is our monthly live TACoS Tuesday show, where we talk about anything and everything Amazon and Walmart PPC and advertising related with different guests, and today's host is going to be Carrie Miller. So, Carrie, take it away. 

Carrie Miller:

Hello everyone, Welcome to TACoS Tuesday. We have our expert guest here, Destaney Wishon. Thanks so much for joining us, Destaney. 

Destaney:

Happy to be here. Very excited. I mean the chaos of the holidays Black Friday, Cyber Monday, what better time to get all your questions in? 

Carrie Miller:

Yeah, exactly. 

Destaney:

On our end, almost across the board, we saw Amazon's extending this holiday period, you know, taking some pressure off of their shipping for two days. So for the first time ever. You know, if we're just comparing Black Friday to Black Friday, year over year, this Black Friday was a little bit lower, but the overall holiday period was up. I don't know if consumer sentiment around shopping is higher, but sales were almost incredible and I would say our ROAS was pretty in line. We had one brand go from $200,000 to $4 million in sales month over month. It's obviously a giftable item, but it was pretty crazy to see that. So it's been really strong now.

Carrie Miller:

Oh, that's amazing.  

Destaney:

Didn't run deals whatsoever. You did nothing for lead-in CPCs are up and your sales weren't that much stronger. But for the brands who leaned in, they did fantastic. 

Carrie Miller: 

That's amazing, was there a specific strategy you think that they changed, because that's a pretty substantial jump. 

Destaney:  

They did a fantastic job. And this is kind of the new topic I've been coining in my training is when you list on Amazon, you're just capturing the demand. Amazon's doing all the work. They're driving the people that are searching for your product. You're just, you know, you got a little bucket and you're capturing it. 

Carrie Miller:

Yeah

Destaney:

What they did incredible was they created their own demand, so they went off platform, they invested in TV and video and they educated their customer based on why they need to buy their product. So when Black Friday, Cyber Monday came along and they typed in their search term, they stood out in the page because the customers were already familiar with their products. 

Carrie Miller:

Wow, that's, that's pretty incredible. Yeah. 

Destaney:  

Yeah, it was insane to watch. 

Carrie Miller: 

I was. I've been curious about the tv ads and how. You know how those are going for people, so that's sounds like they. You can do a really good job with them, depending on-

Destaney:

100%. We're seeing a lot of success. It's also just like rewiring your brain. I think a lot of brands are spoiled because sponsor products are so successful. But I'm like, of course they're successful, a customer's already planning on buying you. You didn't do any work, you just fit on a keyword. Like Amazon did the work of bringing people on the platform.

Carrie Miller:

Very true, so would you like to get on and start answering some of the questions from the audience? 

Destaney:   

Let's do it. I mean, typically these run over, so we might as well start strong. 

Carrie Miller:

Well, yeah, okay, this is from Spencer, and he says What is considered best practice for branded sponsored product campaigns. Do you make a separate campaign for each SKU or do you make one campaign and put all the SKUs in it? 

Destaney:    

It kind of depends. Your branded searches aren't always the same, right, if someone's typing in Coca-Cola Diet Coke versus regular Coca-Cola, you can change your strategy. So we segment based off search intents. We almost always separate branded versus non-branded, like that is table stakes. You have to separate branded versus non-branded campaigns. But when it comes to lining up your SKUs, we depend on search intent. But also from a reporting perspective, it's sometimes nice to break out into single SKU campaigns because then you can look at your TACoS per brand and you can say you know SKU A is doing really well. Maybe I should increase my branded search investment on this SKU and increase my budget on that campaign while pulling back on my branded investment for SKU number two. Breaking out into single SKU campaigns as a whole just makes it really easy to control your budget distribution if you have good naming and good organized campaign structure.  

Carrie Miller:  

Daniel says afternoon. Is there a I think it's morning for me, but afternoon probably for you guys Is there a golden ratio of CTR to CVR for measuring effectiveness of ad campaigns?

Destaney:  

I'm not going to give a golden ratio per se because it's really dependent on category. Click-through rate's also really difficult because it depends on things like pricing and reviews. So your advertising is going to be influenced by that. Same for your conversion rate, but your conversion rate. You can figure out what your category is converting on really easy using tools in Adtomic or using the search query performance report and clearly see using brand metrics. Hey, my category is converting at 20%. You should be converting better than category average, like that's kind of the standard. If you're going to increase your ad investment, you need to be converting better than category average. That being said, again, it's also dependent on search intent. Probiotics is going to be a lot more expensive than probiotics for kids back to school, right? So you can't just blanket look at your conversion rate across the board. You have to understand intent. 

Carrie Miller:  

Awesome. Okay, let's go to Joshua. He says if you came to Helium 10 from an agency and had hundreds of their old campaigns in your account, what is the best practice? Should I delete all of the non-performing campaigns and start over? I am not sure how to proceed.

Destaney:  

Great question. No matter what software you're transitioning to or an agency you're transitioning to, we don't ever recommend just pausing everything and hard stop. It's really bad for relevancy and it's difficult for the transition. What we do recommend doing is pulling your search term report for the last 60 days. Pull out all of your keywords that are successful and build them out into the new structure that you want to move forward with using the new software and then slowly rolling those out at the same time. As your new campaigns pick up traction, you can slowly pause out your old campaigns that are maybe a bad structure or maybe they're a weird single keyword structure that you don't want to move forward with. You slowly transition them over. First thing pull all your good keywords. Second thing pause all your bad keywords. Third thing slowly launch and transition your budgets over from old to new. 

Carrie Miller:    

What are the best practices for 2025 for new product launches. What's changed? I mean, I don't know if that's in regards to that's what I would put it, as I think.   

Destaney:    

I mean I don't know if that's in regards to me, but I would put it as yeah, I think quite a few things have changed. In terms of product launches, I would say driving external traffic is still doing really, really well and something that I think needs to be leaned into. A lot of brands cannot afford the CPCs in the category on a product that has zero reviews, so any way you can use external traffic that's maybe a bit cheaper to get your reviews up before leaning really heavy into Amazon advertising is a little bit more profitable. I would also say we're seeing this transition to creative matters so much more. So, making sure your click rate and conversion rate is good with your main image, but on the Amazon advertising side, really focusing on your sponsor brands, your sponsor brands video, your headline search ads, anything that makes you stand out on the Amazon advertising side. Really focusing on your sponsor brands, your sponsor brands video, your headline search ads, anything that makes you stand out on the page, because when you're launching, you don't stand out on the review perspective, so find unique ways to stand out within the search results. 

Carrie Miller:  

My product launched in October and I'm struggling to get sales. I've been using auto and manual campaigns, spending between 30 to 50 per day on a $20 product. I've launched the product in another territory where it's selling well. So feel confident with the product and listing. Any suggestions?

Destaney:  

Yeah, so I would say the first thing is to look at the keywords and really make sure they're the right keywords. Type them into Amazon. Do you see similar products? Once you see similar products, are those products priced at the same as you or are they cheaper than you? Do those products have a lot more reviews than you? Figure out the competitive advantage that they may have over you and improve your listing in that way. On the advertising side, it's really as simple as again looking at the keywords and trying to expand the keywords in which you have that competitive advantage and then optimizing your bids to make sure you can be profitable. The biggest thing, though, I would say, is understanding that competitive advantage. When you type in your main keyword, what do your competitors look like? What's the price? What's the reviews? Is the main image different? 

Carrie Miller:  

And the next question is from an Elite member of ours. Hi, Andrew. For SB product collection campaigns we find basically all our sales come from top of search. Is that common? Also, is it worth spending time bidding on other placements for those campaigns? Great question. 

Destaney:   

In general, I would say it is common. If you think about how the search results are set up on desktop and mobile, what is the biggest ad on the page? It's the sponsored brand top of search ad. The headline ads, the sponsored brand ads on the product detail page are typically video. It's not typically product collection, it's sometimes store spotlight and video. The only other sponsored brands that show up on page one are way down in the middle of search, sometimes the bottom of search. So this is very typical, not surprising. You can bid on the other placements. It's not going to drive a huge difference. Just know that the majority of your traffic and visibility comes from top of search because that's where all of the customers are clicking and viewing before they scroll down the page.

Carrie Miller:  

All right. The next one is from Keith. He says my BSR is improving and my PPC is converting. However, the organic ranking for my main keywords are not improving much. Any advice on how to improve rank? 

Destaney:   

Yeah, the two biggest factors that you can then break down is sales velocity or conversion rate. So again, figure out your category conversion rate. That's super easy with brand metrics, insights and planning or Helium 10 Adtomic, it's Amazon given data, it's first party data. So look at brand metrics. If you're converting lower than your category, you're going to need to drive a lot more traffic to your category, so you're probably going to need to spend more in order to improve that organic rank. On the flip side, let's say that you are spending more than the category or driving more in the category. Then it comes down to again like improving that conversion rate. It's traffic or conversion. Those are the two levers you really need to consider. So again, traffic the easiest thing to do is spend more it's not always the best answer or improve your listing and convert better, so that way you can easily spend a little bit more.  

Bradley Sutton:

Did you know that just because you have a keyword in your listing, that does not mean that you are automatically guaranteed to be searchable or, as we say, indexed for that keyword? Well, how can you know what you are indexed for and not? You can actually use Helium 10's index checker to check any keywords you want. For more information, go to h10.me/indexchecker. More information go to h10.me/indexchecker.

Carrie Miller:   

Hello, 80 to 90% of my PPC campaigns coming from SBV. I see the CPC and SBV a lot lower than sponsored. I am thinking to double down on I'm assuming that's sponsored brand video and let the SP sponsored on the second plan. Would that be a good way of going? 

Destaney:

This is. I'm not going to say this is wrong, but this is really really unusual to see because on page one there's one sponsor brand video ad, so it's very limited in terms of advertising inventory. On page one there's 15 to 20 different sponsor product camp placements, so almost actually across the board. As an agency with over $100 million in spend, 70% of sales almost always come from sponsored products because they have more real estate and inventory on the page than anything else. Very unusual. Also, sponsored brands view can get competitive really fast because since there's only one placement on page one, when everyone starts increasing bids for that placement, you can kind of lose control as CPCs go up and you're going to lose a lot of your sales velocity. So I love sponsored brands video. It's a great format, but it's very, very limited in terms of advertising inventory and you should be investing more in sponsored products. That is, across the board, the highest sales driving tactic because there's so many more sponsored product placements than anything else. 

Carrie Miller:

Keith says or asks what is the best way to check my conversion rate versus competitors on keywords? 

Destaney:

I would say your search query performance report is probably like one of the easiest ways as a whole to look at search query performance. It's not specifically related to advertising. When you're specifically looking at advertising, you can't compare directly on the keyword level. You can look at it at the subcategory level but you cannot see directly on the keyword level. You have to use SQP and then overlay it with the rest of your data.  

Carrie Miller:

How can you measure the effects of having a loss leader to help bring in additional traffic into your brand or variation listing? 

Destaney:   

Great question. I would probably dive into AMC for a lot of that. AMC is going to help you understand if someone clicks on one product, do they then end up buying another product? That's the easiest way. Without that, you could probably use depending on where you're advertising the sponsor product to advertise product report to see if people are clicking on one and then buying another. That's a really easy way to justify. It's just limited to only your advertising data where, if you use the appropriate AMC report, then you're gonna be able to see all of your organic data and that's gonna help you understand much better.   

Carrie Miller:

My sponsor campaigns are doing well when I have a lower bid. Whenever I raise my bid to try and get more juice out of them, my budget gets blown and they become unprofitable. Do you know what I should do in order to make this work for me? 

Destaney:   

There's really no perfect answer here. I mean is the balance that is Amazon advertising. One of the things that we do to help this is we'll create two campaigns with the same keywords. One of our campaign will be lower bid, focused on profitability, and the other campaign will be higher bid, with focus on sales, and we'll shift our budget back and forth. You know, 70% of our budget is going to go to profitability, 30% of our budget is going to go to the high traffic. That way we're not having to constantly fluctuate our bids. This kind of allows us to move the budget from both to maximize profitability and then, when we're done with that, it's okay, we can shift more and turn on higher sales. It's just easier budget distribution. The other things that you could look at is your bid management strategy. Maybe there's a better middle ground. Are you optimizing for placements? Are you moving broad phrase and exact? Sometimes your long tail keywords are going to be a little bit cheaper from a CPC perspective, so you're going to be able to drive more profitability from your long tail keywords. All of those additional measures are going to be hugely beneficial for the strategy. 

Carrie Miller:  

The next question is what's your take on DSP and data from AMC?  

Destaney:

I'm going to start with data from AMC, because it is now available for everyone. Brian Lee asked later on in the chat who can use AMC. Helium 10 has actually rolled it out, so you first need to request your instance being set up, but you do not need to run DSP ads to get access to AMC now. AMC is basically analytics and audience platform that just gives you a ton of insights into your Amazon advertising data. If you're not incredibly familiar with Amazon ads, it's gonna be probably a shiny object syndrome and I don't recommend you dive into it just yet. But if you understand sponsor brands and sponsor display. The second part of this question is what's my take on DSP? DSP has a bad reputation in the space because agencies and or Amazon managed services haven't been running it well, but DSP as a tool is incredible. It's one of the most powerful Amazon advertising tools out there, I would say, if used appropriately. You do need to be spending at least $10,000 on DSP a month for it to make sense, but DSP is incredibly, incredibly powerful for brands that are ready for it. 

Carrie Miller:

What do you recommend for Ad campaigns when you have separate listing variations. Do you recommend to merge or manage in each campaign??  

Destaney:

Again, it depends on search intent. In my opinion, if I have a black t-shirt versus a red t-shirt, and that's how they're variated, I like to separate out my campaigns so I can create search terms based off the variations. So I can create search terms based off the variations. If my only variation difference is size. No, not size price $20 variation, $10 variation I may not segment them. I would typically put my lowest price first because that's going to have the highest click-through rate and then lead customers to my other variations. If it's flavor variations, weight variation, something with different search intent, I recommend segmenting campaigns so you can curate your keyword experience.  

Carrie Miller:

What is a good way to determine keywords that you are ranking for, then comparing them to PPC campaigns to determine which keywords you may not be advertising for? Any quick way to do this. 

Destaney:  

Quick way is the fun part of this question. So the biggest thing I would say is to 100% 80-28. We kind of look at if we're ranked in the top four. We're going to pull back on sponsored product spend and move budgets to our sponsored brand, so we're winning the top of search and showcasing our brand. That's our overall strategy. You can use TACoS correlation to do this. If you have a TACoS objective, you'll see that when you spend on a sponsored product ad that you're ranked for, your TACoS is going to increase because you're cannibalizing your organic sales. So you can almost use TACoS as a lever to push and pull. It's not a perfect solution but it will help. The second thing to do would be to dive into you know, using Helium 10 and on a monthly, quarterly basis, pulling probably those terms, that on average you're above number four, number eight on, and then we create segmented campaigns for ranking that we can turn on and off as needed. So I don't want to turn off that keyword as a whole, I just want to lower the bids. So I'll shift my budget for my ranking campaigns to my profitability campaign. So I'm still running, but I'm not showing up in the top four sponsored ad placements.  

Carrie Miller:   

Jason says what is an optimal amount of keywords per exact campaign. I started with 15 or so, but as keyword harvesting creates new targets, the list has grown quite a bit. Break them into new campaigns question. 

Destaney:

Absolutely I personally don't love harvesting new keywords into an old campaign because it's going  change the performance of your old campaign right. If you have 10 new keywords that aren't proven, then your overall campaign may stop, start performing worse. So 15 is a great number. This is one of those fun like depending on what influencer you follow in the space, you're going to get a different number. It's really dependent on your budget. You know we've had brands that are spending a million dollars a month and they're able to have 100 keywords in a campaign because their campaigns had a thousand dollar budget. So we could afford from a budget perspective to drive traffic to every keyword. If you don't have that budget and you're only at $100 a month or a day, then you're going to need a lot smaller group of keywords to make sure you're collecting data on those keywords. So start with 15, maybe go to 20 to 30, depending on how high you want your budget to be, but then always break them out to new campaigns past that point. 

Carrie Miller:  

Are exact keywords generally expensive than broad? What, according to you, is the right mix of keywords, match type within a campaign and how many can should be added?

Destaney:

This is a fun one. There's a ton of misconceptions around this. In my opinion it just depends, because it's an auction model. If someone is bidding more on their exact match term than they are their phrase match, then maybe your exact match keywords are more expensive because your competitor is bidding more. We test all three match types across the board. They all three run in a very similar ACoS or ROAS because we control the bids to what's converting best at that certain point in time. I think for us, phrase match is one of our highest selling match types right now because broad sometimes goes too broad and doesn't convert as well. Exact match typically converts the best but can be the most expensive. If we're in a category where our competitors are bidding a lot more on exact, highly recommend running all three. Later on, someone asks can you put them all in the same campaign? You can. It's not necessarily going to hurt. We break ours up most of the time. There's instances where we won't, just so I can control again where my budget's going. But we continue to test every single keyword and every single match type and then just negate and or pause or lower bids depending on the performance in the CBCs. 

Carrie Miller:

I recently launched, about two weeks ago. I'm running an automatic and manual campaign. Is there any other campaigns I should be running?

Destaney:

No, I'd say that's fine unless you have a really high budget and look at maybe video or sponsored brands. Those are going to do really well for you. It's unique advertising inventory but considering it's only been two weeks, I think an auto and a manual is good. An auto is going to be used for keyword research and data collection for you. Use your manual campaign to really control where your traffic's going and then just continue adding those automatic keywords you're finding into your manual campaign. 

Carrie Miller:

Mike says, I'm in a category where there's a lot of window shopping, so my advertising spend is high as lots of clicks, no and low sales. Long tail keywords have low traffic and the keywords with higher search volume are very general, expensive and saturated by competitors. Any other strategies to consider? 

Destaney:  

Yeah, I would say, like the home decor, apparel, puzzles those categories can be really difficult because of the window shopping. So you got to think how do you stop someone from window shopping? Video does really really well because then you're educating them on why your product's better and why they're interested. And the good thing with sponsor brands video is if they're just watching the video you don't get charged. You only get charged if they clicked, and if they click they're interested. But again, I'd put this back on you to ask why are people clicking on your listing but not buying? Like even in high window shopping categories, you need to have a competitive advantage. The second thing I would say is product targeting, sponsor product product targeting, sponsor display product targeting can do really well. Target all of the competitors who have lower reviews than you, a higher price point than you, worse reviews than you. These do really well in window shopping categories because, as you mentioned, people are looking at competitors and then clicking on other listings and other listings. So this is a good opportunity to kind of take advantage of that mentality. 

Carrie Miller:  

Would you also say influencers are probably really the best way for those particular categories. 

Destaney: 

Yeah, I think influencers do really well because they're again, it's the same as the video concept. You don't want to just capture the demand and be compared to every other product in your category by price or reviews, which is what Amazon's known for. How do you educate a customer on why they need your product before they even click? Influencers, video ads, off-platform traffic does that job. 

Carrie Miller:  

Do you think Amazon rewards or gives more ranked juice for organic sales more than PPC sales, or do they treat them the same? 

Destaney:   

I would probably say more to organic sales. This is why your big retail brands your Johnson and Johnson's, your Pepsi or Coke's can get away with having listings that maybe aren't as fantastic because their organic conversion rate is so much higher, right? Even before they were spending a ton like seven years ago when I got started in this space those brands did so well because their conversion rate was higher. Customers were searching for their brand name and buying right, so their organic is already inflated and doing much better. Nowadays, PPC of course plays a role, but Amazon knows that they're going to max out on how much PPC opportunity they can have within the search results, so I think organic is weighted a little bit heavier in terms of conversion rate and click-through rate. 

Carrie Miller:

Do you ever increase budget on a PPC campaign, even if it isn't maxing out? 

Destaney:

It doesn't hurt. I don't think it necessarily helps. It can. I've seen a few people kind of make statements like I ran a campaign at $50 a day budget and it did nothing. When I increased it to $500 a day it did something. I've never really seen that, but it doesn't hurt anything.

Carrie Miller:

Joshua says wait. So I thought it was best practice to segment campaigns, as in keywords and such, to determine the performance. So is it best practice to clump keywords together for campaigns in groups of 10 to 15? 

Destaney:  

It doesn't really matter. Single keyword campaigns are okay, they don't hurt, but they're a pain to scale. We have brands that have 500 keywords doing well, so I'm not going to create 500 campaigns when it doesn't drive that much added value. We do 10 to 15 because it's controllable, it's easy to scale, it's easy for us to build out. Because it's controllable, it's easy to scale, it's easy for us to build out. In an absolutely perfect world, single keyword campaigns could be the best solution, the most value added, because you can do your placements at the same time, but they're not scalable for most people. Most people don't have the operations to run it appropriately and the software's out there that are recommending single keyword campaigns have a really terrible bid management strategy that doesn't make sense for them. So I would say if you're a small brand, only have one product, go ahead and run single keyword campaigns if you want. Just make sure you have a good system for naming and structuring. 

Carrie Miller:

This is a good question. If you're new to Helium 10 Adtomic, what's the best place to start? I feel overwhelmed by the complexity of the system. 

Destaney:  

I would start by saying that that is the nature of Amazon and Amazon probably going to feel overwhelmed. So the biggest thing is to actually go through, like the videos that are directly within Adtomic. Like that's what I would say one of your best bets and start learning each piece individually. That's something that I kind of got overwhelmed with, like in the beginning. Keyword research and bid management that should be our core focus when it comes to advertising. So go through those segmented videos and help yourself understand the system that way. Do you have anything else, Carrie? 

Carrie Miller:

Yeah, I mean we do have kind of a PPC Academy. If you are a paid subscriber to Helium 10, you can go into that course. But Bradley also has done some. He did some masterclasses on Adtomic and then there's also kind of learn videos, like you were saying, just like watch those little videos for each different thing within the actual tools. There's kind of little training videos. I would suggest doing that. We also have it in our academy. We have videos in our academy that show you how to use Adtomic. 

Destaney:  

General, it just takes time and, to not get overwhelmed, you have to hop in and you have to test and learn. By the time you learn something Amazon will change some button or some switch. So don't get overwhelmed by like. We have incredible comments and questions that are being asked that I would say are pretty advanced here. So, like, don't get overwhelmed by all of that. Just start simple, start small and you'll figure it out as you go.

Carrie Miller:  

I think we'll do maybe one more here. I think this is a good one. I use Cerebro to extract keywords from competitors ASINs and then include those as exact and phrase match within the same campaign. As a result, my campaign sometimes ends up with 500 plus keywords. Is this approach okay, or should I create smaller, more segmented campaigns?

Destaney:  

I'm going to assume what's happening with your 500 plus keywords is only 10 of them are actually getting impressions and clicks. That is the problem with that strategy. Unless you have a thousand dollar a day budget, you cannot afford the data across all those keywords. And what I mean by that is the industry standard is you need anywhere from 10 to 20 clicks per keyword before knowing whether or not it's a keyword that can be optimized right. So let's say 10 clicks at a $1 bid across 500 keywords. I can't do that math. What is 500 times $10? Like 5000? 

Carrie Miller:

Yeah. 

Destaney: 

Please, you guys I just got the zeros. This is one of those memes I was like what is the most embarrassing thing you typed into your Amazon or your calculator this year? I was about to say you cannot afford to collect data on all those keywords. You're going way too big and you're going to have campaigns that only have 5 to 10 keywords getting clicks, because that's where all of your budget's going. Your budget's only going to go to those keywords. Amazon's not going to spread it across all of your keywords. So there's no point in doing any of that keyword research when 480 of those keywords you cannot afford to get impressions on. That is why we break them out in a segmented campaign. So I can have a $10 campaign focus on one to two keywords, collecting data. I can turn on and off as my keywords are successful versus your 500. Again, you can't necessarily afford it unless you're going to be spending 5 to $10,000 to collect data on all of those terms.  

Carrie Miller:  

All right, I think that's the last question. I think you've done an amazing job for pretty much 45 minutes straight answering questions. So thank you. And Andrew says Destaney is the GOAT. And then Cory said “Agreed, this is awesome!”. So thank you so much for joining us for TACoS Tuesday and thank you to everyone in the audience. We had lots of I mean, we still have questions we haven't answered. I'm sorry about that. We just don't have time to do all of them every single time, but if you join next time early, you can get your questions in early, right when we start and get them answered. But thanks again for everyone who joined and also Destaney. If anyone wants to reach you, where can they reach you?

Destaney:   

Facebook or LinkedIn is probably the easiest. I see a few like good questions that came in last minute. Cory Benson, like all of my content is pretty much on LinkedIn, based around your question, so feel free to follow me on either of those platforms or reach out in the Helium 10 groups. I'm pretty active in those groups, so if you have any questions that we missed, we'd love to hop in and help.  

Carrie Miller:

Yeah, if you're not following Destaney on LinkedIn, you're missing out, so you got to go go follow her there. So, all right, thank you again, and we'll see you all again next time on TACoS Tuesday.