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

#583 - Build An Unbeatable Amazon Brand

Can bold, provocative branding be the key to skyrocketing your success on Amazon? In this episode, we are joined by the insightful Emma Schermer Tamir of Marketing by Emma, as she unpacks the art of building an iconic brand that doesn’t just blend in but stands out in a crowded marketplace. Alongside Kevin King, Emma demystifies the elements of branding beyond mere logos and names, highlighting actionable strategies to boost profitability and customer lifetime value. Using the example of selling water, she makes a compelling case for unique value propositions and effective communication with target customers.

Discover how AI can be a game-changer for your Amazon branding strategy. We discuss powerful techniques for competitor analysis, from examining social media presence to dissecting customer feedback. Emma explains how AI tools can streamline this process, allowing you to build comprehensive customer avatars that include demographic details, emotional drivers, and cultural references. By examining the bold and provocative marketing strategies of Liquid Death, we showcase the importance of truly understanding your target audience and aligning your brand to meet their needs and expectations.

Creating and maintaining a cohesive and evolving brand identity is more critical than ever. Emma shares the importance of continuously updating your customer avatar to reflect the shifting behaviors and needs of your market. She further explores the concept of imagining your business as a person, ensuring that every aspect, from marketing to product packaging, aligns with this identity. Through the compelling case of Liquid Death, Emma illustrates how bold messaging and sustainability efforts can create a deep customer connection. We wrap up by emphasizing the strategic benefits of thoroughly understanding your competitors and customer preferences to cultivate a loyal and enthusiastic customer base.

In episode 583 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley, Kevin, and Emma discuss:

• 00:00 - Building an Iconic Brand on Amazon
• 02:06 - Copywriting and Branding Expert Interview
• 05:26 - Building a Profitable Water Business
• 13:14 - The Edgy Marketing of Liquid Death
• 14:44 - Differentiating Brand on Amazon With AI
• 18:08 - Powerful Branding Strategies
• 21:56 - Creating a Strong Brand Identity
• 30:02 - Effective Brand Storytelling for Communication
• 33:50 - Elevating Brand Strategy for Customer Connection

► 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

#582 - From Teacher to 7-Figure Amazon & Walmart Seller

Join us on an incredible journey as we welcome Carrie Miller, a familiar voice on the Serious Sellers Podcast, who shares her remarkable transition from teaching to becoming a multi-seven-figure seller on Amazon and Walmart. Born in Florida and raised in San Diego, Carrie attended Pepperdine University with aspirations of becoming a teacher, only to find herself navigating a challenging job market. Despite the odds, she secured a position teaching high school Spanish and even coached basketball, showcasing her dedication and versatility. Carrie's global experiences in Argentina and China add a unique flavor to her story, making her insights into the e-commerce world all the more compelling.

Listen in as we explore her journey working for another e-commerce software company and shifting from customer interactions to creating content and masterclasses for their Academy. Her extensive experience with Helium 10 since 2017 played a pivotal role in her freelance work for various clients. Discover the impressive growth of their skateboard and apparel businesses, which saw significant milestones in 2020 and 2022, respectively. The discussion also touches on their successful foray into Walmart's marketplace and their upcoming venture into TikTok Shop, offering listeners valuable insights into e-commerce business growth and strategies.

This episode also uncovers the lessons learned in product inspections and the importance of targeting niche markets. Hear firsthand about the challenges of receiving a large batch of smeared skateboard decks and dealing with quality issues that impacted product reviews. We emphasize the critical role of thorough factory inspections and having reliable on-the-ground sourcing experts. Additionally, we tackle security risks and challenges on Amazon, including account hacks and listing issues, and share effective strategies for optimizing e-commerce operations. From managing supply chain fees to utilizing AI-powered tools for competitor analysis, this episode is packed with practical advice to help you succeed in the competitive e-commerce landscape.

In episode 582 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Carrie discuss:

• 00:00 - E-Commerce Strategies With Carrie Miller
• 04:07 - Global Teaching and Living Experiences
• 09:35 - E-Commerce Business Growth and Strategies
• 10:04 - Helium 10 Essential Tool for Agencies
• 13:52 - Success in a Competitive Apparel Market
• 18:44 - Learning From Mistakes in Product Inspections
• 19:38 - Security Risks and E-Commerce Challenges
• 24:41 - Success Through Consistency and Growth
• 28:13 - Unique Amazon & Walmart Strategies
• 32:09 - Optimizing Listing SEO Strategy With AI

► 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

Helium 10 Buzz 7/26/24: New Amazon Reimbursement Policy | TikTok Shop Is Expanding | Amazon Is Giving Free 3D Models

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 FBA Inventory Reimbursement Policy Update | Helium 10
https://www.helium10.com/blog/amazon-fba-inventory-reimbursement-policy-update/

TikTok Reportedly Bringing In-App Shopping to Spain and Ireland
https://www.pymnts.com/news/ecommerce/2024/tiktok-reportedly-bringing-in-app-shopping-to-spain-and-ireland/

Additionally, we highlight significant updates on Amazon Seller Central. Discover the enhanced Voice of the Customer dashboard, which now includes new performance metrics and multilingual customer feedback. US-based brand-registered sellers can now create free 3D product models using the Amazon Seller iOS app, offering a 360-degree view to elevate the shopping experience. New brand analytics features are also on the horizon, focusing on customer segmentation to better target new audiences and reduce cart abandonment.

Lastly, we explore Helium 10's AI-powered features in the Listing Builder tool, designed to optimize and generate copy and seasonal AI images for Amazon Posts and product listings. Tune in for a comprehensive rundown of these updates and more!

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

• 00:51 - Amazon Reimbursement Changes
• 02:47 - TikTok Shop Expansion
• 04:00 - Voice of the Customer Updates
• 05:09 - Free 3D Models
• 06:42 - New Customer Segmentation
• 07:34 - Pro Training Tip: New AI Features Of Listing Builder

► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast

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

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

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

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

Transcript

Carrie Miller:

Amazon has a new reimbursement policy, TikTok is expanding to even more countries and free 3D models for sellers who have an iOS seller app. This and so much more on today's episode of the Weekly Buzz.

Bradley Sutton:

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, where we give you a rundown of all the news stories that are going on in the Amazon, Walmart and e-commerce world. We highlight the latest new feature alerts from Helium 10, and we review a training tip of the week that will give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Now, today, our host is going to be Carrie Miller. So, Carrie, take it away and let us know what's buzzing.

Carrie Miller:

So the first story is about Amazon changing their reimbursement policy. So, starting November 1st of 2024, amazon is going to proactively reimburse sellers for FBA items that are lost in Amazon fulfillment centers. They're going to issue the reimbursement as soon as an item is reported as a loss by the fulfillment center, which you can actually track in the reimbursements report on seller central, and Amazon is hoping that this is going to be a more seamless experience that's going to save sellers time and money by minimizing the need to manually research and file claims for lost items. However, if you as a seller do not receive an automatic reimbursement and you believe that your inventory has been lost or damaged, then you're going to actually also have to file a manual claim when they don't proactively do it, if there's a glitch in the system. Additionally, any removal claims are still going to be need to be filed manually. Also, starting October 23rd, amazon is actually updating their eligibility window policy, so all manual claims must now be submitted with the following deadlines. So, first, a fulfillment center operations claim for an item that is lost or damaged in the fulfillment center must be submitted no later than 60 days after the item was reported lost or damaged. Second, an FBA customer returns claim can be submitted between 60 to 120 days after the customer refund or replacement date. Claims must not be submitted before 60 days to ensure that the customer has time to return the item to Amazon for processing. Third, a removal claim for items lost in transit can be submitted 15 to 75 days from the shipment creation date. Claims must not be submitted before 15 days to ensure the shipment can be delivered back to you. And then, last, all other removal claims must be filed within 60 days of the shipment being delivered back to you. If you want more information, we actually wrote a blog so you can get that link to that blog in our description. So go ahead and check out the blog and it should answer all of your questions in regards to the new policy.

Carrie Miller:

All right, so next up, we have some TikTok shop news. TikTok shop is allegedly, or reportedly, going to be bringing in-app shopping to Ireland and Spain. According to this article, they're basically saying that they're expanding first to Ireland and Spain and have some plans to expand to more countries in Europe. Now, obviously, TikTok is already in these countries, but this is going to be the in-app shopping piece so that people can actually utilize TikTok shop here. And this is after a few months ago. It talks about here and here that TikTok had planned to bring this shopping feature to Spain, Germany, Italy, France and Ireland earlier this year, but they actually halted that because they wanted to focus on the US market. Now there's a lot of uncertainty with the US market, so they probably are going ahead with the expansion to Europe because of that. So we'll see what happens. I think this is an interesting development. It could be some really great opportunity for sellers to everywhere. So we'll see how this goes and you know, just keep your eye on these European countries. If you are a seller and you can potentially expand out there or, you know, maybe some influencers in these countries can start making money selling on TikTok shop.

Carrie Miller:

All right, next up, we have some information about how the voice of the customer dashboard has been updated as well as there are some new translation features. So Amazon says here to show you how your products perform against industry bank benchmarks, amazon has updated some features on the voice of the customer dashboard. The negative customer experience review rate and the NCX return rate show how your product review and return rates compared to the product category benchmarks. This information enables you to track your product performance over time so you can make informed decisions to improve quality. On the listings detail page, you can you to make corrective action and improve your product offerings. Amazon, finally also has enhanced the customer feedback section by now offering it in multiple languages. Previously it was only available in English and now it's available in multiple languages.

Carrie Miller:

All right, we actually have another update to share that was actually in your Seller Central dashboard and that was where it was announced, and it's for brand registered sellers in the US, and that is that you can now create free that's right, free 3D product models using the Amazon Seller iOS app. These models are gonna provide a 360 degree view of your product, which is going to further enhance your customer's shopping experience. So 3D scanning in the Amazon seller app is actually going to be a guided experience and the eligibility actually depends on the type of product is, because not all products are actually going to be good for a 360 model. So you know things like that more like hard products, and so they're going to look at the product category, the physical properties and other factors. So if your, if your products don't appear in the app for scanning, then that's probably wise because they're not actually eligible. In order to get access to this feature on your phone, you're going to need an iOS or an Apple device, and it has to have iOS 17 or newer, and your device language needs to be set to English. So you're going to also find instructions in the app on how to prepare your product for scanning, and a 3D artist will actually review each scanned model for quality and if your status if you basically it says in progress that means they've successfully received a scan, and then, once they've received the scan, it's going to take about three weeks to complete the model and then make it ready for your customers on your listing and it's going to actually just pop up there automatically, so you don't actually need to kind of check anywhere and upload it yourself. It'll automatically populate. So you just want to keep checking your listing to see if it's been populated.

Carrie Miller:

Okay, this last piece of news is actually with brand analytics. Amazon has actually introduced new brand analytics features that are going to help you to refine your segmentation of customers and help you to engage the following audiences. So the first audience is new audiences. That allows you to highlight declining top tier and declining promising customers segments for insights on groups of likely customers who are forecasted to spend less in the next year, and then next cart abandoners to spend less in the next year, and then next cart abandoners. So this audience is going to help you to engage and convert customers who have added your products to their cart and they have not yet completed their purchase. All right, so that is all the news, and you can see there's a lot going on. You know lots of really important information. So if you want to check anything further out, you can find some of those things in your seller central dashboard with some more information. Or if you want to check out our blog on those reimbursements, you can check that out as well. All right, so let's go ahead and get into our training tip of the week now.

Carrie Miller:

This is going to be in our listing builder, ai. We have a lot of really great ai features throughout helium 10 tools, but I wanted to focus on the ones that are in our listing builder because I think they might be a little bit overlooked or maybe you don't even know that they exist. This is one of our listings, this is our coffin shelf and what you need to do is you're going to just scroll all the way down. So we've already written this one and used AI there. But if you scroll all the way down to the bottom, you're going to see where it says Amazon posts, and sometimes you might have writer's block and not really know what to caption your Amazon posts with and you want to make sure that they're optimized. So what we will do is take the keywords that are in the listing here and just the information from the listing, and it's going to help write some different posts for you. So I just hit write it for me and then you're going to see some fully optimized posts come up here. So, for example, we've got here transform your space with this coffin shelf set, perfect for your goth decor. It includes a skull figurine and led pumpkin candle. Okay, so since ours does not include that, I'm going to just kind of I can just edit this if I wanted to use it. So you can basically kind of use it as a jumping off point and you can just start, you know, editing and doing whatever you need to do. You can also hit rewrite it for me and you can get some more suggestions that are rewritten for you right there and you can utilize those or kind of take some from this one and then add it to this one anything that you want to do, but that is a great way that you can get some optimized content for your Amazon posts.

Carrie Miller:

Next, we have how to generate AI images. Now, this is really cool because you can change these amazing backgrounds. Sometimes, especially going into different holiday seasons, you might want to put your product in a different background with a different holiday season. So all you need to do is just upload your product with a white background here and you'll just click browse and upload that and then you're going to choose a theme. So you could choose you know holiday and maybe you know Halloween or something like that, and it will give you kind of a suggested description. But you can actually edit this and do whatever you want to do.

Carrie Miller:

I already did one for you here. I uploaded this coffin shelf here and I chose holiday and Halloween spookiness, and I actually just kind of changed the item, the image description, and I was able to get some of these. Now, obviously, some of them are not perfect, but you can go ahead and edit the description and then hit generate images. Again. It'll generate some images that are different, so this is a really good place to get some of those really cool backgrounds, especially for those stationary products, and help to make your product look a lot more festive for the holidays or anything else. You can choose any of these themes. You can do home themes, abstract, whatever you want, and then you can choose a theme setting once you get over here. So really great cool things in Helium 10. We're always trying to innovate and give you the latest and greatest tools to help you with your Amazon business. All right, so thank you all for tuning in to this week's Weekly Buzz. We'll see you all next week to see what's buzzing.

#581 - Top Ten New Helium 10 Features for 2024

Join us for an exciting episode where we uncover the latest and greatest from Helium 10. We kick off by exploring the top 14 innovative tools and features introduced this 2024, designed to give Amazon sellers a competitive edge. We highlight the platform's expanded capabilities to include the Amazon Brazil marketplace, making it easier than ever to tap into this emerging market through Amazon's Remote Fulfillment Program.

Next, we introduce the powerful Product Launchpad tool, perfect for organizing multiple product research projects. Discover how you can track competitors, get AI-generated summaries, and even change Amazon prices directly within Helium 10. We also discuss the revamped Demand Analyzer tool and updated title length recommendations feature in the X-Ray tool, all aimed at enhancing your product research and listing optimization.

Finally, we explore advanced features like the automation of Cerebro, available on the Diamond plan, and how it can save you time by tracking competitor activities and identifying valuable keywords. Learn about the new AI image generator in the Listing Builder tool, which allows you to create customized product images with specific instructions. We also cover Helium 10's new Listing Builder Scoring System that enhances Amazon SEO by providing a comprehensive score based on keyword usage and relevancy. Tune in to find out how these features can transform your Amazon selling experience!

In episode 581 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley talks about:

• 00:00 - New Features in Helium 10
• 01:52 - Expanding Marketplaces With Helium 10
• 03:46 - New Tools for Amazon Product Research
• 08:32 - Helium 10 Niche Analysis and Features
• 13:09 - AI Image Generator in Listing Builder 
• 18:19 - Tracking Competitors' Ads on the Product Page
• 20:48 - Helium 10 New Product Features
• 30:06 - Listing Builder Scoring System Overview
• 30:55 - Optimizing Product Listing With AI

► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast

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

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

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

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

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Did you know that since November of last year, Helium 10 has released 67 new tools and features? Today I'm going to go over my personal top 14 list of the best ones that can make you money right now, including one new tool that's going to make me over $3,000 for me on just one product alone. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show. That's a completely BS-free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world.

 

Bradley Sutton:

What I wanted to do today was I wanted to pick, I tried to pick, the top 10 best ones that can help you immediately as Amazon sellers right now, just from what we launched this year. All right, but I couldn't keep it to 10. So we're going to go to 14. So this, basically, these are my top 14 new features just from this year in Helium 10 that I think can help you guys out and probably apply to the great majority of you. All right, like, like it's not just like, oh, only a few people can use this one or a couple of people can use this, and I think you guys will find benefit in a lot of these, and I want to start going over these one by one here. Number 14 is now Helium 10 works for Brazil. All right, so we have a lot of marketplaces that Helium 10 works in. We have, obviously, Amazon USA, Walmart, Amazon Canada, Mexico, Germany, Spain, Italy, France, UK, India, Netherlands, Australia, Japan, United Arab Emirates and now Brazil.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So why is this important, though, is what changed on Amazon? Is you guys know about the Amazon North American fulfillment used to be called North American remote fulfillment. Now it's just called remote fulfillment, I believe, but that allows you, if you're selling an Amazon USA, it allows you to be able to just click a button and then your listings go live and are translated for Mexico, and then also your listing goes live in Canada if it qualifies. Well, now last year or early this year, Amazon changed it where now, if you are activate remote fulfillment, you have the option to sell on Amazon Brazil, which is an emerging marketplace in the Amazon ecosystem. So Helium 10 now works for Cerebro, Blackbox, X-ray, Magnet, Profits, whole bunch of tools. So, for example, I entered in this cooler bag my Portuguese is not great, that's what I'm assuming his is here into Cerebro and, as you can see, I get all these Portuguese keywords and some English keywords come up to of where this product is ranking. So, guys, this, the first part of this has nothing to do with Helium 10 is hey, go in and check, do you qualify to go ahead and open up your listings for fulfillment in Brazil? Now, how it works is Amazon will ship from your Amazon FBA USA inventory to the Brazilian customers and you're not having to pay any extra fees or anything like that. So, first of all, get your listings active over there and then go ahead and use Cerebro, Magnet, et cetera, to maybe optimize your listings. Maybe, if you don't like the translation, you might change the translation for the listings up a little bit, using what Cerebro is telling you, and then obviously put in the Keyword Tracker, et cetera. So that's number 14 on the list.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Number 13 was a brand new tool that we launched. All right, so maybe some of you are doing multiple product research things at the same time. Right, if you do multiple product research things at the same time, you might have trouble keeping track of all your projects. Like hey, I'm uh, you know searching this in the home and kitchen category and I've got this one that looks like a good idea. I mean, you might have 10, 15. Well, now you can go ahead and organize all of them in product launchpad, which is a brand new net new tool to Helium 10. Now, this product launchpad allows you to go ahead and start different projects. Like here's one I had started a while back of coffin makeup shelves and gives me like aggregate numbers of what's going on in the coffin makeup shelf niche, what are the main keywords for these products. I can go ahead and add competitors to this. Like, hey, I want to start tracking this product and this product because they're part of the coffin makeup shelf ecosystem, the niche right and then, using AI, it's going to give me kind of like some summaries of what I have come up with in my product research. But the main part of this new tool is to just help you organize all of your projects so that you might want to not forget about what you had done and you might want to come back to it. Like, maybe you decide to go forward with one project, like, hey, I'm going to make this coffin letterboard, but let me save that makeup shelf for later. Now you can go back to your projects and then also add products, add keywords to it and then see if the AI has any other advice based on best practices, on what the future of that niche is. So again, that's number 13 guys, brand new tool that launched this year called Product Launchpad.

 

Bradley Sutton:

All right, number 12 thing of something brand new is you can change your Amazon prices inside of Helium 10. Let's say you're like, hey, you know what I'm not doing a prime, exclusive discount, but I want to go ahead and change my prices and just drop everything 50 cents because my competitor will now on your dashboard right, I think this might be for Diamond members and up you can actually change your Amazon price for your products without going into seller central. So you just go to the listing section of the SKU, zoom in here. I'm going to zoom in and you can see all of these little price fields. You can actually change your Amazon price right here inside of Helium 10. So that's number 12 in the list of new updates. Number 11 is the relaunch of an older tool that we used to have and now we relaunch is called Demand Analyzer. Let me give you a scenario here. Let's say you're searching for something on Alibaba, on whatever website Etsy, I don't care what website you're on. Did you know that the Helium 10 Chrome extension will work on any website to let you know something that's going on Amazon based on what you input? For example, I was searching at these crazy Alibaba companies that were copying my images for my coffin shelf and I was just curious what other things are these people selling in their Alibaba factory? And I went into this Alibaba factory page and I went to this category of letter boards, right? So, for example, what can I do here? Maybe I didn't know there was a such thing as letter boards, right? So maybe I'm wondering, hey, is there demand on Amazon for letter boards? Well, maybe in the past you thought, oh, okay, now I have to go to Helium 10, uh X-ray and be on Amazon and search letter boards and see what the search volume is. Or I have to go into Helium 10 Cerebro or Magnet. Let me see what are the related keywords. What is the search volume? No, you can actually do that right from here, so I can see here. This is like a pumpkin letter board, like you know, Halloween coming up and then maybe I'm wondering right now hey, is there any demand for pumpkin letter boards on Amazon? Well, let me go ahead and hit that and then I'll type in here pumpkin letter board, all right, and then analyze. Is anybody searching that? No, all right, I got to answer right away. It's something new and cool. But I see that there's an autocomplete says pumpkin, four letter boards, all right. So maybe I might want to look into that more. Maybe what about this one Hexagon letter board, hexagon shaped letter board? Is anybody searching? Oh, okay, there's about 50 people searching a month, but you see what I'm talking about here. You guys can now go on other websites and get product ideas and instantly see what is going on Amazon for that Um, and so I highly, highly recommend doing that when you get inspiration or ideas from other websites. All right, so that was number 11.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Let's go to number 10. This is actually a newish, um, a newish thing that has been updated and this is in X-ray. Do you ever think about how long should my title be? Now, I know Helium 10 has scoring systems and stuff, but it's based on like overall best practices, right? Uh, as I've always trained you guys, I hope you guys follow the training videos. It's not one size fits all as far as what goes best for how long your title should be across the board on Amazon. I've always said look at the niche theme. What are some of the main players in your niche doing on page one, you know? Then you know, hey, if everybody's got long titles, well, it looks like long titles actually are a good thing for this niche. Maybe you're in a niche where there's shorter titles that work better, all right. So now how can you go ahead and figure that out? Well, you can go into X-Ray and then right here at the very top, you see you're going to have an average title character count. You guys see that there? Average title character count of the top 20 products on the page and so you can see in collagen peptides, oh, it looks like most people have long titles because the average title character count is 167. I can put my mouse here and I can see, all right well, of those top 20 products, what kind of distribution I can see. Wow, look at this. 65% of the top 20 products have titles between 180 and 200 characters, right? So I'm like, oh wow, definitely, long titles are working really well in collagen peptides. So if I'm going to start a collagen peptides product, let me go ahead and, you know, maybe put my title out 190 characters or so. Now let's go to the flip side. Let's look at this one accordion. All right, this is the accordion search term on Amazon and take a look here. What's the average title character counts. It's 110 way different than collagen peptides. Let's take a look at the distribution here. Look at that. Half of the listings on the top 20 have only between a 99 and 119. Okay, uh, limit, all right. So almost nobody has longer titles. Most people have you. So you see how it's different based on the keyword and based on the niche.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So this is not new, this strategy of, hey, look at what kind of titles people have. But in the past, what did you have to do? You would just have to kind of like eyeball it, right? Hey, let me look. Ah, it looks like they have long titles, but how, how many characters would you really know? Now you can see the title character count of every single listing on page one to see what your competitors are doing. Next one we are now in the top 10. Number nine I don't have a screenshot of because this is I don't sell in Europe, but Helium 10 inventory management historically only worked for Amazon USA and this year we launched it now for Amazon Europe, and so there's still a lot that we're working on for there, like you know, trying to integrate pan, pan EU uh forms of FBA, distribution and velocity. So, guys, if you are in Europe and please take a test drive of our Helium 10 inventory management, let us know what you like, let us know what you don't like, so that we can tailor it to your needs. All right, so that's number nine. Uh, number eight is not actually a new tool but a relaunch of a feature. You guys remember the Helium 10 Elite program we've had for years, but for over a year it was fully closed, like you could not get into Elite even if you wanted to, unless you were like a Supercharge member, like, like. Elite is actually part of the Supercharge program, but elite as an add-on just couldn't do it for almost a year. Well, we relaunched it this year and it has a lot of cool new features. So, for anybody interested in like a one-on-one call with me, a one-on-one call with Carrie, Elite members can do that once a month. Do you want to meet with other high level sellers once a week on zoom in round tables that aren't recorded so you can talk about anything and everything you want. That's available for a Helium 10 lead. Do you want to do quarterly workshops around the world and be able to learn from a high level speakers? We just finished one a couple a few weeks ago in Spain.

 

Bradley Sutton:

The next one is going to be right before Amazon accelerates. So if you sign up for Elite, you get to go to that one. It's going to be Kevin King as a speaker and destiny with Sean. We're going to have meals and networking and a lot of prizes and a lot of cool things and a lot of learning. Obviously, for those two, um, it's going to be on. September 16th is the next one. That it's going to be, like I said, in Seattle and maybe another one later on this year in Milan, Italy. I'm not sure yet, but we've got those. We've got monthly trainings with Kevin King and expert guests online where you can ask them live questions and you can learn from like high level things that's not normally in like a podcast episode or something like that. You get exclusive first access to tools and then the new price. Instead of having it being a separate Helium 10 plan like it was before, it is now just an add on. So if you've got a Diamond plan, you can just add on Elite for only $99 a month. All of that, what I just mentioned, only $99 a month, and a lot more. There's monthly Zoom calls with Kevin King, there's a private Facebook group. The list goes on and on. So, guys, I highly highly recommend giving that a spin for a few months. Helium 10 Elite if you've got the Diamond program, you can just add it on for only $99. All right, so that was the number eight thing.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Number seven is an AI image generator. All right, AI image generator this is living inside of Listing Builder. All right, so you go into Listing Builder, go into any of your listings and then hit generate AI images. And then this is super cool because you just put you know, you upload, like your maybe stock image of something or a white background or whatever, and then you put in your instructions of like hey, I want to see this. Uh, here's an example here. I want to see this product in a cozy, dim and inviting home setting, resting on a table, various natural elements around you and this is a candle, right, and you can see that this is all AI generated, what this came up with. I've done this with my coffin shelf listings a lot as well, and the cool thing about it is you can do this for different Amazon assets. Like, for example, if you are doing a main, if you're doing a main image or a regular image on Amazon, what kind of dimension should that be? It's a square right. You should probably have it 1600 by 1600 at the minimum. Or you can actually do a custom size, like for whatever reason. You have some custom uh image that you want to put on your website or something you can put the custom size Uh. Let's say, you want to do something for Amazon post. Amazon post should be 640 by 640. There is a preset for that. What if it's an A+ logo image, that's actually a banner size image, or it's 600 by 180. You can go ahead and have the AI create an image based on your regular image, but now it's made for Amazon A+ content, and the list goes on and on of different sizes and different things you can have. So I like using it for the Amazon post, especially since in Listing Builder we have an Amazon post caption generator. So, as you know, for Amazon post, you should be doing one per day for each of your products. Well, maybe you didn't take 365 images of your product, uh, you know, when you did a photo shoot. So how are you going to do 365 different images in a year? The answer is with Helium 10’s AI, you can go ahead and create 365 versions of a certain image, and then who wants to write 365 different captions that relate to that image? Nobody wants to do that, I hope, right. So again, you can use Listing Builder AI and it will go ahead and generate as many captions for your product as you want. So now it's kind of like Amazon post made easy. So that's another cool feature that Helium 10 released this year. That's number seven.

 

Bradley Sutton:

All right, now we're getting into the top six. Uh, okay, so top six for new features of 2024 for Helium 10 is Freedom Ticket, all right. So Freedom Ticket is the number one course for Amazon sellers out there and a lot of you who are watching this. Maybe you're already Amazon sellers. That's fine. It's a great refresher course or you could share it with your teams. A lot of bigger Amazon companies use the Freedom Ticket course to onboard their new employees, to train them on the Amazon. It's not just oh, here's how you do Seller Central and stuff. It's like explaining the concepts behind Amazon. We've got tons and tons of modules here. There's about 20, 30 hours of training that we have in the Freedom Ticket and we're constantly updating it. That's a new update too. This is version 4.0. We've made three versions before, from 2017 up until 2021, 2022. And now this is version 4.0. Just film this year in 2024. And every month we're actually adding, with a live workshop, a new module so that you're always guaranteed to have the best information in 2024. For example, some of the things that we just did a couple of weeks ago, we had a virtual workshop on how to set up TikTok shop. That's all the rage these days TikTok shop, right. In a couple of weeks, we're going to be talking about advanced brand building, all right. So all of that is going down inside the Freedom Ticket program. Huge, it takes a lot of work, guys, to make an entire A to Z Amazon course and a lot of work, a lot of money, and so that's a big update that we have Freedom Ticket 4.0. Platinum members have access to it, Diamond members, obviously, Elite members all of you guys have access to Freedom Ticket 4.0. So make sure to take a look at that. So that is number six, all right.

 

Bradley Sutton:                                                                                       

Now number five is another one. Um, that is going back to the Chrome extension. Now, this is, uh, pretty cool. Let me show you guys, what you can do here now. Uh, the first thing is, if you're in the search results of a page, all right. So if I'm in the search results of a page, I can now see the different placements of the PPC, for example, sponsor brand ads. Maybe there's some sponsor display on the end. Now, all of that is going to show up here in line. Before, only sponsored product was showing up. But look at this. You see these little widgets here that say SB. Well, those are the three sponsored brand ads that showed up on the top header. Uh, what about sponsored video? That's going to show up here. Sponsored product is also going to show, uh, up over here. Uh, is so. Does something have Amazon's choice? We'll show that, um, over here. So be looking at that. You can see all the now, all the uh, start tracking all the different placements on the page for sponsored ads. All, right, now what about? If you're on a product page itself? Let's go like, like, maybe your own product page, like, hey, I want to know what listings on Amazon are advertising on my page, right, cause you know there's sponsored display ads here? Uh, there's, there's going to be, uh, this sponsor brand section. Um, there is your, your favorite brands. That comes up at the or not favorite brands, but, like similar brands on Amazon, shows up on the very bottom. All these things are ads writing on your page and you want to start tracking. Say, hey, who is showing up on my page, right? Well, now you can do that by hitting the Chrome extension, going into X-ray. Look at all these ads. So, all the different variations are going to show up here, all the different ads. You know this. This is the similar brands on Amazon. Here's sponsored product, there's going to be sponsored display, so now you can start tracking. I could just download this with one click, export it to an Excel file and now start tracking daily or maybe weekly. Hey, who is bidding for placements on my page? And maybe you want to target them right back right. Or maybe you know track who are the ones that stay there the longest? And hey, those guys might be having success stealing a couple of my sales. I got to figure out what they're doing. That's working right, all right, so that is something that, again, is available for all plans. I think super, super cool. That's why I had it in the top five of new features.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, so now we are in the top four. Let me ask you guys I hope that part of your SOP for Amazon is to create or to run Cerebro on your product versus your competitor's product, maybe once a week, maybe once a month or whatever. And the point is, when you're running that over and over again, it's like hey, you just want to make sure, uh, are your competitors not getting sales from keywords that you're not getting sales from? Like, maybe they discovered a new keyword that they're ranking highly for that you're not ranking at all Right. So, so obvious. We've always told you, hey, you should be running Cerebro every now and then. Now, that's all fine and good If you've got one product right. You got one product, five competitors, we're all good to go right. But what about those If who've got 10 products? And having to run Cerebro on those 10 products and your 50 competitors? What if you've got 100 products right? That's a very tedious process. That's almost a full-time job for somebody, but you still got to do it because you got to make sure that you're keeping up with the Joneses, right, make sure that you're keeping up with all their keywords. Well, you can now automate that with Helium 10. All right, so this is the number four coolest new feature that we've launched in 2024 is kind of like the automation of Cerebro, and where that is in your dashboard. I believe this is for the Diamond plan, only so far. The first step is you have to make sure that your main competitors you're tracking, all right. So how you can do that, let me just show you. You go in, make sure that you have your child level set up in your or you're on your child level category here in your dashboard and then, for example, you just hit expand right here, which is the arrow right next to there, and then hit competitors. Now make sure you have got your main competitors right here. All right, these are your main competitors. And now, once you do that, you can actually not only first of all, this is not even this was another new feature, but I didn't even add, it, didn't even make my top 14 lists but you're going to be able to get notifications on hey, is my competitor changing their price? Is my competitor changing the number of variations they have? Are they running a coupon or did they take off a coupon? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You're going to get notifications on that. But the cool thing that this one is this is why it's number four is I'm going to automate the Cerebro.

 

Bradley Sutton:

You go to insights and then I am going to create a new insight and it is going to be a keyword insight, keyword suggestions based on my competitors. And then, once I hit that, I go here and these at the very bottom this are the settings that I could do. I could do a specific product or I could do it across the board. For all of my products. I can say, hey, it's basically a mini cerebral. I can say, hey, I want to look at keywords that are at least 500 search, 400, 300, whatever you want, and then where my product rank is All right. So for this one I would change. I would do two different insights, guys. This is how I have it set up. I would do one insight where it says where my products rank is zero minimum, zero maximum. What that means is I'm not ranking at all in the top seven pages, right? And then the number of competitors ranking for the keyword is minimum one and they are ranked, let's say, between one and 40. So what does that mean? What does that gibberish? I guess that means that basically says hey, Helium 10, run Cerebro on my product and my competitors every day, every week, whatever, and look for any keyword that's at least 500 search volume, where I'm not ranked at all, but my competitors are ranking on page one. Boom goes to dynamite. You're getting a notification whenever your competitors are getting sales for a new keyword. That's basically, in a nutshell what that is. Another one that I would do is I would say where my products rank is between, let's say, 50 and 306, and my competitors product rank is between one and 40. What does that mean? That means, hey, I'm ranking for this keyword, but I'm on like page two, three, four, five, six, seven, but my competitor is on page one. Don't you think that's a valuable keyword to know about this, guys? I can, I could, I could have spent this whole show talking about how valuable that is all right. That right there is enough for Diamond package by itself, just because of the time it saves. Now, if you're a Platinum member and you're wondering, is that worth it for you and you've only got one product, I'm no salesman, guys, but let me just tell you no, it's not worth it. Don't upgrade to Diamond just to get this feature because you're lazy, all right. And if you're lazy, go ahead and you're proud to admit you're lazy and you need Helium 10's help to help with a 30-minute job once a week or a 20-minute job. Go ahead and admit it. We'll be glad to take your money as a Diamond member. But as a realist guys, don't do that. But if you've got five products. We're not talking about a 30 minute job anymore. Now we're talking about a three hour job. What if you've got 20 products? Now we're talking about an eight hours a week job that Helium 10 can automate with the click of a button.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So now you can see why. You know, like, how beneficial it is to have Diamond plan based on how many products you have. This is when you're going to need that, all right, so that's pretty cool. That is the number four new feature from Helium 10. Now, uh, here is another, in my opinion, game changer. Now we're in the top three, okay, the top three of new things, and let me just show you. This is like super, super cool, and this is only if you have brand registry, All right. So hopefully you guys have brand registry, right, but basically it's linking brand analytics to the Chrome extension. So now you can see for last week, what were the top three products clicked on that had the most clicks out of any product for this keyword. After somebody searched for this keyword, what were the three products that were clicked on most. This is not some Helium 10 algorithm or estimation. This is literally direct from Amazon, all right, and so you can see here it's going to say ABA most click, number one, ABA most click number two and ABA most click number three. Now the thing that is also beneficial is don't always think that just because it's the number one most click product that it's going to have the most conversions or sales. Like, watch what happens when I put my mouse over the number one clicked coffin shelf, it says CVR 0%. What does that mean? That means that's not conversion rate, that's percentage of the conversion. So actually last week the most click product of coffin shelves got zero order. So now, all of a sudden, that maybe have my creative juices flowing. I'm like, hmm, why are people clicking on this? Maybe they think that's interesting, this product, but then what's wrong with the product page that nobody's buying it. And then I go to the second one and put my mouse over all right, ah, this product was a number two most clicked, but it had 20%. I don't know if you guys can see that there it had 20% of the sales for this keyword. So actually, the number two guys, the one I got to worry about, I'm like man, this guy got 20% of the sales, right. So this, guys, I hope changes the way that you look at search results. It's not just about who's ranked at the top one or two or three. Now, I know in this situation actually hold on. Look at this Is the number one most clicked product, the number one organic position? No, it's not. This is a sponsored placement. Where is this product showing up? This product is one, two, three, four. The number one click product was the fifth sponsored or the fifth organic position. So you can just get so much knowledge and ideas about what's going on in the niche just by looking at these search results that you maybe you didn't have before. Okay, so really, really cool guys. Whenever you're searching on Amazon, take a look for those blue bars that say ABA most click one, ABA most click two, and you'll be able to see that.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So now we are at number two, and number two is something that might have just saved me $6,000. That's why I put this as the number two new feature. Now here in the Project X account I don't have. I don't have it because not every account is going to have it. But what Helium 10 is doing is we are monitoring all of your products and if we notice you have got a product that is at the border of one of the Amazon size tiers and what are Amazon size tiers? That's like standard size, large standard size, standard oversize, bulky oversize, all those things right. If you are within one inch of one side of changing that, all right, if you are within one inch of one side. Basically, what's going to happen is we're going to send you an alert and say, hey, did you know that for blankety, blank product, if you just decrease the length by one inch, you are going to go from large standard size to standard size. I got one of these notifications in one of my accounts, guys and that one inch. Can you guys guess how much per unit I would save? And healing tends to show me $2 and 75 cents. That's the difference to go from large standard size to standard size or whatever it was, 2.75 per unit. Now do that math, guys. Let's say you are selling 10 units a day of this product. All right. That means that every day, like let's say the next time, you do a production run and somehow you're able to lessen the size of the package by one inch, that means every day. If I do this, which I am going to do. I am going to do it on my next product when I reorder this product. I'm absolutely doing this. I could save $27 a day just with that one inch savings. Now, times that by a full year, that is $3,650. I'm saving just by changing my package and I never would have known that unless Helium 10 told me. So that's what you guys should do, guys, is go into your alerts. This is Platinum, this is Diamond. It doesn't matter what account you have. This is number two, because this brings you like ridiculous amounts of money. Go to your alerts page and look at the very top left where it says overview. Everybody do that right now and you guys tell me if you have anything. I hope that nobody has it here. Like it actually kind of hurts to know that I've been wasting money for this long. Very few people are right there on the border of within one inch, but, like I said, my other account absolutely had it. Take a look under overview, right under, where it says Buy Box. If it has size tier optimization alert, you're going to see it right down here in this section, all right, so take a look. Everybody's listening to this podcast. Everybody's watching this live right now watching this on YouTube. Pause this, go to your alerts page and see if you have one, and it's going to be a game changer for you guys, like that's probably the most valuable alert we've come up with in years. All right.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So now we have come to the number one new tool or feature alert that Helium 10 has created, and that is the Listing Builder scoring system. Okay, so this is something that people have been asking us for years and I've kind of wanted Helium 10 to do ever since I was doing SEO tools for the blogs, when I used to write blogs for Helium 10 years ago, where we had a scoring system where it says based on where I use my keywords right and based on how many times I have it and what's the relevancy, uh, to the niche, um, what kind of impact it's going to have on your score right, and that really you know the higher the score. Theoretically usually it's not a hundred percent. Nobody knows the Amazon algorithm a hundred percent but it's going to give you a better chance to rank. It's going to get give you a better chance to get sales. So, for example, I just create a full listing inside of listing builder for a brand new product I haven't even launched yet, but I create it and listed, but I actually use the AI to help me create it. But now I put all of the phrases in Helium 10 Listing Builder and I can see based on the competitor performance score. This is nothing new. This is actually the same score that you have in Cerebro. It's the last column in Cerebro. But once you put your competitors now I can see, hey, which are the most important keywords for my niche that my competitors are getting sales from. And then I can see oh, shoot, I already dropped off. I was number one a few days ago when I created this listing, but now I can see my score is 194,000. And then number one in my niche is 198,000. So I still have to maybe tweak my listing a little bit more to try and up my score. I could see what all my root keywords are. You've always been able to do that in listing builder, where we show you the one word roots. Now we can show you the two word roots that are showing up, the three word roots and more. Okay, take a look down here. I can actually go to my keyword performance score and see what's going into the score. I could open up competitor comparison and take a look.

 

Bradley Sutton:

All right, how do people have these keywords phrases in their listings, like, for example, let's look at the most important keywords, which is sorting it by competitor performance score, and I can see here here is a keyword that most people it's actually the most important coffin letterboard. Without a space between letter and board, and I can actually see wow, this product doesn't even have it in their title. They've only got it as a phrase form in their bullets. This coffin letterboard doesn't have it anywhere in their listing. So maybe this is an opportunity. Most of these competitors don't have it. Only two competitors have coffin letter board in their title. So there's an option. This is obviously not an important keyword to my niche. That's why the score is low. But coffin cooler, if I look here, not one of my competitors has coffin cooler in their listing in exact form. So now I, with just in seconds, I get I get insight into wow, if I put coffin cooler in phrase form, I'm going to be way more relevant to Amazon algorithm compared to my competitors. I can just see that at a glance. What if I want to see like, hey, what about? How am I doing on certain root phrases. How about words in my listing that have coffin? Wow, there's 27 words that were important to my niche that have the word coffin in it. How do I have it distributed? Oh, wow, look at all these keywords I don't have anywhere in my listing at all. Maybe I need to put it into my description, I need to put it in my bullet points. I mean, the list goes on and on. Guys, this Listing Builder scoring system is something a team worked on for months. I worked on the scoring part also for months. I created like over a hundred listings and I tested micro changes to make sure. Hey, is this scoring system based on what actually moves the needle for Amazon ranking? If I just put one keyword in a different place, is that going to, obviously, or is that going to instantaneously bring me to page one and get me a billion dollars for the sales? No, probably not. But these little micro changes, these are the things that give you a leg up on the competition that they're probably not doing, unless they're using Helium 10 to really see how they can optimize their listing for the Amazon algorithm, and I've been testing this. Like I told you, I'm launching four new products the last few weeks. All of this worked. Guys Like I'm just crushing my launches, getting to page one for all of my main keywords. Thanks to this.

 

Bradley Sutton:

All right, guys, thank you so much for joining us. Hope this was helpful. Those of you who are Helium 10 Elite members and those of you who are Serious Sellers Club members you get this every week, so make sure to tune in next week. If you're Elite member and you're not getting the invites for these calls, let customer support know. And for the rest of you who are Platinum, Diamond members, you are going to get access to this monthly call sometime in August. So we'll do another one of these sometime in August with a new training tip and a new Ask Me Anything. Thank you, guys so much and have a great rest of your day. Bye-bye now.

#580 - Reddit and Exit Strategies from an 8-Figure Amazon Seller

Have you ever wondered how to conquer competitive markets without relying on PPC? In our latest episode, Melisa Vong, a Serial E-commerce Entrepreneur & Investor, returns after nearly three years to share her journey of exiting two successful brands in the beauty and supplement niches using innovative strategies. She dives into her unique approach of utilizing Reddit for Amazon sellers and stresses the importance of a diverse product catalog. Melisa also unveils her rapid product launch methodology, which employs extensive A/B split testing to constantly refine and improve her tactics.

But Melisa's entrepreneurial flair doesn't stop there. She takes us on an exciting detour into the world of escape rooms, revealing how her Amazon-selling success funded this new venture. Melisa talks about why she chose to become a franchisee instead of starting from scratch, and the benefits of partnering with an established brand to manage logistics and technology. She opens up about the investment required and how a side hustle turned into an unexpected career opportunity at the franchise's head office.

We also explore cutting-edge marketing strategies for e-commerce, including the use of Advite.ai to monitor Reddit threads for promotional opportunities. Melisa highlights how personalized branding can set you apart in crowded markets and discusses innovative tactics like Google redirects to drive external traffic to Amazon listings. Tune in for a wealth of practical tips and inspiring entrepreneurial insights, and find out how to connect with Melisa online to keep the conversation going.

In episode 580 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Melisa discuss:

• 03:47 - Success in the Competitive Supplement Market on Amazon
• 10:12 - The Impact of Creative Marketing
• 11:37 - Franchise Escape Room Side Business Discussion
• 13:43 - Potential Partnership Opportunity With A Game Company
• 18:11 - Melisa's Passion Project
• 22:26 - Innovative Marketing Strategies for E-Commerce
• 22:30 - Reddit Strategy
• 26:23 - Label Variation for Product Packaging
• 28:21 - Enhancing Customer Engagement With AI
• 30:40 - Heat Maps Strategy
• 32:18 - Targeting Dog Breeds for Marketing
• 33:29 - Networking and Escape Room Fun

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

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

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

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today, we've got Melissa back on the show who's going to talk about how she's exited a couple of brands. She's had success in competitive niches without even using PPC. She's got a cool Reddit strategy for Amazon sellers and now how she's using her Amazon income to start an escape room business. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.

Bradley Sutton:

Hello, everybody! And welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show. That's a completely BS-free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. I just had somebody recently on the show. I forgot who it was, but I was like man. It's been like forever since you've been on the show. It might be a record. Well, whatever it was for him or her, you have broken that record because I'm looking at my notes from Mel here and the last time you were on the show was 2021. So almost three years in between I've been trying to get you back. Melissa, you're just so hard to get a hold of. You're such a busy, busy boss lady. Anyways, how's it been going?

Melisa:

I know. I'm so sorry it's been a while but I'm excited to be back and thank you for your persistence and your patience with me. You know what they say the fortune's in the follow-up. So there you nailed that. But I've been awesome, you know, keeping busy not just Amazon, but kind of just dabbling in different worlds, and it's been fun, yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, we're definitely going to talk about some of that stuff. You know I follow you vicariously a little bit through Instagram. It's kind of interesting to see some of the things that are going on your side. We're definitely going to dive into that. But if anybody wants to get more of Melissa's backstory, we're not going to completely rehash it here. Check out episodes 111 and also episode 302. All right, so episode 111, episode 302, you could learn a lot about her history and actually, one of the, were you in the? I don't think you had exited at the time in 2021, had you exited that? Was it a supplement brand or a beauty brand that you were doing back then?

Melisa:

So I exited a beauty brand and then also the following year exited in a supplement category, so still currently selling in supplements. I think when we last spoke, we did close out our exit.

Bradley Sutton:

What kind of beauty products was it?

Melisa:

So it's like natural and organic skincare. So things like castor oil. I know we've talked about it a couple times in previous so it's like vitamin c serum skincare. You know, moisturizers.

Bradley Sutton:

I'm all into that kind of stuff. As I get older, you know, like I've been, I've been going like I got it here on my desk been going heavily into k-beauty products. I got these products called Be Wants and it's funny because I always talk about collagen peptides on my podcast and stuff right, this is like collagen lifting cream, collagen essence toner the secret to looking like I do when I have a 23 year old daughter. So there it is Korean beauty products. That's the secret.

Bradley Sutton:

Now that, you know, beauty products and supplements are cliché as far as the most difficult things to break into. And then, of course, oh, maybe you, you know, somebody might say, oh yeah, she had a beauty brand. Maybe she started when it wasn't so, it wasn't so competitive, way back when, and that's how she was able to exit. But right after that, you said you went into supplements and were so successful. What's some of your secrets?

Melisa:

Yeah, obviously everyone kind of thinks that supplements is this weird and uncharted territory and it really is. It's a whole different ballgame in terms of how competitive it is, but from not just a black hat, you know perspective, because there are a lot of things that people will do to try to bring you down and it's unfortunate. But sometimes it's just about having a very wide catalog and just having you know a number of different products rather than just relying on one cash cow because then if you only have like one, really you know one real cash cow product that's bringing in all the money, if it goes down, then you're kind of screwed. So we kind of had to move quickly when it came to launches. So it was just speed to market. Just every quarter we were launching you know three, four new products, just consistently. And that gave us a lot of practice on launches and figuring out okay, what's working, what's not working. So we were able to kind of figure out and do a lot of AB split testing and see, okay, now we have like an actual template that we can work off of.

Melisa:

And supplements is one of those easy things where really you don't have to reinvent the wheel, it's really just slapping on. You know a label on a bottle and branding does pay a big. You know it's a big part of it in how you can differentiate yourself. But one thing that we did even now because we're still in the supplement space, so even though we sold that company moved into a little bit more of a niche supplement space. So now we sell gummies in particular and I also sit on the board for another company, which is like pharmaceutical crafted supplements. So a little bit more niche where it's like multi-ingredient formulations, so you can no longer just launch single ingredient products anymore and think you're going to rank for those super high volume keywords now we're relying-

Bradley Sutton:

Let me launch a vitamin c or some vitamin d and crush it.

Melisa:

Yeah, no, like you always use the example of collagen right there you no one should ever go into the collagen market these days. Even you know, five years ago it was very, very hard to break into collagen. So rather than focusing on collagen, we focus on solutions. So things for hair growth, things for, you know, hair, skin nails is also another big keyword, things like that. You want to go after more of those long tail keywords, but ones that target specific problems that people are having. So that's kind of what we've kind of shifted into, and then also doing things that you know are kind of following a trend as well.

Melisa:

So, for example, you know, there was that whole big craze it still is a craze where people are taking semi-glutides which are like Ozempic, you know, Manjarono, things like that for weight loss, and obviously with that comes a lot of side effects. So we were able to create a custom formulation that targets and helps with a lot of those side effects. So that really helped us gain a lot of traction because no one else was doing it. So we're creating different solutions for these problems. That kind of became more popular and more in, you know, more searched. So if you pay attention to different trends, keywords, things like that, sometimes you can get ahead of the trends. So, rather than trying to arrive a wave that's already dying, you're almost positioning yourself for the wave before it happens, and that's what any good surfer knows.

Bradley Sutton:

Something crazy. I don't remember if it was your beauty brand or your supplement brand, but you were talking about. At one point you were doing like 400 K of sales a month and you were not using PPC. Now, was that for the beauty brand or also for the supplements? You weren't doing PPC.

Melisa:

For both. Yeah, we never really focused too much on PPC. We did have a little bit for the beauty brand, but for supplements in particular, we focused on velocity, because if you can sell at a slightly you know lower price point and remain competitive, still making a profit. Our goal was not you know the amount of profit we're making per product, it was how much we could actually sell, how many units could we actually get out the door. Because not only that, we get more exposure to the customers if someone buys a product once, it's easier to sell to someone again rather than trying to sell to a new person. So we make it very easy for people to purchase our products because they're affordable, right. So not only that, it's negotiating with your suppliers.

Melisa:

We now have brought on our supplier as a partner in one of our brands, so we have the best terms. We have net 90. We don't have to pay them and it's basically until most of our stock is already sold, which is it puts us at a huge advantage compared to some of our other competitors, right, where you have to pay for it upfront, before it even gets sent into Amazon. You know, Amazon takes like four weeks sometimes to check in your inventory, depending on the season. So things like that definitely make a difference in helping us remain competitive. But the reason why we weren't needing to spend on PPC was because we were riding the wave of other people spending big marketing dollars to educate our customers for us and we just had to make sure we were positioned next to them.

Bradley Sutton:

Like direct influencers, or just riding the wave of just like search terms that were generic and those people weren't even necessarily pushing you? Or is it a mixture of both?

Melisa:

Right. The search terms and then also the branded search terms as well. But you know the whole craze with apple cider vinegar gummies, right? So there was that big company that they launched apple cider vinegar gummies. They were the first to do it. They were spending so much money trying to get Ellen, you know, on the Ellen Degeneres show, all these different outlets like paying out the Kardashians to promote this product and they were educating people for us on, okay, this is what this product does.

Melisa:

We just had to make sure we were showing up for the right keywords and showing up for their brand keywords as a cheaper alternative. So even if we could just get like a small percentage of their market share, people are going to try us. Just because we were undercutting them a little bit. They were charging, you know, a pretty high price point at the time and now there's so many different players in the space, so obviously it's kind of like a price race to the bottom now. So we don't currently sell it because that was in our previous brand that we sold.

Melisa:

But that was one of the things where, like, we saw the trend, we're like, okay, they're already spending so much money on marketing, we don't have to spend it ourselves. We just have to make sure that we show up in the right places at the right time because that's what marketing is. It's all about. You know, being there when someone needs something and the more times you can be in front of someone when you know, the time kind of persists because not everyone's going to need to buy certain things at that exact moment, so the more times that you can actually position yourself so that when they are ready to buy and you're there, you're more likely to be able to convert.

Melisa:

Like the cool thing about marketing is not just about how you say something but like there's so many different ways that you can say something. So like if you walk down the street and you see two different coffee shops, for example, right, and both of them have a sign out, one maybe says, like you know, we sell hot liquid from brown beans, and then the other is like hey, our coffee is stronger than your Wi-Fi. By the way, we have free Wi-Fi, you know? Like which one are you going to go to? There's so many ways to say we sell coffee. So it's really cool, because it's such a fun game of finding the most creative ways to say something.

0:11:04 - Bradley Sutton:

I like it. Now we're going to get back to your e-commerce strategies, but one thing, as I was mentioning, I live my life vicariously, sometimes through Instagram, and so I've noticed you know, you've done some side hustles and some other endeavors and investments, which I think is important that e-commerce sellers think about the next step too. It could be, for some, a hobby, like, hey, I've always wanted to do this, but now I have the means to do it because of my Amazon business, or they've exited and now they want to. You know, hey, what else can I get into? So I think it's something that a lot of Amazon sellers aren't thinking about. But maybe, talking about your experiences, you might stir some creative juices.

Bradley Sutton:

But one of the things that you decided to do and I'd like to just get into, like how you came to that was doing an escape room. So was like escape room something that you always like doing yourself, and you're like, oh, this is a passion project. Or were you like, oh man, there's in this area, there's a need for this. I think I can make some money off of it. How did you come? You know, land on that as your side hustle, kind of thing.

Melisa:

Yeah, I love escape rooms. I think, as entrepreneurs as well, we naturally are good problem solvers, so these are kind of like fun problems to solve, right. They put you in a situation where you need to complete all the puzzles and then you have to escape. But it's usually immersed in some sort of storyline, which makes it interesting. So essentially you become like the main character in a little video game and it's a lot of fun. So it's good for team building. We like doing it with family.

Melisa:

You know friends, other entrepreneurs I've met on my travels. I'll be like, hey, like I know we just met, but like, call me crazy, let's do an escape room together. I know it's crazy walking you know strangers in a room for an hour. Anything could go wrong. But some of like the strongest partnerships and I guess relationships I've had are, you know people I've done escape rooms with because you kind of see this different side of them and you work together. You're almost like you know how trauma bonds people. Well, this is like you're in a high stress environment where, like, you need to escape by a certain time and you know, naturally we're all competitive people, we're entrepreneurs, business owners, so it was like really cool seeing people work really well together to get towards a common goal. And then you know some of those people I still talk to today and it's really, really cool.

Bradley Sutton:

Now is this something that, like you, 100% did from scratch, or you bought into a franchise or something, or you just started your own brand and built it all yourself.

Melisa:

Yeah. So I am a franchisee, which is, I thought it was the best way to, you know, get into this space, because for me to learn everything from scratch, you know, like, how to program controllers, the logic flow, writing all the storylines. You know the prop building all that stuff. You know CNC, build it like printing 3D printing, all that stuff you know CNC building like printing 3D printing, all that stuff like that would be way too much for me to do as a single person. Sure, I could hire out teams, but it just made more sense to partner with an existing company. So I ended up doing some of their games. I was like you know what? These are really great. There's obviously some room for improvement, as well, which I would be able to take care of on my side for my specific location.

Melisa:

And then, you know, fast forward, they love what I did so much with my location that they actually offered me a job, which is crazy. Now I haven't accepted it yet, so it was like we're still kind of talking back and forth, but it would, you know, consist of some equity in the overall franchise, as well as, you know, a cushy paycheck. So it's it might be a cool thing for me to do or even as a consultant for them but they want to bring me on as part of the head office teams. I think that would be kind of cool and I really thought I'd, you know, have another job again after having a job for what? Eight years, eight-nine years now being self-employed. So yeah, it'd be definitely interesting, for sure.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, for this kind of thing. You know what kind of investment. Obviously there's a franchise, you know fee, and then there's, you know, construction and you know training new employees and getting everything together. So, like how much would I need? I mean, obviously you know I'm in California, it might be different than wherever you did yours, but you know we talking a hundred thousand, 200,000, $300,000 that somebody would need to be able to start an endeavor like this.

Melisa:

Right, so I mean out of pocket, you'd probably need at least $150,000, but it could be upwards of 500,000. Most of it would be covered by like SBA financing in your case in the States because it's an existing franchise. It's a lot easier to get you know that friend or that funding for a brick and mortar business, so that's also the appeal of it as well. So to be able to have you know outside sources or using other people's money we all know how great that is.

Melisa:

But in terms of like construction, that depends on the size of the space. So if you want to do you know, the bare minimum is you need at least 2,500 square feet of space. That's going to provide you with four different games. But if you want more space, obviously you can have a lot more space to work with, but it's going to cost you more in construction. So, depending on the space that you find, if there's already existing infrastructure like it has drywall, it has drop ceilings, the HVAC is already installed, it has bathrooms and you have very minimal to work with your costs are going to be much lower than if you were to work with an empty shell building. So for me, I literally moved into a building that was like completely empty. It was gutted they call it vanilla shell so I had freedom to do whatever I wanted with that space.

Melisa:

And it is very, very, very tall. It has like super tall ceilings. It's like 17 and a half feet tall. So obviously that's a lot more paint that I have to pay for, so it does get more costly, but it could run you, like I said, anywhere from 150 to 500,000. But in terms of like ROI, it just made so much sense because I went to a franchise show, checked out so many different business models the food space. You have all this overhead cost in terms of inventory. You have food costs. You have spoilage right. Food that doesn't get bought, or, like you mess up, you cook it improperly, so there's a lot that could go wrong, whereas this, you build it at once and then that's your main cost. The only thing you have is your rent and then the employees to run it, which really doesn't take that many people to run an escape room.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, that's something I noticed when I did my escape room with my family. It was like two people or one, you know, just the front desk person. There might have been somebody cleaning or something like that. Just thinking from an e-commerce seller's viewpoint, at what stage or what level of person should you say, hey, you know, I mean not necessarily escape room, but just anything you know like this, like what you know. Like hey, if you're making less than a million dollars a year and you're doing everything on your own a hundred percent, don't be trying to think about you know doing this. Or hey, once you get to the level where you've got two-three employees in your business on autopilot, or hey, you should not even think about this unless you hit this kind of you know revenue or profit, or like. What kind of guidelines would you suggest to people out there who might be like, hey, I've always wanted to do something on the side for some more steady income perhaps. How would you advise them?

Melisa:

The thing is there's so many ways to make money these days that don't require a lot of, I guess, startup capital. Especially when it comes to affiliate marketing or high ticket sales things like that. I always recommend, if you need to make some extra cash, get really, really good at sales. That's going to be, you know, the biggest skill build and investment that you can make into yourself. But also, if you just need to make cash, like sell for someone who has something really awesome to offer and you can make a big commission from that, right. But if you want to start like an actual, I guess for me this is very much like a passion project because I love escape rooms and it's kind of like I wouldn't say a side hustle at this point because it does require a lot of time and effort, just in the beginning at least. But once you have it up and running for about six months and your staff is trained, you have a manager, you know you could step away. That's why I was able to go to Hawaii. I was able to, you know, be in Hawaii with you for BDSS and take time off and not have to worry and like I'm not there right now, but I have staff there right now who are running it while I'm gone. I'll probably stop in later because we're doing a really cool collaboration with this local influencer. He has like 14 million subscribers on YouTube but we're getting him to do one of our escape rooms so I'm really excited for that but there's like so much opportunity for collaboration.

Melisa:

Anyways, in terms of how much you need comfortably to start something like an escape room or franchise, I guess in general it really depends on the franchise. You know McDonald's, it's going to require you at least a minimum one million dollars, right. Subway's a minimum 500, 000. This escape room very low entry compared to some of these bigger franchises. So, like I mentioned, 150 to 500, 000. But a lot of that is covered by the bank loan. So, as long as you have in excess capital, be able to float.

Melisa:

You know the time during construction. But there's ways to negotiate free rent during the construction period, which is pretty. It's often offered depending on you know the space that you're looking pretty. It's often offered depending on you know the space that you're looking at. If it's been empty for like a year and they want to put someone in it. They don't mind giving you four or five, six months free rent while you do construction, until you're up and running. So I'd say you know you would want probably half a million in assets before thinking about doing something like that, just because, in case something happens, it's always good to have a rainy day fund.

Bradley Sutton:

You know, I think it's funny because a lot of people obviously complain about Amazon and the problems that sometimes it has and new fees and this, you know, screw up by Amazon, or they lost my inventory, but they don't realize. Hey, businesses have trouble, too. So, like you just mentioned your fire thing, but then also, when you got started, did you like even get robbed, like right away, or something like that?

Melisa:

Yeah, we had a break in and, funny enough, a month ago we had another break in, but twice in one night. So it's just a different set of problems, right. Every business is going to have its own unique problems itself. Sometimes I joke, I'm like, oh, maybe I should just do an e-commerce. But I love what I do with the escape room. Obviously, it's very fulfilling.

Melisa:

I get to hire students. I have this amazing work culture. You know some of my employees they'll come to work even on their day off. Like it's so cool seeing that and to be able to provide that kind of and give back to my local community, providing a place of work where people can grow as individuals who can build these different skills. Just from customer service standpoint and, you know, learning the ins and outs of the business and being a key holder, things like that and being in proximity to me, because I have one girl that works for me and she's also kind of in the e-commerce world as well, so she's almost like my little pupil, little protege. So it's kind of cool just having that know mentor-mentee relationship as well.

Bradley Sutton:

Nice, nice, all right. Now, coming back to e-commerce, you know you won best speaker at Billion Dollar Seller Summit. You did some cool magic tricks. I remember too. But you know, obviously we're not going to rehash the whole entire Billion Dollar Seller Summit. You got to go to Billion Dollar Seller Summit, guys, if you want to get that good data. But I wanted know, like, maybe you can bring out one of the topics you did, maybe either the site map one or the Reddit one, your choice. But what do you think is relevant here in middle of 2024, that on one of those topics that you think that can help our sellers out there?

Melisa:

Yeah, I think that Reddit would be a cool topic of discussion just because it's such an underrated social media platform. Like cool topic of discussion just because it's such an underrated social media platform. Like when you think social media, you don't really Reddit is not at the top of your mind, but it's a really great place for people to do research. So most of your customers are still in their research phase, so you want to show up when they are doing their research. Right, and that's where, if you have all these different threads that you are consistently mentioned in, it's going to be so much easier when it comes time to them actually pulling the trigger to actually want to buy from you.

Melisa:

So there's this really cool tool called Advite that we use. That helps us A-D-V-I-T-E dot AI, I believe, and they use AI to basically scrape Reddit and all the different threads and it will actually ping you whenever there's a relevant thread that you should maybe comment on. It's almost like help a reporter out, but like, for you know people, just random people that need answers for questions, and it's usually very unique questions too, like whenever I have a specific problem unique to myself, I always like type in, like, okay, this is the problem I'm having and I put Reddit at the end because I know someone in the world has had this problem before. Maybe someone has a solution. So it's really cool because these threads they obviously live there as like a forever forum and once you've recommended your own product or whatever it is, or your own solution on it, it stays there.

Melisa:

So other people who might have that problem will end up coming back to that thread and you can hit people and it's very evergreen. It's like it's there. It's almost like you posted it once and it's going to be there forever for people to come back to. So that's definitely something you should keep in mind when trying to warm up your potential customers. And if you use Advite, it's going to ping you all of those different threads. Just be on top of posting, contributing, getting that good karma, those upvotes, things like that, and you can even get other people or higher VAs to comment on your behalf on different ghost accounts. And as long as you can show up multiple times, people are going to be like oh yeah, I remember that brand. I've seen it pop up a couple of times. That's the brand I'm probably going to choose because you know so many people have recommended it.

Bradley Sutton:

So now I see you active sometimes in the Helium 10 Elite Facebook group, you know. So obviously you're doing something on Amazon now, but you exited the other brand. Are you still working with that brand you exited, or you went and started another one? Or what exactly are you doing in the Amazon world these days?

Melisa:

No. So we've exited that brand and then started shortly after another supplement brand. Thankfully, we didn't have like a very strict non-compete, so we were able to get into that space and then also dabbling in pet supplements as well. So another cool thing is that we're kind of looking into is customization of packaging, because nowadays, like you, really do have to do things different. Amazon just announced that they're making it so much easier for Chinese sellers to be able to ship their products straight from China. So that's going to change the game a lot. And if you don't have a solid brand or you're not connecting personally with your customers, then you are going to have a very rough time once that starts kicking in and all of your the Chinese competitors are undercutting you. So things like the kitchen industry are going to get really disrupted, like things that don't really have a lot of branding. You know, like most people can't really brand a garlic press. People are just going to buy the cheapest one that they think is going to for them.

Melisa:

But in terms of like supplements, especially things for pets, like it's such a personal thing, like people will spend as much money as they can for their pet. They have the budget spread because it's like their second children really, especially for millennials, right, who can't afford children. Like pets are our new children. But yeah, in Hawaii, actually, Janelle page, she mentioned something in her presentation about Jones Soda Company, how they would let people vote on different photos to put on the bottles. So we kind of want to implement something similar where we actually have our customers, dogs, photos on the bottles of our products. So that's something that we're kind of logistically exploring right now and I think that everyone should be kind of forward thinking like that, if you can to personalize it, or even if you can't, you can, you know, do a lot more blanket. Like for this print run, we're going to feature one of your dogs, so get everyone to post selfies with their dogs, with your product, and that's a good way to generate more content for your company. So doing things like that aren't as difficult to implement, especially if you don't do the manufacturing yourself.

Melisa:

Difficult to implement, especially if you don't do the manufacturing yourself, but with labels nowadays, like it becomes a lot easier, as long as you can get them all printed on the same roll. We do have, I think, our manufacturer for labels. They allow you to have as many different variations of label as you want. Which I think is cool. So if we had even like a hundred different dogs that we like have on this bottle, so we had even like a hundred different dogs that we like have on this bottle, so it's not like a consistent one, but then at least when we do go to retail people are going to see oh, this is the same dog as my dog. Like I'm going to buy that just because my dog is on the product.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, yeah, I like that. I think I always wonder about you know how, when your listing goes down on Amazon, that there's a dog page, that, like I always wondered. It was like are those Amazon employees dogs? Or something like that. It was a similar vibe, I guess.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. That's pretty cool. Now what? What's one thing new you're doing with this supplement brand that's working, and what's one thing that you're not doing? That you did with the other ones because, like you know, the Amazon world has changed off of.

Melisa:

So I guess something new that we've done is, I mean, it has been pretty consistent across all of our brands is just doing like variations of Supreme URLs I know Super URLs and that kind of graduated but we've been doing a lot of Google redirects, so making sure that we have a lot of external traffic coming into our pages because before we weren't doing any of that, it was just strictly. We were so Amazon focused. We were just like let's rank for keywords on Amazon, like let's just make sure that we're good here. But now you can't just rely on Amazon anymore. You have to be well-rounded in on different platforms. And we've been doing a lot more social media. It's obviously a lot more work but once you have the systems in play, it kind of makes it easier when you have VAS pumping out that content for you. But yeah, we've been doing a lot more content. Like content is king. You know how they say attention is the new currency, like that rings true and truer than ever. So one thing I am trying to do is become more comfortable in front of the camera and almost like pull things that I'm doing from the retail side of things, like from the, from brick and mortar into our e-commerce.

Melisa:

So like, for example, knowing the life cycle of your product is so important because then you know, okay, especially because we're in consumables we know when someone's going to run out of their product. Usually, it's either like a 30-day or a 60-day supply. So if you can, you know, send out an email to your customer a couple of days, or, if not, like a week, before they're about to run out, or even just like as they're about to run out. You're going to raise, you're going to have that top of mind awareness and you're going to be there at the right time. You're going to be there when you know your customer is going to need you and then it's going to, you know, trigger something in their brain. It's like oh yeah, I'm about to run out, I should probably order more.

Melisa:

So we've been sending out like emails or follow-ups for our customers, even with like review generation. What we do at like the escape room, for example, is we do have like a funnel, almost, where people would like leave us almost like feedback and then we convert it into a review but now we've been doing it as like more personal. I'm trying to find AI tools to help us automate it a little bit more. But basically we have like a selfie of us holding like a whiteboard and then we would just put like the person's name on it and be like thank you so much, like so and so, or whatever, and just thank them for their feedback. And then they're like, oh my God, like this is so personal, like of course, I'll leave you a review, you know. So, trying to do like more personalized things like that, and I think AI is going to make it so much easier. And yeah, that's the other thing, right, AI, implementing so much AI and everything in all aspects of our business has been so different because, like a couple of years ago.

Bradley Sutton:

Obviously you're probably doing 10 different things, but if you were to say the most impactful, what is the most impactful AI thing that you've implemented?

Melisa:

Using Midjourney has been a huge game changer for us as well, because now content creation for us is so much easier and so much cheaper, even product images. So before, if you wanted to get a really high quality product render with crazy you know, like crazy fruit in the background, things like that you'd have to pay someone a lot of money to just get one photo, like from a photographer. But now AI can literally generate it and it costs you pennies on the dollar. And then copywriting oh my gosh, copywriting is so much easier now. So that's why we're doing a lot more email marketing too.

Bradley Sutton:

Last couple of questions here. Favorite Helium 10 tool.

Melisa:

Favorite Helium 10 tool. Well, the one that I use on a daily basis is obviously the Keyword Tracker that helps me keep on top of everything, but also the map that shows you, you know-

Bradley Sutton:

Inventory heat map and sales heat map.

Melisa:

And seeing like the clusters of customers and where most of your inventory is and kind of tailoring to that, because we've been doing a lot more location targeting as well. So kind of what I mentioned earlier was knowing what to show someone at the right time. So taking a page out of like Tim Hortons book, for example, I don't know if you know Tim Hortons, but that's like a coffee company in Canada,

Bradley Sutton:

That's like Canada. Yeah, I know, I know about it, yep.

Melisa:

Yeah. So they have an app where they'll show you different deals based on your location, but also who you are as a person or as an individual shoppers like personalized coupons, things like that. So there's this one platform we were using, called Aviva, for the longest time, where we can on our website. If someone visits our website, we can show them different popups based on their location.

Melisa:

So we can show them like a very personalized experience when they arrive to the website. So knowing where our customers are super helpful, and I think the Helium Heat Map tool is cool for that just seeing where our inventory is as well, because then you're going to have, like that, faster shipping. So you know that. You know it's going to show up as prime or even same day shipping sometimes, so being able to focus on a specific area is also super cool.

Bradley Sutton:

When you look at the sales heat map and see, like, where your sales are concentrated, do you do anything based on that, like, do you actually run Google Ads or something that geolocated you know, to areas that you're not doing well, or you double down on the areas you are selling? What's the action that you take after looking at that?

Melisa:

Yeah, we usually double down on the areas that have high concentration of our customers because that's where they typically are and sometimes it surprises you where some of your customers are. Like, we do get a lot of customers in New York. Obviously, it's a big city, but I think a lot of people during COVID they were lonely in their condos but because it's very constricted you get a lot of small dogs. So we'll start like doing like when we do our targeting for Facebook ads and things like that, we'll actually show a lot more smaller dogs in New York versus, like you know, in Texas maybe they have bigger yards, things like that. We're going to show the bigger breeds so that way we can hit more of our demographic.

Bradley Sutton:

I used to have a great Pyrenees, because I have a big lot here and I would actually have. I had goats and pigs and stuff and that's like a livestock guardian. But yeah, somebody in New York City would not have a great Pyrenees, which is the gigantic dog. Okay, cool If I were to give you the keys to the Helium 10 product team, like, hey, you're our CTO for the day and you're like Helium 10 needs to have this feature in an existing tool or it needs to make this new tool that we don't have now. What would it be?

Melisa:

Yeah, you guys don't do that anymore, but if you can create your own Google redirect URL targeting keywords, that would be cool. Okay, because I use that regularly, especially for launches especially for launches.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, how can people find you on the interwebs out there if they want to follow you or maybe connect?

0:33:34 - Melisa:

You can follow me on Instagram @melisa with one S, my mom's felt my name on a member certificate, so it's very fab of her. Or you can email me. Linkedin is also a good one. I'm starting to be a little bit more active on LinkedIn, but yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome, Melisa. Thank you so much for joining us and I'm going to have to go to your escape room. But don't judge me on how slow I am. Sometimes it takes me up until the very last deadline to try and get out and I sometimes have to have help from the guide in those things because I don't think well in those kind of high pressure situations. But I'm going to give it a try. Hope to hang out with you at an upcoming conference soon.

Melisa:

Yeah, absolutely. I can't wait to catch up with you somewhere in the world. We always see each other, you know, in our travels.

Helium 10 Buzz 7/19/24: Amazon Prime Day 2024 Recap | New Helium 10 Keyword Tracker

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

Amazon Prime Day drives U.S. online sales to record $14.2 billion
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/07/18/amazon-prime-day-us-online-sales-climb-to-record-14point2-billion.html

Shoppers spent $14.2 billion during Amazon's Prime Day: Here's what they bought
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/shopping/2024/07/18/amazon-prime-day-sales-record-14-billion/74457292007/

Prime Day 2024 drives record sales for overall US ecommerce
https://www.digitalcommerce360.com/article/amazon-prime-day-sales/

Here’s some numbers that caught our eye when we looked at Pacvue data from Prime Day so far
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/melissaburdick_amazonprimeday2024-primeday2024-activity-7219460602312708096-Tmdu/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

Amazon Prime Day 2024 is officially over, and once again, broke records. Adobe Analytics' initial data shows that spending surpassed forecast, totaling $14.2B over two days.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/pacvue_primeday-pacvue-commerceacceleration-activity-7219815051182919681-KIZw/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

Don't miss the introduction of the upcoming live monthly Freedom Ticket webinar on advanced branding techniques with guest expert Emma Schermer Tamir. Plus, get a sneak peek at new Helium 10 features, including the Adtomic Dayparting feature for Walmart advertising and an updated Keyword Tracker tool with enhanced functionalities. Lastly, discover how to effectively utilize the sales and traffic conversion tool to improve your e-commerce performance, and hear personal insights on tracking crucial metrics and making strategic adjustments throughout the year. Tune in next week for more invaluable tips and insights!

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

• 01:01 - Prime Day Stats
• 04:13 - More Prime Day
• 07:09 - Community's Prime Day
• 09:07 - Freedom Ticket Webinar July
• 10:00 - Helium 10 New Feature Alerts
• 14:56 - Pro Training Tip: Amazon Business Reports Inside Helium 10

#579 - How to Source Amazon Products in India, Turkey, and Vietnam

Meghla Bhardwaj, the globe's leading expert on sourcing from India, joins us for an illuminating discussion on the current and emerging trends in India's e-commerce landscape. Discover how giants like Amazon and Flipkart are transforming the market and how tier-two cities are becoming key players. Meghla also gives a heartfelt account of her personal journey of moving back to India from Singapore, shedding light on the adjustments and opportunities she encountered along the way.

We take a deep dive into the quick commerce revolution in India, where mobile apps deliver groceries to your door in mere minutes. From specialty e-commerce websites focused on categories like apparel and electronics to the impressive success stories of Indian sellers on Amazon.com, this episode covers it all. Learn how individual entrepreneurs and niche manufacturers in sectors like bedsheets and jewelry are thriving, and how Indian factories are evolving to meet the needs of Amazon sellers with improved packaging and labeling capabilities.

Beyond India, Meghla shares insights on sourcing opportunities in Turkey, emphasizing the high-quality textiles and unique designs that set Turkish products apart. She also discusses the growing electronics manufacturing industry in India and the increasing competitiveness of Indian sectors like organic cotton babywear and wooden toys. With a focus on the booming handmade sector and the importance of India sourcing trips, this episode is packed with valuable tips and personal stories for anyone interested in the dynamic world of e-commerce and global sourcing.

In episode 579 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Meghla discuss:

• 00:00 - State Of E-Commerce in India
• 03:34 - Rising Trends in Indian E-Commerce
• 06:14 - Success in Cross-Border E-Commerce
• 11:51 - Finding Suppliers in India - Tips
• 14:32 - Sourcing and Differentiation in E-Commerce
• 20:38 - Changing Sourcing Trends in India
• 20:48 - Growth of Electronics Manufacturing in China
• 25:04 - Utilizing Meghla's India Sourcing Services
• 31:58 - Exploring Turkey's Unique Products and Opportunities

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Transcript

 

Bradley Sutton:

Today we've got the world's foremost expert on sourcing products from India, Meghla, back on the show and she's going to talk about a variety of topics, not just sourcing in India, but also e-commerce in India and even sourcing in other countries like Turkey. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Helium 10's got over 40 tools for e-commerce entrepreneurs. I know how overwhelming it might seem to try and figure out how you're going to learn how to use everything, or maybe even to know which ones you want to get started with, so for a completely free course that's going to guide you through learning everything you need in order to become a Helium 10 expert, visit the Helium 10 Academy that is h10.me forward slash academy. 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 completely BS-free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world, and we're going back on the opposite side of the world again. For the fourth time, Meghla 's here on the show. Meghla, welcome, welcome.

 

Meghla:

Thank you so much, Bradley. So excited to be here for the first time, yeah, but it's been quite a while. I think the last time I was on was a couple of years ago, wasn't it?

 

Bradley Sutton:

Yes, yeah, so just you know, if anybody wants to get Meghla’s full backstory, I got a list here of all the episodes she's been on, so you guys can, you know, pause this one and go back if you guys want to, but she's been on the show since 2019. All right, that was her first time on the show, was episode all the way back in episode 84, then two, 10, then three, 31. And now we're in the 500. So, every couple hundred episodes she joins us here like clockwork, and so it's been a couple of years. I guess the last time was right towards the end of COVID there early 2022. First of all, what are you up to these days? Where do you live? Where are you calling in from today?

 

Meghla:

Well, I'm calling in from India. So, as you know, I was previously based in Singapore and two years ago I moved back to India. To, you know, focus a lot more on the India sourcing business, India sourcing trip. So now I'm permanently based in India and it's been

 

Bradley Sutton:

Whereabouts?

 

Meghla:

in Delhi.

 

Bradley Sutton:

How is it being back home?

 

Meghla:

well, it's amazing, I mean, I really like it. My son had a bit of a problem adjusting.

 

Bradley Sutton:

I was about to say like your son, never lived in India before or when he was little. Maybe or no, his whole life was in other countries.

 

Meghla:

Yeah, his whole life was in other countries China and Singapore and so it was a bit of an adjustment for him as well. He couldn't even speak the language very fluently, but now he's like totally Desi. Desi is like a local person, that's the word that we use. So, yeah, he's, he's adjusted. I'm really glad I moved back because there's so much opportunity, you know, so much happening in terms of the economy, manufacturing, exports, so I think I made the right decision to move back.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, nice, nice. Now let's talk a little bit about, you know, the economy over there and I know, like you know, social commerce is big, and but what about just the traditional? You know that's been one of the larger Amazon marketplaces. How is Amazon doing, you know, versus Flipkart, etc. What's the e-commerce situation in a nutshell that's going on in India the last couple of years?

 

Meghla:

Yeah, the e-commerce situation is very rosy. I mean, e-commerce is booming. There's, you know, increasingly the tier two cities are also getting on the e-commerce bandwagon and there are more sales from, you know, the smaller cities as well. It started with mostly the Metropolitans but now it's sort of you know, the tier two cities are also. A lot of people are shopping online over there.

 

What's really moving very fast is quick commerce. So that's something that is, you know, like for your groceries, for example, or daily use products. There are these apps and they're totally mobile based, right, there's no website that they have no browsers are only apps and you can basically order your groceries and they're delivered in minutes, like 10 minutes, 15 minutes, seven minutes. You know there's a race to like how fast the groceries can be delivered, so it's very convenient. Like since the time I've moved here, I've probably gone to the grocery store, maybe like twice or so. So, everything is ordered online by these websites or these apps basically.

 

Meghla:

So, I think that's really booming, that whole quick commerce sector. Apart from that, there are a lot of these specialty e commerce websites that are coming up that. So, for example, you know, for apparel, there are specific websites only for women's apparel, for electronics, for toys, for all of these kinds of things. So that's another trend that's happening. But Amazon is still sort of the everything store, so if you can't find anything anywhere else, you'll definitely find it on Amazon. And then Flipkart as well is sort of number two, you know, to Amazon, but it is. I mean, both Amazon and Flipkart are sort of neck to neck and they're still dominating the domestic e-commerce sector over here.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Are there more successful Amazon India sellers? You know, I remember when we first started like or around then, like in 2019, you know I was like, hey, I need some help with finding some, like, really successful sellers. And then you did come up with one, but that was about it. In those days there was, like you know, one main guy who was doing really well but uh, are you seeing more people have a lot of success over there, or is it still pretty kind of like just even like everybody's just doing okay and not many people have really made it big?

 

Meghla:

No, so there are some people that have made it really big and you know, they're doing like seven figures, eight figures in terms of cross border e-commerce, in terms of, you know, like selling on amazon.com mostly amazon.com at Amazon Europe as well. So that is definitely happening. A lot of the larger manufacturers, you know, they have established their own brands and they have, you know, started selling on e-commerce directly. So that's a trend that's happening. But, by and large, most manufacturers prefer not to sell directly on e-commerce platforms, even though Amazon themselves have been encouraging manufacturers to sell directly. But typically, the small, mid-sized manufacturers they want to focus on their core strength, which is manufacturing. They want to do large orders. That's where they really make their money and a lot of manufacturers have tried selling cross water but they have not been successful because, you know, of course shipping rates are high and there are a lot of returns and things like that. So not able to manage it.

 

Meghla:

But the people that are being really successful are entrepreneurs and individual sellers, you know, because they are good at marketing. So, they source products from different manufacturers and they sell those products cross-border. So, there are quite a few niches that are seeing a lot of successful sellers. So, for example, bedsheets. I know one manufacturer that's doing really well in terms of bedsheets being exported. They have their own factory and they're doing that. Then there's also things like marble products and jewelry. So, a lot of sellers, resellers and manufacturers doing jewelry from the city of Jaipur. So, there are niches where people have been successful.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Now, you know, speaking of sourcing in India, you know that was something we've been talking about every time you've been on the show. Now, in the early days, you know, like before 2020, it could have been said that, hey, a lot of the manufacturers I believe we even talked about this a lot of the manufacturers, you know some of them didn't have that much experience, as far as sourcing or supplying. I should say Amazon sellers you know the new ones is that go on with that, like the manufacturing time and the quantities, and interfacing sending stuff directly to Amazon. Like you know, a lot of the Chinese factories are ones who have been doing this for 10, 15 years and they know all the ins and outs and the requirements of Amazon and it's like clockwork. But, you know, in the early days, you know, I remember you had said that, hey, you know, some of the factories might be a little bit green when it comes to that, but now I think you know I hear more and more sellers manufacturing, or even ones who were manufacturing in China, you know, moving their manufacturing to India. You know, due to tariffs or whatever the case is. What's the situation now? Do you find more and more factories are almost like on par with the Chinese ones as far as experience now with dealing directly with Amazon sellers?

 

Meghla:

Yes, definitely. There are increasingly more factories that are familiar with the packaging requirements, the labeling and all of those things. In fact, I was visiting a couple of factories just last week in the city of Moradabad, where there's a lot of metal production that happens there metal and wooden production. So, I was visiting this factory that makes urns and they have a ton of Amazon sellers as their clients, and what they have started doing now like they're adapting to Amazon sellers’ requirements. So, for example

 

Bradley Sutton:

urns would be something good for my spooky coffin shelf friend, perhaps. Maybe you should think about adding that.

 

Meghla:

Absolutely yeah, and they're beautiful, gorgeous urns, right. And so, they cater to Amazon sellers. And what they have started doing is because Amazon sellers require inventory very fast, very quickly. So, they have started keeping stock of just blanks, you know, because the basic shape of the urn is the same, it's just it comes in different sizes and it's basically the patterns, the designs and the finish that differentiates one earn from the other. So, they just keep blanks ready in stock and so whenever you know Amazon sellers have sort of an order, they're like okay, quickly send it into production. So, they save a lot of time. And they specifically told me this is for our Amazon sellers because they require, you know, products to be shipped really fast. So that's happening. A lot of small midsize companies, because more Amazon sellers are sourcing from India now, they are definitely getting more familiar. The one thing that I'm seeing is that there aren't too many still like freight forwarders that are familiar. Not everybody is familiar with how to ship to Amazon. So just a couple of days ago I was talking to a freight forwarder and they were like we have no idea how to ship to FBA, but the one that we work with, for example, they understand how to do it very, very well. So, I think for shipping you just have to be a little careful. But increasingly suppliers sort of understand Amazon.

 

Bradley Sutton:

When sellers who are sourcing from China experience increases in shipping costs, kind of like. Now what's going on? Is it pretty much the same across the board for India, or sometimes they're kind of immune to those, or pretty much just hey, anybody who's going that direction over the Pacific Ocean is going to have the same changes.

 

Meghla:

So, it depends. In some situations, India does face increases, just like China. So, for example, during COVID, both India and China, that was sort of a global phenomenon overall. So, even though, I mean, China’s cost increased significantly they were up to, I think, like $25,000 per container at one point, but India's cost did not increase that much. I think they were maximum $12,000 or so. So currently India's costs are increasing, but for different reasons, because it's mostly because of the whole situation in the Suez Canal and you know, because of which the ships have to sort of take a longer route to the US. So that's what's mostly affecting, you know, the shipping costs from India currently, whereas in China, I think it's a different situation, where, you know, there is sort of increased demand for certain products as such. So, yeah, it's not always the same trend, but it can be.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Obviously, you know, we'll talk a little bit about it later. You know, I think you know, one of the best ways to find factories is getting help from you and also, you know, maybe even visiting the factories on one of your sourcing trips or taking, you know, source. You know, maybe somebody can go on their own to visit certain factories. But what are you know, outside of that, what are some other ways that people can find the factories? Like, obviously, Indian factories have always been on Alibaba. Is that still a good way also, at least just to see what's out there? Or are there other websites that have emerged, maybe I don't know about, in the last few years?

 

Meghla:

yeah, so Alibaba and global sources, those are the two key global marketplaces. There are some suppliers from India and other countries, so you've got to use the supplier location filter to find factories from India. Plus, you can also just do a google search. A lot of the websites are now ranked on Google because Google is not blocked in India as it is in China. So, you'll find, you know, suppliers have websites, but of course, they don't keep their websites up to date. Sometimes they don't reply to emails that are sent to. You know email addresses on the website. So, you know, that's something you just have to keep in mind. Avoid the website India Mart, because that's going to come up very often, but that website is very domestic focused, and so there are a lot of companies that you know might not have export licenses, for example. So, yeah, I mean, there's also export promotion councils that you can go to, so visit their websites. You can download the list of their members, all of whom are exporters, but again, you have to like call them or email them to actually find out what their capabilities are.

 

Meghla:

In terms of other websites, I mean, I don't think there are any other supplier directories that have come up recently. There are some websites that have started, you know, selling products from India. For example, there's this website called expobazaar.com, which is basically they have stock in the US, which is basically they have stock in the US and so if you want to drop ship, for example, or if you want to buy very small quantities, like five, 10, 15 pieces, you can buy it from that website and then they can ship it directly. So, they have a lot of stock in the US and what they don't have in the US they can ship from India. So that concept is sort of picking up. Drop shipping is picking up for certain categories as well. Yeah, concept is sort of picking up Drop shipping is picking up for certain categories as well, and we have started offering sourcing services now like a sourcing agency. Previously we were just sort of connecting suppliers and buyers, but now we are managing the entire process because we found that a lot of people just stumble a lot. India is not easy to navigate, suppliers are not easy to manage sometimes, so we've started offering sort of end-to-end sourcing solutions  as well.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, all right. Yeah, speaking of that, you know, like a couple of years ago we were working on what was going to be kind of like a version of Project X, and then most of it we kind of just postponed, like we filmed a whole bunch of stuff, but then, you know, with COVID and different things going on, like we kind of paused it. But the one thing that we actually, or the only thing in that project that we saw all the way to the end, was something that we sourced. I remember, you know, I I told you about it. I was like all right, you know, we obviously know in project X how to source products. Uh, you know, from China, let's try to do a product, that would be, that would be good for India, and then it was this macrame, product, and so, um, conversations and stuff. You know, I believe Shivali went directly to you but, walk us through, kind of like what happened? Like she, she maybe, contacted you and told you kind of like the, the, the kind of product it was, and then, first of all, you had to make the decision is this good to source in India or not? And we'll talk a little bit about that. You know what is good and maybe what isn't good to do in India. But then then, how did you go about finding and vetting factories, like, did you have one exactly that went to mind, or did you, maybe you know, shop around a little bit, get some samples? Walk us through the process a little bit.

 

Meghla:

Yeah. So, Shivali basically sent us a link and, I think, a couple of photos, and she had specific requirements. So, then what we did was we looked through our database, because we have a database of vetted suppliers and we do have quite a few suppliers that do macrame, because macrame is one of India's strong points. Like anything that is handmade, handcrafted, you'll find it is you know better in India, because labor is, of course, cheaper over here. So, what we did was we spoke to I don't remember the exact number of suppliers, but maybe like four or five suppliers we sent out the product to, we got quotes from them and then we basically went with the supplier that had the most competitive quote and also that had a good experience in macrame products, because a lot of the macrame products actually are done in homes by women, they're not done in factories and they're outsourced. So, it's very important for the supplier to be able to manage quality for such kind of products.

 

Meghla:

So, you want to make sure that the supplier has control. So, we spoke to quite a few suppliers and with this supplier we've done some other products in the past and we know that he's got good control over the quality of products and he has somebody to go around and check what's happening in each of the households or the communities wherever these products are being manufactured. And I personally have visited his facility over here in Delhi, so I know that he has the you know facilities to process and he has a process of you know like a checking and cleaning and packing and processing the entire product after it comes in as well. So, then we decided to go with this supplier and we got a coat and the coat was very competitive. So, you know, we negotiated a little bit with this supplier and we went to Shivali with the coat and she was pretty happy with it. So, we didn't have to negotiate that further and the only issue that we had was for the hook. So, Shivali, wanted a specific kind of hook,

 

Bradley Sutton:

That was me. I was the one who told her about that.

 

Meghla:

yeah, you're the one causing all the trouble.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Yep, yep, I remember that part of it.

Yeah, I'm always thinking about how to differentiate, and the reason why was, you know, like already. But you know, by the time we started working on this, it started getting saturated. I was like, well that's fine, I want to show what happens when you do launch in a saturated niche. But I'm always thinking about how to differentiate. And one thing I learned about, you know, from my experience with the coffin shelves and things and I do a lot of other home decor products and I do a lot of other home decor products was that something that differentiates is how much you know how heavy you can, you know put something that's hanging on a wall and there's two, two factors there it's  not just how heavy, but how easy it is to install.

 

Bradley Sutton:

You know, like me personally, I hate something you know that requires like a drill to use or you have that plastic piece and you put a screw through and through and it leaves like a humungous hole you know, I might have to have a drill in my house, which I know a lot of people don't have. So, and then, plus those just screws that go straight in. You know, those always aren't the strongest, you know, unless you're going directly into a stud or something, and then I think they're called, like, monkey hooks, but that was what we started using a while back for coffin shelves, and it just like you can just put it in with your hand and then, because of gravity and physics and everything, the way it works is like the strongest, and so I was like, no, we have to have this special hook because we'd be the only, we'd be the only macrame holder that has that, and so I think, if I'm not mistaken, we ended up actually sending it from China to India right?

 

Meghla:

Yes, exactly. So, we tried sourcing those over here, but we couldn't find them. We could find all of the other types of hooks, but you know there are certain products that are just not made over here. Oh, there we go, that hook right here, yeah.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So, yeah, here's one of the listings. Like I'm using this, you know skipping to the end, you know to the end, you know we ended up getting this product from India and then I'm using it for a couple of my launching case studies, where I'm just analyzing the different effects and it'll be it'll be like a permanent product on Amazon too, but already we've been using this whole product, and then there's those, those hooks and nice little bag here that they came up with.

 

Meghla:

so, yeah, this is a real product, guys, that we are talking about here yeah, so the hooks came from China and that was a smooth process as well. We didn't have any issues. I mean our supplier over here. It was sent directly to his factory, so he was the importer. There were no duties or anything. It was very smooth process. So, yeah, that worked really well, and then the bag as well. So, the bag was also sourced from the same supplier, because he also does, cotton bags and things like that. So that was also one reason why we chose him, because he could do the bags too.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Now, did Shivali organize the shipping, or did, did? did you also find the shipper for it?

 

Meghla:

yeah, so we organized the shipping too and, because we used our shipper that you know, we're we've been using for a long time and they, they know how to ship out of India and also we used our shipper. Yeah, there was no issues with the shipping as far as I.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Now that product in particular, you know, like I just happen to know, probably from previous conversations we've had, and then sometimes I'll watch your live streams on LinkedIn and stuff so I knew that you know that was a good one to source in India. But what are some other do's and dont’s Like? In the past I believe you had said, hey, you know electronics, you know like consumer electronics maybe stick to China, you know they're very good at that, but you know textiles and things like that in India. What about nowadays? What would you say are the top three or top five to do in the top three or so that maybe another country is better?

 

Meghla:

So, electronics, I would say, still China is better, especially if you want to do OEM of things like Bluetooth headsets and if you want small quantities. But that's changing. I think maybe when I'm on the podcast, like in episode nine or so, I'll probably have a different story in the next couple of years, but that's changing too. There are a lot of electronics manufacturers that are being set up over here and, in fact, a lot of the bigger brands like Apple, Xiaomi. They have set up their factories and the supply chain is growing. So, there are a lot of like Bluetooth headsets and those kinds of companies that are setting up that are supplying to the domestic market and gradually these companies are going to export as well. So, the situation is definitely changing very fast. For example, there's this brand called Boat. They make a lot of Bluetooth headsets and you know, headphones, a lot of the small accessories, and now they have started exporting under their own brand and, of course, they will start doing OEM as well and they have, like I don't know, like 10 000 or so employees and across you know, various factories. It's a really big setup that they have and the government has been promoting electronics, but anyway. So, unless you are a big large, many you know brand electronics is still in China.

 

Meghla:

And then I would also say in terms of dont's, a lot of the very low value products. You know something like for example, recently somebody came to us with the you know these curtains, polyester curtains that are blackout curtains and they're selling for I don't know like ten dollars or something or $15 online and we were not getting them in India at a good price. So, something like that that is very mass produced and suppliers and manufacturers in China can sort of get you know scale by producing in high volumes. Those sorts of products are still better in China. A lot of the plastic type of products as well, I would say China is still better, although again, there is more manufacturing of plastic items happening here, bigger factories being set up, but still, by and large, China is better for plastic items as well. In terms of the items that are good, of course, textiles, any kind of fabric, especially cotton and organic cotton. So organic cotton is really a really high quality over here. We're seeing a lot of growth in baby wear, very high quality, organic cotton, kids and baby wear. That's a very fast-growing category. Also, toys so there's a lot of focus on the toy industry in India. Because what happened a couple of years ago, Bradley, that there was a bit of a tension between India and China at the border I'm sure you must have heard of it. It was probably around COVID times and so you know. China did a couple of things to you know, sort of in defense, and then India sort of retaliated and one of the things that India did at that time was impose very high import duties on toys being imported from China.

 

Bradley Sutton:

A toy Cold War.

 

Meghla:

Yes, a toy Cold War exactly, and so because there were these cheap toys that were flooding the market over here and of course, that was, you know, affecting the toy industry. But what that has done is that it's given a boost to the toy manufacturing. You know industry in India. So now, for example, a lot of wooden toys are coming up, and not only in, you know, like the traditional mango acacia wood, but like steam beach wood and pine wood, and very high quality and prices are very competitive. In many cases we've actually been able to beat China prices as well for you know wooden toys. Then there are a lot of factories being set up for you know regular like dolls and action figures and you know guns and sort of those types of things. Well, so that's a fast-growing category and a lot of local brands are also coming up and they are in fact exporting. So, there are a couple of local brands that do STEM toys, like India is really good with engineering and mathematics and all of those things. So, STEM toys is another huge category. There are some brands that in fact, we are helping launch them in the US and other markets, so that's another good category. Then I would also say, of course, all the entire handmade sector. So, there's wooden products, metal, ceramic, glass, all of those home decor items. That is still a very big category, especially for Amazon sellers and most sellers we know are finding a lot of success in those categories. Then there's leather, so a lot of beautiful, different types of leather. There are equestrian products, you know garments, shoes, accessories, bags, all of those things. And then I would also say, to add one more, eco-friendly products. So, if you're looking for anything that's made out of maybe cotton or jute or a lot of R&D is being done in alternative materials. So, for example, cactus material or banana fibers. Those are being converted to fabrics and they are used in bags and other kind of accessories, but of course they're not mass materials yet because there are niche and the prices are much higher than a normal material, but still that’s an emerging category.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, interesting. Now, guys if you guys want to you know reach out to Megla to you know, perhaps you know, utilize her sourcing services, just like we did with success, as you saw. You know, one of the easy ways to remember is go to hubhelium10.com and then just type in India and then it'll come up right there, India sourcing network, and you could, you could connect her with her right from this page, right inside of Helium 10. Now I noticed also here on your Helium 10 hub page, it talks about India sourcing trips. So, are you still, have you still been doing, or did you start doing those again after COVID? Like what's the? What's the? You know? Like the cadence, is it once a year, twice a year, once every other year?

 

Meghla:

Yes, we're still doing the trips there twice a year, and we started after restarted the trips after COVID, and the one that we did after COVID we had 70 people on the trip, so that was amazing, and since then we've continued to do. The next trip is coming up in October. So, you know for people who don't know much about the trip, it's basically an eight-day tour to India where we teach you all about sourcing from India. We take you to a trade show that has almost 4,000 export-focused manufacturers, and then we also do some cultural activities and, of course, there's a lot of networking. You get to meet all the different service providers. You can also do factory visits. We can customize the trip so that you are able to find the products that you're specifically looking for, and it's just a very fun experience. And, Bradley, what are you.

 

Bradley Sutton:

What are some of the fun things that you that you do, because I still have been saying for a long time I'm going to go. What do I have in store for me the first time I go on one of these? For the fun side. Obviously, I know the work side, what's going to happen, but what about on the fun side and the food side that's very important to me, as you know.

 

Meghla:

Yes, the food side is amazing because we choose the menus and the restaurants very carefully because India has so much variety in terms of you know, the different food, um sort of flavors and items, like each state of India has a different type of cuisine, so we try to mix and make sure that you get a flavor of all different types of Indian cuisines, we do a Bollywood night. I would say that's the most fun night on the trip. You can basically wear an Indian dress. For men it's the Kurta, which is like a long shirt. Women wear Saris. We buy Saris for everybody. We have a live dance troupe. They're singing and dancing on Bhangra tunes. Bhangra is a very fast-paced band.

 

Bradley Sutton:

I love Bhangra. I have some Zumba routines for some Bhangra songs. Yes, indeed.

 

Meghla:

Yes, amazing. So, we have that, and then we're just, yeah, dancing and singing and drinking and eating, so that's a very, very fun night. And then we also go to Taj Mahal. So, I think that's also very special, because that's one of the seven wonders of the world, and especially if you come with your partner, like your better half, or your spouse, then you can get a picture in front of the Taj Mahal, which is basically a monument that's dedicated to love and romance. So that's also very special.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, all right, interesting So, the next one, is in October, you said.

 

Meghla:

Yes, October 14^th to the 21^st.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, excellent, excellent. I'll see there's a chance you know I might be going, or I am going, to Maldives, as they do every year, you know, to film one of my every 100 episodes of this podcast, and then this year, I'm actually going to be going from Turkey. I'm speaking at Turkey and I think I want to ask you a couple questions about that it's Segue, but I found one flight that potentially has like a like a set, like a seven-hour layover or something, on my way to the Maldives from Turkey, in India, I think, Mumbai, and so I had never even set foot on soil in India. So, I'm like, all right, maybe that'll be my, my first dip and then next step would be going on the India sourcing trip. So, speaking of Turkey, I believe you said you just spoke at an event there and actually you've expanded some of your sourcing to there. And, like I know, you know Carrie, who works with us here at Helium 10, she was telling me you know she went like on a sourcing trip to Turkey on her own, like last year, for her own Amazon and Walmart brands, and she actually moved some of her manufacturing from I'm not sure if it was in China or Korea, but to Turkey, and has had good success. What, what can you? How did you get you know? Linked with sourcing in Turkey?

 

Meghla:

Yeah, so I was invited to this conference. I mean, we have been thinking about sourcing in Turkey. In fact, I got the domain name turkeysourcingtrip.com last year because we were, you know, sort of exploring that and that's the first thing you do, right, when you have an idea. So, you know, because Turkey is definitely coming up as an important production hub and in fact, somebody told me when I was there that Turkey is the China of Europe. So, if you're based in Europe, if you're sourcing in Europe, then Turkey is like the perfect destination for you. So, I was speaking there at the World Deaf Conference and, you know, I thought that, you know, while I'm going there, I would meet manufacturers and we already had had been having discussions with some sourcing agencies and some sourcing partners over there. So, yeah, I mean, in terms of the products, Turkey makes a very wide variety of products.

 

Meghla:

So, first of all, textiles, like any type of towels, bedsheets, like Turkish cotton is very, very famous and I was, you know, some of the towels that I saw over there at the factories. They were so unique. I've never seen any towels like that. They had beautiful embroidery, some of them had like beads, embellishments, like very, very unique designs. Even the bedsheets were like very different from what you'd find in China or India. Then another thing is that they do a lot of cosmetics. So, there's in terms of cosmetics, it's also like skincare, or maybe shampoos, or you know, soaps, for example, things like that. So, there's a lot of R&D happening at that front as well. There are a lot of brands that I met that were doing vegan and organic. You know, like creams and body. You know body products as well. So that was another category.

 

Meghla:

And then, of course, apparel. So, Turkey does a lot of different types of apparel, whether it's women's apparel, kids or even men's apparel. There are men's suits. They do a lot of linen fabric as well. That's very popular linen and cotton. Then they do things like carpets. In fact, Turkish carpets are very popular. Then there's some handicraft items as well metal and ceramic and those types of things. But I mean exports of those are very minimal. There are also some very good packaging companies that we found so like very high-quality boxes. If you are sourcing some kind of product from there, then you can get the packaging and all done in Turkey as well. Also, the domestic market in Turkey for e-commerce is pretty strong. It's growing pretty fast and in fact Amazon is one of the marketplaces there, but it's not very popular. The popular marketplace is called Trendyol. So that's a local domestic marketplace and you know there is an opportunity for you to also sell in the domestic market on Trendyol if you are sourcing in Turkey.

 

Meghla:

I also saw quite a few like wooden products and very unique designs. I mean that's one thing that sort of differentiated you know Turkey from China or India. The designs are very unique. And then some toys, some very basic kind of toys, like puzzles, some, you know, board games and things like that. So, I mean at first, not a huge variety of products like China or maybe Vietnam, but very niche, very unique, very differentiated. And I mean, if you're in Europe you should definitely, definitely explore Turkey, because it's just in your backyard and you can save on logistics costs and of course, the deliveries can be faster and you can order in smaller quantities as well.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, cool, cool. So, another you know alternative place that not a lot of people yet are sourcing from. That I think sellers should, should look into and I'll be looking forward to when you actually launch that website, because it means you're going to have some events and I love Turkish food too and I so many places I want to visit in in in Turkey, you know Bible history, a lot of Bible history there in a lot of cities and a lot of like Maldives-ish kind of places even that people don't realize on some parts of Turkey. So, I know you'll arrange something good. Just to prove, I wasn't making it up, but I found one of my old videos here of some Bhangra dancing here. Look at the skinny me going and doing some fitness right there. That's me, that's me from like 10 years ago. and even you can see my kids in that in that video leading a fitness class doing some Bhangra dancing there. But, anyways how you know, I already gave you know I told people how they can find you from the Helium 10 hub, but if they want to find you, you elsewhere out there on the interwebs. What are some good ways that they can? They can reach you.

 

Meghla:

Well, I'm on all of the social media platforms, so just search for me on either LinkedIn or Facebook and or Instagram and message me. You can also go to our website, Indiasourcingtrip.com or IndiaSourcing.net, and then Vietnamsourcingtrip.com as well.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Vietnam sourcing too. Yeah, I know that's another hot place. I see a lot of people moving to. Maybe there was just a couple of kind of products, a specialty, but I know a lot of people who are not only moving sourcing there, but even some of their operations moving to Vietnam. I spent about a week last year there and the last couple of years really nice, really nice place to visit. So maybe next time we can talk a little bit more about that. Do you have like a 30 second tip or 60 second tip you can share with the audience? Could be about sourcing, could be about travel, could be about moving to a country your son has never been to. Whatever kind of tip you want to give, go ahead and hit us with it.

 

Meghla:

Yeah, I would say be adventurous in your business. You have to explore different markets. China is not the only place where you can source products. Sometimes we get too comfortable sourcing in China and like, oh, we're sort of scared to go to these other markets. But there's a whole world out there, like whole different world, and people who are more adventurous and who are willing to take that risk will definitely reap rewards, because there are tons of unique products to be discovered in these alternative production hubs.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Alright. Well, Meghla thank you so much for coming on here for the fourth time, we’ll look forward next year for the fifth time and hopefully maybe by then we can say that I've been on one of your sourcing trips, like I've been planning for years to do So hopefully that happens within the next year or so. But thanks for joining us and we'll see you back here for sure.

 

Meghla:

Thank you so much, Bradley Bye.

#578 - The TikTok Shop Opportunity

Unlock the secrets of skyrocketing your e-commerce sales with TikTok Shop! Join us as we sit down with Michelle Barnum-Smith, a leading expert on TikTok Shop, who will reveal why this platform is revolutionizing e-commerce and how you can tap into its immense potential. From unparalleled user engagement to an all-inclusive buying experience that supports brand building and data transparency, Michelle dissects the unique advantages TikTok Shop offers over traditional platforms like Amazon. Get ready to learn how full visibility of sales data and direct customer interactions can transform your business.

In this episode, we explore the seamless customer journey on TikTok Shop from sparking awareness to completing a purchase all within the app. Discover how the shift from traditional influencer marketing to a collaborative affiliate model is empowering creators to drive sales through direct rewards from TikTok. We also get into TikTok's growing prominence as a search engine for younger generations and the new shopping features that make discoverability effortless. This is a golden opportunity for sellers to leverage TikTok Shop's innovative ecosystem to maximize engagement and boost sales.

Prepare to be inspired by real-life success stories and practical tips for setting up your very own TikTok Shop. We cover everything from business registration and linking social accounts to optimizing your listings and content for viral success. Michelle shares invaluable insights on inventory forecasting and the ripple effect of TikTok Shop's success on other platforms like Amazon. Plus, learn the importance of adhering to community guidelines to avoid account suspensions and ensure your business thrives on TikTok Shop. Don't miss out on this comprehensive guide to navigating and conquering TikTok Shop's dynamic marketplace!

In episode 578 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Michelle discuss:

• 00:00 - Exploring TikTok Shop for Sellers
• 02:56 - TikTok's Influence on Consumer Purchases
• 06:23 - Enhanced Shopping Experience on TikTok
• 09:32 - Maximizing Sales Through TikTok Shop
• 11:04 - Reviving Live Selling With TikTok Shop
• 16:22 - TikTok Shop Viral Success Stories
• 16:40 - Success Tips for TikTok Shop Setup
• 19:55 - Maximizing Marketing Opportunities on TikTok
• 25:11 - TikTok Shop Guidelines and Best Practices
• 26:40 - Navigating TikTok Shop Suspension Guidelines
• 33:48 - Effective Creator Outreach Strategy Guide

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Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

TikTok shop is one of the hottest marketplaces in 2024 to sell on. Today we're going to do a deep dive into everything you need to know to get started selling on that platform. 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 special Freedom Ticket monthly workshop, where we actually film live a training, a deep dive training, into a certain aspect of e-commerce and we put it later into Freedom Ticket so that you guys can benefit from it. But you guys here on the podcast are going to get the benefit of getting this training too. Now today's guest is going to be Michelle Barnum-Smith, who is definitely an expert in the field of TikTok shop and she's going to do a deep dive into like hey, what do you need to do to get started and what are some best practices? You know we've had some people on this podcast who sell on TikTok shop. You guys have heard them doing some crazy, crazy numbers, some of them even doing more than their Amazon business. So if you guys want to know what's involved with getting set up on this platform, this episode is going to be for you.

 

Kevin King:

Now, Michelle I've known for quite some time, and so today she's going to be showing you why you need to be considering TikTok and talking about some of the opportunities that are there and what she's doing to help herself and her clients actually crush it. So please welcome Michelle.

 

Michelle:

Today we've got lots of ground to cover and we're going to be talking about the TikTok shop opportunity. Just like Kevin said and Shivali said, unless you've been living under a rock, it is all the buzz, and rightly so. Some people don't realize this, but TikTok shop was born from a hashtag and the whole idea of TikTok made me buy it. This hashtag has been around for several years and it basically was like hey, I discovered this on TikTok and I went and bought it. And here I'm showing it off again because TikTok made me buy this. And essentially, TikTok shop allows businesses to showcase through engaging short videos, live streams and creator collaborations, and users can discover and purchase products directly within the app, creating a smooth and convenient shopping experience. And we're going to talk about, like, just how powerful this really is for you as brand sellers.

 

Michelle:

So the opportunity of a TikTok shop has never been hotter. I mean, essentially, we're talking about a billion monthly users. They're on the app 17 times a day, with 83% of people saying that TikTok has influenced purchase decisions on what they're doing and what they're buying. So consumers are on TikTok specifically to be entertained. They hang out for hours. One and a half billion monthly user base spending an average of 95 minutes a day on the platform. I want you to think about that. That's like at least three episodes of your favorite show on Netflix. It's, you know, it's like people are just like scrolling, scrolling, scrolling and, um, all, all times of the day, like, like we saw in that previous stat of 17 times. You know, essentially starting the app 17 times a day, kind of crazy. Um, they offer a frictionless buying experience from creator to product page, to checkout to back to scrolling in seconds, which is one of the huge reasons why TikTok and TikTok Shop is such a powerful opportunity for sellers, right this second, so you can literally go from an organic discovery experience to a checkout experience in just seconds, and you can amplify that opportunity with some certain promotional activities that we'll talk about. So, bottom line, TikTok shop really helps build brands, not just sell products, so they have more high quality traffic, more sales and repurchases, have full visibility of data, end to end loop closing data.

 

Michelle:

So one of the things that I love so much about TikTok shop is having previously just used TikTok to drive traffic to Amazon. So I have tried it a whole bunch and it is so frustrating because Amazon's a black hole. They don't share data back with you. So if you've ever tried to run ads, drive influencer content, even do social media like, just focus on the social media side of TikTok or Instagram or Facebook or whatever it might be. There's no data back from Amazon, even with using attribution, because Amazon attribution is 55% inaccurate to actually tell you what converted, what drove sales. It's kind of like a guess most of the time and if sales rise you're kind of like, okay, well, what contributed to that In TikTok shop? You know exactly what contributed to that sale. You know exactly what social posts drove how many sales. Which affiliate is your number one affiliate? If you're running ads, you know exactly how those ads are performing.

 

Michelle:

It allows you to speak directly with your viewers as well, your customers, your prospects, every step along the way. It's you the face of the brand, your brand, interacting directly with customers. So most of the time, most sellers, most consumers, don't realize that there's sellers behind their brands on Amazon. They just think that they're buying a product on Amazon. That's not the case with TikTok. TikTok gives sellers opportunity to interact directly with the customer on every step of the customer journey. So there's no question who is? You know who this relationship is with and there's serious marketing opportunities, and I'm such a marketing geek. I love all of the marketing opportunities that TikTok has. Just this, just today, they released promo codes. Super excited about that. So let's talk about the full shopping journey within TikTok. Essentially, TikTok allows you to discover through shoppable content and through short videos and lives to select, basically go and learn more from about the product on the product detail page and then actually check out and buy, place orders and check out without ever leaving TikTok. So why this is so significant? As a marketer and as a seller myself, if I have, let's say, the counter to that is on Instagram and if you've ever been influenced on Instagram, you know, let me know, raise your hand, you're watching, you're watching that content and then the person is saying, oh, go to the link in my bio and you go to the link in your bio in, and it's some linktree that may or may not have been updated and that link might take them to Amazon. Take you to Amazon, where their Amazon storefront is like laid out, all for you to have to sort through just to find the product that you were interested in that caught your attention for just a second, that interrupted your entertainment experience that you were there on Instagram to experience, and now you can't even find what it was that caught your attention. You just give up in frustration.

 

Michelle:

What I love about TikTok shop is that you can go from being entertained seeing a shoppable video, seeing something that a creator is promoting, to all the way to checkout in just seconds and back into your entertainment. That experience has very little interruption. So TikTok has several ways to checkout. Essentially, you have the opportunity to go from a shoppable video to a TikTok shop where you can see that brand's full lineup of offerings, and go to the product detail page where you can then check out. But this is not typically the shopping experience. Usually, it's you see a video. It takes you directly to the product detail page and then you just check out. These are the things and ways that you can build your brand on TikTok shop directly. So let's talk about the customer journey on TikTok versus Amazon. So previously TikTok, when it was just a social media channel, sat a little bit higher up in the customer journey. So if you guys aren't familiar, the customer journey is this idea of a funnel or this process where somebody goes from awareness to consideration, to purchase, to customer service, to going deeper in their rebuy or loyalty to that specific brand. So previously, TikTok the app, the social media side of TikTok was just in the awareness phase, the awareness and consideration phase. Just like Instagram, it was like a place of discovery, a place of entertainment, a place to maybe get educated, but it wasn't a place to purchase. That was where you would go to Amazon, and Amazon fit squarely in the consideration phase, like I need more information, I'm aware of my need already and then I'm going to purchase. So essentially, Amazon is solution solving. It's a search engine for buying. Customers are already aware of a need. They search, research and buy on Amazon.

 

Michelle:

Buyers don't hang out on Amazon for fun or entertainment, despite Amazon's best efforts with Amazon Lives, Amazon Post, Amazon Inspire, and that's really why TikTok shop has taken over in that regard. Not necessarily like I'm not saying that Amazon's going away anytime soon. Obviously that's a huge opportunity, but TikTok shop now owns the entire customer journey, from awareness through consideration, purchase, the customer service experience, all the way to rebuy opportunities, average order value increases, um rebuy rates, all sorts of things that TikTok shop makes available to sellers to be able to do and accomplish all within the TikTok shop platform. Are you guys seeing the potential and the opportunity here? And, as a marketer, this is why I'm so passionate about it, because if you own the awareness, if you are the one creating the awareness of the need and you immediately go into a checkout scenario, you win. The checkout is not okay we're making you aware and then you're being taken to a page where you and 100 other competitors are then brought up with different options and people are overwhelmed with options. It's not like that. It's literally going from awareness to checkout to back to entertainment in a matter of seconds. So TikTok really comes down to need awareness. Their focus is on entertainment and education and their goal is to keep users on the platform with their addictive algorithms. Users are made aware of products and the purchases is done within TikTok shop with quick checkouts and then buyers are back to scrolling within seconds. So that's really kind of the crux of TikTok shop there and live selling. I don't know if you guys have seen have been on the platform yet, but live selling it really had its heyday. I feel like you know as far as US consumer behavior goes in, like the late eighties, early nineties, Saturday morning infomercials Anybody remember those?

 

Michelle:

I know I was like, always sucked in. I was always sucked into those Um. And then there's QVC and home shopping network where, you know, basically little ladies hang out to buy kitchen kitchenware, but TikTok shop, specifically, is bringing live, selling back, and it's crazy's crazy, the amount of organic viewers you get checking out your products live, seeing what you have to offer live, you know, and it's a form of entertainment, so they're already on there to be entertained and then they get to watch you pitch whatever it is that you have. That's kind of crazy. And also creators we have this. Creators have been kind of like put up on this pedestal as influencers, right, and this kind of title and with that has come a little bit of a combative nature. When it comes to working with brands, right, how many of you have worked with an influencer where you've reached out to them, you've tried to recruit them and they're charging like a couple hundred dollars of post to like two thousand dollars a post, five thousand dollars a post for the honor to get to work with them. Anybody experience that. And then you're like, um, what did I get from that? I got a post. Did it do anything, right? So the awesome, the awesome thing with working with creators now is that they essentially become affiliates because TikTok is rewarding them for sales that they make through the platform. So creators are now motivated to work with brands and to push products and seek out opportunities. It's no longer just like oh well, I'm a creator and so my creative needs are above your needs as a brand. Now they're willing to be more collaborative with brands in and focusing on content that converts and that drives sales, because, at the end of the day, they want to make money right and we all want to make money, and so it makes it more of a win-win relationship. So that's one of my favorite things about this kind of shift is it goes from the honor of working with a creator and an influencer to now like okay, we're affiliates and we're in this together.

 

Michelle:

So there's kind of four native ways to discover and buy on TikTok. There's the browse area, which is shoppable videos. That's what you would generally see if you're just scrolling through TikTok. You're going to have some content that is just entertainment content. You're going to have content that's educational and informative and that sync to and our shoppable videos, basically, and shop pages. That's where you know brands show up with their brand presence, um, live shopping, like we discussed, and the shop tab. So that's the new kind of search functionality within TikTok. That's all about finding and discovery and searching for solutions. It's kind of crazy, but TikTok has now become a search engine for a certain demographic. Anybody who's less than 25 years old, instead of going to Google with their questions first, they're going to TikTok with their questions first, and it used to be that videos were what was served first in the search results and now it's product. Are you picking up? What I'm putting down? Like this is this is a significant opportunity. This is such a crazy shift and I will say that every almost like 80 to 90% of the in TikTok shop contacts that I have were recently recruited from Amazon. Like Amazon employees are moving over to TikTok shop just like clawing their way over here. So it's very soon there's gonna be some aspects that are native to Amazon that we'll start seeing show up in TikTok shop, especially this kind of search portion, the shop tab, and then the buying experience, like we've talked about, is very seamless, from the product page to the checkout page. You literally can like sync your Apple Pay with TikTok shop, click the side of your phone gosh and be back to doom scrolling in seconds, if I haven't, you know, beat that into you enough.

 

Michelle:

But let's talk about this idea and this question is TikTok shop just a distraction for you as sellers? I hear this kind of objection a lot, and from really big sellers, and so I'm a little surprised. I'm always a little surprised because, like Kevin said, I think that if you have an opportunity to make money, are you going to say no to that opportunity, especially when it's relatively zero to low cost to get started? You already have inventory. You just bring it over to TikTok. So let's talk about just some case studies really quick. Every time I talk to an Amazon seller who is looking to expand off Amazon or diversify their revenue off Amazon, they're usually happy with like, hey, if I can get 5% of my Amazon sales off Amazon, like my Shopify site or Walmart or Etsy or something, I would be happy if just 5%. So here we have a few sellers and I'm just going to cruise through here. This brand got serious about TikTok shop beginning of April and year to date, they are 8% of their Amazon sales on TikTok shop. This brand launched in September of 2023 with TikTok shop. They're one of my brands and we immediately went viral. Immediately, like the bestseller that we had became a bestseller on TikTok shop and then, as we got to know our audience a lot better and affiliates a lot better, launching products on TikTok shop with them, we saw halo effect on Amazon. Every single time that we launched a new product on TikTok shop it would go viral. It would go viral on Amazon as well. Rank would skyrocket and along with sales. So their year to date revenue is 11%.

 

Michelle:

Our biggest struggle with this brand is every time we go viral. Like it's really hard to forecast inventory for going viral. So we keep running into like our bestsellers going out of stock because they just take off. They just take off, so that I guess that is like one of the sides of TikTok shop that is a warning is that your shop could go viral and with your inventory. This seller I did a big training in Cancun back in February and in and around TikTok shop this seller was doing two sales a day before my training and after that, um, 180 sales in the week following. So I was a little proud of that. And then subsequently, uh, we've been working together and now their brands, their, uh, they have 15% of their total brand revenue, uh, of their Amazon revenue they're making on TikTok shop. I'm not going to talk a lot about these brands, because these brands are just like killing it. They're 16% of Amazon sales for this brand. This brand, gosh, they're just like. I just met with their category manager last week, their new category manager. They're number one in their category on TikTok shop, all of TikTok shop, and their year to date is 17% of their Amazon sales. So I guess you have to ask yourself, like, is it worth getting started? Like, yes, I think the answer is obvious, right, like I'm not doing a sales pitch here guys. I don't like this is you already have the inventory, right? You're already selling on Amazon. It's not too much more difficult to extend, uh, what you're doing and get started with that same inventory on TikTok shop as well. So, but there's some nuances to it and I want to talk about those nuances. So there are some keys that are necessary to a successful setup on TikTok shop. So this is where we're getting a little bit down into some specifics. On setup, I am not walking you through step-by-step a setup step-by-step at this point. This is not necessarily how to. This is more of kind of like lessons learned from setting up over 30 brands personally on TikTok shop and some of the nuances, some of the troubleshooting, some of the kind of like things to avoid, basically from a high level perspective.

 

Michelle:

So this is kind of my setup checklist to be successful, this is what. These are all the things that you have to do one time during a setup. You need to get through your business registration. You need to complete that. You need to link a TikTok social account that is US based based with your TikTok shop seller account that is US based. You need to create or connect a TikTok ads manager to that account ads manager account to your TikTok shop account. You need to get your shipping set up and your listing set up and your content optimized for TikTok shop. You need to import available reviews, meaning, if you have like and this is all legal TikTok shop owns well, TikTok is owned by a company called ByteDance and ByteDance owns lots of different tech companies. One included is the main tool that's used for importing reviews. So if you have a Shopify site or another website with reviews on it, then you can bring those reviews over. If you don't, you can import reviews from Amazon to your website and then import those reviews from Amazon. It's a little bit of a process. It's a process, but you only have to do that once. To help you build up, to start the process of building your review presence, you need to select and implement promotions for your listings, such as pre-shipping with qualifications, product discounts, flash sales. Now the new promo codes that are released, and for select accounts, if you qualify, there's now a customer marketing whole section where you can go back and offer, you know, present offers in app. So showing up in the customer's TikTok inbox, basically like they already bought from you once, or, if they're a potential client, you can get directly inside of TikTok users' inboxes with your offers. My marketing heart, it just loves this from an opportunity perspective and we can actually measure how many sales converted from those messages. I love email marketing, I love SMS marketing, I love all of that, but sometimes we just can't close all the loops. And when we're talking native platforms and the marketing opportunities that are native to that platform, we're able to see all those loops close. When it's when we're talking native platforms and the marketing opportunities that are native to that platform, we're able to see all those loops closed and the associated data with that. So we know what further to invest in, what's working, what's not working, and then, of course, they're the final step in success. A successful setup is making sure that you have an affiliate plan set up for affiliates creators to find your products and to start promoting them and to make sure free samples are available. We'll show that here in a second.

 

Michelle:

Okay, the second thing that you need to make sure that you do is to review the prohibited products list. So just because you can sell something on Amazon and Shopify doesn't mean you can sell it on TikTok shop. And this is probably like the number one thing that I see sellers screw up on, um, that they just like rush to get all of their products on TikTok shop and all of a sudden uh, they didn't ever check prohibited products and all of a sudden their account gets deactivated. Um, because they're promoting products or promoting it in such a way that's against, that's either prohibited products or against community guidelines in how you talk about it. So the most suspensions and account deactivations could be avoided by checking this first. So essentially, just, I mean you could even just search for it TikTok shop prohibited products policy and go on there or also look at their restricted categories on there as well to see is my product a prohibited product? I've been surprised how many products are not allowed on TikTok shop that are allowed on Amazon and, of course, on Shopify. You can sell whatever the heck you want to. So it's definitely one of those things that just because you can sell it somewhere doesn't mean you can sell it on TikTok shop.

 

Michelle:

And this is just from a having been through it so many times. Business registration is not what it used to be. In September, I was able to get just like a ton of brands on TikTok shop with very little effort. Now there's a few more steps. Now there's a few things that kind of slow people down. It's amazing to me how many sellers just like give up. They just roll over and they're just like oh no, I can't get it to work. And I'm like guys, you are Amazon sellers, it is selling on Amazon is not an easy thing. Why are we giving up so easily? Have some like, have some resilience here. Also, TikTok shop like says oh, your account setup failed. I wish they would use different language, because sometimes it's not true failure and sometimes it's like they're just um, you get to a certain place in the process and then the system is moving you forward, but it needs more information, like you need to submit additional documents or you need to submit them in a certain way, and so it says failure, but really it just means like you need to go add more, add more documentation or whatever it is that they're actually asking for. So my advice to you is just keep pushing forward, keep pushing through that. It is worth it in the end. And just as a little like hack is any requested documentation, even if it says that they accept PDFs and PNGs, only submit them as JPEGs. Like their system, their bots read JPEGs and more often than not they don't read PDFs. So just, even if it says it'll accept a PDF, just submit it as a JPEG. Okay, cause it will help you. And especially if you're talking to support, support. It's so crazy because support can't see submitted PDFs or PNGs, but it can see submitted JPEGs. Does that make sense? So that's a little, a little note for you to take and make sure that you're doing Okay.

 

Michelle:

This is relatively new and this has to be. This is around community guidelines. Community guidelines were updated mid last month and essentially it's just saying hey, this is the way that we behave on our platform. So there's, they become a lot more strict about what creators as well as sellers can and can't say on their product. You know, on the platform and that includes your listings and what you say about your products, especially, um, you know if something has an effect on weight or weight loss, physical performance or physiological effects or changes. So in this example, I had a seller reach out to me and they're like I don't know what I did wrong, I don't know why this account is frozen, or this product is frozen, I don't know what's wrong with it. And all I had to do was read through the title to see what the issue was. They're essentially saying this eliminates snoring and enhances facial structure and post-workout recovery claim, claim, claim, claim, claim, like you're physiological effects, physical performance, eliminate snoring. You can't say that on Amazon had. Like how can you say that? Like you can't say that on TikTok shop either? Um, and if you have any product in and around weight loss, I'm not saying it's not possible to sell on TikTok shop, it absolutely is. But how you talk about it is really critical. You cannot say weight loss, you cannot say metabolism, fat burning oh my gosh. I had another brand that was just like beside themselves. They were so like offended that TikTok shop suspended their product, their you know key seller, and I was looking through their account. It was like weight loss, metabolism, dah, dah, dah. And I'm like you can't say those things. You. You failed TikTok, you know like. You showed up like, oh well, we can sell it on Shopify. Yes, you can sell it on Shopify, because on Shopify you can say whatever the heck you want about your product. There's nobody policing what you can and can't say on your Shopify site. But this is their market and so they get to say what you can and can't say. And it's not just what you say in the text, in your title, in your bullet points, it's also what you say in the images, on the products themselves as well. So if you have packaging that you're showing and it's making claims. You got to scrub that. You got to like, get rid of it if you have infographics. So that's why I say you're not just pulling over everything that you've created for your Amazon listing or your Shopify listing. You got to be really careful in what you're bringing over and being aware of these community guidelines and what you can and can't say. These are the main ones. It's worth looking at, it's worth reading through and I do talk about that extensively in my course where I detail and outline it, but these are the top ones.

 

Michelle:

Okay, focus on your bestsellers. I often see that the second somebody gets started on TikTok shop, they bring their whole category, their whole catalog of offerings over at once and I really advise you to just test the opportunity and to learn the platform and which of your products is the best opportunity first. So too many products are a distraction to affiliates and your ops team. So, like in this example, this brand brought over gosh all of their products and anytime that they were doing creator outreach they basically all of their creator and targeted plans was just like hey, here's everything that we sell and that's a lot, that's too much. So instead we shifted their focus to okay, what's your best seller on Amazon, what's the one with the best reviews, the strongest call to action, the most obvious for how it helps a consumer? And they're like, okay, this one, their free sample request took off, the affiliate performance took off, their sales took off. So just don't flood. It's a distraction for your team. It's a distraction when you start to reach out to affiliates, so just focus on your best sellers first. Now hear me out. This is probably the biggest warning that I have for you. Second to prohibited products okay, so this is probably the biggest area that I want you to be really careful with. And don't use the shortcuts, okay. So oftentimes I see that sellers are you're on Amazon, you're on Shopify and there are apps available within TikTok shop where you can just sync your Shopify account or sync your Amazon account and sync over your listings. So all of your listing content immediately gets imported into TikTok shop, and I have seen so many issues with this. Like I've said so many times, there's things that you're saying on your listings that you can't say in a TikTok shop, and what happens, guys, is that your listings are not reviewed by human beings, right, they're reviewed by bots, and what I have seen happen so many times is that people have seen those listings and they bring over their entire catalog, like we just talked about, and they're making claims or bringing over prohibited products or something like that that they didn't know.

 

Michelle:

I didn't know and immediately they get account violations and account violations and they get a million account violations and then their account gets suspended because there's a limit to your account violations that you can receive, and then you lose your account, your account gets deactivated and it's over before you begin. So that's an extreme example, but I have seen that too many times to count what also happens, especially in the case of Shopify. For example, if you're syncing your listings, let's say you want to make a change to your TikTok shop listing, like your price or your title or something like that, because your listings are synced with these apps. You can't do that because Shopify and the Shopify listing owns the TikTok listing, so you have to go and make the change on Shopify If you want to make that change, show up on TikTok. You see how that's a problem, right? So and it's not an easy fix, it's not, it's not just like a quick separation, um, because I have a seller, like I've talked about. He's number one in his category and he set this up, his like. When he first got set up, an account manager told him to do this and they didn't know. These account managers have no clue, they really don't, um, and so he is dealing with this issue. If he were to try to separate at this point, he would have to create a new ASIN, for lack of a better term. A new listing for one of his best sellers and one of the big areas of social proof on TikTok shop is to see how many people have purchased the product. He would lose all of that history on that listing that now has like a hundred thousand purchases. So, yeah, it's, it's like a serious deal. So please don't do that. If you're wanting any kind of true shortcut, use the bulk uploading options. This is new the import product upload accelerator. Go this route if you're looking for shortcuts. But, like I said, I really do want you to like set up your listings manually first, at least the first couple, so you understand what TikTok is really looking for, so you can then go and add more products in the future.

 

Michelle:

Offer free shipping. Oh, my goodness, we're running out of time, guys, we'll send you these slides. Basically, bottom line, you set up the free shipping opportunities within the promotions tab and not when you're setting up your shipping templates and your shipping solutions. So it's a promotion and you can apply all sorts of qualifications to qualify for free shipping and fulfilled by TikTok is now a thing, and they're gonna start pushing this really, really hard. So start with your Amazon inventory, start selling via Amazon MCF syncing with TikTok shop. Once you've proven the opportunity for your brand, immediately apply for FBT as soon as you set up your TikTok shop account so that when you prove like, hey, is this an opportunity for me, cause MCF is expensive, you want to get that inventory into FBT and start taking advantage of the opportunities and like super cheap pricing that they have for fulfillment over there. Okay, I'm going to cruise through this, but, just like I showed you, there's kind of like the setup checklist and then there's the ongoing success checklist. This is what you need to do ongoing, daily, weekly, monthly to be able to make sales on TikTok shop. Really, what it comes down to is working with creators, making sure you have your free samples turned on. I have my three S's to targeted outreach, which is search, sort and then save. And just a warning if you are using bots or planning to use bots, that gosh. They've now put regulations in place where new sellers are limited and restricted on how many people they can reach out to because of these messaging bots that are out there. So I really recommend focusing on target collaborations versus and reaching out to creators that way, versus messaging and spamming methods. So this is my search and sort and save method. Essentially, you're under the find creator tab and you're searching via relevant search terms for your brand or your category. You're sorting I like to sort by GMB, and if they're fast growing that's even better, because then they're hungry, they're starting to see success, but they're not so successful yet that they you can't get the time of day with them. And then you hit the little save button over here and then when you go to target collaboration up here, you can import your saved folks I recommend at least 50 per day that you're reaching out to via this message.

 

Kevin King:

Thanks everybody for showing up today. We'll be back again next month to do this again on a whole new topic. Remember there's a replay of this, if you missed part of it, in Freedom Ticket inside the Helium 10. So if you're a member of Helium 10 at any level, there's a little button somewhere up around the top in the education section or resources section that says Freedom Ticket. You'll be able to find this recording in a few weeks in there, added as a permanent addition to the Freedom Ticket. So thanks everybody for coming today and thanks again, Michelle.

 

Michelle:

Thank you, bye, guys.

Helium 10 Buzz 7/12/24: TikTok Shop Special Program | Temu Becoming Amazon-ish? | Etsy Shift

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

TikTok Launches New Program To Attract More UK Merchants
https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/tiktok-launches-program-attract-more-uk-merchants/720798/

Temu Breaks With Direct-From-China Strategy In Threat to Amazon
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/temu-breaks-with-direct-from-china-strategy-in-threat-to-amazon

Amazon Price Matching Update: As we all know Amazon has been price-matching Target and Walmart for a few years now causing many issues for brands.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/brandonfishman_amazon-target-activity-7215821589546721280-2Rv_/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

Flip, The TikTok Shop Competitor, Expands Social Commerce By Acquiring Curated
https://www.forbes.com/sites/pamdanziger/2024/07/09/flip-the-tiktok-shop-competitor-expands-social-commerce-by-acquiring-curated/

Amazon defeats US consumer lawsuit over ‘buy box’ product listings
https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/amazon-defeats-us-consumer-lawsuit-over-buy-box-product-listings-2024-07-08/

Etsy loses its ‘handmade’ and ‘vintage’ labels as it takes on Temu and Amazon
https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/9/24190843/etsy-handmade-vintage-policy-change

Don't miss an exciting preview of the Amazon Accelerate event and how you can win free tickets from Helium 10. Lastly, Bradley talks about the latest update on Helium 10's Chrome extension, designed to give you the competitive edge you need in title optimization.

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

• 00:47 - $1M TikTok Shop Program
• 01:43 - Temu Becoming Amazon-ish?
• 03:27 - Target / Amazon Buy Box Blunder
• 05:12 - New TikTok Shop Clone
• 07:12 - Amazon Wins Lawsuit
• 08:24 - Big Etsy Change
• 10:38 - Walmart Connect Updates
• 11:15 - Amazon Accelerate Updates
• 12:00 - Follow Helium 10 On TikTok
• 12:54 - New Feature Alerts & Training

► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast

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

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

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

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

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Temu's going after Amazon now. Big buy box issues. If you sell on Target and Amazon, is change coming to Etsy? These stories and more on today'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 am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that is our Helium 10 Weekly Buzz, where we give you a rundown of all the new stories that are going on the Amazon, Walmart, TikTok shop and e-commerce world. We give you training tips of the week and we let you know what new features from Helium 10 can give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Let's see what's buzzing. All right, we got a lot of articles, so let's go ahead and hop right into it Now. The first article that we're going to be talking about today is actually from social media today, and it's entitled TikTok launches new program to attract more UK merchants. All right, so this is basically called the 1 Million Pound Club Initiative and it says it aims to help UK retailers reach 1 million pounds, or about 1.28 million in US dollars, in revenue via the app. Now what is involved in this program? Well, it says they're going to offer special incentives, support offerings, 0% commission, free sales, free storage, free fulfillment by TikTok seller support priority service. Some of you all might be saying, hey, sign me up. So it's kind of crazy these benefits that they're going to do Now. If you're interested in getting more information on this program, if you're in the UK, there is actually a link in this article that you should be able to get to down below.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Let's go talk about another platform and it's funny. A couple of weeks ago, when Carrie was doing the weekly buzz, there was a news article she had where it was entitled Is Amazon Becoming Temu-ish? You guys remember that story. It talked about how Amazon's opening up a kind of channel where it's kind of like Temu, where they have Chinese sellers, sell directly to US buyers and then they ship directly low-priced items and it gets to customers in like 10 days. This is funny. Now this is entitled Is Teemu Becoming Amazon-ish? So there's this article from theinformation.com and it's entitled Teemu Breaks with Direct from China Strategy in a Threat to Amazon. And basically what this article is talking about is how Timo is trying to kind of go away from just the direct from China to US model and they are actively trying to recruit US sellers, or at least sellers who have warehouses in the US, to ship and then potentially, you know, who knows, maybe Temu would have some um fulfillment now for the very first time ever. I started like downloading the Temu app and looking at it and I'm like, oh, my goodness, uh, they've got coffin shelves and other stuff on there for super, super cheap prices. I'm not sure how it would work in the U? S. Now I I'm going to be actually trying to reach out to Temu and maybe do like a little mini case study to see how in the world they expect to have US sellers selling on the platform. But who knows, maybe it's an opportunity, like if they have a whole bunch of incentives where you can make a profit, you know, due to maybe no selling fees and very, you know, no advertising, et cetera. So let's see, come back in maybe three or four weeks I'll let you know how my project X team is going.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Next article is not really an article but just a LinkedIn post. In case you missed it, Jason, who comes here on the podcast sometimes, and he along with the CEO of VitaCup, Brandon, were reporting on something that's going on where you know how Amazon price matches, you know, with Walmart, Target and other websites. And now target had this circle, target circle prices like target, that target circles, kind of like their club where they get special discounts. But then what's happening is, on this target circle Now they're showing the target circle price over here with the regular price, with a line crossed out of it. Now you know you might be wondering, well, how is that an issue? You know that's pretty cool. But no, it's not cool because what's happening is Google, I guess, picked up on that new Target Circle price which only a few people have. It's not like, oh, everybody's a Target Circle member, like everybody's an Amazon Prime member, almost right. So what's happening now is that's a special price, a special discount that I believe Target even gives. It's not really the buyer or the seller who's giving all of that discount. Target, I think, is subsidizing it a little bit. And now what's going on is that Amazon's price matching that and so of course, your Amazon listings are priced higher than that Target circle price. And so what happens when Amazon detects that? No, buy box. So a lot of sellers out there it's not just VitaCup, I've heard this across the board that a lot of people are being affected by this where Amazon is removing the buy box because it thinks that they're price gouging, right. So if you're selling on Target and your Amazon sales have gone down, take a look at your Amazon listings. That could be the reason. I don't know offhand of a solution, but I'm sure Amazon will come up with something before Prime Day.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Next article is from Forbes.com and it's entitled Flip, the TikTok shop competitor, expands social commerce by acquiring curated. Now, I have never heard of Flip. I have never heard of curated, but it's interesting. First of all, why should we care about this? This is like you know. We're talking about social commerce where there's social media blended with buying right in one. That's, that's the whole kind of like premise. You know, there was TikTok and then now there's TikTok shop. Now this is big overseas. You think it's already getting big in the US. Well, the social commerce market in China is going to grow from 350 billion back in 2021 to 900 billion next year. Now US social commerce was 37 billion in one and it's projected to get to 80 billion. But that's like China's like 10x the ceiling. If it really starts to take off in the US, you know, who knows how big it can actually get. So it's interesting to follow, hey, who are the new players in the game? We saw what happened with TikTok shop in the US and now it says hey, it has over 500,000 merchants in the affiliate program selling products via influencer produced shoppable videos, as we know, right, bloomberg reported that TikTok shop expects to reach 17.5 billion in sales by the end of this year.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So now there's another social commerce player. It's called Flip and they're similar to TikTok shop, but it's significant differences, it says, could make it more appealing to customers. In the US it only has 5 million users, so this is not something that TikTok Shop is. Shaking their boots, oh, my goodness, this Flip company is coming after us, but they curate every brand. It features On TikTok Shop not anybody, but it's a little bit loose. But on TikTok or on Flip, it said pretty, a little bit loose, uh, but on Tik TOK or on flip it said 70% of the sellers that apply uh are actually rejected. Uh, giving customers more confidence. So, anyways, um, just another, maybe marketplace that you can maybe get in a little bit early on. Um, if you think it's going to get bigger, uh, take a look at flip.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Next article is from Reuters and it's entitled Amazon defeats US Consumer Lawsuit Over Buy Box Product Listings. Now, at first when I saw this I was like, oh, did that crazy FTC lawsuit finally get thrown out? No, this was just like something that a couple of random Amazon customers wanted to do some class action lawsuit, saying that, oh, amazon is not rotating the buy box in a fair way. You know, it's actually showing some prices that were a few cents more expensive than other ones and we're all affected by it. So obviously the judge kind of like threw this one out because they're like all right, well, show us the receipts. Like literally like where's the receipts? And they're like well, we don't have any receipts. I guess is how it worked out. But you know, remember that other FTC lawsuit I haven't heard about that in a few months. You know, what I've said always from the beginning is like I don't understand why the FTC is going after certain things that Amazon is doing when there's so many other things that Amazon sellers are concerned about, like you know, the new fees and buy box matching and things like that. But here I guess anybody can file a lawsuit against Amazon. But hey, just because you do it, that doesn't mean you're going to win. Amazon won and these Amazon Prime customers zero on this one.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Next article is kind of near and dear to my heart because a couple of weeks ago, literally two weeks ago, I got a whole bunch of my Etsy listings suspended. And I don't know about you guys who sell on Etsy, but when you sell on Etsy or you get suspended, like on a listing, there's like no way to contact customer support, no way to argue. It. It's like final, it's like this and that and my products, you know, like coffin shelf products on one account and on another account some other similar, uh, not mass produced products that I sell on Etsy. It absolutely falls within what Etsy is says. It's like the handmade policy. It's got to be handmade or made by a member of your shop, uh, or designed by you, like. I qualify for all three of those. You know pretty much. So it's ridiculous that Etsy was removing my listings but now this week the verge is reporting it. Etsy loses its handmade and vintage labels as it takes on Temu and Amazon. So what does that mean? Well, it says hey.

 

Bradley Sutton:

A policy update announced today creates four new classifications for items for sale on Etsy Made by, designed by handpicked by and sourced by. All right, all products need to fall into just one of those four to be eligible. Vintage items will fall under handpicked by. But again, this is kind of crazy. I had to redo a whole bunch of my listings just because Etsy erroneously removed it. Couldn't they have waited two weeks? Their policy was about to change anyways. There's no way that. I mean, who knows, I was already not breaking the policy. So who knows? I mean Etsy probably still could remove my listings. But anyways, this is kind of big news, I think. You know Etsy wants to kind of like, you know, make sure they're competing a little bit more with Amazon, and you know websites like Teemu, I guess, and so this move you know, let's see might help them. You know, let's see might help them. Does this open up the possibility for you to sell on Etsy? Maybe before you didn't think you qualified. But do you qualify under one of those four things? I, technically, if you design your product, even if you're not the one making it, you absolutely should qualify if you take that at face value. So a little bit interesting for those of you. Maybe you can start considering Etsy as a marketplace.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Speaking of different marketplaces, Walmart had a Walmart Connect few announcements that they sent out in email. They said they launched a couple of new things a video module, item and module reordering for brand shop. So brand shop is kind of like I guess you know the your brand store on Amazon, but now you can add a video module to that. You can also rearrange your modules on your brand narrative or brand shop page and do a couple other things. So I don't even have my brand store set up on Walmart. I better get on that and then I can go ahead and take advantage of some of these other features going to Amazon seller central they have.

 

Bradley Sutton:

This is the last story of the day Amazon accelerate We've been talking about for a few weeks. They announced a couple of the special speakers Amazon Store CEO, Doug Harrington, and also Martha Stewart is going to be joining Amazon Accelerate 2024. So there's your chance to meet a couple of celebrities of the Amazon and pop culture world. I guess there that you can do if you go to Amazon Accelerate. Now Amazon Accelerate, if you go to h10.me forward slash accelerate, you'll be able to get a hundred dollars off your um tickets, which I believe is only four 99 right now. But do you guys want to go to Amazon accelerate for free?

 

Bradley Sutton:

We have a contest going on right now. If you go to our Tik TOK channel right, helium 10 software. Right, helium 10 software follow us and then like one of our posts. All right, don't just software. Follow us and then like one of our posts. All right, don't just always just pick the first one I don't know why my face is all over this TikTok channel right now but pick one of the recent ones and like it and then comment something with the word accelerate. Don't say, hey, I'm entering the contest for Amazon Accelerate. Say something like Bradley, looks like your hair growth has been accelerated lately with your haircut, I don't know. Just trying to come up with a unique way of using the word accelerate. And then our social media person, Lailama, she's going to pick one of you to win a completely free ticket to go to Amazon Accelerate worth $600. So make sure to do that when you see this sometime this weekend, if you can. All right, that's it for the news this week.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Now let's get into a couple new cool Helium 10 feature alerts. All right, we've got some new things that are coming to our Chrome extension. Actually, they have come to our Chrome extension and here's the background of it. As you know, when you take some of my listing optimization classes, or if you've learned from other people out there, like Tomer Rabinovich, he's always said, hey, try and find out what is the niche theme? Right, like what kind of images the competitors are using and like what kind of style they have. But one part of a niche theme is the length of title. All right, it's not like hey, every single category, every single product, you should have 200 characters in your title. Every single product, you should have 50 characters. No, some could be 50. Some could be 200. Different things work in different niches, and so now what sellers were looking for is hey, how can I just really quick, at a glance, get an idea of what the top 10, 20 products on a keyword page? What is the length of their titles? Well, watch this.

 

Bradley Sutton:

If you go into the Chrome extension now, you are going to be able to hit Xray, for example, right here. This is a search that I have here for collagen peptides. And if I hit the search button now, as you can see, there is this new widget at the very top. It says average title character count 169. And then, if I put my mouse over the eye here and it says here at the bottom there's actually six that have 180 to 189 and there's seven, seven listings, 35%. So 65% of the listings on page one of collagen peptides have between 180 and 200 in the top 20. All right. So now compare that to another one. We go and search accordion on Amazon, all right. And then we run a Xray on this page remember the collagen peptides was 169. What's the average on accordion? It is only 116. All right, and if we put our mouse over right here we can see that, hey, 25% of the listings on page one actually have less than 100 characters, all right. And another maybe 50 percent or 40 percent have between 110 and 139. So completely different than what you were seeing for collagen peptides, right. So again, just because a list you know, even helium 10 has listing scores. It's just based on like kind of best practices overall. But this is something that is interesting, where now you can see what's going on at the individual product level. You can see the title character count of every single product on page one and on average. So pretty cool update for the Helium 10 Chrome extension.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Now one more update here in the Chrome extension. Hopefully you guys have had a chance to maybe use the new tool that we launched a couple of months ago that uses AI to kind of aggregate and analyze and organize your product research maybe projects, right. Well now, let's say you're researching accordions and you ran Xray here and you want to add a few products, like, oh, I want to add this to my product research project right in product launchpad. Well, now what you can do in Xray is go ahead and select any of the ASINs you want and then you are going to hit the button right here save product idea. And once you hit the save product idea, it's going to open up a widget and now, if you actually have some projects open in product launchpad, you're going to be able to choose it from here and then just add it right there. Or if you're just like oh, wow, I'm just browsing Amazon, this is like actually a really interesting idea. These mini accordions for kids never thought of that. I want to start researching that, uh, without having to go and do all this research right now. Let me save this for later. So then you would hit new product idea and now it's going to go ahead and save in your new project. So super cool updates this week from the Chrome extension and hats off to Simon at Helium 10 for helping push those through.

 

Bradley Sutton:

All right, now it's time for the Helium 10 training tip of the week, and this also has to do with the Chrome extension. Maybe a new way that you can see who is targeting your ASIN and start tracking it. All right, it's not available like in black box or in the Helium 10 tool. It's available right here in the Chrome extension. Just go to your product pages or go to your competitors product pages If you want to track. Hey, who is showing up on my competitors product page? Where am I showing up on my competitors product page? Or vice versa, who is showing up and who is bidding for the most on the Product Targeting Ads on my page? Who's putting sponsored brand ads on my page? Who is putting a Sponsor Display Ads on my page? Let me show you how you can do that. You go into Amazon and like, let's say, this is my product. Actually, this is one of the products I work on in motion hemp cream. You can see that there's plenty of ads all over the page. Here's products related to this item. There was a couple of sponsor display or some sponsored brand ads down here towards the bottom. There's even more products down here that are showing up.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So what you can do, all you have to do now is hit Xray and then instantly all of the products on this page are going to show up. All right, so you can see here that there's actually um, let's see, it looks like 25 products are all appearing on the front of this page, from sponsor brand to sponsor products. Uh, maybe some sponsor display here, and I could just go ahead and just save this as an excel file and just start storing it to see. All right, hey, maybe you can have one of your VA’s do it. You know throughout the day, like, uh, or every once a day, it's like, all right, let. Hey, maybe you can have one of your VA’s do it. You know throughout the day, like, or every once a day, it's like, all right, let me just track who is showing up the most on my page. So again, that's just two clicks it takes to do that.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Make sure to start looking at your competitors pages. Look at your pages. I like looking at competitors pages too, because it might give me ideas on different products that I can target in my Sponsored Product ASIN Targeting Campaign. So, uh, pretty cool feature. I think you guys maybe are sleeping on. You might not have known that it existed. Make sure to go to hop on any product page, run Xray and tell me who is advertising on your page. All right, guys. Thank you so much for joining us this week. We'll see you next week to see what's buzzing.

#577 - Walmart Seller Success Strategies with SellCord

Join us for an insightful episode where we chat with David Milstein, co-founder of SellCord, about the strategies that drive success on Walmart. David shares an inspiring success story of a client who saw their sales surge from $2,000 to $200,000 per month within just two months by leveraging strategic account managers and Walmart Fulfillment Services (WFS). We also discuss realistic expectations for Walmart sales growth, suggesting sellers aim for 10% to 20% of their Amazon sales, emphasizing the importance of focusing on Walmart to unlock its full potential.

Explore the benefits and intricacies of using virtual multi-packs with Walmart Fulfillment Services in this episode. We discuss how virtual GTINs can create multiple listings for a single unit, like multi-packs of shampoo, without additional physical inventory, reducing storage fees and return orders while lowering WFS fees. David also sheds light on pricing strategies, highlighting the significance of the $10 price point, and the current beta status of virtual packs and their anticipated wider rollout, along with the role of promotions in driving sales on Walmart.

Listen in as we navigate the intricacies of Walmart's promotional campaigns and recent updates to their item specifications. We cover different types of promotional campaigns such as category-specific events and flash deals, and the strategic advantages they offer. Learn about accessing these campaigns through the growth opportunities section and the newly introduced Item Spec 5.0, which shifts from category-based to product-type-based listings. David also shares essential tips for managing Walmart accounts, including consolidating multiple accounts, transferring reviews from Shopify, and utilizing Walmart's Review Accelerator Program.

In episode 577 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Carrie and David discuss:

• 00:00 - Walmart Success Stories and Strategies
• 07:23 - Walmart Virtual Pack and Promotion Strategy
• 11:08 - New Walmart Promotional and Listing Strategies
• 11:38 - Accessing Growth Opportunities and New Promo Campaigns
• 15:55 - Optimizing Attributes for Walmart Ranking
• 20:36 - Walmart Account Management Strategies
• 21:01 - Bringing Reviews to Walmart Restrictions
• 23:58 - Flash Deals for All Sellers
• 29:05 - PPC and Listing Optimization Strategies

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Transcript

Carrie Miller:

Today we're talking with David Milstein from SellCord and he's going to be talking about some Walmart success stories and some strategies to help you to become successful on Walmart. He'll also be talking about the new item, spec 5.0, and Walmart promotions that can help boost sales.

 

Bradley Sutton:

How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that's completely BS-free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies or serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world, and this episode is our monthly live Walmart Wednesday show where we talk about anything and everything Walmart related with different guests, and today's host is going to be Carrie Miller. So, Carrie, take it away.

 

Carrie Miller:

Welcome to another Walmart Wednesday. I'm so excited to have a very special guest today. We have David Milstein here, and so we're going to ask him a lot of questions. He is definitely one of the top experts in Walmart. He definitely has taught me a lot of what I know about Walmart, so definitely a privilege to have him here today. I'm going to go ahead and bring on David. Hi David.

 

David:

Hey, Carrie, it's great to be on. Thank you for having me.

 

Carrie Miller:

Yeah, thanks so much for coming on. So I told them a little bit about you. I mean, you are the co-founder of SellCord and you've been doing Walmart or in the Walmart game for like maybe three or four years now. Definitely an expert in Walmart and very, very knowledgeable about anything. Okay, so let's go ahead. And, David, I don't know if I've done enough justice for you about your background, but can you just tell a little bit about what you do at SellCord and just a little bit about you and your background and anything you want to let us know.

 

David:

Of course. Of course, sure, thank you for the opportunity. So, yeah, so I'm one of the co-founders of SellCord. Uh, we are a Walmart focused agency, so we only work on brands, on their Walmart growth, and we've positioned ourselves to just be exclusively focused in this, in this space, as we understand the future and opportunity that Walmart does have to offer. It's always great to be alongside Carrie, a fellow like-minded individual, who is with us on this Walmart train, so we're excited to chat, as always.

 

Carrie Miller:

Awesome. Okay. So let's go ahead and we're going to just get into the questions, and I think one of my first questions that I wanted to ask you about is because and I'll kind of give you a little bit of background a lot of people say you know, what kind of sales can I do on Walmart? You know if I'm doing, you know millions on Amazon, what can I do on Walmart? But I just wanted to see if you could give us some stories about, like a client who maybe got on Walmart. Maybe they were struggling with Walmart before they came to you and then you helped them to do certain things and they became successful. So, like you know what was the scenario, how did you help them? Any kind of thoughts you can give us about like client success stories would be kind of cool way to start this out.

 

David:

For sure, for sure. Actually, Walmart just did a case study with us on one of our clients. So you go on LinkedIn, you guys could check out like a post on this brand, Simply Magic. Uh, this was a brand you know they have a lot of success just historically, both on Amazon. Actually, they were at Walmart before and they were working with us. They were just trying it out. They were doing about like two thousand dollars a month like really really low business, not really giving it the attention it deserved. They came to us, we met with them and just due to their you know experience, we're able to link them with some really insider people at Walmart to be able to work with like a good Sam, the strategic account manager, and working with like the WFS team, and within two months we're actually able to get their sales to 200k, which is like that's, I don't think that's a normal scenario, like we really did. It went above and beyond with them, but that's just because of the opportunity that they had to offer. Now this is a major, major player the Amazon space. However, we do work with brands of all sizes and we have just general expectations of what you can get from Walmart. We typically like to say you should aim for about 10% to 20% of your Amazon sales. So if you're doing like $2 million, $3 million on Amazon, you should be able to expect $200,000 to $300,000 a year, which is again a very solid opportunity.

 

David:

It's obviously all about the long run, but so many accounts are coming to us. We meet these guys at shows all the time. Hey, I'm not even doing 1%, I'm doing 2% and just talking to them. It'll come down to some of the things we'll speak about in this call like different strategies, but it just often comes down to just focus and really giving Walmart the opportunity it deserves, but getting them up within just a few months the 5%, 10% and then it's about can we grow up more from there? And that's really where the opportunities lie, you know, if there's some more strategies to grow further than 10%, how you can do that and we'll speak, I think, a little bit about that more in this talk, in this podcast.

 

Carrie Miller:

Yeah, Well, what do you think the top things are that they're not doing beforehand? Because I've definitely experienced this where people aren't necessarily doing. You know all the things they could do possibly, but what are some of the top things? People like they're just totally ignoring that they would never ignore any Amazon that you see with clients.

 

David:

So so the same way that you would give the opportunity to, let's see your copy on Walmart compared to, let's say, you know, Amazon, Amazon, you're in there like which keywords do I need where in my title and my description? Specifics, like you're very detailed with it, and then you'll just kind of use the same copy on Walmart. Walmart has a completely different guide. You know like they want to have a very different set of copy. They want to have a shorter title descriptions should be more keyword rich and we've done actually a lot of research also on like the keyword tracking and indexing and we found that if you're lacking your main keywords within your copy, those are the highest scenarios of just not indexing for those keywords. It's so related I could show proof. Like not being not having your keywords in your copy, you're just not gonna index. And indexing is even worse than ranking. That means you just don't show up at all for that keyword. And these are basics. That's just one great example.

 

David:

I think another very common one is being in the correct category or product type. We'll speak more about product types a little bit later. Just with Item Spec 5.0. Just being correctly categorized is so important because that determines which keywords you're able to rank for. Just don't make the mistake that Walmart is just some other random marketplace. It's going to be the next big marketplace. You can even see the trajectory of where things have come up thus far and how it compares to Amazon and just the growth it's seeing. And if you're missing that, you're just missing out on the opportunity. Treat it as if it's Amazon right now, you know. Think of it that this is an opportunity that Amazon was seven years ago, five years ago, whatever, whatever specific timeline. But understand that it is an opportunity. And if you had, the chance to do Amazon again now just think of it. What would you just do on Walmart?

 

Carrie Miller:

Yeah, that's all good information. The next thing I wanted to talk about was the virtual packs, because I know I saw you post on LinkedIn about virtual packs that they had just come out. So what, you know what are they? You know how have they been doing? Have you seen a lot of success with them so far?

 

David:

Yeah, for sure I really love the direction Walmart's going with all their beta programs and the new things that they're rolling out. You know I love that they kind of have like Amazon to kind of like go after. You know they don't have to be the pioneer, they can be like hey, this is something that we like about Amazon and they're going all out. You know there's so many new programs coming out and virtual packs is like the latest and greatest. I just want to make a distinction. It's not a virtual bundle, it's specifically a multi-pack on a single unit, and this really what it allows you to do is to create multiple listings for a single unit. So let's say, you're selling a bottle of shampoo. Instead of having to create a second GTIN to list a second bottle of shampoo with it, you can now create a virtual GTIN and you can do up to as many as you want. And where the real benefits come in is actually through using WFS for the fulfillment. So oftentimes you know you might want to list a three-pack or a four-pack or a five-pack and then when you send it to WFS it doesn't actually sell, and then you have to deal with storage fees, you have to do a return order. It's just such a pain.

 

David:

So what this allows you to do is just to have one unit. You just send that into WFS and WFS will just create the virtual packs for you. And what's even nicer is that they will have actually consolidated and lowered WFS fee. Depending on how many units, for two units they reduce it by like a dollar for each one. You can look at the like. There's a great guide about this from Walmart where they give you the specific breakdown of the fees. But it's just a really good opportunity to expand your assortment and offer multi-packs where you might not necessarily have that opportunity. It also works really well when it comes to, let's say, you're in a category where, let's say, if you're under $10, there's an 8% commission break. So you think if you go two pack, if you had a separate two pack listing, you'd be paying that 15% fee because it's above $10. But with with virtual packs, you actually still locked into that eight percent fee as long as, like, the average price is lower. So that's really nice, you know, it's just like an opportunity that people aren't necessarily factoring in I just want to make a really cool point, though, about that is there's also in WFS if your products are under ten dollars. This is something actually people don't really know much about. I'm not sure why if your products are on WFS and your retail is under $10, there's a dollar fee that gets attributed to your product. So if you're selling it under $10, even if it's a multi pack of two and it's selling for $19, you still have to pay that dollar fee twice. So it's very important to factor in your pricing and how that impacts both your WFS and your fee.

 

Carrie Miller:

That might actually be a reason to kind of lower your price if you're just at like the 12 or 13 dollar mark, maybe I don't know. I guess you'd have to do the numbers but.

 

David:

It's kind of. It's kind of a hack. I like, like, I call, I call like the 10 perfect price.

 

Carrie Miller:

Yeah.

 

David:

It's exactly 10, because at 10 you don't have the WFS fee for a dollar, but if you're in certain categories you're still in the eight percent. So it's kind of like if you're at ten dollars on one cent, you're at 15% commission, and if you're $9.99, there's that extra dollar WFS fee.

 

Carrie Miller:

Wow. So interesting.

 

David:

So it's actually if you're around that price. Yeah.

 

Carrie Miller:

Very, very good to know. And those virtual packs are in beta, right? So when do you think they're going to roll out to everybody?

 

David:

Yeah. So from our information, they have like a virtual pack, a virtual bundle, virtual pack beta that we did months ago that only a limited amount of sellers got in, and other rolling it out across the board. The initial release was two weeks ago, I think on the June 13th, and then they're also going to be doing early sometime in July, I believe that should be the rest of the sellers that should be live for everyone and I'm pretty sure that's what. It's not confirmed, but we'll find out next month. You know, if you don't, you don't have it. It's a great opportunity. You know, open a case, reach out to your strategic account manager if you have one. Ask for these programs. You know they're here to help you and they'll try and get you in wherever you can.

 

Carrie Miller:

Okay, so let's move on to another topic, and I want to talk about promotions. So let's go ahead and just talk about, like, what types of promotions does Walmart offer for sellers to participate in?

 

David:

Totally. So, I mean promotions is such a great topic on Walmart. I think, after advertising or even combined with advertising, promotions is going to be the best way to grow your listings. Kind of referencing that previous case study we spoke about, the way we were able to see such insane results so quickly is because we enabled these items to go into promotion, that to really grow. And so just to speak about, like, the different types of promotions on Walmart, there's two main categories that exist. There's promo campaigns, which are like category specific and they happen during a specific set amount of time. For example, there's a July event happening throughout the entirety of the month of July and then you have different events here and there. You have some highlighted special events. You know that we just had like Walmart Plus week this past week and you have like Black Friday like, but there's generally more like you know this is allergy season or like some like some random home and cleaning week, like something that they come up with. You know just where they're trying to get some products in and you could automatically enroll in that. If you go to growth opportunities, you'll see promo campaigns.

 

David:

If you don't have access to that just open a case and you'll be able to get access to that. You have to be an admin on the Solid Center account, which is pretty obvious, and you'll be able to roll your products in there and just be able to participate in that. And then another type of campaign which is called Flash Deals which is kind of similar to Flash Picks on Amazon, the difference being lightning deals on Amazon are Lightning deals are a single day, versus Flash Deals on Walmart run for a whole week and it's every week, I believe Sunday through Saturday, that it runs through a promo for your product and you can get in there with a basic 10% off and you can really roll through your catalog. You have to get approved for it, but you can't do back-to-back for the same product in two weeks, but you can do it every four weeks per product and it's actually a really, really great way to be able to quickly move your products because you get put into a special flash deal page and if you go to Walmart's home page, there's always a little icon for a lightning symbol. You can click it and, depending on how well your product does, it will fluctuate in its rank amongst the deal. So if you push a lot of ads, you'll actually quickly be able to move up the list just because you have a high conversion rate. Even if they're not clicking on the flash deals page, your listing just moves better. So you'll move up on the ranks and actually able to fly through units. Like that it's interesting. We've seen higher conversion rate. I mean it makes sense at a cheaper rate but very like a 30, 40% increase in sales, dollar wise, not even units specifically dollars. So even at the 10% discount, which is not a lot, you're still able to really kill it over there.

 

Carrie Miller:

So do you have to have a strategic account manager for that? I've noticed a lot of accounts don't have access to those Flash Deals or Flash Picks.

 

David:

I would say just open up a case. Yeah, I think with Flash Deals, Flash Picks it used to be called Flash Picks. They changed it to Flash Deals. No, that's Walmart, though wuickly changed things on the fly just to sound better, but open up a case. If you don't have a strategic account manager, just that case should be able to get it for you.

 

Carrie Miller:

Cool, yeah, let's go ahead and talk about something that I just saw roll out recently, and it's the Item Spec 5.0. Can you just tell everyone what, what the Item Spec 5.0 is and how it can help with the visibility of products, or just any information you have on the Item Spec?

 

David:

Yeah. So this is. This is one of the bigger buzzwords you know happening right now in the Walmart space and it's just because of how impactful this is for your listings and really planned forward with Walmart. Uh, Item Spec 4 came out quite a while ago and what they did was they changed the number of categories you were able to list under to like from like 20 something to like 77, and now, with Item Spec 5.0, they're doing it in a different, a different style. It's based on product type. That's how you set up your product, your items, rather than doing it in a general category, you now have to actually select the product type. This is similar to like my experience with Amazon. The minimal experience that I've had in the past with their flat files is you have to select, like, a product type prior to uploading it, so it's not a similar idea on Walmart. So I understand if you have a big assortment and you're trying to come up with how you could quickly list it. It could be a little bit harder now because you can't just generalize it into Home and Kitchen. You have to find your product types. But previously Walmart would automatically select the correct product type for your item and you can change it. But now that it's forced into the product type, as like the initial start, you do have to do a little bit more research on listing. But what's the point, aside from just the change in how you list your product and how you do edits to your product, what's the goal of what they're doing here.

 

David:

So this is actually, I expect, 5.0 was previously first released on actually the 1p side. So if you're doing edits through item 360 or supplier one, you should already have familiarity with this and all that was already done by product type for a while. And what it does is it enables a whole bunch of more attributes by product type. So each category has, like its list of predetermined attributes, but it didn't tell you which ones you should fill out for this. Like it could be in sports and like you're selling, you know weights and it's like what sports team is this? It's not applicable to your weights, you know. But then if you have let's say you're selling now with the new product type if you're selling something related to like a sports, like an actual sports team, it'll ask you for the sports team, but if you're selling something that's not relevant, it won't make it a required category for you. So it's basically they make attributes that are dependent on your product type, which is really cool in the flat files they'll gray out certain areas and it'll actually have like recommended attributes that you should be filling out based on your product type.

 

David:

So it's a lot more dependent. It's a lot more granular, which helps you fill in the correct detail with mine. This is like the number one thing that people are just what attributes do I fill out? There's just so many and some of them are useless, but like what's important. So now that with 5.0, I think it's only going to get better and better, Walmart's going to keep showing even more information on how to utilize it, but with this it enables you to actually see more attributes that were previously only restricted to one fee, which is interesting, as well as which attributes they recommend that you do fill out in order to rank better. So how does it impact your rank? I think this is like leaning into that Walmart's actually trying to not necessarily focus so much on the. You know, obviously, conversion rate is the number one driver of rank right now, but they want to have attributes actually have a bigger impact on your rank, because discoverability to them is something that's so important. So if you have like a very specified search, they want to be able to show your product, not just because of your relevancy from keywords, but also your relevancy due to attributes. So that's why it's so important to fill them out.

 

David:

I want to sort of tip about Amazon Fill out every attribute you can, even if it's just as N/A as long as that's an option, obviously or just type in something basic, even though it's not applicable to your product, just so that you have everything filled out. If anyone ever comes searching for you, you have literally all the information you need there. It might take you some extra time, but it's totally worth it because you're then setting yourself up for future success. It also limits the ability for someone to hijack your listing with content rights issues. Someone could just put your listing in and they could fill out one attribute and now all of a sudden, your listing's content rights restricted for that one thing which could be some miscellaneous attribute. So there is the opportunities for you as a seller and also opportunity for people that might want to try to harm you. Not recommended. But there is so much happening with Item Spec 5.0 and I'm excited to see the great impact because it is it is slowly rolling out for a lot of sellers. It's not fully live for everyone. We're able to see from the UI if there's like an add items or update items feature. You can see from your items page. You'll know if you're like in 4.0 or if you're still in a Harfian 5.0. So a lot of cool stuff there and excited to see what comes.

 

Carrie Miller:

So if you download it and still in the 4.0, do you just write a case to ask to get the Item Spec 5.0? Is that?

 

David:

I don't think they're going to help you with that. I don't think so. I think it's just going to like they'll just tell you like they might not even know what they're talking about, honestly, in that case, but they'll also just say it’s rolling out. You’ll get it when you get it.

 

Carrie Miller:

Okay.

 

David:

Yeah, I wouldn't I wouldn't push for you to ask your Sam If you have a Sam, maybe it's worth off to pick it up to them but oftentimes they'll also just say, you know, you're you'll get it in in September, you know. Hopefully everyone gets this sooner than later.

 

Carrie Miller:

Definitely. Um, somebody in the comments said that the drop downs in spec 5.0 are not working. I don't know if you have any. Have you had any any experience with that, with the drop downs not working or kind of some glitches with this, with the spec sheets?

 

David:

Interesting. So the drop downs are possibly for if it's great, look, if it's grayed out, is that what it is? It's something that's grayed out. But if it's grayed out it's not relevant to that product type. And is this specifically in a flat file? Because you'll notice when you go to edit an item and through, like the item page, it will. It will be a whole new layout. It's going to look a lot cleaner, a lot newer and instead of having three different tabs, it's all going to be on one page going down. Are you experiencing the same issues there? There are definitely issues and actually as of today, if you log into SolidSign, you'll see a line on top that says there's issues with files right now. So they are having some issues right now as a whole Walmart, so don't go crazy on them If it's still not working in a couple of days and once that banner goes away, that's something to definitely want to take a look at. See if it's something with the flat file, see if you're able to manually edit it. In that case, I definitely suggest opening a case. But I was just working on a file earlier this week and it seemed to be working just fine.

 

Carrie Miller:

Okay, so I'm going gonna go in straight to the questions. We've got a lot of questions up here, so I'm excited about this, a lot of good interaction here. So the first one is we have brands A and B already on Walmart but would like to test B without setting up another account. Can we test list these, these products, on existing account that belongs to A? So I guess like testing products on different.

 

David:

Yeah, yeah, I mean there's, there's absolutely no issue with that, the only thing that you might consider is that it's going to say sold on ship by the store name. So if it's brand A, as long as you're okay with saying like brand B product is being sold on the ship by brand A, like that might be something to consider but there's no issue. But another thing you might want to consider is that if you eventually want to have an account added for brand B, it's a bit of a pain to have to transfer the content rights from account one to account B, but it is possible. If you set up brand portal for brand B on account A, I don't recommend that. You're kind of setting yourself up for future failure. But unless you plan to run everything through one account. We've actually worked with a lot of aggregators unless you plan to run everything through one account, we've actually worked with a lot of aggregators and at first a lot of them had one brand, like one account per brand, and they realized it was just such a disaster. Also think of it from like Walmart's perspective like they don't track accounts together, they don't really group them together, so they treat them as like 10 different accounts and it was just too hard for them to deal with Walmart. Too hard for them, like they would have access to beta programs in some accounts but not others, so it actually consolidated all to one account. It can become a little bit of like a billing issue if you have, like, different legal entities, but I would recommend sticking to one account unless you have a fear of really like getting suspended. But I would just recommend staying clear of doing anything that would get you in that in the first place.

 

Carrie Miller:

The next question is about the best way to bring reviews from Shopify or Amazon, if that's allowed.

 

David:

This is a good question. So there's a few options here. So, firstly, you're not allowed to bring in reviews from Amazon. Amazon officially, according to the terms of service, they own their reviews. You're not allowed to bring them to Walmart. Walmart actually won't even allow you to upload them. Back in the day, you'd be able to get away with it even though it wasn't recommended, but these days you cannot do that. You can, however, bring in organic reviews from Shopify and as well as from other sites as well, just not Amazon specifically. So there is a free version through Walmart. You just go to reviewsindicationwalmart.com. You'll be able to sign up for it. You can work with your Sam to get access to. It is through a company called Aspective. I believe Walmart purchase them. There are other tools as well, like there's the Yotpo, which officially does it. There's also Bizarre Voice, which, if you're like a bigger brand, I want to go that route because it's in the case to many, many platforms. But for most of like Amazon sellers, I find this just very expensive for what you're looking for. So I would just check out again that reviews indication the online economy. You can also message them if you have any questions. Just reviewsindication at Walmart.com, we'll go to them.

 

Carrie Miller:

All right. So the next one kind of goes with it, and it's about you know, is there a fine program on Walmart. So what is the similar program on Walmart?

 

David:

Right. So, Walmart does have what they call the review accelerator program. There is a requirement in order to get into it, which is you do have to have a sale. Recently they did change some things up. It used to be limited to five reviews, now it's up to 10 reviews, and if you work with a service provider. I believe it's up to 20. It's available through growth opportunities. They charge $10 per review. They recently changed the specifics of the program so I don't want to misspeak over here, but if you look in you can see the exact details of like. Walmart is great with their guides, like their guides are amazing and they're typically up to date. Just click on the guides you can read through, like the whole program. But growth opportunities reviews indication, I'm sorry review accelerator program that will give you what you're looking for and you can enroll products. There's even something cool which they say is there, but I've never actually seen it’s something called a pre-purchase. So post-purchase is very common, where someone purchases your product. Walmart will accept the buy and then give them a $3 credit to leave a review, you're not guaranteed to get a five-star review. Just keep that in mind. You could get a one-star review through the review accelerator program, but there's something called a pre-purchase, which I'm not sure when it's going to be enabled, but this actually will allow you to discount an item on Walmart in order to get a review up to 100% off. I've never seen it, but it's something that does exist in.

 

Carrie Miller:

Wow.

 

David:

You can see an option for this. You can enroll your items.

 

Carrie Miller:

The next question is is SellCord able to get my Walmart account access to a Sam? Strategic account manager is a Sam. For anyone who doesn't know.

 

David:

Right. For sure, we can definitely help with that. We work directly with Walmart. We have our own like agency level Sam and we work with them to in order to get a Sam through Walmart. Also, depending on what category and we work with a lot of categories we can even just reach out directly to other Sam's to try and get someone approved. They typically expect you to have good sales somewhere. We've seen randomly accounts get assigned to Sam. Walmart's trying to do like as much as they can, even for the lower end accounts, but for like. If you're like a smaller account, Walmart might not necessarily go for it, but if you could prove like sales to them, either from Amazon or from like another website, that's kind of the best way to get it. But we've had a lot of success with that. If you guys, if you want to reach out, we could definitely give that a shot.

 

Carrie Miller:

All right, here's kind of a follow-up with. The other question Is Flash Deals, are Flash Deals offered to brand owners only?

 

David:

No, you know, it's not restricted. Actually, here's a little fun, little fun fact there's sponsored brand ads, which is actually exclusive to brand owners right through advertising. You're not allowed to do if you sell, if you resell. But there's actually something called sponsored product, sponsored brand, like Flash Deals, which you can use, instead of having like the brand logo, to say flash deals and you can list your items that you're reselling. It's exclusively managed through Walmart you have to work with, like your product manager, but you can definitely run Flash Deals on items that you do not own the brand for.

 

Carrie Miller:

Someone asked where do I download or where do you download spec 5.0 from?

 

David:

It will either be on your account or not when you go to your items page to go ahead and make updates so you have like you have like on the top right Like add items or manage items. You'll just see from there it'll be a little bit of a different UI. Things will look a little bit different than they were before. Previous, it was like it would give you by template. You could update it by category or by g10 match now, just as like by g10 match or like by product or product, something like that. And if you click on like, do by g10 match that's my favorite to do it g10 match, just throwing all your g10s in there and just export the file and you'll see the name of the file will say 5.0, or we'll say something like 4.5.

 

Carrie Miller:

Here's another question, should our brand prioritize matching Amazon's prices on Walmart or focus on offering flash deals?

 

David:

Wow, this is, that's a great question. So, uh, I want to touch on this earlier with. I just want to talk about couponing, which I think would be something that also a long conversation, generally speaking, for most of you. Amazon is your main business and you shouldn't jeopardize your main business because of Amazon. If you're listing on Amazon is bringing in so much more than Walmart you don't want to risk losing your business there. We have found that Amazon is a little slow sometimes to catch price differences. We've been able to run a 10% flash deals for a week and actually be cheaper than Amazon, and the price on Amazon will. We won't lose the buy box and Amazon won't catch up. What I would just recommend is if you could get away with it for as long as you could and let's say Amazon does give you problems. Just quickly change your price on Amazon, just you got a monitor you gotta be on top of your game. What's cool is that coupons, which is also a beta program, is the only way, as of today, they able to actually offer a cheaper price on Walmart than on Amazon without having to lower your Amazon price at all. So there's a lot of strategy around that you could. Also, if you have a Sam, you can work with your Sam to be like, let's say, you want to get into a bigger program where they request like a 30% discount. You could do like 10% strike through and then a 20% coupon. They'll work with you and because they understand the Walmart damage on Walmart issue, I think that's the biggest issue Walmart's trying to deal with is how do you get a promo on Walmart without impacting Amazon? That's why Walmart loves Walmart-only sellers. They love these guys. They don't care about their Amazon, they're all invested in Walmart and there is maybe a strategy to having a Walmart-specific catalog. If you have a lot of different products develop bundles or even go back to virtual packs. Play around with things and see what you can do to differentiate your Walmart from your Amazon listings. There's also you could have a different UPC that you use on Walmart versus Amazon. I'm not sure that's going to last forever, but it does. It is a good way to keep Amazon from price matching your items.

 

Carrie Miller:

Let's see the next question here. Once copy is set up, products are properly categories and PPC is running, other than those two and those three tasks, what? What are other daily, weekly, monthly tasks that SellCord would do to make my Walmart business successful? What could a new customer expect to see SellCord to be working on every month in their account?

 

David:

So it's not just the copy on the categorization, there's also attributes. You know it's played a very big role, kind of spoke about, especially with items spec 5.0. And then PPC is really it's not a set end and forget. It's set up with Walmart. You know you want to make sure that you're constantly, you know, revisiting PPC, checking in daily, seeing how things are going, what's doing better, what's doing worse, especially at launch. It's so important to be tweaking things, you know. You see, we didn't really talk PPC strategy much, but learning what's happening, especially if you're new to Walmart, you can't just expect things to be a certain way. Every account, every listing has its own history, which is just so complex. It makes things so much fun just to be able to learn within each account. There's also constant work that you can do just to see like copy as well. It's not a set and I forget it situation. You want to test something out. You want to learn more keywords and implement them into your copy. You want to try out different categories, different product types, to see if you can succeed in different areas as well. There's also just working with brands to discuss promotion strategies, to just continuously work and figure things out. There's also constant audits you have to do on your listings.

 

David:

Walmart is like I'm not going to say notorious. It doesn't sound nice, but your images could just revert back. Your variation could split up your copy. If you have multiple paragraphs, it's squished into one paragraph. These things happen all the time. There's constant audits that you have to do just to make sure your things are, your content is good, and then it's just about primarily utilizing PPC as well as just promotional strategies to grow and grow, and there's also a lot of tracking information you know you have many items you want to be able to see. Let's say, keyword tracking. You know how. Am I ranking for my main keywords? Am I doing well overall? Is there more opportunity? Do I need to go more aggressively? Because even in ads like, are you ROAS focused or are you trying to just grow general sales? There's so much to go, depending on your strategy, Just like we deal with many, many different size accounts. We deal with accounts that are doing literally $5,000,10,000 a month. And then there's also nine figure Walmart sellers. You know that are PPC isn't necessarily their larger thing. It's about like having a strong pricing strategy because they have to win by $1. And then, not even having big margins, they just have to just make units sell. So so many different strategies depending on the count types.

 

Carrie Miller:

All right. Last question what program is best for keywords on Walmart and for optimizing your listing in general?

 

David:

Okay, so I'm a little biased over here, folks. So obviously Helium 10 is a fantastic tool for any keyword research. I live in Cerebro and Magnet. The fact that they're available for Walmart, I love it. It shows you. I mean, the amount of data that's in there is just fascinating. You can learn immediately what your top keywords are for your product. They have a search volume which is so impactful. It shows you historical so you can see, since it's seasonality, you can see one was this product doing well. It gives you the past, like two years or something like that's great. It'll really show you like where and when you can expect to do well. You also have to do the work you can't just like go here's everything. Do the work, make sure you're not hitting branded keywords, make sure they're relevant to your product, obviously. But it is really solid in terms of just keyword research, very, very highly recommended. In terms of optimization auger listings program-wise. I am also biased here, but that's just because this is what we do. We do listing optimization as a company, so obviously I'm going to plug SellCord, Carrie does Helium 10 have some sort of like AI tool to optimize listings for Walmart.

 

Carrie Miller:

So we do. We have a Listing Builder and as you, basically, you put the keywords in a keyword bank and then, as you write them into your listing, they get crossed off, so you make sure that they're fully optimized. So yeah, we have a Listing Builder that will help you to optimize using the keywords you find with Cerebro for Walmart.

 

David:

I'm sure it's fantastic. I mean, obviously we have a self core strategy, but I mean you guys make amazing tools. Definitely give it a shot.

 

Carrie Miller:

All right, that's all we have. Thank you so much, David, for answering all those questions. We had a lot of great questions, and definitely David's the you know the best to ask all these amazing questions too. So thank you so much, David, for being on. And again, if you are interested in SellCord, David, can you say your email address and how they can get in contact with you again?

 

David:

For sure. You can send us an email to david@sellcord.com S-E-L-L-C-O-R-D.com. You can do info@sellcord.com. If you want just more general, hit us up. Visit our website. Sign up over there. There's a lot to talk about.

 

Carrie Miller:

All right, sounds good. Thank you everyone for joining and we hope you have a great rest of the day. Bye, everyone.