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

#599 - Secret Amazon Strategies from China

Howard Thai, the legendary "Professor of Amazon," is back to share his game-changing insights straight from the playbooks of top Chinese Amazon sellers. Curious about the secret tactics that can revolutionize your Amazon product launch? He'll reveal how to optimize your listings, uncover top-performing keywords, and navigate the surge of Chinese sellers on TikTok Shop following recent policy shifts. Plus, get a glimpse into Howard's unique journey, his time in the US, his return to China, and his passion for the epic anime Naruto.

Our conversation doesn't stop there. We'll dissect the global selling opportunities on TikTok Shop, highlighting the stark differences in ease of access for Chinese sellers compared to others. Learn the proven strategies for success on the platform, including the importance of daily multiple video postings, leveraging affiliates, and smart ad usage. Discover the potential of live shopping and the groundbreaking impact of AI influencers in China, and how US sellers can adopt these innovative practices.

Lastly, we'll tackle the escalating challenge of ranking products on Amazon amidst soaring PPC costs and the growing emphasis on external traffic. Howard shares actionable insights on using external deal sites like DealNews and Woot to drive traffic and boost product rankings. Dive into practical advice on securing initial reviews and sales through varied promotional tactics, including social media and PPC. Plus, get an insider look at different deal strategies to maximize visibility and sales, and hear about exciting travel plans to China with Howard, promising new adventures and networking.

In episode 599 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Howard discuss:

• 00:00 - Strategies From Top Chinese Amazon Sellers
• 05:13 - Global Selling Opportunities on TikTok Shop
• 07:33 - Strategies for Amazon-Selling Success
• 10:24 - Strategic Launch Using Outside Traffic
• 11:03 - Ranking Products With Deal Sites
• 21:03 - Inventory Management in Sales Transactions
• 23:05 - Amazon Inventory Strategy and Temu Marketplace
• 31:30 - Mastermind Event in China

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Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today we're going to talk to a seller who used to be one of the top 100 sellers all time at Amazon and even has the nickname Professor of Amazon. He's going to give us some inside strategies from top Chinese sellers, what they're using for launching that you've probably never heard of before, like using what deals and more. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Do you want to see how your listing or maybe competitors listing rates as to best practices for listing optimization? Or maybe you want to compare a group of ASINs or Amazon products to see how they compare to each other? Maybe you want to see within seconds the top keywords for a single listing or a group of listings? You can do that and more with the Helium 10 tool listing analyzer. For more information, go to h10.me forward slash listing analyzer.

 

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 completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed, organic conversation about serious strategies or serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. We are going on the other side of the world, completely different time zone, a different day. I think it's like Saturday over there. It's Friday night here at Helium 10. The whole entire Helium 10 had the day off today. Like, sometimes they give us random days off like a recharge, so they're like you know what? Everybody in the whole company, you guys, get the day off, but I'm having Howard have to record again because there's technical difficulties. So you know what? I'm coming in on my holiday, on my, my vacation day, at uh, what time is it? 8 pm on a Friday night and I'm like I'm here for you, Howard, because I need the world to know what you have to say. The professor of Amazon. Guys, Howard, welcome back to the show.

 

Howard:

Thank you very much Bradley. Nice to be back on.

 

Bradley Sutton:

You notice my shirt here?

 

Howard:

Oh wow, yep, Naruto. Well, I love Naruto.

 

Bradley Sutton:

You and I are about the same age, like literally months apart, and so I think we both grew up with some similar things. So you were probably in your UCSD really close to me days when you were into Naruto here, and I believe you went even to Japan and even got more into it, right?

 

Howard:

Yeah, I'm really into Naruto and I'm side by side with Japan when they released the translated version of it.

 

Bradley Sutton:

You're back in China. How long have you been back in China?

 

Howard:

I left the US on June 10th so I came back here around June. I was traveling around with uh in Beijing for the family, and then uh Xi'an for my mom, my wife's side. Then uh, I went to um, I went back to around like July 4th or 3rd or something like that and I'm here to stay.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So I've been back, been back like for good, back like like for good or like for a year, or what would you talk?

 

Howard:

well before before the whole covid stuff. I've been in China since 2009, so I'm like one of the first Chinese Amazon seller here, like I mean basically a China-owned company that is selling on Amazon.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Ah, that's right, I forgot about that. You were always based out there after you for a long time, but then you came back here because, yeah, China was not exactly a great place to be during COVID, so that's why you're out here, okay, okay. So yeah, in your honor. Anyways, you see I'm wearing my Chinese baseball team hat, even got the Chinese colors on the side here. So, yeah, there we go. All right, I'm right on theme with the Naruto and China hat. Now, first thing I want to ask you I've seen you talk a little bit more about it, um, lately is now that you've been back in China, maybe your eyes have been opened a little bit more uh, about the strength of Chinese sellers on TikTok shop. Because I think in the beginning, like TikTok shop was mainly like all right, us companies a little bit harder for foreign companies to get on. But now correct me if I'm wrong TikTok shop has kind of like opened up the floodgates where now, all of a sudden, there's a lot more Chinese sellers on there. Is that right?

 

Howard:

Okay so before, like TikTok shop was only for in China, right, US was only for sellers that are selling in Amazon over $2 million. Then after, like recently, like last month, like early, early last month, they opened a floodgate to everyone. But there is still requirements, so there are little requirements, they have to be a seller and so on. But uh, it was like it's like wide open kind of you could say.

 

Bradley Sutton:

And for like for you know,USs customers it's pretty strict, you know, not not too strict. Like team I've been trying to get on Tmula. That's just ridiculous. I got to take pictures of me holding up signs and the 17 different addresses have to match. It's crazy. But TikTok shop was not too too hard to get signed up for. I think I got denied the first time because an address didn't match but I got it hooked up pretty fast. But foreigners, you know, like if I'm in Estonia, if I'm in Argentina or wherever, it's impossible to sign up for TikTok shop unless I've got like a friend or a family member who's got a social security number who can tie to the account. But if you're Chinese they get to skip that requirement.

 

Howard:

Well, no, they get registered as a Chinese to get in.

 

Bradley Sutton:

That's what I mean. They don't need to have a friend or family who has a social security?

 

Howard:

So if you are a Chinese Hong Kong or Taiwan then you don't need that. Um, you know, you can just use your own nationality to get in and sell on TikTok shop US. And actually the good thing is about this. Oh, I'm not sure if it's good, but let's say, in China, I mean, it's always like, oh, everyone favors China, right, but the TikTok shop in China is global selling, meaning they open all the countries up US, UK, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam and also Thailand. Was it Thailand or Malaysia? I forgot, it was like all of the list of TikTok shop that you can actually sell on. So it's not just one and US is only for one right now, and I don't even think we can even open TikTok shop UK.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, yeah, I know UK was there before US, but I they're not. Really. It's not like Amazon, where your Amazon token is connected and then it's kind of like you just switch and then now you're on your UK token or something. You can't really do that on TikTok shop, that's. But you're saying Asia, you can, Okay. So now, now lot of uh sellers out there. Hey, that's not fair, why? Why is TikTok shop giving uh, giving advantage to Chinese sellers? Hey guys, it's a Chinese company, they can do whatever they. They can do whatever they want. Um, what are the majority of the Chinese TikTok shop sellers doing? Are they shipping from like Amazon inventory warehouses in US? Or are they doing the kind of like Temu-ish direct shipping, using those subsidies, uh, to customers who buy the product?

 

Howard:

So there was the old-fashioned TikTok. So right now mostly it's based in the US inventory for TikTok shop or fulfilled by TikTok mainly it's all fulfilled by TikTok. Or if you are a seller to open, probably just like a seller-fulfilled TikTok in the US, though You're not supposed to be. Yeah, mainly that's what it is.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Any like little mini hacks or or TikTok shops. You know, before we get onto our Amazon stuff, uh, that you can. You know that you've learned since you've been back there, like like, uh, I'm wearing my red hat today, but I could be wearing my white hat. No, I'm definitely not wearing a black hat. So no black hat strategies, but but what is a one you know quick? You know, I know we usually do 30 seconds, 60 seconds strategy at the end of the show. We'll do an Amazon one then. But what's a 30 60 second tip you can give us about TikTok shop?

 

Howard:

I'm not sure what level people out there are, but uh, from what I know is uh in the US they're pretty much getting started. So there's just, it's just like Amazon you got to spend money to get the velocity. You need to start making sure that you get a lot of uh affiliates and you're also making sure that you're posting, making sure that you're uh having more videos a day continuously and doing ads.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So that's multiple videos a day. Somebody should be posting uh to their like brand page and then, at the same time, don't just rely on that, but use, use affiliates, what? What about live Like? Like you know, should we be in the live streaming? Is that? Is that like a? I know it's obviously not on a level of of China, like I saw that one lady in China who has like this I don't know what, what you call it, but like a, like a conveyor belt, and then products are coming and she literally shows her product for two seconds, throws it away two seconds and she's making millions of dollars. I know America's not at that level yet for live shopping, but what should sellers be doing for live shopping? As far as TikTok shop goes?

 

Howard:

China still doesn't have the culture for the US side live shopping. So we still have in the US. We still have a chance to US. We still have like a chance to like really do a really good job on the live because the way they uh speak and so on. But right now it's getting more and more uh sophisticated in China they're doing using AI influencers, doing all the lives, so in 24/7 they could be doing live every single second. So that's something that we need to catch up on. And things like tools. All the tools you think about TikTok is made by China. Right, Douyin is from China, and then TikTok is a version of Douyin with a little less functionality, and all the tools out there that you can think of for TikTok is made by Chinese companies. So if you really want to learn more TikTok, you should probably learn from the Chinese first and see what you can get out of it.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, and then now, like I said mentioned before, Temu is also trying to recruit US sellers. I don't have much to say there, but I know Temu is actually last month was in some trouble. Chinese sellers were actually upset with Temu. They were storming the offices and stuff like that. So I'm not sure what the future is for Temu, but it's still a very strong marketplace. It's like number number two or three as far as app usage and stuff. So that's a that's one to to be on the lookout for too. But mainly we like to talk about Amazon here and uh, I didn't. I didn't get to see your last mastery call that you did in your Elite Sellers Society, but I saw the outline of it and it looked like it was all about how to use deals. So, first of all, what deals are you talking about? Is this like lightning deals, deals of the day, prime, exclusive discounts, all of the above? Or what was your major focus for this?

 

Howard:

topic. So the master call that we had regarding deals was mainly talking about outside traffic deals, because Amazon right now is. Why is it getting harder for it to do Amazon? It's because Amazon wants you to push external traffic. That's why it's harder. People are doing the old way. They're doing only the one that yo go to BBC and everyone's does BBC. Bbc costs are going up so you have to do outside external traffic and what the deal was talking about is using the high ranking, all the stick deals, deal news woods and those kind of deal sites to help you rank your products. Let me just talk about it. So those are deal sites. Probably most of you guys heard of it before. So these deal sites are where Anchors starts coming in right. Anchor is the first people that came in with the deal sites to rank products back in like the days uh. So what it is is that you put your product on the on the deal sites. You push it to. Either you push it to your uh uh Amazon or you push it to your website. So when, if you put it, put it on, if you push it on uh on Amazon, then you will be able to rank your product on Amazon with the sales velocities and so on, keywords as well, um, and you can even put uh. And then, if you put it on your website, you're able to make sure that your product is either, when people go onto the website is, either to buy it from your website or to Amazon directly, because there's a go to I won't buy on Amazon kind of like little tag or little uh, a little button so they can. Depending on if you are matured or not. If you're already matured, you're just going to go, uh, directly to Amazon. But if you're like already pretty well off and you're like kind of, um, not, you're not sure if you need to rank or not, they can turn on and off the button to go to Amazon. So based on if you need to..

 

Bradley Sutton:

Let me ask a quick question Is that going to the canonical URL or is it just going to the ASIN-based URL?

 

Howard:

It could be anything, any URL you want.

 

Bradley Sutton:

That's one thing I haven't tested, but whenever I tested it for years and years, it's not like, oh, I'm going to get to page one for keywords that are in my canonical URL. But you could always see if you ever did a deal site or some outside traffic or in Google just going to your base canonical URL, then if you had some good keywords in there, like coffin shelf or something, you would see a bump just on the velocity. Have you done any testing on that recently to see if, like, those words in your canonical still matter or it doesn't matter as much anymore?

 

Howard:

Canonical probably what matters, but we're talking about the URL in general, right? what you can put like some kind of special URL in there that would be able to uh to rank your product as well.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Well, yeah, I mean, once you start doing that, though, where were you? I mean? Yeah, I mean you could put a fake canonical URL, potentially, or even a two-step URL, but now you run the risk of getting on Amazon's bad side if you're doing that for the purpose of ranking, but then Amazon could never say anything about your regular canonical URL. Amazon is the one who provides that. You're all just curious to see if you still saw some residual bump. Okay, so then when you launch a new product, let's just say you don't are. Uh, let me give you a scenario. Let's just say that this is a new product for a new brand. Whether I'm a new seller, I'm a old seller, whatever, this is a new product for a new brand. So I don't have too much outside traffic. I don't have a huge email list that I can say go to this listing. What would your launch strategy be? Leveraging these deal sites and, if any, internal Amazon deals?

 

Howard:

So we could use we call it a strategic deals ranking style to get onto, to rank your Amazon product. First, we look at it, we have to make sure that we have at least 10 reviews and 10 uh, uh, 10 sales a day or something. So that goes from like doing like promotions, uh, social media, like those Amazon influencer coupons, uh, and also PPC. So as long as you get that 10 orders a day, we can actually put you into a special program. It's on Woot, right? So being able to first list..

 

Bradley Sutton:

W-O-O-T?

 

Howard:

Yeah, Woot is an Amazon-owned company, so they're able to be able to put your products on Woot. And Woot can do four things Like. One of the things was talking, was you talking about launching a product? The second thing is to be able to like uh, this, uh, uh, clear, clear on all the, all the discontinued items, uh. Third is, if you were like ranked top five you want to be, be, be aggressive and rank number one, or if you're stale, stagnant on like bottom of the page, or like on bottom of the BSR, 100 BSR or something, then you can do something to give yourself some momentum and kickstart the algorithm again and be back up and movable, you know, be able to be ranked again on those old listings. So if you qualify from the requirement that we just talked about, then we could be able to push you into a Woot kind of a special program. What it is is that Woot will be like buying from you, like a wholesaler, right? They're going to be buying your product and, based on your Amazon's average two weeks of sales, they will use that as an average and, with that said, they will then look at it and said, okay, we are able to do three best deals consecutively. So best deals is normally seven days, right? You could either pick seven days or 14 days. So if you want to rank your product on launch wise, we'll do a 14 days best deal, and so. But then in between each best deal, it has to be a seven day rest period. So all three of the all three of the best deals with 14 days could be um, the same price, right? I I mean the best deal price, right? Usually 15% off the normal price you're really selling on. So at that they're looking at oh, two weeks ago, how much sales have you gotten? And they're going to be holding your inventory most likely for 56 days of the for 56 days, meaning that 14 days, seven days, 14 days, seven days and 14 days. So there's three actually 14 day best deals. So then, within those times you are able to do, if you have option to do, deals like lightning deals, within that that seven days, you'll be able to do it with your own account. So they will take the buy box, they will be able to take the buy box from you. They'll take your.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Woot we're talking about?

 

Howard:

Yeah, what will take your buy box from you and it's just like moving your inventory to their account, right? So um.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So if they're using my FBA inventory, it's not like I have to send them inventory directly to some Woot warehouse or something.

 

Howard:

No, you just have to confirm and let them move those inventory over to their account and it'll just come off of your FBA inventory. From there it could be. So that's a lot of inventory, right? If you're looking at the average two weeks ago and then you have 56 days worth of inventory, that might be a lot. So they will then negotiate a price with you and if you're okay with it, there it is, they're going to start doing your best deals and then your best deals you will not get the buy box?

 

Bradley Sutton:

What do you mean by negotiate a price, what price the product is going to sell at, or what price we're kind of like selling to what?

 

Howard:

Selling to what? That's the wholesale price, right?

 

Bradley Sutton:

What do they? What do they usually like? Like, what's the range? Like, like percentage wise off of your retail price that they're they expect?

 

Howard:

So it matters a lot about velocity, how much sales you're getting and how much the price point of the product is. If the product is like a hundred dollars, then the percentage uh, like, uh, you're like it costs like uh, say a hundred dollars, right, your cost is a hundred dollars then they'll probably say, hey, I'll take like 70, I'll give you 70 of that. But if your product is a 10 item or 20 item, very cheap, they'll probably lower that to like uh, uh, making it like 40 percent, 30 percent, 40 or something like that. Uh, depending on I'm sorry the price of the deal the price of the deal, not not the cost of your product, but the price of the deal they'll lower it to down to 30 percent. So, depending on how much you remember you don't have to pay anything when they, there's no other extra cost.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So you're not paying Amazon fee and you're not paying the shipping and and stuff like that?

 

Howard:

Nothing. It's not even storage right, storage is on them, but the but the problem is PPC is on you. You still have to pay for your PPC, because if the product of brand is, it's still yours right.

 

Bradley Sutton:

But if they have the buy box? If Woot has the buy box? I'm still able to run the PPC, though it's still going to give me impressions and stuff?

 

Howard:

So a sponsored brand uh, you can always do, but the thing that you have to do special is you have to use Woot’s portal for PPC in order for you to see. But the great thing is that you can copy over, download your PPC uh report. You know how you like upload the PPC file. You can also download it and then upload it directly to Woot system using same format, the same campaign structure and so on. So it's pretty much like you're copying and pasting it.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So then let's say I had, you know, an ASIN or an FBA SKU, had 3000 units, and now I close a deal with Woot. I don't have to close my SKU, it just automatically transfers to Woot all 3,000, at least during the time that they're running the deal?

 

Howard:

They will agree on the amount of quantity to take from you based on your moving average of the two weeks, and you negotiate, say hey, I'm going maybe do more PPC at the time or I'll do other external traffic or something. Then they'll give you a quantity after the quantity and the cost that you're going to be selling to them. Then they will be using that to uh to push traffic and so on. So at the same time you can also use Woot’s website to post your product there. They will automatically be sending external traffic from their website to Woot uh for, to your deal on what uh on Amazon. So there's all that. So let me give you an example. Okay, you have a thousand pieces that you are selling to Woot at $10. And all of a sudden, everything sells out, except they only sold 900. You have 100 left. They will put that 100 back into stock in your inventory and that 100 that they put into stock will start from zero, zero storage date.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So even if it was there like three months or four months, it kind of resets after Woot gets their hands on it in other words?

 

Howard:

Yeah, so if you have like old inventory, that's great, because then it's like you can reset the storage date for those for the image getting held back and from the 900 pieces then they will. They will times uh, ten dollars that you're selling to them, so that that will be $9,000, right that they're going to give it to you after 20 days.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Some of these discounts. It's, it's, it's pretty heavy. It might be like what's your target when you help sellers do this Like, are you trying to pick a price where they can break even or where they only lose 20%? You know, let's say we don't use this strategy and we just do a traditional one like me, like just PPC launch, you know, like, of course I'm still losing money because I'll do like a 40 % off discount code or 50 % out, you know, just to get that momentum now with what you don't have to get that momentum because they're pushing so much. But, but what's your like, how do you help sellers budget for, for, hey, you're going to lose 20 % on this Woot deal but don't worry, it's going to make up for it, or are you actually trying to find a break-even point or what are you trying to do?

 

Howard:

Most of the time I would say that you would probably break even or lose money right, because you're trying to launch a product, you're going to do PPC, you're going to do hard, so that's not going to really make you money. You're just trying to get rid of inventory or doing velocity of sales for launching. And for the other side, where you're talking about like you're just trying to sell it and not do PPC, then I've seen the cases that you're actually making money because it's like an outlet deal, turbocharged. You have three of them and in between those seven days you can add extra lightning deals in there to even spike up the algorithm even more.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So Woot’s deals last seven days or?

 

Howard:

Woot's best deal lasts 14 days each time, right? So it has three of them.

 

Bradley Sutton:

And then you have to have a break for seven days?

 

Howard:

Within that seven day break, you can have lightning deals too, your own, or Woot's? That means that there's two lightning deals you can put in there in between. Huh, if you qualify for the deals at the time, you know.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Now you mentioned some other deal sites. So, like this lounge, like it just works by itself, all right, you go Amazon Woot, Amazon Woot, back and forth. Uh, but then like, in what situation would I use another website, like Slick deals or some of these others that you mentioned?

 

Howard:

Um, Slick deals is great, uh. If you even go to uh Slick deals and search your competitor, or search that, your keyword, you'll see a lot of your competitors are on there already that are selling you're talking about like tea or coffee, even like supplements are all in there. Like on on like uh Slick deals. Even Woot uses Woot, which is an Amazon company? Amazon also goes to Slick deals to advertise their products on there. The reason why is like the deal of the day or best top deal right now. They also use that to bring in traffic. That's where the traffic is coming from, right. Yes, they put you on a better position on their deal page as well as they bring external traffic into Amazon through like deal sites such as Slick Deals, deal news and Woot and Woot and themselves and other deal sites. Aggregator deals, aggregating sites.

 

Bradley Sutton:

What else is working for you on the Amazon side, be it advertising, if we're still talking about launch or you have more to talk about deals, what other nuggets can you give us today?

 

Howard:

Why we have this Temu thing right here. Right, Temu themselves. You can make money and you can also, if you want to really clear out inventory, which everyone else out here that does Amazon or does internet selling, e-commerce or something, has a problem. This is called overstock or like dead, discontinued items. You're using Temu to push out your dead, discontinued items. So, look, if you, if you just post it up there, it's not going to sell, most likely it's going to just be whatever. Right, but you have to work out a special agreement with with Temu. Hey, Temu, I want you to help push this product. I'm going to be at this price, a low price. So please, let's work out a deal, send traffic to this page and they will send traffic to this page, and we've seen 20,000 orders a day on that product, just almost like a top deal or deal of the day, which it's not as on Amazon, which is not as good as before. But now this is like really doing a really good job on clearing out your inventory. We're doing this with a lot of clients right now. The thing is Temu, yes, they're getting very a lot of criticism back in the day or last couple months ago. Uh, these are mainly factories. These are many factories that does not know how to sell. They're giving cheap products. So there's two ways. There's two problems that are that Temu had with those uh sellers. Those are the first generation sellers we call it uh first generation. And then those are the ones that are factory. They're giving Temu bad inventory and they're also very slow at giving shipping or something. So those are the two where they charge the supplier or the factory cost on that. That's why people are complaining.

 

Howard:

Second generation people which are based in the US that are selling and using their inventory in the US warehouses here now. So those are not having that kind of problem because they are like Temu has all most uh are are getting all the Chinese Amazon sellers into Temu right now to help themselves. So they getting ready for all the inventories in the US to sell on their website. So, yes, Amazon is trying to do the old-style Temu where they ship from China, but right now Temu is in US and recruiting all the Chinese sellers to put their products into Temu at a lower cost than on Amazon, because Amazon they and Temu they have to be 15 percent less than Amazon. That's one of the deals. So that's how they're rushing in and trying to get all the all the people to come in to uh sell on Temu, especially right now.

 

Bradley Sutton:

It's all all Chinese sellers yeah, like I said, I've been trying to get on there. Um, I know they're pushing, you know they approach me and, um, even me who they're trying you know, they know who I am and stuff and and they wanted to to help me get some accounts up so I can do some content on it and even despite that, so, so they already know I'm just like this is. So you know you would think that this might be a little bit better service. Uh, I still can't get approved. So so you just imagine if, if you know like you're trying to go to them, like it might be even harder. Um, all right, now you know a lot of your, your advanced strategies. You give out your special masterminds and you know, every year you try and do it, it seems like a little bit better. You know, like I remember, uh, first year I think you did it in Vegas you rented a mansion it was funny it was the exact mansion that we were about to rent a different year for for a Helium 10 party I saw it in the same place, probably that you did. And then the next year you like rented this huge castle in France. And then the next year, like, okay, we're gonna go ahead and rent an island in Thailand, and so this year, I believe you're taking the show to China. So tell us a little bit about what you have planned and where people can go to get more information.

 

Howard:

Uh you find the information on our website Uh, it's elitesellersociety.com/ess2024. It's two zero two four. Um, we're actually doing it in Ritz Carlton, Sun Zhen, Fu Tian Uh. So it's going to be really really cool. Uh, we're we're trying to get you into one of those. Uh, this is our third time, I believe, in Sun Zhen and we had it where we were thinking. Right now we're trying to plan where we can bring our attendees to some Chinese big Chinese seller's office and show them around as well as taking them out, as well as this two-day main event. Of course, it's on the 22nd and 23rd of October, so that's gonna be really good. We have like Temu there. We have TikTok there. We have uh, uh, other big, uh big people. I'm right now we're talking to Alibaba and and and Seller sprite and stuff. They're they're coming and stuff like that. So there's like so many like really cool people that that or not, people that you should network with there. So that's like uh, I believe we're getting the co-founder of uh Temu. That's gonna be there. So what I would say is there's a lot of opportunity. Uh, in China, everyone is doing the 996 or doing a lot of. It was really learning a lot. Okay, so they're like, doing like they're already at TikTok level. They're mastering that. They're going into, like Facebook, Google ads, they're going to the Shopify side.

 

Howard:

So, uh, as, as a seller e-commerce it's not just only Amazon you need to expand yourself to social commerce. We're talking about social commerce. It's in TikTok and YouTube, YouTube has their own and also like Shopify, because you need to have Shopify, because people will bounce to your website to try to check you out and also multi-channel marketplaces such as Walmart and Amazon, and, uh, Ebay and other Etsy or or whatever it is. There's a lot of other channels that you should put in there yourself, as well as other countries, right, they, each country has their own, so you can expand. That way. You need to start looking into different channels, because it's getting even Amazon scared of TikToker. You see there were Temu, right? Yeah, they're trying to like, do their, do whatever they're doing, trying to catch up, because they're eating a big chunk of their pie and Temu is supposedly number ranked number two now as second marketplace.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Howard, I hope to see you. Maybe in China. I should be going to China sometime this year, I'm positive. Maybe I might be in Shanghai, but I have to take a trip down to Zhenzhen and we can go to Macau again or some other place. But it was great talking to you again and I hope to see you either here stateside or in China real soon.

 

Howard:

You do.

#598 - Amazon Product Marketing & Differentiation

Can your brand truly stand out in the crowded Amazon or e-commerce marketplace? This episode features Kevin King, a master of product differentiation, marketing, and branding, who shares game-changing strategies to elevate your business beyond the basics. Kevin walks us through the creation of his innovative Basecamp Apple Watch charging dock, illustrating how identifying market gaps and blending functionality with aesthetic appeal can help you craft a premium product that demands attention.

We then uncover the critical role of visual storytelling and emotional appeal in successful product marketing. Kevin shares compelling real-life examples, including a groundbreaking product launch during Christmas 2015 and the branding triumph of Liquid Death. We dive into the challenges and rewards of rebranding, drawing lessons from Kevin’s experience with his dog product line transformation. The conversation underscores the importance of innovative packaging and impactful imagery in driving sales and maintaining a brand's identity.

Finally, we explore unconventional marketing strategies that can turn an ordinary product into a thriving brand. Kevin recounts the phenomenal success of a hand sanitizer brand during the 2020 pandemic, revealing how creative tactics like catchy jingles and engaging public interactions led to remarkable sales figures. Whether you are an aspiring Amazon seller or a seasoned seller, this episode is packed with valuable insights and strategies to help you achieve a standout presence in a saturated market.

In episode 598 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Carrie and Kevin discuss:

• 00:00 - Product Differentiation Secrets With Kevin King
• 04:36 - Multi-Functional Charging Dock Design
• 06:57 - Product Development From Scratch
• 10:16 - Illustrating a Product's Transformation With Cartoons
• 10:54 - Product Innovation and Differentiation Strategies
• 14:33 - Brand Identity Success Through Innovation
• 15:48 - Premium Bully Sticks Differentiation Strategy
• 16:50 - Researching and Deciding on Bully Sticks
• 21:35 - Listing Strategy for Niche Keywords
• 27:09 - Differentiating Products for Marketplace Success
• 27:36 - Pet Product Influencer Partnership
• 31:24 - Building a Brand With Differentiation
• 35:19 - Hand Sanitizer Market Frustration and Innovation
• 41:52 - Unconventional Marketing Strategies for Brand Success
• 42:45 - Successful Million Dollar Marketing  Strategy

Transcript

Carrie Miller:

In today's episode, Kevin King is going to be sharing his secrets on how to differentiate your products so that you stand out from the competition.

 

Bradley Sutton:

How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Are you a six, seven or eight figure seller and want to network in a private mastermind group with other experienced sellers? Or maybe you want to take advantage of monthly advanced training sessions with Kevin King, an expert guest? Do you want to come to our quarterly in-person all-day trainings at Helium 10 headquarters? Or do you want the widest access to the Helium 10 set of tools? For all of these things, the Elite program might be for you. For more information on Helium 10 Elite, go to h10.me/elite. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Seller’s 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.

 

Kevin King:

You know, a lot of times people don't in the space, don't like to share their products. They're afraid people are going to copy them. I'm afraid like, oh, if I share this, this cool thing I found, I'm going to have a hundred different copiers on it. And that does happen. You know, Bradley’s had that with the coffin shelf, you know, here at series, and now there's I don't know how many coffin shelves that are A lot, a lot. Yeah, so it does happen. But I'm going to show you some ways to make that almost impossible today. I mean not to say that someone can't mimic you, because sometimes when people copy, that's a nice way of flattery. But there's a lot of things that you can do to differentiate your product and it's becoming super important. You know the days of when I first started. I know you've been doing this for a while 2015, 2016. You just go to Alibaba. You'd find a product look at Helium 10, see where the gaps are and just stick a different name on there and maybe create a logo, put it on there and put that up and sell it. Those days are long gone. I mean, can that still happen? Occasionally, someone can have success doing that, but it's extremely, extremely difficult. And branding true branding and true product differentiation is where it's at. And some people think, well, I'll just add a warranty or I'll add an eBook to my product or I'll bundle it with something else and that'll make it different enough. And that's usually not enough. And in today's world, you got to change your approach and that's what I'm going to show you today with real-life, real-world examples of my actual products. Some of these I'm not selling anymore for different reasons. Pricing got priced out of the market with raw supplies or something like that. But I'm going to show you exactly what I do and to try to give you some insights and some perspective on how you can approach this differently for what you're doing.

 

Carrie Miller:

Very nice, I'm excited.

 

Kevin King:

When it comes to business, there's really only two things that matter, and when you cut it to the core, that's innovation and marketing. I mean, yeah, there's all the details of finance and money and all this kind of stuff, but really, if you look at any business look at Apple, you look at Microsoft, you look at Tesla, you look at any of these. It's innovation and marketing. Those are the two fundamental things that you should be focusing on first. So, I'm going to start off with innovation. So the first thing I'm talking about is innovation. This is a product on screen called Basecamp. This is an Apple watch charging dock. It also charges your iPhone, charges your iPad. It has a night light on it. This is a really, really cool product that came out in 2015. It was launched in 2015.

 

Kevin King:

So almost nine years ago, right when the first Apple Watch came out, and where this product, how this originated. This is a product that I sold and I actually created this product from scratch. This was my actual product and I created it from scratch right when the first Apple Watch came out. And what happened is I went on Amazon to try to find some ideas for products and I saw that Apple Watch charging docks were trending at the time and most all of them were like these cheap bamboo kind of wooden docks for 15 to 20 bucks, all coming off of Alibaba, with just different names on them. Each one looks exactly the same, just had a different name, and I was like, if I'm going to spend 500 bucks for a watch or whatever the watch costs back then. I don't want some cheap, cheap stand to put it on, I want something that looks cool. So I developed this that I would want and I was like I don't want something where there's cables hanging across my desk, cables hanging across my nightstand, so I want to hide all the cables and I want to be able to charge like three things at once. And so that's what I developed, and so this particular product you can see here has a little light on it.

 

Kevin King:

I later added a Bluetooth speaker to it in a version two. It put the watch up on top, the phone would sit on the side and it had a. The charging was buried inside all the cables. Um, the back actually had two additional USB ports so that you could actually charge an iPad or put something else on the back of it. It had. The cables were all hidden underneath, so you'd wrap the cable around underneath so it's not like just all messing up your, your desktop or your, your nightstand or whatever the night light there you can see it. You can hit that button a few times and adjust it up in different levels. I created a really nice box for it and I had all the different adapters. I was prepared to sell this in the US market, and so I created one charging dock and then had them make the different adapters that go in the end, depending on if it's for the UK or for Europe, or for the US or for Australia the bigger markets. I later added a Bluetooth speaker to it. I changed that nightlight to not just a nightlight but actually a Bluetooth speaker so that you could this is the days before there was beats or any of that kind of stuff so it actually was a cool, cool thing to be able to have your phone sitting there charging and have a little speaker that would play your sound music or your wake-up call or whatever. You can see there are the little nightlights turned on. As an example, these are actually some of my listing photos that you're seeing on this. You can see that it would fit all kinds of different watch bands. I created a really nice box for the outside of it to differentiate it so that when you got it felt like you're paying 80 bucks for this thing.

 

Kevin King:

This was a little video that I had made. I found the way I got this made is I came up with the idea. I found a factory on Global Sources Comm. So I didn't even use Alibaba. I use a company called global sources comm, which is another alternate sourcing place. It's not as big as Alibaba, but you can find some better factories sometimes on there. So if you haven haven't checked that out, check it out. And I found a factory in Shenzhen, China, that would do this and I ended up paying them a thousand dollars for the design and so they had their internal guys do all the design and then the molding and everything. It was expensive. It cost me about 30 grand to do all the molding because it's electrical parts and USB and there's a chip in there. So this is not for everybody, but I spent about 30 grand on that.

 

Kevin King:

We've created all kinds of prototypes and they would send me these files, these 3D rendered files and these like SFP files, I think they're called. And then I took that actual file. So before this was ever manufactured, didn't even exist, there wasn't even a prototype yet. I sent it to a guy in Eastern Europe and he made this rendering from me from those files and this is a video. He made this entire video, this. The product did not exist so I could see it exactly as it was gonna be. He made these 360 degrees, basically before there was AI. AI video of the actual product. You can see this one only has one charging dock on a USB on the back.

 

Kevin King:

I had a second one, but I did this and then I sent this out and did some testing, like what do you guys think of this? And I was able to get the people at one of these big Apple insider blog posts. They're like, when this comes out, let us know, we'll publicize it. So right there I was, like they thought it was cool. So, I had my launch ready to go. Like I said this didn't come from Alibaba, this didn't come from the Iwo market or the Canton fair.

 

Kevin King:

The idea for this, this came from my head, and so I created this from scratch from my head. I've done that for a dog bowl and for some other products as well, and so I also. At the same time, back in 2015, I launched five different brands at once. Some of them were the traditional find something on Alibaba, change it up a little bit, change the packaging, put your logo on it and then send it out. But this one I actually designed from scratch. I think that's where you need to start thinking more and more about is designing things from scratch, and it's not always about a better mousetrap, it's about what the people want.

 

Kevin King:

With today's technology and with the AI, you can do so much that I couldn't do nine years ago when this was launched. That you can do now with iterations and these renderings, that you could have 20 different types of this and do all kinds of testing on PickFu. You can do so much more now with this. So this was the renderings that they would send me. So I would open this up, these EASM files, and I could play around with it on my computer and spin it and everything and say, oh, let's modify this or let's change this, or I don't like where this is positioned, put the logo over here. So this before we even made a prototype.

 

Kevin King:

And then what I did is I did 3D printing. So I had there's a guy in Austin where I live that had like 30 different 3D printers in his garage, literally, and so he had all kinds of different sizes and machines. I just took it. They followed him and he made this. This is a 3d printed uh sample. And then I took this to the Apple store in Austin and I said can, can you open up the drawer of all the watches. Uh, I want to make sure every watch, every band, fits on here and doesn't touch the light, and we'll make sure the cable fits through the, the fits through the, the channel on the back and everything. So, I had a total like piece of crap, basically, but 3d printed, but it's actually at least something that's I can hold and touch and feel, kind of get an idea of how it's going to be. And then we made modifications. So after I tested it with this, then I went through and I made modifications oh, we need to make the cable doesn't quite fit, it's not quite snug enough or it's crimping in the corner. So we went back and I, I, we made some modifications to it and then this was a prototype. So then they do what's a machine prototype? Um, there's a specific name for it, but it's a machine Like it's. They make like 20 of them before they make the mass run, and then I could actually test it and so I took it and that's what we created.

 

Kevin King:

This is one of the product photos for the actual that I used on Amazon that I had taken. This is one in my guest room and so we just put it on a nightstand and just showed it. They're actually charging three different devices and how it works. It works like magic. And for the listing also, I actually showed. You know, I create cartoons. I found someone on Upwork.com that would do this for 50 bucks and I had them actually said I want a before and after. I could shoot this with photography and it would be expensive. So I just had them make a cartoon and say, look, show the before. Because every product you need to be trying to solve pain points. I mean there's three or four different things you want to focus on when you're developing a product. One of those is solving someone's pain point. So you want to show them what it's like before your product and what it's like after your product. So that's what I did here. Instead of using photos, I used these cartoons.

 

Kevin King:

So I show on the left how you got all these cables everywhere and stuff all over the place taking up your whole nightstand just a mess. You're having trouble sleeping over there, the person you know. There’re all kinds of little hints all throughout this thing. You got a light that's flashing on it instead of a night light. That's all bright, keeping you up. And then then you got the one on the right. That's like you having a peaceful sleep, everything's organized, everything's nice, and so these are things that you want to think about when you're actually creating your images is show the before and the after. You can do it in photos, you can do it in, or you can do it in cartoons and like this one and this, it worked really, really well. You're going to see another example of this in a minute. So this is the way you can do an example of how you can do innovation.

 

Kevin King:

This product on 2015, Christmas of 2015, I was selling about $30,000, $40,000 a day of it at $89. And then what happened is the reason. I and I did a second version, I did a version two with feedback and put the Bluetooth speaker in, did some other changes, and then in March or April of the next year this is before there was Gatita, before there's any or Helium 10 that had the refund ability, and someone posted on a Facebook group, on the FBA High Rollers Facebook group on Helium 10, saying, oh, did you know that Amazon will refund you for damages and lost items? And so, I was like, oh, that's cool, they lost some of these things when I shipped them in. So, I filed a claim. And when I filed that claim for like 10 missing units, amazon suspended the listing and said, oh, we're going to do what's called a bend check. And they went and they actually said we're going to stop all sales. And we got to do a total inventory across all of our warehouses and I was like no, no, no, don't do that, don't do that, I don't care about the 10 units, just forget it, forget the claim. You're killing, you're crushing me on my momentum. Well, I was down about 10 days while they did this quote unquote Ben check worst decision I ever made and that basically killed the momentum of the product. But I was able to bring it back up, but never back to that level, because there's all kinds of other competition coming in. Um, and I sold this on uh, uh I forget the name of the website. Now it's kind of like a sharper image uh, website for dudes. I sold this in the best buy. I sold it a lot of places, but then the market started changing and I was able to ride this for a couple of years and it was good. So that's a way that you can think about doing innovation. That's an example of one that I did.

 

Kevin King:

Now let's talk about something on the marketing side. On the marketing side, you can differentiate with your packaging. A lot of people do that, you know. You could have just a generic bottle that you see on the right or a really nice bottle on the left and put your differentiating bullet points in your image how they're showing one's made from bamboo and no plastic or biodegrade super-fast. The other one's going to take hundreds of years, and so on. These are great ways you can do it in your, in your image, in your image stack, to actually show the difference. Because it remembers, on Amazon, people, people buy, buy photos. They don't buy products. My buddy, Perry Belcher, is actually the one that actually said that. But they can't touch the product, they can't hold it in their hands, so they're buying based on the photos. So you got to remember that so many people skimp on their photos or they don't spend enough time creating the right photos to create the right emotions. People buy on emotion and they buy on photos, and so by differentiating like this, you can do a lot of cool stuff in your infographics and your stack.

 

Kevin King:

Look at another one. I mean this is someone selling a commodity Liquid Death is water, it's just water. But look what they did with the branding and the way they actually packaged it. They put it into a can instead of a bottle. They had this liquid death name. All the graphics it's just most of the cans are actually oversized. Liquid Death is a great case study if you want to go and look at how someone actually has developed a brand on something that everybody else is selling and actually stand out. Now it's over a billion-dollar company and there's crushing. It's a really, really good case study. At some point I'll go into deep detail on this, but I want to show you one of my products where I did this. I had a brand that was originally called Tailwaggles and I made a mistake on this brand. I filed for trademarks to get brand registry and all that kind of stuff and about three months into the trademark process I get a note from the trademark office saying oh sorry, your name, Tailwaggles, is too close to something else. This is three months after filing and I'd already done the homework, but they found something in the system so I had to change it to Wag Haus. So I had to. Actually, I was already in production on some dog bowls and I actually had to call the factory, said throw away all those old molds and those imprints. We got to change the logo and logo and to change the whole name mid-production. It cost me a lot of money to Wag Haus, but one of the products that I sold under this this is the Wag Haus logo. Here it wore bully sticks.

 

Kevin King:

If you're not familiar with what bully sticks are, they're still popular today. It's a dog treat. It's made out of the penis of a cow, so they use every part of a cow to maximize the value when they when they butcher it for meat and they take the penis and they actually make bully sticks for dogs. It's a very popular dog treat. So, there's six inch versions, there's 12 inch versions. Those are two typical sizes, and it in 2016, 2017. I was doing some research of what's selling on Amazon. I saw that these things are just crushing it. I already had a dog bowl out, so I was looking for another type of product to accentuate my slow feed dog. Well, and bully sticks came up and back then there’s Helium 10 didn't have what was just getting going, so they didn't have Magnets and they didn't have Cerebro and all that stuff. So, I had to use this old program called amazing product validator. And so, I punched in bully sticks and look there, I was like boom, big green result thing saying that's a really good keyword, excellent BSR. You know, look at that search 359,000 search volume. I was like, all right, I'm going to do bully sticks.

 

Kevin King:

So I started researching bully sticks and I looked at these. This is another tool back then where it was popular, called merchant words, and these are results from Merchant Words. They showed these search volumes actually are probably not right but it's the best we had back then. We didn't have much more accurate stuff like Helium 10. So it showed 7 million. I was like, all right, all the different keywords are based off of that free range and those are beef bully sticks and bully sticks for dogs and all had some decent search volumes. So I like, all right, I'm going to go into bully sticks as my next product on this brand. So I pulled up and did a search and I see that, um, there's all these different brands that are selling bully sticks and a lot of them, this are selling for around 20 to 30 bucks and it's a pretty much a package like a plastic bag full of 20 30 bully sticks, all for around 30 bucks, so somewhere around a dollar and a half a stick is basically the cost to the consumer for these. And I was like, okay, that looks good. So I started calling some factories and I was like I need to differentiate. I don't want to be just another guy selling 30 bully sticks for 30 bucks. What can you do? What can you make special?

 

Kevin King:

And I started reading all the reviews on all the products and the reviews were coming back with like, oh, these bully sticks stink because you can just imagine it's the part of the cow that you know that area stinks sometimes and so people the it. My house has an odor to it. After my dog chews it or some liquid drips out onto my couch, my dog jumps up on the couch. It's just. And then people were worried about where are these bully sticks from. Is it US cows or is it some? There's a big scare of like Chinese beef back there. Are they Chinese cows? Are they from Brazil? Where are they from? And so, I was like I need to differentiate this product and I don't want to just put it in a plastic bag either. I want to put it in something really cool, and so the way I differentiated the product is I found this through tracking down. I wanted to make sure it was US made US beef, not imported, and I wanted to set it apart. And so, I found this guy who was a classically trained French chef, like worked in Michelin star restaurants and he was up in the New England area and I got in touch with him and said you make bully sticks. He's like oh yeah, I don't, but I don't do them on machines, I hand carve them, we smoke them in a certain way. We have a 15-step organic process that we do. I'm like this sounds perfect. This is like I can differentiate this from all these little cheap bully sticks.

 

Kevin King:

I was like, well, they cost. He said you're not going to like this part, they're very expensive. So, I ended up having to sell three bully sticks, three 12-inch ones for $54 and 95 cents, so 55 bucks for three bully sticks. Now remember everybody else on Amazon selling 30 for 30 bucks roughly. So, I'm like way crazy overpriced. I was like I don't know if this is going to work. You know everybody, everybody always says on Amazon it's all about the price, all about the value. And I'm like I don't know if this is going to work. But I'm like you know what? I think there's people on Amazon that don't care about the price. If you know the avatar of your customer, you know that there's a lot of pet owners that a pet is just a farm animal. You know they keep the dog out in the backyard and it's just a farm animal. But for other people a pet is part of their family, it's their best friend, it's their compadre. I just saw a story my dad just forwarded me a couple days ago about how people take care of their pet's health better than they take care of their own health. And it's true and I was like I can market to that. There's people that have dogs that are willing to spend really good money for their dogs to give them the best. So this is classically trained French chef. That's a good story. It's organic. I'm solving all the problems of the juice because the way he cooks these and he does the smoking and stuff. They don't have all that extra liquid in them, they don't stink. They're organic. It's from the US, I can solve all the review pain points, and this is before all the AI tools existed to analyze reviews.

 

Kevin King:

I was having to read reviews, so I was looking at how can I package these different, and so these were some of the packaging ideas I came with. But what I ended up doing is putting them in a cigar box. So I had a custom cigar box. I found a company in Brooklyn, New York, that's close to this guy, so I didn't have to pay shipping across the US or across the world. They'd make these boxes for me. I'd put a sticker on the outside with, like a cool textured label on the outside of it, and then we put them in the cigar boxes. So this is the six inch version. So there's five, six inches and those sold for 40, uh, 44, 95, I think it was. And the 12-inch version was only three sticks and sold for 54, 95. But I packaged it. So when you got it, you felt confirmed. You're like, if you just spent 44 bucks for five of these bully sticks, you're like, did I just get ripped off? But when it comes in the, in the, in the Amazon box, and you open it up, you're like, oh, this is a cool box. It's got a cool texture to it. It's all about the sensation when you feel the box. There's like a little edge on it, like a texture. The label had like a texture on it, so like, oh, this is kind of nice. So it helps justify in the mind that I'm getting value here. These are premium.

 

Kevin King:

I created the listing. This is actually the bullet points and the title for the listing. All the keywords are in there and what I focused on is I couldn't compete on the word bully sticks, because the word bully sticks, as you saw earlier, was super popular and almost everything on that page is cheap, and so I could do a launch. Back then you could do all these coupons and all these giveaways and rank to the top within a day or two. It's crazy stuff you could do back in the day and I would get there. But then as soon as I stopped doing these promotions, I would fall off to page two, page three. But on long tail keywords like bully sticks made in USA or bully sticks no odor or premium bully sticks, those I could stay on page one for and there was enough keyword depth on all those where I could stay ranked for those and it worked because there's enough niche, enough variation in the keywords where it actually worked.

 

Kevin King:

And so, then I created pictures. I went to a dog place, a dog kennel, where my dog would stay, sometimes like hey, can you get permission from some of the owners, I want to come in here and do a photo shoot with dogs? So we did a little cute little dog with a chef hat on, did another dog holding it. So actual, real pictures, not my iPhone, because a lot of other bully stick people were taking their iPhone, just taking a picture of a dog sitting on the ground or something. Just horrible pictures. So I create all these kind of cute pictures. Remember, selling is about emotion and so this creates emotion of oh look, how cute he is. And then I did a whole series of image stacks to show the difference. Because if you see something on Amazon for 50 bucks, you're like and it's three sticks, and you're like this guy's out of his freaking mind, $50, $55 for three sticks. I can just go buy 30 for 30. So I had to show the difference. Remember what I said people buy photos on Amazon, they don't buy products. And so, I showed them in the box to show that these are big. You know these aren't little skinny little things, they're like big honking sticks. I listed all the reasons people wouldn't buy, all the objections basically, and all the things that were important in all my research. You know these are kosher. You know you don't think about that, for a dog, I mean, but some people. That's important to them. So everything that was important I put on here. These are kosher sticks.

 

Kevin King:

I showed the comparison look, ours are full. The other guys they stretch theirs. That's how they can sell 30 for 30 bucks because they're stretched and they're hollow. I showed look, ours are wide, the other guys are skinny. I showed look, ours has no odor, it's glossy and smooth, but the other ones stink. I showed look, ours are with a knife and there's something sitting on the table there. They're hand cut. The other ones are on some nasty ass machine that's never cleaned. So I showed all the reasons why you don't want these cheap ones and why you want mine. And then I showed a comparison of ours versus others just to keep.

 

Kevin King:

I kept driving at home Like you're going through this image stack. You're like, all right, all right, all right, I get it, I get it. I showed them on a scale, like look, this is what they weigh. Don't just trust my, trust me. I mean, yeah, you could Photoshop this, but don't. I showed them. It validates it. So I showed everything. At the top here's some dogs driving through like a fast-food place and they're just getting some cheap, cheap, you know happy meal type of cheap hamburgers or something. And then I show in the bottom if you want Wag Haus sticks, you'd like go into a nice steakhouse where there's a maître d' with a bow tie on a serving these on a platter and just connotates that image and creates that emotion, creates that feel and helps justify why you should give these a try. And then I did another cartoon. I tested different cartoons, so I had another one go from fast food to Wag Haus Premium similar concept. Now it's still in a car, they're inside the restaurant and you look at the sign there. If you look at it, there's all kinds of details. If people blow this up, I know you can't see it very good here on the screen, but on Amazon if they blow it up, they would see. You know other, all these kinds of like making fun of the other sticks all in the menu and stuff. It works.

 

Kevin King:

And then I created, you know a put back. Then I was called EBC but now it's called a plus content. So I created a plus content and I used pretty people. You want to use pretty people. You want to use faces whenever you can, even though you have the dog use and faces. There's science that shows that's a 35% lift in conversion rate when you use faces. A lot of people don't use faces in their photos. They just show the hands or they show the dog. But you need to have people and showing that they're having fun, their dogs happy. You're creating that emotion. I went out. This is before. It was popular to find influencers, influencer. The whole influencer UGC game was just getting going at this time. But this guy I found him on I think it's called Fame Kit. I forget the name of the website. I don't even know if it still exists, but you could go and you could hire people to create UGC.

 

Kevin King:

I'm just going to play you a little bit of this video. I did not script this. I sent this to the guy. I sent him my bullet points to say, hey, this is kind of what I'm looking for. Can you do something? But I'm just going to play the first part of this because it's pretty cool what he did and you're going to see where he actually sniffs these things. He actually pulls them up to his nose yeah, they're right there. He actually pulls them up to his nose and does a demonstration of showing, look, there's really no smell, and I mean it just creates that trust and that yes, it's true. And then he's got playing with his dogs and he just did a really good job. Then I take a look at my reviews. Now these are some of the real reviews that were coming on the products. You know I was getting some fives and fours highly recommended. I would get the occasional one-star review. Someone like this is the biggest rip-off ever Three sticks for 50 bucks. You've got to be freaking, kidding me. But look, I got constant reviews. I had a 4.6, I think, average overall and it just worked really well. And I had one guy I subscribe and save. It had just begun back then, so I was on subscribe and save. One guy I think he did 86 or 87 times on subscribe and save Just kept buying them over and over like every, every. Every time that he would get renewed, he'd buy them. And he'd buy them in between too because he needed more. It just this work.

 

Kevin King:

This is how you differentiate a product, uh, and how you approach a market where it's saturated differently and don't always think it's always about the price. As long as there's long tail keywords, you can do some amazing stuff. There's just a few more the lifestyle pictures the on the right there's my actual dog, Zoe, when she was a little much younger, and what happened is the guys that owned the best bully sticks, which is the biggest brand on Amazon. They saw what I was doing and they're like how's this guy, this guy in Texas, selling $50 for three sticks? We need to reach out to him. So they reached out to me and they said hey, why don't we partner up? Why don't you actually sell some of our stuff? You can basically private label some of our other treats. We've got duck feet and we've got, uh, pig's ears and we've got all these, uh, you know, antlers and all this other kind of stuff. Why don't we, why don't we partner up and you just, you just use your brand and private label from us. We manufacture here in the States, we'll ship it to you. So I tried it and it didn't work. I actually I need to package it differently. So, instead of putting in a plastic bag. I had these custom bags made and we tried this. It just didn't work. But my other bully sticks because of differentiation, the way I marketed it, the opportunities there and appealing to the rabid pet owner wanting to take care of their best friend, their member of their family it worked. This is an example on pets.

 

Kevin King:

Now, if you want to get some ideas, if you're trying to ideate this oh, Kevin, this sounds good, but how do I do this? This is a really good link here that you can go to actually get an idea on how to position. This is a positioning, marketing positioning. I'm positioning the product against everybody else and this five-step process it's free at aprildunford.com that link there. Take a screenshot of this or maybe someone can post it in the chat. And this is a good five-step process to help you brainstorm through and to know how can you truly differentiate your product. So, I recommend you at least take a gander at that or have someone on your team take a gander at that. So, when you're trying to come up with your next product or differentiate what you've currently got, maybe something's kind of on the down and outs right now, but if you just re-engineer that product and come up from a different positioning point of view. You can do really well. So that's a resource for you there. That should be really good.

 

Kevin King:

Now let's take a look at another thing on differentiation how do you turn a commodity into a brand, a commodity? You got Temu coming in that's selling all these cheap things on Amazon. You got Amazon now going to start allowing factories to ship directly from China under this Amazon whatever. It's called Amazon Direct there's a name for it but where they're going to basically have their own version of Temu on Amazon. That is going to kill some people. You're going to see some people go out of business on Amazon because of this, because they're not differentiating. They're just another me too product. There's no differentiation other than maybe the price, and it's who can sell the cheapest price is going to win, and if you're competing on price, you you're playing a losing game. You're going to lose against these Chinese factories. They're going direct because they're going to sell it on Amazon for less than you're buying it from them for. Let me repeat that when Amazon launches this section, which is basically a Temu type of section, your factory will sell it for less on Amazon direct to the consumer for less than what the price they're willing to give you to buy it from them. That's going to happen.

 

Kevin King:

So if you don't differentiate your products or you're not thinking in terms of some of these examples I've given you, you're going to be. You may be in some high water and maybe going out of business, or if you're just starting, you may not have a chance to actually succeed. You've got to approach this game differently now. It's more complicated, it's harder, it's a real business. It takes thought, it takes effort. In some cases, it takes money, but this is how you can do it with a commodity product. This is a periodic table. It's a really good thing take a screenshot of this that when you're creating a brand, it's a periodic table of branding. You always remember most of us from school, you had to learn the periodic table of elements. This is a periodic table of branding and this is some of the things that all go into creating a brand.

 

Kevin King:

A brand is not just a logo. A lot of people think, well, I've got my brand on Amazon. You don't have a brand, dude, you have no brand. This is no brand. This is a logo and a name. A logo and a name does not make a brand. A brand connotates a feeling. It connotates a message. It connotates an identity, an affinity for people. There's a lot more to it, and these are some of the things. Does the type of type style you use matter? Yes, that's part of it. Does the logo matter? Yes, that's part of it, but every brand has a voice, every brand. The name is important yes, but that's not a brand. You've got to go way, way beyond that, and this shows you some of the elements in a really nice, concise way that you need to focus on when you're truly building your brand, and I'm going to show you an example of this right now on how to do this with a commodity product, with one of mine.

 

Kevin King:

We all remember the pandemic of 2020 and hand sanitizer was going nuts on Amazon. It was booming worldwide. Everybody's freaking out need to buy hand sanitizer. Around April of 2020, this was the SQP report, the Search Query Performance report on Amazon. It had just come out as a brand-new kind of thing on Amazon and hand sanitizer was number six, and some partners of mine and one of my other Amazon companies saw this and they're like we should do hand sanitizer and I'm like no dude, everybody and their brother's going to be doing hand sanitizer. This is going to be like hoverboards, going to be like fidget spinners. Everybody's going to be doing it. And they're like, no, we can do it. We got this, this company in India that can make this stuff for us. Yeah, I started doing homework on it. I'm like, well, okay, maybe there's something to it, but let me look into it. So I looked into it and I used some other tools. This is not Helium 10, it's a different tool. It's a private mastermind tool that shows showed me last week's sales volume and on the hand sanitizer it showed this was in April. It showed 129,000 units on Amazon on the word hand sanitizer alone just that single keyword. And then other ones. I was like all right. And then there's all these.

 

Kevin King:

The Polaris, this big market research company, came out and said this hand sanitizer thing, even if the COVID goes away, people are going to change their habits. And yeah, you're going to have a huge bump because everybody's now using hand sanitizer but a lot of places are going to install hand sanitizer machines. It's going to become more pervasive in society. And I was like, yeah, okay, so if this has a big boom, boom up, it's going to go down when COVID goes away, but it's going to probably be higher than what it was before COVID started, just because people have changed their habits or they're more aware of it. That's basically what this Polaris study said. So, I'm like, all right, let's look, let's look school.

 

Kevin King:

Then there's a story came out of this this kid that was in, uh, in in the middle of the United States I think he's in Tennessee or Kentucky or somewhere and he was going to all the dollar stores, uh, and buying out their hand sanitizer and then arbitraging it on Amazon for those crazy amounts. He ended up getting sued by the, by the uh, the state, uh, for price gouging and stuff. But I'm like, all right, and he's just crushing it. And so, you're all this stuff coming out. And then I look on Amazon and this is what was selling, because hand sensors, all the Perel and Germ Sharks, Germ X the two big brands in the US were hard to get.

 

Kevin King:

And then what Amazon did is they created something called the COVID store and they gated, basically Perel. They said all the first responders, all the hospitals need to have access to this, not you people at home. We need to save this for the people that really need it, that are dying in the hospitals. So in order to buy the big hand sanitizers, you had to go into the COVID store and get authorized, and so it took a lot of the competition away on Amazon. I saw that and I started seeing all these like weird hand sanitizer people are making almost like felt like in their backyard coming up on Amazon. Some of it was long shipping times is coming from China and you'd order it and take a month to get to you and it's just garbage. And you look at, look at the reviews on they’re just bad and they're selling for like crazy amounts it's $11.59 for these little bottles.

 

Kevin King:

And so I was like, alright, guys, let's do this. We're not gonna use this company in India. We're gonna get proper FDA approval, we're gonna. There were some rules where you could at the time, where you could actually make this without going through all the steps of FDA if you did certain things. We figured out all that's figured out, all the legal side. We came out with a brand name of germ shark. We came out with and this logo. So this is where the name Germ Shark and we started this company. It was me and four other guys. I was handling them Amazon side of things and all the branding and all the marketing. And there's other guys handling all the sourcing and dealing with the factories and all that. And then the other three guys were the money guys and these guys put in about a million and a half bucks, before it was all said and done, of their own money.

 

Kevin King:

Luckily, crypto was doing really well at the time. One of these guys was just making bank selling NFTs and on crypto, so he had a lot of extra cash just sitting around doing nothing. So he threw a bunch of that in and we started this brand, Germ Shark, and I was like, okay, if we're going to sell hand sanitizer in this super competitive commodity, hand sanitizer is like one to three ingredients, it's nothing. Anybody can do it. How do you differentiate a product that everything is basically the same? Yeah, you can put a smell in there or you can do a few things, but it's basically the same thing. How do you differentiate it? So, we came up with some bottles. We said we're gonna do a three pack of these small bottles and I tested it on Pick Fu and so I took R3, the ones that says winter there with the green box around it. Those were R3.

 

Kevin King:

And I tested against these no-name brands, like these Chinese no-name brands, and we won, hands down won. Everybody said we would buy this one. This one looks legit, the others are sketchy. And then I tested against the top brands, like Perel, which is a number one brand in the US, and I got my butt kicked. Perel beat me because that's a bigger brand, people trust it more. So I was like okay, as long as Perel is not on the main Amazon site and they're locked away in this COVID store where nobody can get in there, I can crush it, I can be number one on Amazon until Perel comes back. And when Perel comes back onto the normal Amazon website, I'll be okay in spot number two or spot number three, because I've positioned myself, I've gotten my rankings, I've gotten my reviews. There's still enough depth in the market share that even if I'm spot two or three or four, I'll still make some good money. So we're like all right, let's go forward with this.

 

Kevin King:

So then we create a whole line of products. We ended up going. We saw that there's wipes. We're having trouble. We had the big bottles to refill, like the canisters at, like the restaurants and malls and airports and stuff. We create little toys we actually created with our brand. We created like a little stuffed toy you see the little stuffed shark there. We create little holders. That little kind of turquoise looking thing in the middle is a holder for the clip onto your purse or onto your backpack or something for the small bottles, and then, oh, there's a better picture of it, these little guys here.

 

Kevin King:

We created this kind of stuff, and why did we create this? Not to sell it, but for branding and for promotional purposes. So what we did with it is we went out and we did a campaign to hospitals, and so we reached out to hospitals and we said, hey, we'd love to send you a free gift. Thanks for your service, thanks for everything you're doing. We'd love to send you a free gift. So we made this little brochure here thanking them for everything. And then we sent a package of like 25 in a nice like four-color box, like a gift box. We put some of that little like shredded paper in there that makes it all look kind of fancy. Put them all in there and then we included, like you know, there's some kids and stuff in the hospital. So here's some stuffed toys. You know along the branding. And then what did they do? These are the actual ones getting it. You can see the box there and they started posting it all over social media and we started actually getting sales and this legitimized us. It showed like, look, this is legitimate, doctors are using this and they're showing this stuff off.

 

Kevin King:

We create our A-plus content page and actually did some really good stuff with A-plus and we showed how, for every bottle, every package you buy, we donate a bottle. So we had a cause with it, too is we donated a bottle to charities. We created memes and graphics for social media that would actually show play off of different things. During that time, we ran huge campaigns on this. We did actual physical postcards in the mail. A lot of people was like, oh, the mail is dead, nobody checks the mail, bs. We did these physical postcards through the mail and sent them to hospitals, sent them to people that previously bought sanitizers. We got some lists. We got editorial recommendations because of our branding. People love the branding and the mission that we're giving a bottle for every three sold. And then we did stuff like jingles. We actually created a jingle for the brand because, remember I said, selling is emotional and this is a really good study here. You should take a look at this sometimes.

 

But sound is the most important thing to our brain, not visuals. So you can be watching a YouTube video and if the YouTube video is grainy or jumping around a little bit, then you might accept it, but as long as the sound quality is good. If the sound quality is good, you can deal with lesser quality video, but if the sound quality is bad, you're going to skip this. You're going to move on to something else and it's an area of your brain called Broca's area, and it's an interesting science. If you take a look at this from a branding point of view, if you can reach Broca's area, you can do things, really amazing things. Think of old jingles like the Oscar Mayer Wiener jingle, if you're old enough to remember that, or some of the old jingles that you see on TV now you know the State Farm jingles or some of the other ones that are out there. That's all branding and marketing and it's creating these visual images. There's a really. There's a lot more to this.

 

Kevin King:

We could go and do a whole presentation just on this, but so we dialed in on Broca’s area and to use influence, and so what we did is we created a jingle and then we created a video. I had, uh, one of the amazon companies that does these nice videos. I had a couple of them actually do it. I actually had a contest with pick food to be to be on water. I had four different companies doing and competing and we create these jingles and just this is not the best singing, so don't worry about the singing, but the music in the song. It will stick in your head. I'm here to help you, uh, keep your germs away. I'll bring the bottle to you. I've got the germ charge for you. Rub it, rub it, rub it, rub it. Germ charge protection. Peel your hand, catch the germs away. Brother, strength, the best protection, no matter where you are. It can't be too far.

 

Kevin King:

Anyway, this was a really cool jingle that had all these lyrics to it and I sent this to Bradley here at Helium 10, and he watched it and he was like damn, dude, I can't get that out of my head now. I was like that's the point. So the next time that you want to get hand sanitizer, that comes to your mind. And it worked really well. So we had a couple of them. We also went out man on the street, we had these costumes and we would go down to a park and walk around, give them out and we'd go mess with people and we'd create all this stuff. We went to a grocery store and grabbed grocery carts and had like 10 of these sharks walking into this grocery store and freaking people out and just, we did all this kind of marketing to help differentiate and it didn't sell a lot locally but it helps us create the content that we could put out there worldwide. And it really worked really well.

 

Kevin King:

These were our sales on seven, you know, $40,000 on one single skew on that day. And you can see, we just started crushing it and we started standing out, and this is how you take a commodity and you truly make it into a real brand. These were some sales, the first we started selling in July of 2020. We went live so this is basically the first month. Sales was a million bucks on a brand-new product, and so this stuff works, but you got to come at it from a different point of view. So, what I'm trying to do today is just show you a different way of thinking of this. Can you do everything I did? Maybe, maybe not, but you can start thinking in this direction and start moving in that direction, and that's what we have for you today. Thanks everybody for joining us.

 

Helium 10 Buzz 9/20/24: Amazon Accelerate 2024 Recap | Prime Big Deal Days | Walmart Holiday Deals

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 just announced dates for its October Prime Day sale — here’s what to know
https://www.nbcnews.com/select/shopping/amazon-october-prime-day-2024-dates-rcna171355

Walmart announced an anti-Prime Day sale and it’s no joke—learn about Walmart Holiday Deals now
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/reviewed/2024/09/19/walmart-holiday-deals/75289574007/

More than half of US Gen Zers are headed to TikTok Shop this season
https://www.retaildive.com/news/gen-z-tik-tok-shop-social-media-holiday-purchases/726139/

Amazon small oversize FBA fee reductions
https://channelx.world/2024/09/amazon-small-oversize-fba-fee-reductions/

Maximize your brand goals efficiently with goal-based bidding in Amazon DSP
https://advertising.amazon.com/en-us/resources/whats-new/amazon-dsp-goal-based-bidding/

5 new generative AI tools to accelerate seller growth and enhance the customer shopping experience
https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/innovation-at-amazon/amazon-generative-ai-seller-growth-shopping-experience

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

• 01:07 - Prime Big Deal Days
• 03:31 - Walmart Holiday Deals
• 05:14 - Gen Z Shopping on TikTok
• 06:25 - FBA Fee Reductions?
• 07:23 - Goal-Based Bidding in DSP
• 08:16 - Amazon Supply Chain Updates
• 09:50 - Buy with Prime Integrations
• 12:33 - Amazon Shipping App
• 13:00 - Faster MCF Shipments
• 13:37 - New Amazon AI Tools
• 22:11 - New Amazon Analytics Tools
• 23:24 - More Accelerate Updates
• 28:17 - Meet Bradley in South Korea
• 28:30 - More Upcoming Events

► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast

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

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

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

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

Transcript

 

Bradley Sutton:

Prime Big Deal Days has been officially announced for specific dates. In October, amazon Accelerate had more than 20 new releases and announcements and we're going to go over almost all of them today. This and more on this week's Weekly Buzz. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Series 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 and goings on in the Amazon, Walmart, e-commerce world. We also give you training tips of the week and let you know what new things that Helium 10 has that will give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Let's see what's buzzing. As a matter of fact, today I don't think we're going to be able to get to any new releases or training tips, because this was the week of Amazon Accelerate. I just got back a couple hours ago and I want to try and like get everything out there while it's fresh in my mind. Hopefully I'm not going to miss anything, but we have got tons and tons to go over today.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Let's actually first hop into just non-Accelerate related news. All right, let's go ahead Now. The first news story is from NBC News and it's entitled Amazon just announced dates for its October Prime Day sale. Here's what to know Now. You guys remember a while back, a few months ago, I had predicted when the regular Prime Day was going to be. Somehow, you know, I like use some just I used some just common sense and mathematical things based on dates that Amazon had, and I hit the exact date two months in advance, actually, three months in advance, I think. I hit it Now again. A month ago, I was like you know what, I'm going to go out on a limb and try and guess when Prime big deal days are. Take a look at what I said in August. If, again, I had to pick a date, it would be around October 9th. Now let me show you why. I noticed here that one of my products was eligible for prime big deal days window. So when I went in there, you'll notice and you guys probably have seen this yourself is that there's weeks for regular deals right All the way up to October 6th. Okay, and then the very next one it says is prime big deal days window. So first of all, it pretty much guarantees that prime big deal days is not going to be before October 6th.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Now, historically prime big deal days, I think there was another it was called something different in 2022. It was kind of like on the second Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday of the month. So that's why I'm thinking that, hey, it could be around October 9th, 8th, 9th, 10th, around there We'll see. You've got a lot of time to plan, but at least, again, it is now confirmed. There is another prime big deal days coming. Well, guys, Nostradamus Bradley back at it again, because, look at this prime big deal days was. Well, guys, north stardom is Bradley back at it again, because, look at this prime big deal days was announced on October 8th and 9th.

 

Guess what? I'm gonna make another prediction. I think I know when Black Friday is gonna be hint, hint, wink, wink. That's not a great, uh prediction. I think my prediction days are over two for two, that's it. But anyways, prime big deal days, guys.

 

Bradley Sutton:

It's kind of like the second prime day of the year is coming on October 8th and 9th and hopefully you have gone ahead and applied for some deals. If you're going to do it, this might be the time to do Prime Exclusive Discounts. Don't forget, prime Exclusive Discounts aren't free anymore, as we reported on the Weekly Buzz. But whatever the case is, there's going to be a lot more traffic shopping online, and when I say shopping online, it is not just shopping on Amazon for this special day, because take a look at this new story from USA Today. It says Walmart announced an Anti-Prime Day sale, and it's no joke. Learn about Walmart holiday deals now, all right.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So this is a new or special kind of discounts that Walmart is putting on. What date is going to be for these deals that will have up to 70% off? You guessed it starting October 8th. So it's kind of funny. Sometimes this Amazon and Walmart are going back and forth, trying to one up each other and make sure they don't have special days. But I think this is actually good for sellers that it's on the same day, because if you're doing deals on one site, you almost have to do deals on the other site because of price matching and things like that. So when Amazon and Walmart dates coincide, it allows you to go ahead and put the same discounts on both, and now you don't have to worry about things like buy box suppression and things like that. Now one difference, though, between prime big deal days and Walmart holiday days is this article says that it starts on the 8th, but it's set to continue through Sunday, October 13th. Now, this is important because, just like I just said, while the first couple of days are going to coincident have to worry about buy box issues. If you keep your Walmart deals going after the 9th and you have like the same maybe product identifier, like a UPC or something like that, it's possible that your buy box on Amazon might suffer if Amazon is price matching Walmart or price checking Walmart, I should say, and they could see that you have a special going on a Walmart but not on Amazon. So something to keep in mind. First couple of days you're good to go. It's kind of good that it's coinciding, but after the 9th, definitely check if you're going to stop your deal on Amazon but not on Walmart.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Speaking of holiday deals, there's an interesting article from retaildive.com I guess they did this kind of survey and it says more than half of US Gen Zers are headed to TikTok shop this weekend. It said about 43% of Gen Z shoppers are planning to spend more for their holidays this year compared to 37% of millennials. However, going down deeper, it says, in the US, nearly 54% of Gen Z will find gifts on TikTok shop alone. A third of US respondents will shop for gifts seen on Facebook and Instagram ads. I don't know how that's a poll Like. Do you actually answer a poll saying yes, I plan on buying stuff from ads? So that was kind of weird for me. But however they got this information sounds pretty exact. So they're putting it out there and it says almost a quarter 24% of US Gen Zers will make their purchase through influencer recommendations. So just you know, it's kind of interesting how much the whole landscape of holiday shopping has changed. You know, a couple years ago there was no such thing as TikTok shop, right, you know. So the fact that a lot of people are going to be you know, more than half of a certain demographic are going to be looking on this platform that literally didn't even exist last year is just kind of interesting to me.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Next article is coming from Channel X World. It actually has to do with Europe and it's an FBA fee reduction. All right, yeah, I did not say that wrong. It is an FBA fee reduction, not an addition. You know, usually when you hear me talking about FBA fees, it's about some new fee that we're going to have to do. That we're going to have to do. But if you're in selling in pan EU fulfillment, you're going to be able to save from 1.60 pounds up to 1 pound 87 for small oversized products across UK, Germany, France, Italy and Spain. So in those locations, what signifies a small oversize? So Amazon's definition of small oversize is 61 by 46 by 46 centimeters and unit weight has to be less than 1.76 kilograms. And then in Germany there's another set. But hey guys, take a look at this If your product is in this small oversize, you might actually be getting a reduction in fees, believe it or not.

 

Bradley Sutton:

One more non-accelerate announcement this week was done by Amazon Advertising, so entitled Maximize Brand Goals Efficiently with Goal-Based Bidding in Amazon DSP. All right. So now when you're doing your brand awareness campaigns, you're going to be able to specify reach and frequency goals and DSP is going to optimize bids automatically in real time to maximize these goals. So, for example, how you get started is you set the goal in DSP to awareness, you set your KPI to reach or frequency, and then you're going to choose a weekly target frequency and then you set your optimization strategy to prioritize spending, full budget and then you hit save. So now you're going to be able to, you know, test out this goal-based bidding. So, um, I know not too many of you are using DSP, but something that maybe talk to your amazon rep to get more information on. Or, if you're using an agency, talk to them to see if this might be good for you all.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Right now, let us get into amazon accelerate. Uh, this was my second accelerate um, and there was just tons and tons and tons of things that were released over the three days. Now, on some of these, we're actually going to get a little bit more in depth. I was able to interview some of the product managers at Amazon responsible for some of these, so we're going to go in depth on things like the customer loyalty dashboard and gen AI videos and different things like that in future episodes, but for now, let's just give a brief overview of a lot of the updates.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Now, first up, we had supply chain by Amazon updates, all right. So first they were talking about hey, they're unlocking faster delivery speeds that increase sales an average of 20%, they said and now there is an Amazon fully managed option for US sellers to automate the entire supply chain process, so I'm not going to go too much into detail about that. We've talked a little bit about this in previous episodes. Now, multi-channel distribution for Amazon warehousing and distribution, also known as AWD it says it now offers the ability to do custom labeling, allowing you to distribute products in bulk to different sales channels, including other marketplace services. All right, so you know this is something that before you know, like you might not have thought that Amazon would be down to do like helping you, kind of basically like drop ship to other channels, and they're cool with it, with it going to other marketplaces. That's going to be a kind of a theme on some of these announcements I'm going to talk about from Amazon Accelerate.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Now, speaking of Amazon logistics and supply chain, there is a lot of MCF and buy with prime announcements. All right, a lot of different enhancements. First of all, if you are using buy with prime on your website, now you are going to be able to accept PayPal payments. All right, you can't do that yet in Amazon, but if you're using the Amazon Buy With Prime, like on your Shopify, WooCommerce, you're going to be able to accept PayPal checkout. So that's going to be pretty cool. And then, actually, starting next year, if you're a Prime member, they're going to be able to link their Amazon account to their PayPal account so that Prime free shipping benefits are available automatically. Another update was, if you are doing Amazon DSP, like we just talked about, you're going to be able to now run ads on Google Shopping ads and TikTok ads all right to drive more traffic to your Buy With Prime enabled options. All right.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So here's how this works, if I'm understanding this correctly. So let's say you've got Buy With Prime listings set up. Now, if you recall, buy With Prime it's been around for a while. It's so you can have on your website a literal Buy With Prime badge and you are able to see the shipping time. So, basically, your Shopify customers, if they purchase on your website, they're going to get it delivered from your FBA inventory or MCF inventory. But now if you're running DSP ads the cool thing is they showed a couple examples of this is like in the Google shopping. You know what? You can't link directly to an Amazon listing, all right, you can't put Amazon listings per se into Google shopping. But if you've got your Shopify or WooCommerce or whatever listing there that has the buy with Prime, which basically goes your Amazon inventory. Anyways, you're going to be able to see the shipping time, all right. So, like you know, two, three days shipping. It's going to actually show up in Google Shopping Right, which has not been done before, and also in TikTok advertising. All right, not TikTok shop. We're not talking about buy with Prime inside of TikTok shop. We're talking about that. If you run a TikTok ad, it'll overlay onto a TikTok right. You're going to see that Prime badge right there where it'll say like two days, three days shipping and people can just go ahead and buy it right from that TikTok ad and again, that's going directly to your Amazon Prime inventory. So, pretty cool enhancement.

 

Bradley Sutton:

You know, like a few years ago you wouldn't have thought that Amazon is down to like help sellers. You know, sell on other platforms and things like that. You know, like last year, amazon accelerate. The big announcement was how you could have, you know, Shopify integration. You're like that was would have been unheard of just two years ago, you know. And then now we're talking about, you know, integrations now with google shopping, integrations with TikTok shop. So this is, I think, a move in the good uh, in a good direction here.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Another supply chain announcement. You know we've talked on the weekly buzz before about how amazon's really pushing their own shipping methods, and so now Amazon has released a new Amazon shipping mobile app. So you know, with these you're going to be able to schedule pickups from your warehouse, oversee inventory across multiple warehouses, receive real time updates on delivery, delivery vehicles and everything. So that's like for those of you who are kind of like using Amazon now, as like you maybe have used UPS or something like that before. Another update was if you're using MCF multi-channel fulfillment you know, historically I think that like the fastest shipping was like four days, but usually five days or more. Now MCF is going to qualify for three day shipping, so pretty cool. If you're using MCF is going to qualify for three day shipping, so pretty cool. If you're using MCF to maybe run your TikTok shop or for your Shopify website, and that's how you're shipping you can now get three day shipping, which is a huge update.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Now, that was the main announcements for day one. Let's go skip to day two now, which had a lot more announcements. Go skip to day two now, which had a lot more announcements, and the first one was like five new generative AI tools that are going to be designed for sellers. Let's go over them Now. The first one was a Amazon code name. Right, it says Project Amelia. It says adds a personalized Amazon selling expert for every seller.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Now what this new app is going to be doing inside of Seller Central is it's going to be a generative, ai based tool where you can like have conversations with it, like you can say, hey, amazon or Amelia I'm not sure if you have to call it Amelia or you call it Amazon, or whatever the case is. You can be able to ask simple questions like how is my business doing? Which products of mine have sales been down year over year? You can be able to ask simple questions like how is my business doing? Which products of mine? Have sales been down year over year? You're going to be able to ask questions like what is the status of the shipment that I sent to Amazon yesterday? So basically, the things that you would normally do in Seller Central that you would just have to go around on menus to find, and things. A lot more of it now over time. You know it's not going to be rolling out all these things at once, but you're going to be able to start asking this Amelia, uh, project Amelia app, uh, these questions that it's going to go ahead and respond just like generative AI does. Now, not everything is something that I think that all sellers are super excited about. But hey, I'm, I'm, I'm here to just report the news and let's you know, let's give some honest feedback on it and let's see how things play out Now. And let's give some honest feedback on it and let's see how things play out Now.

 

Bradley Sutton:

The next thing it was entitled Expanding Generative AI Product Listing Capabilities to Get More Products in Front of Customers Faster. So this is nothing new per se. Amazon had announced last year generative AI ability to just get a picture from a picture or from a brief description, make a listing. Now, the last time I tested it, let's be honest, let's keep it real. Well, this is a no BS podcast, right? Well, it was not that great and I would never actually recommend somebody using that, because you know, like we know, how important keyword optimization, listing optimization with the right keywords is for getting indexed, for being able to run ads, and you're you know the ai back then when it started. There's no way it was going to be able to ever get all of the right keywords from day one in your listing if you're just using it right now. That being said, that was a while back that I use it.

 

Bradley Sutton:

I'm very curious as to how it has uh, perhaps improved over time. I still don't understand. I guess can't picture any world in which you, uploading just a picture or two of a product and maybe even one line of text, is going to make sure that Amazon gets all the right keywords. I just can't imagine it, you know, knowing what the status of Gen, you know Gen AI is now, but I got to give it a fair shot, so I'm going to go give it a try in like a little mini case study soon. But anyways, what was released yesterday at Accelerate was now you're going to be able to, even if you do trust the Amazon AI listing creator, instead of just making one listing, you can like have some minimal information on a bulk upload file, and then you can create up to like 10, 20, 30, 50 listings or more, all with generative AI.

 

Bradley Sutton:

The next gen AI thing that they talked about was A plus content automatically creates brand storylines that attract customers. So with this, it's actually allowing you to take, like, maybe just your images or your listing, and it's gonna use gen AI to create a plus content just from an image, so like, for example you can see here those of you watching this on YouTube it just took a couple of pictures of some shoe and then now it like put it in these lifestyle setting kind of images, automatically designed directly for your a plus content, for your listing. Not only that, it's generating the text that comes in on the captions inside of A-plus content. So you know, like for people like me, who you know, I use agencies like professionals like AMZ One Step, to make my A+ Content and you know, some people might not be able to afford that. So if you're not able to afford professional agencies to shoot specific content, now you might be able to dabble into this A-plus content. Don't forget that even in Helium 10, we have an A-plus or not an A-plus content generator, but an image generator that you can output in the format of different A-plus content modules as well. But now Amazon is going to have this completely for free. So this is kind of like a cool update that Amazon is going to offer Now.

 

Bradley Sutton:

The next one I think most sellers I talk to, and myself too, are the most skeptical about basically it's an announcement where they're saying, hey, they're going to use gen AI to personalize product recommendations that part is cool and descriptions for customers including the title. So, as far as the recommendations go, you know that that's totally fine. Like, like, I don't think that's going to affect us negatively. I think it might be a positive thing. Like, for example, it's going to start basing more things off of the customer shopping activity instead of just offering customers more, like this. Like you've probably seen that when you're shopping on Amazon, it's going to give more specific recommendations, such as gift boxes for Mother's Day or cool deals to improve your curling game. That's the example that they give. Who in the world outside of Canada needs improvement on their curling game? But anyways, this is something that's going to be interesting for their recommendations.

 

Bradley Sutton:

But as part of this, there was a kind of like a demo, given that Amazon is going to kind of like redo titles in the search experience. Okay, so it's not necessarily rewriting your titles. You know that that was an announcement done before how Amazon is going to sometimes, you know, change up your title if it doesn't think it's, it's good enough and you can opt out of that program. But this is different. It's like if somebody searches a certain keyword, the way that it sees your title in the search results. Again, this is just the way it's displaying in the search results. It's not actually changing your listing. It could change some words around based on if it thinks that it could cause the customer to be more likely to purchase.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Now, this is the one where people are like I'm not sure if we can trust Amazon, you know, to change the title of my product that I spent a lot of work on. So this is one I think we're definitely going to have to see an action, start tracking it to see you know once this starts rolling out. Is this going to negatively or positively affect sellers? Is it going to help your conversion, your click-through rate, or could it potentially hurt it because it just starts putting these random, hallucinating AI words there? This is one of those ones that we're going to have to wait and see the A+ Content. I'm like, hey, go ahead and start using that right now. Guys, I think it's available in most people's accounts. Let's start playing around with that. But anything that has to do with changing titles and keywords, obviously I think a lot of us sellers are a little bit more skeptical about. So let's see how that one works out. Now, another cool thing that you know maybe you're skeptical or not, but I think it's pretty cool because I saw some of it in action is the fifth thing that they're using.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Ai is creating highly engaging video ads. So it gave a couple examples, like there was just like a speaker and then it put it in this crazy background with, you know, like a beach, and then not only that, it actually made a video like with waves crashing on the shore. The other example that I really like that it gave was it showed a cup of tea, a pitcher just a pitcher of a cup of tea, with steam coming out of it. Showed a cup of tea, a pitcher, just a pitcher of a cup of tea, with steam coming out of it. But then it totally made it a video Like the background was dynamic and the steam you could actually see it coming out of the cup. So you know, for those of you doing like special video ads sponsor display, sponsor brand ads this is going to be cool. You know like videos work better than just still images. It really conveys emotion better. And now, instead of having to pay tons and tons of money to an agency or have some special 3d modeling. You're going to be able to use generative AI to generate these ads, so that's definitely going to be pretty cool.

 

Bradley Sutton:

One thing I neglected to mention from day one I forgot was the drone delivery. All right, so that was a pretty cool announcement where they're like hey, by the end of this decade I'm assuming 2029 or 2030, whatever they assume is the end of the decade they said they expect to have done 500 million drone deliveries. I mean, there hasn't been barely any yet because it's not fully launched, but they're aiming for one hour drone deliveries and to be able to make 500 million of those in the next five years or so. So that's going to be pretty cool to see your you know, maybe coffin shelves being delivered by drone to people's porches. All right, that's going to be pretty cool. Release Next up is something that I'm not going to go too in depth today on, because I actually interviewed the product manager for this tool and it's going to come out in a future podcast in a few weeks.

 

Bradley Sutton:

But there's a few new analytical tools that Amazon is launching. You can see some of this information in your dashboard. But one of the cool things is customer journey analytics. It says it helps you spot trends and pain points so you can create strategies to optimize the shopping experience. It says this tool maps an end-to-end view of the customer journey, from awareness to consideration, to intent and purchase. Right, there's going to be enhanced audience tailoring. Right, we've been doing brand tailored promotions for, like you know, abandoned cart customers and different things like that, but now there's going to be even more opportunity to tailor make your promotions to certain audiences. And then the last tool that they announced under this was business planner, an AI power tool that helps you identify opportunities for sales growth. And again the first two like hey, let's go for it. This next one is probably the one that some sellers are a little bit more skeptical on until they actually see it in action, the one that some sellers are a little bit more skeptical on until they actually see it in action, but it's basing it off of what Amazon is going to recommend, that for actions that you might take to help your account.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Now there's some other various announcements made after this. I don't have a bunch of slides on it or news articles, but there was somebody who talked about. You know how the counterfeit crimes unit are really cracking down on a review. You know manipulation and sellers who are, you know, opening up fraudulent accounts and attacking other sellers and fake reviews, and it was really cool. A lot of people were applauding over some of the announcements that they made about how they're really trying to crack down on a lot of these black hatters out there, so that was pretty cool.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Another department that came up on stage was the customer service department. You know the for seller support, the support department, and you know, at the first part, you know, I think a lot of sellers like, oh, brother, you know what are these guys going to say? This is like the one of the most I hate to use the word, but almost hated departments at Amazon. But I think they got probably some of the most applause during their presentation because they launched a few things where, like now, you can 100% of the time do these chat customer supports where you can get resolution right away instead of going back and forth making emails all the time, and this is going to be pretty cool. Along with the live chat, you're going to be able to share your screen, even live, with an Amazon customer support rep, instead of them asking you to take a screenshot, then you send it and then five hours later you get a reply and they ask for another screenshot. You're going to be able to take care of that stuff live, because it is going to be right there with a share your screen. So that's going to be something I think pretty cool.

 

Bradley Sutton:

A lot of sellers were excited about that, and then probably one of the biggest announcements was that there's going to be the ability to connect to specialists. All right, so from what I hear from people that have had a bit in the beta, it's almost like going to Amazon Accelerate and having a seller cafe appointment. By the way, that's like one of the reasons to go to Amazon Accelerate. You can get some of your issues solved in real time with like a specialist, like somebody who really knows what they're doing, as opposed to somebody who I'm sure we've all had experience with, where they're just copying and pasting answers from a knowledge base or something right. But you're going to be able to connect with a specialist and it's going to be able to connect with a specialist and it's going to be way more likely that they're going to know what you're. You know how to fix your problem, because that's like all they deal with, as opposed to they're trying to be jack of all trades. They're going to be specialists with a certain thing, like maybe compliance or something else. By the way, there's a lot of announcements based on compliance too, but that I think a lot of sellers were really applauding about, because you know how many of us have had that frustrating situation where we're trying to get our point across to a customer support rep and it's obvious they have no idea what the heck we're talking about. And then we're having to, like go back and forth over days where now you might be able to get your stuff resolved in minutes with just one person from start to finish. So that was something definitely really cool to look forward to. So that was something definitely really cool to look forward to.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Other things is like generative AI, where there's going to be potentially again I talk about good things where it's like, hey, show me the money, like this is great, let's start on this right away. And then there's, you know, some things that are kind of like hey, we maybe need to take a wait and see approach, but there's going to be some generative AI things where you might be able to get stuff solved with just a bot, kind of right, and I know that kind of like is a turnoff for some people. But you know, ai is helping bots get a lot better. But one of the examples they gave was you could like say, hey, I need to change the product dimensions on my product to this by this, by this, and then that gen AI bot, as it were, is going to say, oh yeah, let me go ahead and take care of that for you, all right, without even having to open up a case, without even having to maybe go into your listing to change it there. So that could be pretty cool, but let's see how that works, all right. So that's about it.

 

Bradley Sutton:

I probably knocked out about 15, 20 of those announcements. Like I said, in the future, two or three podcast episodes, we're going to go a little bit more in depth on some of these. I also did a recap video with Andrea Marquez, who is the host of the this Is Small Business podcast that's the Amazon hosted podcast and we went over a couple more of these in depth. And then I brought on some Amazon product managers, thanks to the Amazon team, and we're going to go a lot more in depth on some of those analytical tools and some of the gen AI tools. So a lot of exciting things coming to the podcast, a lot of exciting things coming to Amazon.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Right, highly recommend guys, if you've never been to an accelerate, mark your calendars. I'm sure it's going to be around the same time next year, maybe around September. You have got to go to this event to like be the first to hear about these, to hear about these special things that are being released by Amazon, to be able to network with 4,000 other sellers. It's kind of like a really unique experience and I had a great time thanks to the Amazon team and thanks to all of you. I met so many of you out there at our Helium 10 booth, and just walking around is really great to connect with a lot of you. So I hope to see you at some future events.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Don't forget, next week I'll be at the seller kingdom event in Seoul, Korea, h10.me/sellerkingdom. You'll be able to register for that event at the at the end of October. October 31st, there's going to be an Amazon advertising event in Sydney, Australia, so make sure to come out to that. And then November 11th, we're doing an elite workshop in Milan, Italy. So mark your calendar. If you're in Europe, that is another event you can go to. So, guys, thank you so much for joining us this week. We'll be back next week to see what's buzzing.

#597 - Expert Tips for Dominating Amazon PPC

Join us for an insightful TACoS Tuesday with Amazon PPC expert Destaney Wishon of Btr Media, as she shares her expertise on Amazon advertising strategies. We explore the key benefits and features of Adtomic, a powerful tool for managing Amazon PPC campaigns, focusing on bid management, keyword research, and holistic performance tracking. Destaney emphasizes the importance of understanding market dynamics, competitor actions, and customer behavior to effectively manage ACoS fluctuations. She also offers strategies for handling high CPC in competitive niches, including evaluating repeat purchase rates and the impact of ad spending for organic placement.

Next, we cover essential Amazon PPC campaign strategies tailored for businesses of all sizes. Discover how to kickstart your keyword research with low-bid, low-budget auto campaigns, and the importance of profitability-focused campaigns optimized for ACOS or ROAS objectives. We also discuss organic ranking campaigns, the nuanced application of sponsored brands and sponsored display ads, and the comparison between CPC and CPM models for sponsored display. Learn about optimal product launch strategies and effective product targeting strategies that focus on competitive advantages and thoughtful ASIN grouping based on budget and objectives.

Finally, we dive into advanced Amazon PPC optimization strategies, especially for those with limited budgets. Listen as we discuss the benefits of using broad and phrase match keywords over auto campaigns, targeting long-tail search terms, and leveraging customer demographics. Destaney also addresses challenges such as campaigns not receiving impressions and the effects of pausing campaigns versus lowering bids when using day parting. Additionally, we highlight the importance of bid management during off-peak hours, understanding customer purchase behavior, and using the refine feature in category targeting campaigns for more precise ad placements. Don’t miss our interactive Q&A session with Destaney, where she answers a range of insightful questions from our audience.

In episode 597 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Carrie and Destaney discuss:

• 00:01 - Amazon PPC Strategies With Destaney Wishon
• 01:52 - Maximizing Amazon Advertising With Helium 10's Adtomic
• 06:15 - Optimizing External Traffic for E-Commerce
• 07:43 - Essential Amazon PPC Campaign Strategies
• 09:19 - Choosing Between CPC and CPM
• 12:27 - Optimizing Keywords for Amazon Sales
• 13:35 - Amazon PPC Optimization Strategies
• 20:50 - Optimizing Bids Frequency and Bulk Strategy
• 24:32 - Interactive Q&A Session With Destaney

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Transcript

Carrie Miller:

On today's episode we have PPC expert Destaney Wishon and she's going to be answering all of your PPC related questions.

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 a 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 this episode is our monthly live TACoS Tuesday show, where we talk about anything and everything Amazon and Walmart, PPC and advertising related with different guests, and today's host is going to be Carrie Miller. So, Carrie, take it away.

Carrie Miller:

We have back with us Destaney Wishon, who is an expert and everyone loves asking questions too. So welcome again, and her kitty.

Destaney:

Destaney and Luna today.

Carrie Miller:

I'm really excited to see you know, to have another TACoS Tuesday with you and ask you some great questions. First question I had for Destaney today is for anyone who might be starting out with Adtomic to manage their PPC ads, what kind of things do you think that they should pay attention to? That are kind of benefits and features of Adtomic or just kind of strategies to get started with it?

Destaney:

It's funny when you have a conversation around Amazon advertising softwares in general, it's always going to be bid management and keyword research. That's what it comes down to in order to drive success. No tool can provide a huge competitive advantage in those areas because we're all given the same levers to pull. But, that being said, I think the area that I've seen drive a lot of success for brands and sellers is having everything in one portal, so like something that we've been playing around with a lot and done a few presentations on is like something like Market Tracker 360. Being able to directly influence your Amazon advertising based off what you're seeing within the market. Same thing as utilizing, like brand metrics, conversion rate data or I know a lot of people use Helium 10 for tracking performance and BSR and organic rank. You can easily track that and then open up Adtomic and make adjustments and allocations based directly off what you're seeing in some of the other categories. That, in my opinion, is like the biggest value add. Beyond that, I think some of the features that I think really stand out are just the utilization from like an ad type. Expansion standpoint is really important because I think with an ad console it can be a little bit complicated when you get into sponsor brands and sponsor display as well as some of the day partying mechanisms of really being able to understand time of day and hour performance.

Bradley Sutton:

If you're like me, maybe you were intimidated about learning how to do Amazon PPC, or maybe you think you just don't have the hours and hours that it takes to download and sort through all of those sponsored ads reports that Amazon produces for you. Adtomic for me allowed me to learn PPC for the first time, and now I'm managing over 150 PPC campaigns across all of my accounts in only two hours a week. Find out how Adtomic can help you level up your PPC game. Visit h10.me/adtomic for more information. That's h10.me forward slash A-D-T-O-M-I-C.

Carrie Miller:

I'm going to go ahead and get into some of these questions from the audience. I noticed a ton are flooding in because they let's go ahead and start with the first one. My ACOS over the last month on a week-to-week basis has fluctuated between 21% on some weeks to 35% on other weeks. I haven't changed or adjusted bids much at all. Is that normal to have that type of fluctuation?

Destaney:

I would say 100%. Yes. The problem with PPC is it's a pay per click model, so that can be fantastic because we're only getting charged when someone clicks. But it also means that if the industry or your audience changes, there can be fluctuations. A good example is, let's say, your number one competitor goes out of budget during one week. That means that the overall CPCs in the category could decrease because your competitor is no longer bidding them up. And if your CPC decreases and you're paying less for a click, then you could see a lower ACOS. So it's pretty normal to see fluctuations, either from changes in CPC that's kind of the first thing you need to look at or changes in conversion rate. If your conversion rate changes, that typically means your customer habits have changed. If your CPC changes, it typically means your competitor habits have changed.

Carrie Miller:

What is your strategy for this. You've got a relatively popular $20 item which is in a competitive niche. CPC is often over $2, giving COGS, my max bid is set around $125. Looking at Amazon's SKU economics over the last six months, on a per unit basis, the sponsored product cost is $18.25. Click-through rate is 0.81%, Cost per click $2.20. Conversion rate 7.85% on one campaign average of all campaigns. So that's a lot of numbers. Here ACOS is 90%, Click-through rate is 0.61. CVR 6.10. And then CPC is $1.23. Looks like a very expensive hobby. What would you do?

Destaney:

I have three quick call-outs for this. One do you have repeat purchases? If you have high repeat purchases and high LTV like maybe you're selling trash bags and they come back every six to eight weeks then this is completely different. You need to view all of your metrics on what that lifetime value looks like. A lot of people in the supplement space, for example, will pay $20 a click and have a 200% ACOS because they know that customer is going to return four to five times and not click on an ad the fourth, fifth time. If you don't have a high repeat value, I think there's kind of two other options you need to consider. One if you spend more on ads, does your organic placement improve? If the answer is yes and you have that dialed in really cleanly because there is direct correlation if you run your ads appropriately, then sometimes it's worth spending on your advertising and taking a loss because you know you're going to move up on the page and when you get ranked in the top eight you can pull back slightly on ads, focus on profitability, but you're going to drive so much overall revenue because your organic ranking improved. That's the second thing you ask yourself. The third if you're not in a position of focusing on organic rank and it's more of an expensive hobby than a brand building exercise for you. I would consider looking at external traffic and see if there's cheaper avenues to drive traffic to your listing outside of PPC, because PPC can be relatively expensive because it is the highest intent traffic we see in e-commerce.

Carrie Miller:

An interesting question that he has, because I've actually seen a lot of people with this kind of question after they've launched and so that product research is a really, really important part of the whole process and just determining if you have the money to kind of compete in those. But I have seen kind of a shift in this because of TikTok. I've seen people launch in really competitive categories but do extremely well because of that outside traffic from TikTok and like that promotion on, you know just content. So those are all different, different things to look at and you know consider as well. All right, next question is from Eric. He's asking for brand tailored promotions. Do you recommend applying a coupon for top tier audiences?

Destaney:

There's hundreds of different conversations we can have and it really depends on your product. I think in general we've seen a lot of success with brand tailored promotions. I think that there's been some arguments that that customer maybe would have already came back, depending on what audience you're selecting. So you're just giving them a coupon or a discount, but we don't have to get into the psychology behind that. I think in general we've seen a lot of success applying them. But you can also consider some of these applications on the DSP side of targeting those same audiences without a coupon but serving them another ad, depending on their purchase habits.

Carrie Miller:

All right. Sean asks what are the essential PPC campaigns that you'd recommend getting started with?

Destaney:

Great question. I believe Helium 10 as a whole we're working on solving some of these questions in the space with a more actionable education. I think for this purpose the things that we really look at is we do typically recommend running a low bid, low budget auto campaign. Auto campaigns do win more unique placements than manual campaigns, but you can't control the bid and budget. So we run them for keyword research and unique placements. We typically run profitability focused campaigns where we're optimizing our bids solely for ACOS or RAS objectives and we focus on our keywords that we know have already converted through our auto campaigns or the work we've done with helium 10 keyword research. We recommend running some level of organic ranking campaigns as well. So we'll take our two to three keywords that we really care about improving our BSR on and we'll run them at a more aggressive, higher ACOS targets but focus on conversion rate and maximizing impression share. As we get into sponsor brands and sponsor display, it really depends on the stage of business that you're in. We almost always recommend running sponsor brands, especially if you have video assets, if you have lifestyle images, but brands don't always have those. We do recommend running sponsor display, product targeting in a really granular fashion and views remarketing. But if you only have a $500 a month budget, don't invest in those and all of these ins and outs and expectations is where it gets difficult in recommending what campaigns are essential. For a big brand. All of them are essential. For a small brand. Start with the first three I mentioned.

Carrie Miller:

All right. Pedro asks for sponsor display, when should we choose CPC versus CPM?

Destaney:

Great question. So there are two very different models and typically two different levels of targeting. CPC is the format we typically recommend starting with, so we like to run just CPC product targeting ads. When you start moving into retargeting and some of the other initiatives, CPM is an option. There will be a lot of people who will post view CPM results with a $29 return on ad spend or a 5% ACOS. But that's not actually that accurate. A CPC ad a customer clicked on it, so you know the ad did its job. A view CPM ad a customer can view it for one second and then purchase your product later and Amazon will give it credit. That doesn't mean it's bad. That just means the results sometimes look inflated or better than average, because think about how many times you scroll a product detail page and glance at an ad. You don't actually remember the ad, but you glanced at it and then maybe you bought it. Amazon's going to give that ad credit if it's view CPM. So they're both fantastic. They both have different targeting types, but understand that a view CPM can sometimes frequently be inflated.

Carrie Miller:

All right. The next one is what is the best launching strategy for a new product?

Destaney:

Yep, there's a ton of different opinions on this as well. Some people recommend doing auto campaigns so you can collect a ton of data really fast. An auto campaign will cast a really wide net and it'll rely on Amazon's algorithm to figure out where your product needs to be showcased. They're going to review your listing, review your backing keywords and say, hey, I think this product needs to be shown here, here, here. It can be really good for expanding your keyword research, but it's also casting a wide net, so sometimes they're not profitable during launch. So we recommend starting with a low bid auto campaign to collect data on the side and then taking all of the keywords that were prioritized from when we wrote our listing using Helium 10. And we put those in a specific campaign, typically an exact match. So we're really really controlled. And then, depending on our budget, depending on review acquisition how many reviews we get we'll start looking at expanding to broad match phrase match. We'll start looking at expanding into product targeting or into sponsor brands video, but it really depends on your review acquisition strategy at that point.

Carrie Miller:

Andrew asked when you're running a sponsored products product targeting campaign, is there an optimum number of ASINs to target and related? Can you have too many or too few ASINs in a product targeting campaign?

Destaney:

I love this question. Great question. So we typically recommend like 5 to 10 ASINs to target. Again, it also depends on our budget. What we've seen if you put in like 100 different ASINs, your budget's not distributed evenly and one to two drive the majority of your traffic, similar to keywords. We also find that if you were to do a sponsored product category targeting campaign, it almost goes too broad. It's very similar to an auto campaign again. What we recommend doing is grouping our targeting by competitive advantage. So we'll create a product targeting campaign targeting everyone with a higher price point than us. We'll put higher price in the title. We'll target everyone with worse reviews than us and put that in the title. Maybe I sell chocolate protein and I want to target everyone else who sells chocolate protein. We'll create those groups so we can understand our competitive advantage and create our copy in our images if it's sponsored display and sponsor brands to align with that as well.

Carrie Miller:

Namesh says for the product launch, should you go exclusively with the core 1520 keywords that you know, drive sales for sure for your competitors initially, or have auto broad phrase campaigns too for keyword research or keyword sourcing?

Destaney:

Great question. Another it depends on budget. And the reason it depends on budget is we always recommend going after those 15 or 20 core keywords, because you need to prove to Amazon that your product is relevant. That's how you're going to get ranked. The problem with that is those 15 to 20 keywords are almost always your most expensive If you're thinking to bid on them. So is everyone else, so your ACOS is usually poor. So we recommend creating those campaigns for organic rank purposes but then creating other campaigns and broad phrase and auto that are going to find your long tail terms that are cheaper, more profitable for you. So example if I'm selling a water bottle I know water bottles can be expensive. Everyone's going to think to target water bottle, but I have to bid on it because that's what's going to improve my organic rank, it's my most important keyword, so I'll create one campaign for that, but then I'll create another campaign where I'll target things like travel water bottle, cooler travel water bottle for kids, right, those long tail broad phrase terms that are more profitable for me.

Carrie Miller:

What do you think about especially for people who don't have good budgets just doing keyword research in Cerebro and instead of doing some of these like broad and phrase and auto campaigns?

Destaney:

I think instead of an auto campaign 100%, especially with a low budget, I do always recommend still typically running in broad and phrase if possible, because you're already going broad with your keyword research, so then putting it in broad match, we'll just go a little bit more broad, right? So sometimes it's okay because it's going to continue to find those long tail terms. I mean, I've seen some of the craziest search terms, like water bottle for preschool kids in Pennsylvania. I would have never been on that, but the person who selected it and saw my ad it's got like two clicks and maybe two orders. So it's really long tail and really cheap is typically what happens.

Carrie Miller:

Is there a way or a technique to target ads at customers by the year of birth? Say, I wanted to target people who were born between or in 1989, is there a way to do that?

Destaney:

With display. Yes, you may have too small of an audience, depending on like, let's say you wanted to use DSP and say I want to target everyone that was born in 1989 and loved whiskey. Like, maybe you're selling a whiskey glass with the name, your audience may be too small and Amazon won't allow you. But in general you can target based off that. Yes, it's just depending on the audience that you want to. How broad you want to go with your audience, I guess, may limit you?

Carrie Miller:

Why do some campaigns not have impressions?

Destaney:

If it's eligible, which we kind of discussed earlier. Check in your ad group. It's typically because you're bidding too low that you're not showing up anywhere.

Carrie Miller:

Does pausing a campaign with day parting temporarily affect its performance when it's reactivated? Is it better to pause campaigns or to lower bids with this feature?

Destaney:

Great question. Huge debate in that arena. If you're hourly parting throughout the day, we recommend lowering bids. If you are day parting as in, no ads on Saturday or Sunday. We've tested both. We don't see a huge detrimental effect. I personally prefer relying on bid management. If you have the capabilities to. I think bid management's the better recommendation, but I think pausing is the easier recommendation and they both drive a 5% difference from what we've seen, if that. So whatever you have the systems to do.

Carrie Miller:

Okay, what strategy would you advise for implementing day parting rules, especially during off-peak hours?

Destaney:

Really, again, bid management is the best solution, is to see where your conversion rate's decreasing and optimize your bids. For that I go on this soapbox every time. But the other thing to consider is that people don't buy the moment they click. So a lot of people will look at their ads and say, hey, I have a ton of clicks at 1am, turn off my ads at 1am. In reality, people are shopping and adding to cart at 1am but potentially not buying until 9am when they wake up again. So a day parting is really beneficial because Amazon marketing stream, from an API perspective, does allow you to optimize for these areas. But also I recommend like not getting incredibly caught up in it because of the length and purchase times. So, that being said, focus on conversion rate and optimizing your bids based off the conversion rate in certain hours. Or, if you need to oversimplify method, go ahead and turn them off if need be, but just test.

Carrie Miller:

That's a really good point that I haven't thought about is that people are browsing and they're saving them for when they're like oh, I can get my credit card tomorrow, or something.

Destaney:

Yeah. My question always is why did they click on your ad then? Because I personally don't go to Amazon unless I'm looking at purchasing something, whether then or in the future, like, oh, I have a birthday party coming up in two weeks, I'm looking now, and if I look now I'm still interested in buying. I just may not purchase until two weeks later. And I think people forget that part.

Carrie Miller:

All right, can you explain the refine feature in the category targeting campaign?

Destaney:

Well, we have some very hands-on keyboard. These people know what's going on in ad console. I don't typically get this level of detail and questions. Yeah, the refined feature basically takes the category and refines it. So I always explain a category targeting campaign is similar methodology to an auto campaign. Amazon's saying hey, this is Chapstick, let me serve an ad to everyone in the Chapstick aisle. Is what they're doing with the category targeting campaign? Right? The refine feature lets you get a little bit more precise. They're saying let's not target everyone in the Chapstick aisle, let's target every ASIN in the Chapstick aisle who is higher priced than me. That could be beneficial, right? If you're showing an ad on your competitor and you have a lower price point, that's competitive advantage. So that's one of the refinements. You can refine by reviews. You can say hey, I want to target everyone that has two-star reviews, because you know, if someone's looking at a two-star review listing, they're not going to buy it, but if they see your ad, they may buy your product. So the refine feature is just a really fantastic way to get a little bit more specific around the ASINs that you are targeting within your category targeting campaign.

Carrie Miller:

If the cost per click is $2 and the current bid is $1, should we wait until CPC is very close to bid, until we can increase or decrease the bid?

Destaney:

If your CPC was lower. Yes, you're on the right train of thought. Your CPC being higher than your bid tells me that you probably have some weird placement modifier applied that's causing your bid to be even higher than what you want it to be. Or you're looking at a different time frame, like maybe you're looking at two months, so your CPC is $2, but you lowered it over time because it wasn't working, and now your bid's a dollar. So maybe look at a smaller timeframe. Maybe look at what the performance was like after you made the bid change to $1. And then your CPC is closer. That'll help you understand the math quite a bit better. So I think you're on the right train of thought, absolutely.

Carrie Miller:

How long does it normally take to see ad performance improvement once you start using Adtomic, using Travis's full bid rule once?

Destaney:

That's a great question. I think it really depends. I think that it depends, as with everything else I'd said, if you're bleeding money, then it's going to be really quick. If you are running everything just to profitability, then it's not going to make a lot of changes upfront. It really kind of depends on the absolute structure. I've seen bid management take 24 hours to make a difference in an account but it's because they were hemorrhaging money at a 200% ACoS. I think the other thing that needs to be considered is PPC's only job is to drive clicks, like if someone clicked they were interested. People don't click into listings just for funsies not we do like as sellers and brands, but not actual customers. So the other thing you have to consider is like how your conversion rate affects your performance. I think that's always missed. One thing I'll see is, like I mentioned earlier, is a competitor will come into the category with a much lower price point. That's going to hurt your conversion rate because people are going to click into your product detail page and see a cheaper price and click out. So when something like that happens in the market, your PPC is now going to change, because your PPC is going to continue to drive the same amount of clicks, but now maybe they're not buying, so your ACOS is going to increase. So that's why it's really important to understand when there's a change in your performance. Is it a bid or is it a category conversion rate issue. So that was a little bit of a tangent, but I think it was kind of related.

Carrie Miller:

A lot of good questions and we don't have. We might not have time to do all of them, but maybe we can just do a few more. So how frequent should we optimize and what is the best look back window?

Destaney:

Look back window depends on how quickly you're collecting data. For example, I have worked in some very high traffic categories the term protein it would get 20,000 clicks in one day, which means their look back window needs to be almost every 30 minutes, pretty much, to optimize really quickly for all the clicks they're getting. If you're bidding on something that takes two weeks to get 10 clicks, then your look back window probably needs to be two weeks right. So I think it's more important to look at how frequently you need to check in. I usually baseline every 48 hours is a really good start and then, as you increase your traffic, make accommodations, sooner or slower depending on how many clicks you're receiving in that timeframe.

Carrie Miller:

All right. How can you optimize bids in bulk or manual?

Destaney:

Great question. The targeting tab is probably one of the best places to start nowadays. With an ad console that's really powerful. If you're using bulk, that is a whole YouTube lesson that I would recommend going to. There's a ton of content on YouTube for this and a ton of people teaching bulk. It's a lot more complicated than just a webinar response, so you can find that easily on the internet.

Carrie Miller:

Okay, for a mature listing. What percent of sales should come from organic, first PPC? What do you do when most sales come from PPC and PPC sales have no profit? That's a really good question.

Destaney:

So in general we recommend like a 50-50 split. If more than 50% of your sales are coming from ads, you're too reliant on ads and you probably have an organic ranking issue or poor organic rank, which is why you're having to rely on the ads at the top of the page to drive your visibility. That's the baseline. If I see that you know I have less than 50% of my sales coming from ads, there's an opportunity to grow. More than 50% of my sales coming from ads, opportunity to improve my organic rank. That's kind of my baseline question. What do you do when most of your sales come from PPC and PPC sales have no profit? You have to focus on your organic rank. That is why you're having to rely on PPC, because customers aren't scrolling to the bottom of the page where you are ranked. They're having to see it from an ad which is at the top of the page. So that's kind of the secondary thing that you need to focus on. The problem with that is is when you focus on organic rank, you're probably not going to have profit because it is very expensive to rank well organically. So you have to decide that line. You want to walk between long term increasing your organic rank and lowering your profit until you kind of hit that balance of I'm ranked really well, I can profit and pull back on ads.

Carrie Miller:

All right when starting to use Atomic. What criteria do you recommend for keyword harvesting rules and negative rules?

Destaney:

Great question. On the negative side, I typically don't negative aggressively because, again, if they clicked on it, it was a good ad, more than likely it brought them into my listing. Why didn't they purchase, is the question. Now, if I am selling an Apple iPhone charger, I would negate Android charger because maybe they look the same and that's why the customer clicked, but it's obviously not going to work at all. So that's kind of the rules I use for negating. I don't like basing my negating off conversion rate. I would rather lower my bid. So I'll throw that out there. When it comes to harvesting in general, though, we typically recommend harvesting based on orders. That's our biggest metric that we use internally. If a search term drove an order, we're going to put it into a manual campaign and harvest it, and we're just going to set the bid that's appropriate. If it's doing really well and converted on credible ACOS, it's doing really well and converted on Credible ACOS, it's going to be a high bid. If it was 100 clicks in one order, I'm going to set a 10 cent bid to make it profitable.

Carrie Miller:

Awesome. Well, that's the last question. I want to say thank you to everyone for asking really awesome questions. I think this was a really good discussion, and a special thanks to Destaney, too, for answering for about 42 minutes straight all those questions. That's a lot to answer those questions without really pausing. So thank you so much for doing that and everyone. We will have TACoS Tuesday again next month, so we hope you join us again. But again, thank you all for joining, thanks for participating and we'll see you again next time. Bye everyone!

Destaney:

Thank you all, see ya!

#596 - Amazon Influencer Program + Affiliate Earnings

innovative strategies from Gulsen Berkin Cinar and Michelle McLean, who are back after five years to share their secrets. From capitalizing on Amazon influencer opportunities to selling seasonal products, they reveal methods where people are earning up to $70,000 a month with no investment.

Join us as we explore the incredible journey of a family-run Amazon business that skyrocketed from modest beginnings to a seven-figure revenue before being sold. Gulsen shares the thrill of launching a new brand and expanding into platforms like Shopify and Walmart. Michelle, driven by her passion for seasonal products, recounts her success with Amazon products during Christmas, illustrating the excitement of spotting and profiting from trending items.

Dive into the world of Amazon influencers and affiliates with Michelle's expert tips on maximizing commission potential by reviewing higher ticket items. Discover how you can earn substantial income through Helium 10’s affiliate program, even if you’re just starting out. We’ll also guide you on signing up for this lucrative opportunity and highlight the benefits, including lifetime recurring commissions and other rewards. Don't miss this episode, which is packed with actionable insights and real-life success stories designed to help you thrive in the e-commerce world.

(Time Stamps) - 

In episode 596 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley, Gulsen, and Michelle discuss:

• 00:00 - Boss Ladies Making Money Online
• 03:09 - Amazon Influencer Affiliate Program
• 03:47 - Amazon Business Exit and Brand Scaling Success
• 10:23 - Influencer Program and Earning Commissions
• 14:17 - First Amazon Product Review Videos
• 20:08 - Product Sourcing and Market Research
• 22:48 - Amazon Affiliate and Reviewer Earning Potential
• 29:02 - Helium 10 Affiliate Earning Potential
• 32:47 - The Power of Consistent Growth
• 34:29 - Helium 10 Affiliate Discount Opportunities
• 38:01 - Affiliate Program Sign-Up and Benefits

► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast

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

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

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

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

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today we've got a couple of boss ladies on the show who haven't been in the podcast in five years and they're going to be talking about cool ways that they're making thousands of dollars in their spare time by being either an Amazon influencer or selling seasonal products, along with a way that some people with no investment are even being paid $70,000 a month from Helium 10. How cool is that? Pretty, I think. Important message, guys. On October 23rd, Amazon is changing the window for which you can look back and claim that they owe you reimbursements for lost and damaged products at FBA warehouses. It used to be 18 months, but now it's going down to only 2 months. So, if you have never used a reimbursement service or Refund Genie, now is the time. Last week, I ran Refund Genie on two different accounts and got a total of over $5,000 back for those sellers. And don't forget, unlike a lot of services out there, Helium 10 doesn't take any commission on what we get back. If we say you're owed ten thousand dollars and you get back ten thousand dollars from amazon, you keep ten thousand dollars with no commission to Helium 10 at all. Refund Genie is now available to anybody who has a Helium 10 Platinum Annual Plan or higher. So, to get an estimate about on how much money you could get back, go to h10.me/refundgenie. If you've never used a Helium 10 coupon, use the code SSP10 to save money if you need to upgrade to a Platinum Annual Plan.

 

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, and we've got a couple of people here that are super, super old school here at Helium 10, including the one person, the only person who has been at the company here in United States side longer than me, and then another person who was one of my first hires here at Helium 10 just a couple months after I got started. So, Gulsen and Michelle, welcome back to the show.

 

Michelle:

Hello

 

Gulsen:

Hello

 

Michelle:

wow, I feel so old.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Well, hey, that's why I'm also I'm wearing the old school Helium 10 logo shirt here to kind of like reminisce about our old days, you know, way back then in the WeWork. Now I say welcome back to the show because there's been a huge gap since Michelle and Gulsen have been on the show the word now in episode I don't know like 580 something or 590 something. Their first time on the show was episode 86, way back in December of 2019. So, if you want to get a little bit more of their backstory, go ahead and see if you can find I don't even know if you can find such an old episode, but episode 86, where we had them and some of the other members of our crew all together on one episode. But I was like you know what? It's been years since you guys have come on and each of you have interesting things to talk about. So, let's go ahead and have you guys uh back on. So, first of all, um, let's start with uh, Gulsen. Now what about you? And you know you've since before you even worked at Helium 10. You know you've had like a family Amazon business. Um, ven offline, obviously you're my co-worker, but we've never really talked about that in a long time. Like, are you guys still selling on Amazon? You selling on other market? What have you guys been doing with that side of your things?

 

Gulsen:

Yes, so you don't know this, but you know we were running that Amazon business with my husband and last year December we sold that one and the first call I received. Now my husband is building another brand.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Well, hold on. I want to talk about that. I didn't know that you were right, I had brand and I want to talk about that. I didn't know that. You're right, I had no idea. So how did you find a buyer for the business? What was it like through an aggregator? Did you use a service or just networking?

 

Gulsen:

Yeah, he was with a partner and um, he was always getting those questions like, um, if he ever likes to sell his shares and stuff, but at the time it was very good season to do that move last year December. So yeah, and it. You know it was very stressful and long journey for years but I'm so happy that we came to that ending and he took like a few weeks refresh and now he's on top of it another brand by himself right now.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, so what did he scale that brand to like? what was the peak yearly sales like approximately?

 

Gulsen:

Yeah, so by the time he started it was about four hundred dollars per month.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Four hundred thousand dollars ?

 

Gulsen:

Four hundred Dollars.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Four hundred. Oh, when he started, you said yeah, okay, I was like about to say well, who is buying an amazon business that grosses $400 a month, like good grief? Okay, that makes sense now. So that was when he started, and then he scaled it to what?

 

Gulsen:

Yeah, the time he moved out that they were at monthly six figures.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Oh wow. So definitely a seven-figure brand, oh yeah, that is pretty cool and then and then. So now he's starting from scratch or like something similar, or, and he's already launched, or he's just in the planning stage right now.

 

Gulsen:

From scratch it's already launched and now, um, this time we just wanted to want it to be more on like brand side. We still use, of course, amazon and we will try to start selling on Walmart as well, but now we're just trying to be so heavy on Shopify, building the brand awareness, and then, of course, the goal is the goal again, selling it. But to me, you remember my Amazon account. I was so like a Grand Bazaar Amazon account. I still have it and still is my passion to find those seasonal items.

 

Bradley Sutton:

But you're not still. Have you been off and on selling products on that account?

 

Gulsen:

Yes, yes.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Oh okay, I didn't know that. Okay, cool, but only seasonal.

 

Gulsen:

Only seasonal and I know you don't really like it when you do Amazon for patient. But that account you saw that it's such a passionate account only the products I really like to spend my time on and not really that profitable, but still nice. And I feel like I still like to spend a lot of time on Black Box trying to find products and then search them on Alibaba, even if I'm not going to invest. I think it started to be like a habit for my life. And, yeah, the last time I found something it was a toy product. I never recommend anyone to, you know, join a toy business, but this one was crazy because, like it was selling on Amazon about like $26, the price to import and everything was about 450. So now it's just, you know, um, making my mind so busy like should I really launch a toy product? But it's so competitive and, yeah, I might be needing to pick your brain about it very soon.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, I thought you were saying you already did this. I was waiting for the results. This is what you're planning. What is something you've already done in the last year or so that really was a good experience? When you just found some random product and then it was able to sell during the season. Can you give an example?

 

Gulsen:

Yeah, I can give you an example. What's so funny is I really like to look around a lot while shopping, like actual shopping, Like I'm touring the Costco, Sam's Club, these places and like Bluetooth Beanies. I don't know if you remember them.

 

Bradley Sutton:

It's like you have a beanie, but then there's like headphones or something inside. Oh, okay.

 

Gulsen:

Inside the beanie there were headphones and the first time I saw them like we were shopping on Sam's Club. The first time I saw them, we were shopping on Sam's Club and Charlie, my husband, he was telling me you know what? This product will go viral. And then we sourced it and, oh my God, it was such an amazing experience because that product really went viral.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So, you sourced it, not to piggyback on the listing, but you made your own listing a brand new. You just found it in Alibaba. So how much did you sell of that product?

 

Gulsen:

Yeah, during Christmas time we sold close to 1,000 units

 

Bradley Sutton:

1,000 units at what price?

 

Gulsen:

I believe it was about $14,000, $14,000, $15,000.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, so a nice little five-figure a month there on one product or two.

 

Gulsen:

yeah, it was amazing but, like I said, it was seasonal and now like I don't even think anyone is going to search for Bluetooth beanie, but we were one of the first listings on amazon selling that product.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Nice so finding products at Sam’s Club in Costco. I just go there for like free samples and a dollar 50 hot dog and stuff. But now, now I know I need to start looking out for products. All right, let's switch to Michelle now. So, Michelle, you know, in the beginning at Helium 10 and the last time you were on the podcast you like, like your experience with Amazon was pretty much just interacting with Helium 10 and interacting with, interacting with our customers. But now you're not necessarily an Amazon private label seller. But tell us what you are now in that definitely has to do with the Amazon ecosystem.

 

Michelle:

Yeah, of course you know really quick. I wanted to say how far back I've been, you know, just to give some clarity for people listening. When I first started Helium 10, my daughter was eight months. She's going to be seven years old in November. So, this just goes to show like how old I am.

 

Bradley Sutton:

I don't need any reminders for that.

 

Michelle:

Yeah, I was just thinking about that and I was like, oh my gosh, it's been almost six going on seven years, so that's insane.

 

Bradley Sutton:

That's crazy, that's great. And then I remember how it was like your desk was like behind mine, so I need to check on what you're doing. I just like turn around, we're all in that little, we work there. And then I got to move to like this little, literally a closet. You know, the affiliate team office was like this little that used to be a storage closet and then it became my office.

 

Michelle:

And then what? Six or been very exciting, and I honestly love building relationships and speaking with different people around the world. It's awesome. So now what I'm doing is I've learned and I've kind of just jumped on ships with the Amazon. Influencers program is something that you don't need to really invest money in. It's more of just investing your time and basically you are reviewing products and then when you review them, you upload them to Amazon and Amazon does all the work for you and you just earn commission off anyone that watches your video.

 

Bradley Sutton:

How do you even find out about that people are doing that, because I think nowadays some more and more people know about it, but like I didn't really know about it until somebody like I don't know maybe I saw a video on it or something but how do you even know that this was something that people do?

 

Michelle:

Yeah, it's actually really funny. So, I was just searching, looking for new influence affiliates to join Helium 10 and you know, the algorithm just picks up and all of a sudden, you're seeing like people selling you courses and it's like, hey, the Amazon review program. And I was like, what is this? So, I dived into it and I just started following and I was like you know what? I've never been one to just like jump and, you know, spend a lot of money on products, but this seems like something I can do. And I did it kind of just more of like as a test and, um, it was, yeah, I got like approved right away and then I did the second approval and I got approved in that and now it's just putting videos up on Amazon and the more videos you put there, the more commission you make. And you know it really just depends on the type of video you make as well, of course, the quality and everything. But it's really fun and I feel like for me being like a really busy full-time mom um, and you know, working full-time this is something that I can do, that I don't have to just like run a business. It's just more of yeah fun on the side.

 

Bradley Sutton:

yeah, like even us, you know amazon sellers, like we all have families, like this is something, and maybe your daughter is a little bit too young still, but you know this is something, is something that you know you got like teenagers or even, um, you know, maybe preteens a little bit. You could almost have them like make some of these uh videos and it's like something super simple. Obviously, you know adult needs to set it all up, but it's not like rocket science where you have to be a pro influencer. Uh, you know, in order to make these review videos, a lot of them are just like kind of like unboxing and how you're using it right.

 

Michelle:

Yeah, you know what Funny thing is? My daughter got her first brand deal.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Oh well, okay. Well, maybe she is old enough, I guess. Okay, my bad.

 

Michelle:

Yeah, so there's. There's Amazon sellers looking for people to or, you know, other people to review their product. And one was a mom who just came out with a kid's face wash and she was like hey, I saw your daughter on Instagram. I would love for her to review my product. My daughter is all about skincare because of YouTube and she absolutely loved it. She did it and I just got another email yesterday from another seller who saw her video on that listing asking if they can review her skincare product now and I'm like wait, she's starting to get all these deals, she's only six.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Wow.

 

Michelle:

It is really cool. Of course, you know you need to be in it as a parent, but it is really fun and I've seen a lot of married couples, even like a husband will have his own and then the wife has her own and they just capitalize on that extra income.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Interesting. Now, what's the? I mean, there's a difference, necessarily, between like, almost anybody can sign up to be an Amazon affiliate but then to be an Amazon influencer. Do they still require that you have some kind of social media account that has X number of followers? And then, if so, like what is that requirement?

 

Michelle:

Yeah, so that's a great question. So many people get confused between the Amazon Associates program and that is basically offsite commission. You have to have a website; you get the affiliate link and then you basically drive traffic from your website to Amazon with the Amazon reviewers’ program. That's onsite commission and you necessarily don't need a huge following on social media. You just need to have good engagement for the first two steps. So as long as you get engagement, you build your, your engagement, you sign up and you get approved, you don't even need to worry about that social platform anymore. It's just like building up that reviewer’s videos and then just letting Amazon do that for you.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, excellent, excellent. Now, um, what was the very first video that you did Like? What was it for? Do you remember what it was?

 

Michelle:

Yeah, so, amazon. In order for you to get approved for the second step you actually need very first video that you did like what was it for? Do you remember what it was? Yeah, so amazon. In order for you to get approved for the second step, you actually need to submit three product review videos. So, it's not only one, it's three. So, I did a dog uh feeder, so it's basically a dog bowl but like it has a puzzle inside for your dogs, um, to slow their feeding. And then then I did a Spanish book, and then I did a I don't want to say dupe, but I did a smart watch that you know looks like a brand name like Apple, and that actually got approval. So that got me three. That got my first three approvals for the Amazon reviewers’ program.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Your style of doing Amazon business, like why do you think this is kind of good? Like it's obviously not for the kind of person who's like trying to build up a brand and, you know, be able to exit like your husband did with his brand. But what kind of person is what your model is of? Like these seasonal products in here or there? Like are you even putting it on a brand registry or you're just doing generic brands? Or how are you doing these listings?

 

Gulsen:

No, no brand. How are you doing these listings? No brand registry. And I think that what I'm doing is great for who is working like typical 9 to 5 that would like to get extra site income. And also, like you know, before working at Helium 10, I did supply chain my entire life, so I'm so close to those sourcing agencies or the places in like. I'm originally from Turkey. I know a lot of Turkish manufacturers. Plus, I have very good experience in Far East so it's so easy for me to source products. So, I feel like it is mixed for me. If you really like sourcing trying to find new people on the manufacturing end or sourcing end and if it's giving you pleasure, then that's great because then the money comes itself. But it's not something that you can quit working on your corporate and rely on those seasonal items.

 

Bradley Sutton:

now, for example, that, what do you say? beanie, Bluetooth, Bluetooth, beanie, whatever it's called? Um, you know, you, you grossed I don't know fifteen thousand dollars, twenty thousand dollars or whatever from it. Yeah, was that all one order from the manufacturer and you only did one? And then, if so, like what was that initial investment? Like landed to amazon, like the price of the products and then the importation, and landed to Amazon, like, how much did you invest in that project?

 

Gulsen:

It was like we created two orders the first order, it's like it was gone like in the very first month and a half, and then, since we foresee it, we had to place another order and we did the same quantity and I think we invested about maybe $7,000 in total.

 

Bradley Sutton:

In the first order and both orders together.

 

Gulsen:

The first order, like both orders together, could be around 14K, but it includes everything. Everything like it's includes about two thousand of those Bluetooth beanies and the import and the shipping. So, we had to act quick so we couldn't really do a vessel.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Wait, the first order was 2,000 units

 

Gulsen:

It was 1,000 and 1,000.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Okay so you have, you sold all of them?

 

Gulsen:

yeah, so the first.

 

Bradley Sutton:

I thought you only sold 1000 units. You actually sold 2000 units.

 

Gulsen:

it was during Christmas time. We sold about 1000 and that's why we were so high and excited. We ordered the second order and then those um the remainders. I think we have left about like 300 pieces left and then we started to get orders, maybe once a week and like bi-weekly.

 

Bradley Sutton:

No, not so yeah you sold way more than like 20. You know like we're talking more like 20, 30 000, so seven thousand dollars to invest. And then are you just doing the regular private label ways to get on page one like, hey, I'm gonna run some PPC and try, I mean like that's how you did it.

 

Gulsen:

Yeah, we were so lucky because we were one of the first listings, as I said, and organic, we were already on the page one for that Bluetooth beanie. But then of course you know how it goes Competition comes so crucially and we had to run PPC but still it wasn't that competitive because we were there at the beginning and we sent all inventory to FBA but then we had to take some inventory back and started to sell the rest as FBM.

 

Bradley Sutton:

You should see me about those. I'll start shipping them for you. You can pay my kids to do that. Okay, so then I mean, that's fascinating. I don't know how I didn't know all of this stuff that you're doing. Yeah, you know what.

 

Gulsen:

Funny enough. Actually, it's not about me, but again, like with my husband. Do you remember those fidget spinners?

 

Bradley Sutton:

Yes, yes.

 

Gulsen:

Yeah, he was also like one of the first listings with those fidget spinners on Amazon. Like I think he has a good sense of finding what will come to be a buy.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Well, how did you and he validate that thing? Because you know like it's different when you're trying to be the first kind of like we were kind of like the first coffin shelf. You know there's not like a bunch of data where it's like oh, I know all the main competitors and what they're ranking for and stuff. So, what did you guys use to validate? Like, did you buy some from Costco and just put it up and do a test listing to see how it goes? Or how did you have the con? I mean, cause $7,000 is still $7,000. You know that's a lot of money. Like you got to have some kind of confidence that you're going to be successful. So, if you couldn't see other beanie uh, Bluetooth, Bluetooth beanies, people having confidence what numbers or what were you looking at that made you go ahead and pull the trigger on that order?

 

Gulsen:

Yeah, the thing is I can source those products so quickly because of my connections. So, with that fidget spinner we didn't really do any drop shipping. We just found the manufacturer and I still doubt it was the manufacturer. I still feel like we were talking to a trader at that time. But we got the products in like in 10 days when we decided to go.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Oh, no, the beanie, though that's the one I'm wondering. Yeah, the beanie, you saw it in Sam's Club. It's not like hey, let me go to. Oh, there's a nice product Sam's Club, let me go ahead and drop $7,000. I'm sure you must have done some kind of research or something to take a look.

 

Gulsen:

Yeah, so, uh, what was really very surprising to me when you go to Alibaba or like, let's say, DHgate, and search for some products, you would see tons of manufacturer putting the same picture of the product and selling them. That time, when we check for the Bluetooth beanies, we only sold two, two manufacturers on Alibaba and at that time I was like wow, like this is amazing, because the manufacturers are not just saturating the market. Yes, so it was one of the insights for me. And the second one was it was I believe it was right before the Halloween and you know, like during Christmas times. It's amazing product that you can put in those stockings and not very expensive, but still, it would make your grandchildren so happy to have a gadget like that. It's great if you're like, if you do ski, snowboarding and stuff, you don't really worry about you. So, we believe in the product too.

 

Bradley Sutton:

But was there a search volume at the time, like was anybody searching that at all in Helium 10? Or there wasn't even search volume for that keyword yet.

 

Gulsen:

I don't remember that we saw a huge amount of search volume.

 

Bradley Sutton:

interesting, all right. So, hey, like that's really getting ahead of the, you know, similar to like what we did with the wooden egg tray in project X, where there was nobody searching for wooden egg tray but we're like, hey, I think this is going to be a hot product. All right, that's very interesting, I like that method. Now going back to Michelle, um, let's say I start my, my um influencer account. Would you suggest the first thing to do which actually is me I've had, because, I don't know, I'm lazy, I guess, but like should is the first thing I should do is just go around my house and look at stuff that I bought from Amazon or that stuff that exists on Amazon and start making videos of those things? Is that like a good first step for somebody just getting started?

 

Michelle:

yeah, so not a lot of people know this, but Amazon has it. Use your phone, the Amazon scanner app, and you can go around your house and scan anything and then you find stuff that are actually being sold on Amazon. And I do that. And when I first started, I did a lot of my higher ticket items. So, like my bed frame I got on that wasn't on Amazon and I checked and it was. I'm sorry I didn't get it from Amazon, but when I checked it was on Amazon and so I reviewed it. And then I reviewed like my sofa. My couch was there. I got my couch from an outlet and my couch was also on Amazon. So, I would say to focus on like your higher ticket items, but then also mix it up and do some mid-level, like $20, $30, $40, because those are what's going to give you commission. And if you start a lot of people focus on like really small items, like $10, $12, you're only going to see change. So, you want to have a mix of both and the more videos you bring in, the better. I would also say to look at your like how many influencer videos are there right? Like you don't want to review a product and there's so many review videos that you're not even going to be seen, so that's something else to look out for.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Like what's the best opportunity? Like obvious, it's like, is it something that's selling really well, so that you know there's a lot of you know people getting on that page, and at the same time, maybe like there's not that many influencer videos on that page? Like, is that how you prioritize it? Like, let's say, you could do like 30 things and you're like, okay, how do I know which ones I should do first Because I can get the most money? Would that be what you're looking at, or is there other factors involved too?

 

Michelle:

Yeah, so I try to see how many product listings there are. So, I'll give you an example. Like the smartwatch that I did, that was one of my like it's still actually selling really well and because there's multiple, actually there's only like 50 or 100 people buying it per month from what Amazon showed, but there's a lot of sellers that had it as well, and so I realized that people were watching my video and then they were going on to another listing and then they were like, okay, I really want to get this watch, and then they were just purchasing it. So that's one way. So, you also just want to make sure that there's demand for it, like people are buying it. Right, if you have a rug and you're going to review it and you go in and like there's bad reviews, it says from Amazon, this product is most likely going to get returned, probably not the best one you want to start with.

 

Bradley Sutton:

My next question, uh, would be is just, you know, to give people an idea of the potential here? um, what are some success stories you've heard about, like how much money people are making? And then you, your exact example. You obviously work full-time for Helium 10, so it's not like you're just sitting in your house all day doing video I hope not, otherwise our boss might not be happy about that but you're just doing it here and there in your spare time. Since you already have a full-time job, how much are you grossing every month from this?

 

Michelle:

Yeah, so Amazon's commission is uncapped. You can basically make as much. I just recently started, June, and I'm already about last month I made $600 and then all together it's probably about a thousand, but it hasn't even been a full three months. So, you know, with and I only have a hundred and like 60 videos on my Amazon storefront. So of course, the more videos I'm going to have, the more I'm going to be able to make. I I'm in a lot of Amazon reviewer groups and people make who've been there for like 12 months a year two years can make at least three to $6,000. So, like my goal is to put as many videos as possible and I'm trying to get to like 500 videos for Christmas, because I know that during Christmas time it's going to be really busy. So, I'm really excited to see if I can get at least up to two to three thousand dollars by Christmas in a month.

 

Bradley Sutton:

How much time does it take you to make these videos? Because I know like they actually don't necessarily need like super crazy professional video production and seven different scenes and Steven Spielberg quality. But it's like you just use your cell phone, if I'm not mistaken, right, and then and then what program are using for like cut it up and then put some like captions, and is that basically it? So, what's the time constraint? And then, what are the tools you're using to, to, to put it all together?

 

Michelle:

So that's a great question. Because I'm such a you know I'm busy, everything. I try not to put as much time into this and you really don't because people want to see reviews that are very authentic. They don't want to see like commercials or advertisements, they want to see real people making reviews. So, I just scan it. If I see that it's on Amazon, I will quickly get my water bottle, or if it's a product of a water bottle, quickly get it. Put my phone, place it so I can see myself in it and make a quick 30 to 45 second review video. Make sure the audio is good and I use CapCut. Capcut is free. You can also purchase it and I purchased it because you can enhance your audio, you can clean it up and you can also slice it up. So, in all, it takes me maybe like five minutes per video per product, because you get better as you go and then you just float.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome, awesome, okay, cool, I'm going to get my kids started on that then. Now let's switch gears and talk about what you guys do here, because this is another way that people can make money without having to invest too much money and that's being an affiliate. And so, let's just talk about the extreme, just to get people excited here. Some affiliates here at the company how much money are they grossing? How much money is Helium 10 paying them per month in additional things like cars and stuff like that? So just like get people excited about this subject.

 

Gulsen:

It's really crazy, because some affiliates are making about $70,000 per month.

 

Bradley Sutton:

From Helium 10? Okay, I might be in the wrong position here. What in the actual heck? I had no idea.

 

Gulsen:

But it's not that, so we also pay for their cars.

 

Bradley Sutton:

What are some cars that we're paying for people.

 

Gulsen:

What I remember, we have like one, I believe, Tesla Model S and G-Wagon and a Mercedes, RV minibus and yeah, these are the ones.

 

Bradley Sutton:

In addition, making tens of thousands, even up to 70,000, that okay. Now I think we have you got my attention already, like I didn't even know that we were at that level yet, and so okay. So, what about you know what? What are the ways that that that people are getting to that level? Obviously, no, we're not going to sit here and say, hey, anybody can just make $70,000 a month from Helium 10. But basically, how are they doing something like that? Either of you can answer this.

 

Gulsen:

Yeah, it is. If you have an audience this is only what matters engaged audience you can be a very popular YouTuber, you can be running a course, you can be a great blogger, or you're just someone spreading the word about how to sell on Amazon and the software that's helping with it. Because we pay lifetime recurring commission 25% and on top of the commission we have extra rewards. I'd like Michelle to talk about them yeah.

 

Michelle:

So I will say, some of our top affiliate, like producers, that we pay out high commission, it's because our program is so lucrative and, again, it's 25 lifetime commission. So, some of our affiliates have been here for three, four years and they're still making commission with us on top of the extra bonus program rewards that we're paying for their cars or we're paying for their restaurant dinners, like we pay for so many things. And I also want to clarify, like we don't only pay out top affiliates, like we have a bonus reward program that also pays our smaller guys, like if you're just starting out, we're actually going to update our program, so you're going to receive $500 just for bringing in 10 new subs.

 

Bradley Sutton:

I think what you know, one thing that I want to double click on right there that you said is like the lifetime commission. So, theoretically, you know, let's say, I have this channel where I'm talking about Amazon, but, for whatever reason, I'm like you know what? YouTube shut me down. I no longer have a YouTube channel; I'm just going to stop this. But I had signed up 100 people to Helium 10. Let's just say it's the cheapest plan, so they're paying Helium 10. Those 100 people are paying Helium 10 100 times $100. Okay, all right. So hey, wait, wait, hold on, I'm going to. I'm about to do some advanced math here. So those customers are paying helium 10, $10,000 a month, but every month the affiliate is getting 25%, right? Yeah, so then that's a wait 0.25 times 10,000 is they're getting a check for $2,500 a month. But let's say, today my YouTube channel shut down and it shut down for a year, next year. Let's just say, if those hundred people are still paying Helium 10, they never even did anything, they didn't make one more video, they didn't like help these people at all. They're still getting a check for $2,500 a month, every month from now until infinity, as long as those members. So that that that's that. That that's what I think is really good about our, our system.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Now, uh, Michelle, you know, we obviously talked about one side of the spectrum where it's big influencers or people who have this big course or big YouTube channel or something. Obviously, it's a no brainer to sign up, you know, to be an affiliate, because instantly they're probably going to start making tons of money just because they're going to be able to sign up people. But again, we're talking this episode is kind of like about making money without too much investment. What if I'm just an average Joe? Maybe I'm just an average Joe Helium 10 user out there I know Helium 10 well or I'm just listening to this podcast somehow and I don't have a YouTube channel. I don't have a big popular blog or, you know, Instagram, with a hundred thousand followers. What's a way that I can scale up? I mean, I can still be an affiliate even if I have nobody just at least get started. But how can I scale up my platform in order to start building up? How much Helium 10 is paying me?

 

Michelle:

Yeah, so that's a really good question. I would say consistency, and that goes for everything that you do, right. If you are an average girl, like we've seen this. Like we have people sign up and they don't have like a big platform. However, like they're consistent with growing their audience, whether they you know what I decided I'm going to be a YouTuber. Now I'm going to start posting YouTube videos consistently and on top of that, I'm going to start posting Helium 10 demos, because I am a Helium 10 wizard, so why not share my knowledge? Or I'm going to start my own community on Facebook. Um, and they're consistent with growing their audience. They can eventually start growing commission, because all it takes is one person to get inspired and sign up for Helium 10 with your affiliate link and then, all of a sudden, it's three months in, you're like 10, 15, 20. And you're already, like you said, grossing like $2,500. And you haven't even done much. And you know, like I said, it's really about consistency and it's really fun, because I enjoy speaking with a lot of these smaller affiliates and encouraging them and then seeing their growth. It's insane.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Maybe I don't even have plans for making a community, but I mean, I guess theoretically, hey, I'm in, I'm in Facebook groups or uh, I post in in in X, uh, you know, like threads about, you know, formerly Twitter and as far as Amazon, I'm on Reddit and stuff like I could just share the coupon code here and there when people talk about it, and even without either, like being an influencer, I could be making commission. I just sign up. One person sees that code. You know that maybe my Reddit post is indexed by Google and then somehow somebody lands on it and I never even touched that person or had anything to do with them. They thought they use my code. I've got that revenue for life. So that's, that's something guys out there. You know you don't have to be some big influencer. If you're just a regular Helium 10 user and you know you have friends interested in Helium 10, give them a discount. You know, get a discount code Affiliates get discount codes that other people can't get and you're helping your friend out and now you're going to you know what.

 

Michelle:

Let me just join, for instance we just had a webinar and Riley was in it and he taught, talked all about q4 and how to you know create a good listing for q4, how to prepare. That was a webinar and now they have the opportunity to share an affiliate link with their friends or family there and who, anyone else that they know who's selling on Amazon. And if that person decides like hey, this was a really great webinar, I, I really need Helium 10 now because I want to make sure my listing is great, like, oh, now there's a coupon code attached, so just like that, just by sharing a resource and how Helium 10 can help, they can easily earn and make money with it.

 

Bradley Sutton:

that's a good point because it's not like, oh, I need to be a Helium 10 expert or an Amazon expert. If you've got the audience, like actual evangelists like myself, Carrie, Shivali, we'll go on the channel like, hey, we'll do a video and you don't even need to bring the expertise, because we've got it and you just provide the audience. And then I wish I need to arrange something. These affiliates are making so much money and I'm the one who's doing these videos and I'm not seeing any part of this. Something doesn't feel fair there. But anyways, take advantage of it guys. Take advantage of it. I'm not getting any money, but I'll be supporting there. Gulsen. Anything else to say about our affiliate program?

 

Gulsen:

Yeah, I think our affiliate program is offering money and also offering a bunch of information and the trends. So, we're like at Helium 10, we are not just like, hey, promote us and get the commission. We are helping a lot for our affiliates to grow. So, some real-life experiences like one of our affiliate’s accounts get hacked and he was having hard time dealing with Google so we were there for him and we helped him to get his account back. Or I was on a call with one of our affiliates chief marketing officers because he was curious about the latest trends and I was giving him my two cents about what they should be else doing to boost their reach, like getting more students.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Haven't some like giving you access to like their YouTube channel and you go in there and optimize. Like you're literally in their YouTube and fixing for them and stuff like that.

 

Gulsen:

I didn't want to talk about that one, but yes, this happened as well. Yeah, so, like Helium 10 is the only platform where you have your dedicated account manager. We are not a platform like your account is managed by a team of VAs or you're just talking to some AI generated chat box, so it's like you work with us and you also have a marketing manager that you don't need to pay. So that's why I really find it very beneficial for our affiliates. And the other thing is we work with thousands of affiliates and we know we see what's working, and we see what used to be working before but not anymore, or what's failing. So, it's good that we have this experience without really facing the actual work. So, it's always good to share what's working with our other partners to help them grow and win together.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So, if you guys want more information, want to sign up right away there's no sign-up charge or no entry fee or anything like that. Just go to h10.me forward, slash, crush it, crush it. Two words, but it's together, no spaces. H10.me forward, slash, crush it and sign up. If there might be a little box that says, how did you find out about this or something, make sure to say that you heard about it on the podcast. Right before I started at Helium 10, I actually had signed up to be a Helium 10 affiliate and then Michelle was like my affiliate manager and stuff. So, yeah, we've come full circle here, but I want you guys to go ahead and crush it as well on there. So that's super cool. And then remember, guys, it doesn't matter where you are in the world. You know we've got affiliates in in Pakistan and Tajikistan and Japan and Korea, and I think the only country we don't have affiliates is North Korea. So, every other country in the world we've got affiliates because you know you've got an audience everywhere there and obviously Helium 10 works in so many different countries. So, make sure to sign up, all right, guys.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So, uh, one more note is where you know Michelle is actually going to be doing like a little mini course in helium tend to help people learn more about being an Amazon influencer, so be on the lookout for when that, uh, when that comes out, and Gulsen is going to be working on the course of Turkish cooking for Helium 10. I'm just playing, but, uh, we'll have to think of a course that you can, uh, you can make for us too. But, thank you, thank you both, so much for uh coming on here. It's great to see, uh, you know people who were there from almost day one, uh, from when I started here at Helium 10, and, and we're the, we're, we're going to be like the trio here who keeps on going to, are doing.

 

Michelle:

Thanks, Bradley, thank you for having us.

Helium 10 Buzz 9/13/24: Amazon 1P Accounts Terminated | Etsy Seller Updates | How I got $6K Back From Amazon

Amazon launches new Amazon Saver private label to help shoppers save, take on Walmart, Target
https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Food/amazon-launches-new-amazon-saver-private-label-shoppers/story?id=113581546

US seeks to slam shut Shein, Temu trade loophole
https://asiatimes.com/2024/09/us-seeks-to-slam-shut-shein-temu-trade-loophole/

Brand Registry Protection
https://brandregistry.amazon.com/protection/dashboard?ref=brnav_to_impactdashboard

Etsy Offers Subscribers Free Shipping While Aiming for ‘Tremendous’ Growth
https://www.pymnts.com/news/ecommerce/2024/etsy-offers-subscribers-free-shipping-while-aiming-for-tremendous-growth/

Finally, maximize your Amazon FBA reimbursements with the newly revamped Helium 10 Refund Genie tool — a resource that could potentially reclaim thousands of dollars for your business.

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

• 01:00 - 1P Account Termination
• 02:13 - Ads in Amazon Rufus
• 03:25 - Amazon / Temu Brushing
• 05:10 - Amazon Coupon Update
• 05:37 - Etsy Seller Updates
• 07:14 - Amazon Export Central
• 08:47 - Amazon 3D Images
• 09:54 - Amazon Saver Groceries
• 11:35 - No More Cheap Chinese Imports?
• 13:24 - Brand Registry Protection
• 14:55 - Etsy Insider
• 16:10 - Walmart Ads Update
• 17:12 - How To Get Reimbursed By Amazon FBA

► 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:

Amazon is terminating a lot of one-piece seller accounts, rufus is going to start showing Amazon ads, Esty is adding new features to its Prime-like service. These stories and more plus State of the End, to find out how I'm getting $6,000 back on a couple of accounts from Amazon for free 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 new stories that are going on in the Amazon, Walmart, TikTok shop and e-commerce world. We also give you training tips of the week and let you know what new features there are at Helium 10 that will give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Let's see what's buzzing. I'd said a few weeks ago that, leading up to Accelerate, usually there's not much articles and, yeah, for a couple of weeks there were slim pickings for news, but today, all of a sudden, a bunch of stuff coming out of the woodwork. So we've got a number of stories to get into. Let's go ahead and hop right into it.

 

Bradley Sutton:

First story is just something you probably saw on LinkedIn all over the place the last week. I'll go ahead and highlight a previous podcast, guest LinkedIn, right here. Grace, she talked about it here where it's hey, there was a message that went out to a lot of 1P sellers that said hey, we're going to stop sourcing products. This is from Amazon. You know the way that 1P works. You know like Vendor Central is. Amazon actually buys product from vendors and then you see it says shipped and sold by Amazon. So, effective November 9th, our vendor relationship will be terminated. So a lot of people had noticed and gotten these messages. So that means it might be time, as Grace says here, to hey start getting your ducks in a row for those who want to keep selling Amazon and move to three P. You know seller central. Um, you know some of you might reach out to an agency to do that or just start on your own. Obviously, hey, if you, if you're going to be controlling more of your own stuff instead of Amazon, definitely going to be really intense help. So make sure to utilize our tools to help you with that transition to controlling more of your own listings and things like that. Did anybody out there get a notice? I'm just curious Were your sales down or why do you think Amazon sent that notice?

 

Bradley Sutton:

Next article up here is from Amazon Advertising, a little message that came out early last week and it said sponsored ads may begin appearing in Rufus-related placements. Okay, rufus related placements. Okay, rufus, is that AI tool that it's still tripping out for me? Like I don't think I can use it as a buyer. I saw a couple listings this week where it says the reviews state this and I'm like there's only one review here. It doesn't even say anything, it's only a rating. Like how could the review state something? But anyways, that's a side note for now. It says Amazon ads might start showing up in Rufus related placements. It says Rufus may generate accompanying text based on the context of the conversation. But here's the kicker your campaign reports won't include Rufus metrics. I guess you won't even know what's showing up in Rufus or not. So just you know, I haven't seen it in the wild yet. Again, I'm not using Rufus too much as a buyer, so maybe it is showing up out there, but that's going to be interesting. What part of this is going to be showing up in ads? And, like, how is it going to display if this is supposed to be an organic experience to help the seller or to help the buyers. We'll see, I'm sure, in the coming weeks. I'm sure Amazon Accelerate some things might be announced about that in the future.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Now, you know, a common thing that comes up every couple of years is brushing. So for those who don't know, brushing is what happens when all of a sudden you start getting these Amazon packages or other packages and you didn't even order it. And usually what happens is these you know sellers out there on Amazon, other platforms. They want to build up the reviews. So they get, like these you know fake buyer accounts. They have addresses and they just send to you know free product, to, to to people out there so that they can, you know, set those accounts up to leave them fake reviews. Right now this seems to be making a case, or a comeback.

 

Bradley Sutton:

This news nationnow.com article says that, hey, more Americans are receiving delivered package containing goods they didn't order and this is a scam known as brushing. Now something interesting says here in Illinois, one family told a local TV news station they receive one or two packages a day from Temu. So it looks like Temu is now getting in, or Temu sellers are getting in on brushing and so they said at first the constant deliveries were like experiencing Christmas every day. But then over time the family said the daily delivery simply became too much. Another customer, like a woman in Minnesota it says she received a box full of baby reveal balloons that she didn't order Packages delivered from Amazon and also included cupcake stands she didn't order. So like people are just getting random products here and there, didn't order. So like people are just getting random products here and there. Now you know sellers or amazon has said, hey, if you get brushing packages, first make sure that it's not just like a friend or relative giving you a gift you didn't know about, but says, hey, report the delivered package to the company, include the number of packages were delivered, along with the tracking number from the shipping label and any other information that could be pertinent, and that amazon investigate this. So I'm not sure how you can report it with Temu, but Amazon has a availability to report brushing scams. So something that came up early last week on your dashboard, if you in case you missed it, is the duration for coupons is going to be updated, all right. So, starting in last week, the maximum duration of three different kinds of coupons are going to be changed from 90 days, which is previously the max you could do, to now for standard coupons 30 days, reorder coupons 180 days, subscribe and save coupons 365 days.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Next article is actually from payments.com, from Etsy says Etsy's new search tools aim to elevate quality listings and enhance seller success. All right, so now you know, Etsy has been trying to make a push to become a little bit, I guess, more relevant in the, the e-commerce game. And now that they have, uh, it says we are optimizing our search results to showcase a broader range of items for more sellers. We also want to make it easier and more fun to explore the depth our marketplace has to offer. And they say, hey, these changes that they've been making for Etsy listings have led to approximately 70% of shops on Etsy having more visibility in search. And sellers also now have a Etsy search visibility page and this basically gives sellers more insights into recommendations on how they appear in search. And they said, hey, you know, sellers have told us they want more transparency into what goes into Etsy search. So, guys, if you haven't, if you're selling on Etsy like myself, I haven't looked at this thing you probably should go in and look for your Etsy search visibility page. Get more information on this link to this article here that we have in the comments below. But you know you got to keep up on whatever platform you're selling on. Obviously, with Amazon you've got Helium 10 at the forefront giving you all kinds of tools, and Amazon itself is giving you tools for how to show up and search better. But don't sleep on these other platforms as well. You got to go on these other platforms to make sure that you still stay relevant and Etsy is trying to make some moves out there in e-commerce and so you can benefit from it.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Going back to Amazon, actually going to Europe, now there's an article released by Amazon says Amazon launches Export Central, allowing sellers to export to 39 countries in Europe with just three clicks. All right, you know. So Amazon is not in. There's not an Amazon marketplace in every country. You know you've got Spain and UK and France and some of the major ones and some of the newer ones like Sweden and Netherlands, Belgium, et cetera, but now you can ship to those other countries, all right. So this article says sellers can reach millions of customers even in countries without an Amazon store. Today, amazon announced the launch of our Export Central tool, which allows sellers who are part of MFN Merchant Fulfilled Network to expand their reach to customers in 39 countries in Europe. Now, some of these you know places that don't have Amazon stores as mentioned here, like Austria, Portugal and Greece. Now you're going to be able to ship there from your inventory, that is, in your existing marketplaces, like UK and Germany, et cetera. Now this is going to be available to all sellers, even if they're not even FBA. If you're just part of the Merchant Fulfilled Network or FBA, you'll be able to utilize this service. Now FBA sellers are automatically enrolled into this program at no extra cost, and says that, hey, sellers who have enabled export from their EU stores have seen an average sales uplift of up to 10%. So if you guys are selling in Europe, take a look at this article that I have linked below and check your own Seller Central to see if you're enrolled in it and the implications if you're not, and, if you are, and see if it's right for you and let me know how it works out for you.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Now, going back to the Seller Central dashboard, there was another update last week. It talks about uploading 3D models to help drive conversions. All right. So in some categories, such as home furniture, consumer electronics, shoes and eyewear categories, it actually supports 3D content and so you can go to Catalog in your Seller Central, hit Upload Images and then go to the Image Manager tab and then now there is going to be those products you have eligible for 3D. You can select your product and then check for the Register Brand Owner icon and then on the right page it says go to 3D models and select upload 3D model. All right, so you know, for some of these categories, you know having a 3D image there is very good for helping you know drive conversion. So take a look in Seller Central if you are eligible for that, and then obviously, your next step is you know there's a button there that talks about well, what are the 3D model? You know requirements for getting you know these images up there and you'll be able to get that information.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Next article is from ABC News and at first glance it might not seem like it's impactful for Amazon sellers. Let me explain why I'm including this article. It says Amazon launches new Amazon saver private label to help shop shoppers save. Take on Walmart and Target. So you know how Walmart and Target have like their own brands. You know, like Costco's got Kirkland right. Well, amazon now is going to have Amazon saver right. Almost looks like Target products because it's all red here, but basically what the definition is it says Amazon's new private label brand, amazon saver, will offer an array of grocery staples, from crackers and cookies to canned food and condiments, and most Amazon saver items will be priced at $1,000. Under $5 and prime members will get an additional 10% off of these products.

 

Bradley Sutton:

All right, so you might be wondering like well, that's terrible. Like, if I'm selling in this category, I'm never going to be able to sell again with these cheap products. But here, here's why I put this is Amazon historically has not done great in the grocery category. You know, like Walmart, I think, has them beat there. But then if Amazon is providing more of these cheaper products, you know like some of the products here is pancake syrup and sweet peas and coffee creamer and things like that for cheap, if more people are looking, are going to, you know, go ahead and start buying those things. Well, maybe you are in the grocery category and you have some other products, like some Korean snacks or Vita cup coffee out there, and, and maybe the people who wouldn't have bought your product just by itself. But now they're like, hey, I'm buying groceries anyways, let me go ahead and add these others to the cart. That's how I think it could potentially help Amazon sellers who are selling in the grocery category.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Next article is from asiatimes.com and it's entitled us seeks to slam shut sheen and Temu trade loophole. So this is talking about the, the uh de minimis trade loophole hole that allows Chinese e-commerce firms like sheen, Temu and others to not have to pay tariffs. And then, you know, it allows them to just like ship stuff to the us where sellers are paying like three, four dollars and there's no tariffs, no, nothing, and that's why team machine are so popular, that's why Amazon is even opening this up, but there's some, uh, us representatives uh who are calling on us president to try to end this loophole. All right, so you know, check out this article if you want to go into into details. But a lot of us-based sellers probably would like that, because they're like man, how are we going to compete with some of these Temu products where it's just factory shipping direct? They don't have to ship their item to FBA? Temu has like minimal fees, and so that's why you know like you'll see a coffin shelf for like 10 bucks. I haven't seen my sales go down. You know too much, but you know other sellers might be affected by it.

 

Bradley Sutton:

But an interesting thing that this article said was it quoted a professor at Shanghai University who said that if this is tightened, this loophole it actually could long-term benefit Chinese manufacturers by pushing them up the value ladder, it says. It said hey, if they tighten this rule in the future, they're going to have to change their strategy from selling low-priced items to high-quality ones. This is going to create new opportunities for many Chinese consumer brands. So what do you guys think out there? Do you want the US to close this loophole or do you feel like this Chinese professor says? You know what that actually could cause Chinese companies to up their game and be even more competitive in the future? I'm kind of leaning personally on the let's just close this loophole and make it a fair playing ground between US sellers and foreign sellers. But curious to see what you guys think. Let me know in the comments below.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Next article is not really an article but it is again highlighting a former podcast guest here, leo Segovia. In his LinkedIn post he said he reminded sellers hey, you guys can actually see how many infringement and copycat attempts are on your listings, all right, so he showed some of them. He had like 2,000 attempts in the last six months on his products and 151 in September. This is like what's happening is like people trying to do something to your listing or create listings that copy yours, et cetera, et cetera. So he gave a link here that you guys can go to in order to see this. Like, this is not some special link. Everybody has access to it, but most of you probably didn't even realize you had it. So check the links in the comments section of this podcast and you'll be able to go to your dashboard. All right, it says it's called the Impact Dashboard, proactive Protections.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Here's one of my accounts, the how Cool Is that? For Project X. I stay under the radar and I don't sell in niches that are super, highly competitive and that kind of keeps me away from some of those attempts. You know like, right, like if I'm trying to sell a product that's selling 500 units a day, I guarantee it's probably like Leo is going to have thousands of people trying, bad actors trying to attack me. But take a look, you know, like for me, from April to September, I've only had 110 cases, total for 2024. I've had 410, but still that's kind of crazy. For just my coffin shelves and an egg trace, 410 people have tried to do something. But that probably pales into comparison to some of you out there who have much bigger accounts than the. How cool is that account?

 

Bradley Sutton:

Next article, going back to payments.com and going back to Etsy, it says Etsy offers subscribers free shipping while aiming for tremendous growth. Like I said, you've been seeing signs that Etsy is trying to like, you know, like hey, I see Amazon, Walmart, TikTok shop pulling away. We got to, we got to catch up Now. First of all, the funny thing is, if you read this article, it says CEO and CFO of Etsy said at a conference that Etsy seeks to distinguish itself from rivals like Amazon. But one of the company's recently launched initiatives is Etsy Insider, a paid subscription that will provide free shipping to members. I don't know how that's distinguishing. You're literally doing the exact same thing as Amazon, which is fine. I mean you should do free shipping, but it's funny that that statement came right after. Oh, we're trying to be different, you know, um than amazon. But one thing they are unique on is check this out something that does distinguish them from amazon, says. Other new efforts include an Etsy gift mode that lets shoppers send a message to the recipient before the gift even arrives. A plan to raise the percentage of shoppers using the Etsy mobile app from 40 to 75. All right, so take a look at this article. There's more interesting things, but, yeah, Etsy's trying to go ahead and up their game.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Next article for those of you selling on Walmart.com you probably got this email from Walmart connect and it says unlock new brand term strategies to help increase your share of voice. So Walmart connect brand term targeting is now available for sponsored search automatic campaigns, in addition to exact match keyword campaigns, which launched earlier this year. Says that brand term targeting helps you to increase brand visibility by empowering you to strategically bid on keywords associated with your brand and those of your competitors. All right, so take a look at that email. If you guys are selling on Walmart and do Walmart advertising, I guarantee you've got that email somewhere. Check your junk if not, but make sure that you know what's going on. What's the new features? Walmart is always adding new features to its advertising platform and we implement as many as possible as well. For those who want help with Walmart advertising, we have atomic for Walmart, we have, obviously, research tools for Walmart, but make sure you're taking advantage of these things to you know. Keep your share of voice high on the Walmart platform.

 

Bradley Sutton:

All right, that's it for the news this week, guys, but now I've got a question for you how to get reimbursed by Amazon FBA. This is a question that a lot of sellers are asking, because they got that notice they heard here on the Weekly Buzz. That window is closing could cost you thousands of dollars. All right. So you've probably seen ads from different services from saying, hey, we'll, we'll help you get those. You got to take action now, which is true, but almost all of those ads are for companies that are going to take 20, 25% or more of any money they find for you.

 

Bradley Sutton:

How would you like to know how to get your money back for free? Now, don't get me wrong. Even Helium 10 has a service where we'll do the work, like all of the work, for you. It's called MRS, and if you're a big company who's owed maybe tens of thousands of dollars and you don't have time to submit all the claims yourself, yeah, we'll go ahead and do it for you for a fee. Go to h10.me/mrs, and you'll get a quote on that. But what I'm about to show you is 100% free for Helium 10 Platinum annual members and above, and this is the best way to get Amazon FBA to reimburse you money that you are owed. And it's your last chance to do it, because in October 23rd, that timeline is going to go away, costing you potentially thousands. In October 23rd, that timeline is going to go away, costing you potentially thousands.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Let me show you a couple of the accounts I have access to and how I'm going to be able to get over $6,000 in just a couple of counts back from Amazon FBA, how I'm getting them to reimburse me, all right. So, first of all, the next time you sign into your Helium 10 dashboard, take a look at this banner on the top. All right, it'll say, hey, it's your last chance to claim. I look at this. This is one of my accounts here. I got $5,000 because I haven't been keeping up to date with my Refund Genie. So for those of you who have never used a FBA reimbursement service, you're going to see probably a big number right there. All right, so go there and hit open Refund Genie. Now, when you hit that it's going to go up to your regular Refund Genie dashboard. But you need to look at the stars, all right. So in this account I've actually got a few accounts connected and actually I had more than $6,000 original. I've already refund. I've already got a lot refunded by. I kept a few here's just so I can show you guys the process. But I've got like three accounts connected here. So let's go ahead and open up this first one creative, lg, household and healthcare.

 

Bradley Sutton:

But what you guys need to do is look for the ones that say loss and damage and has a star next to it. Forget about all the old ones. If you see that there now really, really quick. If you guys don't have access to this, it means you're probably on like a like a Helium 10 free plan or starter plan or maybe just a platinum monthly. All you need this it's this is a completely revamped Refund Genie tool. So that's why this is like actually our training tip of the week and our Helium 10 new feature request. This is a newly revamped tool to get this. You can have access to it now if you're a platinum annual above. So if you're on a platinum monthly um. You can just upgrade to a platinum annual and you'll get instant access to this.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So, anyways, what I'm going to do right here is click on this EU one. So I'm going to show you one from EU. I click details on one of these ones that have star, and then now I have all the marketplaces show up in this account. I'm selling in Germany, Spain, France, Italy, UK, Sweden and Poland, and so let's go right here to the UK one. All right, so now I have to open up seller central into the UK account. So go ahead, I'm going to go ahead and do that right now.

 

Bradley Sutton:

And then what I need to do is I'm going to hit help and then go to get help and resources, and then now this is different for different people, but sometimes on your page you'll see a widget that says inventory lost in FBA warehouse. All right, that's what you have to click on to get your amazon reimbursement from Amazon FBA. But if you don't see that, you can just hit my issue is not listed and then just type in investigate inventory missing in FBA warehouse, and then it's going to come up. What's about to come up right here? If I hit this button, it's basically just a FN SKU button and then now all I have to do is copy the ASIN or the FN SKU. I should say, and this one is going to be a potential refund of 600 euros, I'm going to get 600 euros back in like a couple seconds here, and then I'm going to hit continue. Once I paste the ASIN or the FN SKU into, I either get the money back instantly or I have to open up a case, and so in this one I'm going to open up a case because this was 600 euros worth and so they require a case to be open. So I hit create case and I create the case and they're going to get me back that money probably within a couple of days.

 

Bradley Sutton:

I go back to Helium 10 and then I hit processed. And then let's go ahead and go on another one. Let me just find one of these smaller ones Like here's, one that is only three items and 28 euros, all right, so let's go ahead and copy this one. Let's go to Amazon. I'm going to go back to get help with a new issue. I hit inventory loss and FBA warehouse paste the FN skew. I hit continue and let's see what it says. Boom goes a dynamite right here. You remember how Helium 10 told me that I was owed three units and 28 euros. Well, look what Amazon just told me. In this case, yes, you are right, three units reimbursable. These items have been processed for reimbursement. I'm going to get that money. I just made 28 euros in about five seconds here. So I'm going to go one by one on all of these cases and I'm going to get hundreds thousands of dollars back on this one account.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Let me just show how it looks in a US account. So I'm back here on the Refund Genie page and here's one of my North American accounts. It says Dial Cash let's go ahead and hit the details here and here we go. And it says US I got nine lost items, potential refund of $1,223. Oh, my goodness gracious. Again, I need to go to the correct seller central account and then I hit the help button and I hit get help and resources. And then how do I ask for reimbursement from Amazon FBA? Let me go ahead. And oh my goodness, let me open up this one. Here's one where there's five conference chairs that looks like Amazon lost and that's a total of $1,100. Oh, my goodness gracious, I'm going to copy that FN skew and go ahead and paste it over here.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Inventory loss and FBA warehouse. Let's paste that FN skew, hit continue and let's see what Amazon says. I almost like want a drum roll right here or something. Boom, it says, hey, this you know, probably cause it's a thousand dollars I'm about to get back in one click. It says here well, we opened up a case and this can be transferred to an associate and there's a case already open, but I guarantee I'm going to get that money back.

 

Bradley Sutton:

I everything that the new Refund Genie has been showing, I've been getting it back a hundred percent of the time. Sometimes even more I'm getting back than Refund Genie. Let's go ahead and do one of these smaller ones that they can refund me instantly on. Here is one product that is for $29.99. Let's go ahead and copy this FN SKU over. I'm going to hit get help with a new issue Inventory loss in FBA warehouse. I paste the FN SKU, I hit continue and let's see if Amazon instantly refunds me. Boom, there it is.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Remember Helium 10 said I was owed one unit and Amazon says you are absolutely correct. Allow four to five days for this reimbursement to come into this account. So, as you can see I've got a lot more I have to do. I said $6,000. It's actually going to be across all my accounts about $8,000. And that's in two of my accounts. I've already been keeping up with the Refund Genie so it probably would have been been over $10,000 for me if I wasn't. But, guys, this is money in your bank account.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Now, how much can you possibly get? It depends. If you've only been selling for a couple of months and you've sold maybe $20,000, amazon might owe you $20 or $100 or something like that. Probably not that much. But if you've been selling for 18 months and you're a six figure seller, you could be owed thousands of dollars. You know, potentially we are a seven figure seller. It's almost guaranteed If you've never done a audit, you it's almost guaranteed that you're owed thousands of dollars by Amazon of what they owe to you. And Refund Genie can help you know what that is. So if you have never used Helium 10 at all and you want to do a free calculator to see how much potentially you might owe, just go to h10.me forward slash Refund Genie h10.me forward slash Refund Genie. We've got a calculator here where you can just enter in your you know rough estimate of your sales and then we'll calculate how much could be owed for you.

 

Bradley Sutton:

But again, how to get reimbursed by Amazon FBA? It is super easy. You just have to open up a case with Amazon, copy and paste the FNSKUs that were lost. There's also another thing that Refund Genie does is allows you to see the transaction IDs of damaged items. All right, so if products have been damaged at Amazon FBA warehouses, you can enter in all the transaction IDs and get reimbursed for those, for the ones that Amazon hasn't reimbursed for you. So you could get thousands of dollars back from Amazon FBA reimbursements on stuff that they have lost and they didn't reimburse you, just by submitting these reports. But you don't have to go searching, hey, what could you be reimbursed on or not? Helium 10 is doing all that work for you. And again, remember, this service is 100% free. We are not taking any commission on it because you're the one who's doing half of the work. All right, if you want Helium 10 to do all the work for you, like some of the other services, go to h10.me/mrs, and you know for the.

 

Bradley Sutton:

You know I saw some. I was looking at a report. There's a lot of you guys out there who are owed potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars, like literally, like I'm like looking at Helium 10 customers like, guys, you are owed hundreds of thousands of dollars and you haven't asked for reimbursement yet. So you have like thousands of transactions and maybe you want you don't want to do one by one what I was just showing you how to do go to h10.me/mrs, we'll take care of all of it for you and, uh, you know we'll charge your fee, but for what I showed you today, guys, there is no fee at all. So make sure those of you who have a Helium 10 Platinum annual account or higher get in there and start getting your money back. And then let me know in the comments below how much did you guys get back Thanks to Helium 10 Refund Genie from Amazon FBA reimbursements. All right, guys, that's it for today's episode. We'll see you in the next one to see what's buzzing.

#595 - TikTok Advertising For Amazon Brand Awareness

In our latest episode, unlock the secrets to skyrocketing your e-commerce success with TikTok advertising! We chat with Tamara Zeravljev of Add to Ads, who shares her incredible insights into the booming TikTok phenomenon, offering unparalleled strategies whether you have a TikTok Shop or not. Also, hear some of her personal anecdotes about Serbian weather and sports culture, adding a touch of warmth to our conversation.

Discover how a high-budget TikTok brand awareness campaign can transform your business. With a minimum starting budget, we break down the mechanics of using TikTok's reach and frequency feature to amass brand visibility in just one day. Learn how to leverage multiple engaging videos and influencer content to maintain an organic feel while collecting invaluable data for future campaigns. Don't miss our deep dive into the importance of product showcases and influencer partnerships to maximize your brand's recognition.

Finally, arm yourself with actionable tips for starting and growing a TikTok brand channel. We guide you through the process of using both original and user-generated content to keep your profile fresh and engaging. For Amazon sellers, we offer practical advice on working with influencers, starting with product exchanges before moving to monetary compensation. Whether you're operating on a tight budget or ready to invest more, our strategies will help you build a robust brand presence on TikTok. Join us for this comprehensive guide to mastering TikTok advertising and content strategy!

In episode 595 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Tamara discuss:

• 00:00 - TikTok Advertising Success Stories
• 03:11 - Passion for Sports in Serbia
• 06:31 - Focus on TikTok Advertising Strategy
• 08:33 - Advantages of TikTok Advertising for Amazon Brands
• 09:57 - TikTok Brand Awareness Campaign Success
• 12:57 - Brand Awareness Video Strategy
• 15:41 - Starting a TikTok Brand Channel
• 21:35 - Creating Brand Identity on TikTok
• 22:02 - Using TikTok Videos for Advertising 
• 26:48 - TikTok Advertising Strategy and Conversion Campaigns
• 31:09 - Creating Effective TikTok Content Strategy

#594 - Advanced Amazon Tools for 7+ Figure Brands

Join us for an inspiring episode where we feature two incredible guests, Chris Zurcher and Sarah Chung. Sarah shares her unique journey from a small port city in South Korea to the bustling South Bay area of Torrance, California. Her story is filled with determination and resilience, reflecting on her family's move to the US for better opportunities and her professional growth at Helium 10 over the past three and a half years. Sarah's first appearance on the podcast gives listeners a heartfelt glimpse into her personal and professional life.

Chris, a familiar voice from previous episodes, reconnects with us to discuss his fascinating transition from an Amazon seller to a valuable member of the Helium 10 team. With a background in acting, photography, and Division One basketball, Chris shares his reasons for moving away from Amazon selling and his passion for supporting sellers through Helium 10's platform. We explore the current challenges Amazon sellers face in 2024, such as increased fees and competition, and how Helium 10's data-driven tools can provide the necessary insights for success.

We also dive into the advanced features of Helium 10's Supercharge plan, which offers enhanced tools and customizable options to meet the specific needs of businesses. From market data and consumer behavior analysis to custom plans and dedicated customer success managers, Helium 10 provides comprehensive support for sellers. Finally, we highlight the benefits of connecting with experts like Sarah and Chris for enterprise-level assistance and share fun, creative ways to make your interactions with them memorable. Don't miss out on these engaging stories and valuable insights that can help take your Amazon selling to the next level!

In episode 594 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley, Chris, and Sarah discuss:

• 00:00 - Amazon Sellers' Success Stories Helium 10
• 07:16 - Amazon Business Principles and Surprises
• 09:49 - Scaling Brands Using Helium 10 
• 16:01 - E-Commerce Brand Scaling and Consolidation
• 18:55 - Custom Plans and Supercharge Benefits
• 21:45 - Customized Plans Offered For Huge Brands by Helium 10
• 26:23 - Enhancing Helium 10 Platform Features
• 30:49 - Personal Customer Success Manager
• 34:32 - Helium 10 Sales Support Options

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

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Helium 10 Buzz 9/5/24: WFS Fulfills Beyond Walmart | MCF Faster Delivery | TikTok Ban Impact

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 checkout process hits technical snag during Labor Day sale
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/08/30/amazon-checkout-process-hits-technical-snag-during-labor-day-sale.html

Walmart wants to beat Amazon at its own e-commerce game
https://www.foxbusiness.com/lifestyle/walmart-wants-beat-amazon-its-own-e-commerce-game

Walmart to Compete Directly with Amazon on Marketplace Logistics
https://www.webpronews.com/walmart-to-compete-directly-with-amazon-on-marketplace-logistics/

Most retailers not prepared for a TikTok shut down
https://www.retailcustomerexperience.com/news/most-retailers-not-prepared-for-a-tiktok-shut-down/

Amazon launches AI shopping assistant Rufus in the UK
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-launches-ai-shopping-assistant-121706169.html?

Temu and Shein packages are flooding delivery networks. Will the surge persist?
https://www.retaildive.com/news/temu-shein-shipping-delivery-industry-impact/725707/

For Amazon sellers, we've got game-changing strategies up our sleeves, featuring a deep dive into Helium 10’s  BlackBox tool Competitor tab. Learn how to pinpoint your closest competitors through shared keywords, supercharge your product listings, and fine-tune your Amazon PPC campaigns to stay ahead in a fiercely competitive market. Don't miss out on this invaluable news and insights!

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

• 00:53 - Amazon's Technical Snag
• 02:03 - Walmart Levels Up
• 03:17 - Using WFS Beyond Walmart
• 04:59 - TikTok Contingency Plan
• 07:00 - Faster Delivery for MCF
• 07:45 - Rufus Launches in UK
• 09:14 - Temu & Shein Changes?
• 10:36 - Training Tip: Black Box Competitor Tab

► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast

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

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

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

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

Transcript

Shivali Patel:

Walmart now offering competitive rates to fulfill orders beyond its platform, Amazon, rolling out faster delivery options for multi-channel fulfillment and potential regulation changes that could affect pricing on Temu and Shein. This and more on this week'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 new 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'll give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Today, our host is going to be Shivali Patel, and so, Shivali, take it away and let us know what's buzzing.

 

Shivali Patel:

First up, we have this news article from CNBC discussing the technical snag Amazon faced during its Labor Day sale. On Friday, customers were unable to complete purchases due to some technical issue in the checkout process. Sometimes the consumers would encounter error messages featuring Amazon's famous dog photos. This glitch occurred just as Amazon was rolling out major discounts for the holiday weekend, frustrating those customers eager to grab deals, leading to it quickly becoming a topic of conversation for social media. For sellers on Amazon, this should serve as a reminder for you guys of the impact that technical challenges can have on sales, especially during big promotional events. While Amazon saw a robust $148 billion in the second quarter, things like this can really damage both sales performance and consumer trust. So, as that holiday season peaks around the corner, make sure that you guys are staying vigilant during peak sales periods to manage your customer interactions and monitor any potential issues that could affect your business.

 

Shivali Patel:

Next up, some Walmart news. We have Fox Business reporting on Walmart stepping up its e-commerce game with bold new strategies aimed at expanding its product offerings. Currently dominating brick-and-mortar retail, Walmart has only a 6% share of the online marketplace, compared to Amazon's commanding 38%, but they're working hard to close that gap. Walmart's leveraging its vast physical store network as fulfillment hubs, while increasing its focus on its online marketplace. The company's actually been rolling out new categories, such as the premium beauty category. This is gonna feature brands like T3 and CauseRx if you've heard of them and they're launching initiatives like Resold at Walmart for pre-owned goods on the Walmart marketplace, which is designed for sellers like you and I, not to mention that Walmart's marketplace has achieved over 30% sales growth for four consecutive quarters and while it's not at Amazon's level, this expansion is only one more reason for you guys to begin considering Walmart as a viable e-commerce platform. If you're not actively selling on it. Increase competition or new opportunities to diversify sales channels and take advantage of Walmart's lower fees and growing customer base. You decide. And this leads me into the next news piece from WebPro News.

 

Shivali Patel:

You guys, if you didn't know, Walmart now has a Walmart's multi-channel solutions program, which allows sellers to fulfill orders from any e-commerce site using Walmart's fulfillment services, offering competitive rates that are 15% lower than its competitors. I mean talk about making the platform an even more attractive option for third-party sellers. Starting September 10th, sellers will be able to use Walmart's extensive warehousing, delivery and return services to fulfill orders from other e-commerce platforms, including Target, Etsy and even Amazon itself. This initiative expands Walmart fulfillment services and directly challenges Amazon's fulfillment by Amazon model, allowing sellers like you and I to manage logistics with Walmart's resources For sellers, using Amazon or other platforms. So if this is you, this means you will now have an alternative fulfillment solution that offers cost-effective logistics, helping you streamline operations while reaching customers across multiple channels. Walmart's logistics services will feature plain, unbranded packaging and two shipping options expedited and standard, though there are going to be some limitations for specific products, like multi-box orders, so just make sure that you read up on those things. Despite these challenges, Walmart is aiming to reshape the logistics landscape and offer more flexibility for sellers across the board. This, you guys, has really big implications for e-commerce and, as a seller, I would just encourage you to keep an eye on how this logistics network evolves over time and provides even more opportunities for growth.

 

Shivali Patel:

Okay, let's switch over to TikTok. A news report from Retail Customer Experience has revealed that, while a majority of retailers 68% of them believe that a potential ban or sale of TikTok would negatively affect their business, only 28% actually have some sort of contingency plan in place. TikTok has become a crucial platform for product discovery, with over two-thirds of the actual consumers finding products on the app and then purchasing them elsewhere. So I would say for Amazon and Walmart sellers, this sort of uncertainty around TikTok's future could potentially pose a disruption in customer acquisition, particularly as 81% of retailers are actually using TikTok to sell directly to consumers. I think we all recognize how monumental viral content can be for a business, and it's no secret that viral content on the platform has led to issues like stockouts and delays. So are you prepared for any impact associated to a possible shutdown? According to the article, 73% of consumers plan to use TikTok as inspiration for their holiday shopping and 59% intend to make purchases directly through TikTok shop, whereas 39% of consumers named Facebook as the platform where they will spend a majority of their time if something happens to TikTok, meaning that there is going to most likely be increased competition for attention on those platforms, on the social media platforms that are not TikTok, where people are finding inspo. Consider diversifying your marketing channels from now and create those contingency plans to prepare for the potential loss of TikTok as a sales tool.

 

Shivali Patel:

Now I'm not saying that it's gone just yet, but be prepared is what I'm getting at. Of course, quite a bit of things are category dependent, but as the holiday shopping approaches, I really think it's important to have a robust strategy across multiple channels, and that will be paramount to maintaining visibility and customer engagement. All right now directly from Amazon and you can find this inside of Seller Central News. But Amazon just rolled out faster delivery of multi-channel fulfillment orders, and this gives sellers a big advantage in meeting customer demands. The updated delivery speeds come at no additional cost, and standard delivery has improved to three business days, which is down from five business days. Expedited delivery has improved to three business days, which is down from five business days. Expedited delivery has improved to two business days, down from three, and priority delivery has been discontinued. Any new orders will be charged at the expedited rate. This improvement means your customers can enjoy faster shipping, helping you boost satisfaction and sales across your channels. Take advantage of these updates to grow your business by providing even quicker delivery. For more information, you guys can just go in and tap this link right here.

 

Shivali Patel:

In other news, amazon just introduced its newest tool in online shopping an AI-powered assistant named Rufus. Are any of you guys familiar with it? Let me know in the chat. I feel like I've mentioned this before on Buzz, but I was in the UK just a couple weeks ago and actually got to see this during my shopping experience in the app, so it's now in beta for select UK customers. Rufus is designed to enhance the shopping experience by answering your customer questions, offering personalized recommendations. Like, let's say, you say I'm preparing for a camping trip. It would give you recommendations based off that and just helping in general with product discovery. So, using Amazon's vast product catalog and web data, rufus can assist with everything from suggesting the climbing gear, the camping gear, to comparing products like lip gloss versus lip oil, and I think for sellers, this represents an interesting and exciting development in how customers can find our products. So, with Rufus, shoppers can save time and make more informed decisions, ultimately improving the overall experience and potentially driving more sales. This AI integration really highlights the future of e-com, you guys, and it's only going to continue to evolve. As Amazon continues to roll out this tool, I anticipate that more AI-driven features will come out that can change how customers interact with our products, which is why, of course, you'll want to keep tuned in to weekly buzzes to ensure maximized product visibility.

 

Shivali Patel:

And finally, let's talk about Temu and Shein, as they've surged in popularity, now sending about 900,000 packages daily. That is insane. That is a lot of packages, and I know a lot of you are concerned on whether this signals incoming price wars. These packages enter the country using the D Minus exemption. Now this helps keep shipping costs low, which allows the company to offer highly competitive prices. However, increasing scrutiny from lawmakers could actually impact this exemption and potentially affect both companies and the carriers that depend on their volume. What I mean by this is parcel carriers like UPS have seen notable growth with the rise of Temu and Shein, and both rely on low-cost shipping rates, which help them keep their product prices affordable, while slower delivery speeds 6 to 22 days for Temu and then 10 to 13 for Shein are the trade-off for shoppers. The high volume of packages keep those carrier trucks full and routes efficient. However, if regulatory changes alter the shipping process, costs could rise, impacting the current delivery boom. So keep an eye out for any potential changes in regulations. With that, that is it for this week's news.

 

Shivali Patel:

Now let's talk strategy. Let me show you how you can easily find your closest competitors for any Amazon product. Now, why is this important and how can it help you make money? Well, if you're researching a new niche, you need to understand who your competition is. Who do you need to watch out for? Who should you study at the keyword level to understand where they're getting their sales from? This tool will help you do just that. Using Black Box's competitors tab, you can input any ASIN that has some sort of history, something that's sold decent volume, and you'll want to avoid new products that aren't ranking yet, because the tool works best with established products. What it does do is it shows you the closest competitors based on how many keywords they rank similarly for. So, for example, let's say I were to input something in like an LED makeup case, I would see other products that are ranking high for the same keywords that that LED makeup case is ranking for, such as lighted makeup case or LED makeup bag.

 

Shivali Patel:

Let me actually share my screen and show you how it's done. You're going to navigate over to the fourth tab inside of Black Box, which says competitors. You're going to input in your own products ASIN or, let's say, a competitor's ASIN, which is what I'm doing, and then click search. In doing so, in my case, I got back 187 products here. So in my case, I got back 187 products here. If you are unfamiliar with the P index that's listed right here. This is what it is sorted by default. It tells you how closely related the products are based on shared keywords. So a product with a higher P index, closer to 10, means that the product is ranking for many of the same keywords as the one that you entered. Now. This is useful because you can immediately gain insight into how relevant these products are compared to yours.

 

Shivali Patel:

A lot of what we're looking at here in these results is makeup cases. They're just a bunch of additional makeup cases. However, you really never know Like. When I run the same search, typically with coffin shelves, I see other products like makeup shelves, spiderweb shelves or even goth themed items. So, depending on your niche, running the search is really really great for understanding what other products are closely competing with yours. From there, the next step would be to take these and jump into Cerebro to check out exactly which keywords these products are ranking for. From here, the next step would be to jump into Cerebro to check out exactly which keywords these products are ranking for. From here, the next step would be to jump into Cerebro to check out exactly which keywords these products are ranking for, or even take one of these products and start a fresh competitor search inside of Black Box to dive a bit deeper. Or let's say that you need to discover which products to target for your sponsored display or sponsored product campaigns Products that you know have a better offering or maybe some incentive over, so that if you appear on their product pages, you could potentially capture the sales.

 

Shivali Patel:

You can just use the filters at the very top to narrow down your search, and that is going to be these filters right here. So let's say, for example, you are looking for products that have fewer reviews than yours you would input in a max for review count. Or maybe you're looking for products that have fewer reviews than yours you would input in a max for review count. Or maybe you're looking for the ones where your product is actually priced a little bit lower you can type in a max for price point. So, in short, guys, this tool is invaluable for competitor research, generating PPC targets or identifying product opportunities in your niche. If you're seeing irrelevant products after the top five or so, then that's a sign that there are not many close competitors, giving you even more insight into the market space. Okay, that's a wrap. Hope you enjoyed this week's episode. We'll see you next week to see what's buzzing.

#593 - Walmart WFS Selling Strategies

Can selling on Walmart.com be your new secret weapon for e-commerce success? Join us as we welcome Ryan King from BlueRyse, a true Walmart marketplace expert, who shares game-changing strategies for boosting your sales on Walmart. Ryan explains why diversifying your online presence beyond Amazon is not just a smart move but essential for long-term growth. He details how to establish a strong foundation on Walmart early, from crafting compelling listings to amassing reviews and maintaining brand consistency, all while catering to the unique preferences of Walmart shoppers.

For those new to the world of e-commerce, Ryan offers a comparative analysis of Amazon and Walmart, shedding light on why Amazon is often the go-to starting point due to its extensive tools and higher volume opportunities. He shares insider tips on navigating Walmart's international selling stipulations and highlights the importance of brand registration to unlock exclusive advertising opportunities and protect intellectual property. Misconceptions about Walmart’s technology and algorithms are debunked, providing you with a solid understanding of how to effectively optimize your presence on this evolving platform.

Optimizing your product listings on Walmart isn't just about slapping on a few keywords. Ryan emphasizes the importance of new product type level attributes and backend attributes for better search visibility. He also discusses the benefits of the Walmart Pro Seller badge and why re-uploading listings using the latest item spec 5.0 can make a difference. Learn how to craft clear product descriptions, optimize image stacks, and leverage sponsored product campaigns to skyrocket your sales. Plus, get the scoop on exciting new developments like sponsored brand shops and shelves that can significantly enhance your offsite traffic and ranking. Don't miss this episode full of insights to elevate your Walmart selling game!

In episode 593 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Carrie, Kevin, and Ryan discuss:

• 00:00 - Advanced Strategies Q&A for Walmart Sellers
• 02:56 - The Importance of Selling on Walmart
• 07:33 - Organic Shopping Shift Towards Walmart
• 10:51 - Maximizing Profits While Avoiding Price Wars
• 12:41 - Optimizing Sales on Walmart Marketplace
• 16:47 - Managing Duplicate Listings and IP Claims
• 22:28 - Optimizing Walmart Listings for Conversion
• 27:22 - Walmart Pro Seller Badge's Impact on Ranking
• 29:32 - Optimizing Walmart Listings and Advertising
• 33:03 - Optimizing Walmart PPC Campaigns for Efficiency

► 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