Listen in as we team up with e-commerce maestro Kevin King to uncover some of his most closely guarded Amazon strategies and hacks, designed to both save you money and significantly boost your profits. In this first installment of a two-part series, Kevin generously shares insights from our new and latest version of the Freedom Ticket course, revealing the fundamentals of branding, product selection, and customer service—essential knowledge for any serious Amazon seller. Not only do we cover these basics, but we also tease some of Kevin's 'ninja' strategies, giving you a taste of the powerful tactics he discusses in the Helium 10 Elite Mastermind Program. Our conversation with Kevin continues as we tackle the world of Amazon PPC, emphasizing the crucial role of conversion rates in successful campaigns. We delve into the importance of understanding and optimizing your brand entity score and the innovative ways you can leverage tools like Amazon Comprehend within your Q&A sections to boost product rankings. The dialogue shifts to the evolving landscape of AI, examining its transformative effects on e-commerce. Kevin and I discuss how savvy sellers are utilizing AI tools to generate everything from compelling images to high-quality video content, and even crafting targeted ads with platforms like AdGen AI. Wrapping up this content-rich session, we focus on strategies to maximize conversions and enhance the overall customer experience on Amazon. Kevin shares practical tips on pricing strategies for attracting product reviews, the psychological impact of using an 'index image' to display product benefits, and the importance of establishing a unique guarantee that resonates with your audience. Moreover, Kevin illuminates the potential goldmine of including optional insurance charges in direct-to-consumer sales and the art of presentation in online retail. Tune in to hear how these tactics, along with high-quality visuals, can revolutionize your approach to online sales in the era of AI-driven e-commerce. Stay tuned for part 2! In episode 548 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Kevin discuss: __ __ Transcript Bradley Sutton: Today is part one in a two-part series with Kevin King, who's gonna open up some of his top Amazon hacks and strategies with you guys for the first time in a while. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Bradley Sutton: Are you looking to learn how to sell on Amazon? The Freedom Ticket course made by Kevin King is one of the most popular courses ever created for Amazon sellers. It's got over 90 modules and 40 hours of detailed, step-by-step training to help get you started on your entrepreneurial journey. Now this course costs $997 but Helium 10 actually covers that cost of the course for any Helium 10 member. Find out why tens of thousands of students love this program by going to h10.me/freedom ticket. Don't forget that if you do sign up for a Helium 10 account, don't pay full price. Use our podcast discount code SSP10 to save 10% off for life. Bradley Sutton: Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And every year, every two years, Kevin King comes on and opens up with our audience some of our best hacks. And now, for the first time ever, we're actually opening that up right here on the podcast. So we are going to go ahead and have a recap of some of Kevin's top strategies that he opened up with a live audience and let's see what you guys think. There are some killer ones here. This was supposed to only be an hour, so I thought I could fit into one episode, but hey, Kevin had too much fire, so we're actually splitting this up into two different episodes. Here's part one. Hope you guys enjoy it. Bradley Sutton: We're going to be revealing some things that a lot of Amazon sellers maybe have never even heard of, and these are things that are designed to help you save money and make money. Two of the things that maybe is the reason why you're even in this Amazon game in the first place right. Now, something that's important, though we're going to be talking about hacks, if you want to call them that, or kind of ninja strategies you see that little ninja logo on the bottom right there but selling on Amazon is not just about knowing the latest hacks and tricks. These definitely can help but remember, we are not trying to take away from the very valid point that you have to know about branding, how to pick products, how to do keyword research, how to do your accounting, advertising, customer service. The fundamentals are still very important and so we've got the Freedom Ticket Program if you guys are interested in that. So some of you might, after watching this, be like, wow, you know what? I am not of this level yet. And don't worry, you're still going to be able to get value out of this regardless of the level you are. But if you're like man, a lot of this stuff is over my head. He's using terminology I haven't heard of. Freedom Ticket Program might be for you. That is something that beginners all the way to advanced sellers can take as a refresher course on the fundamentals of Amazon and we have a brand new one - brand new version first time in over two years. The fourth version of Freedom Ticket is coming out imminently, just in a couple of weeks. So make sure to stay tuned for that. Anybody who is already a Helium 10 member, you guys will be able to get access to that. Bradley Sutton: Now, I mentioned that Kevin is one of the main trainers of our Helium 10 Elite Mastermind Program-that's the one that I've been a part of since, way before I even worked at Helium 10 and probably the most popular thing that's part of this mastermind is every month, Kevin gives his ninja hacks. He gives like usually seven ninja hacks, and these are quick, actionable nuggets of knowledge that can help you immensely in your Amazon business. I think a lot of these hacks that he gives every month are valuable to the majority of Amazon sellers, and with those hacks, two guest speakers join him on these trainings and they share the latest strategies that's working right now. And so that is the basis of what Kevin is going to be talking about today. Today, instead of this being behind the closed doors of the Helium 10 Elite Mastermind, which most of the year is closed, he's opening up some of his favorite ones from the past doors of the Helium 10 Elite Mastermind, which most of the year is closed. He's opening up some of his favorite ones from the past couple of months with you, so you're going to get a sneak peek, without actually being Helium 10 Elite members, on the kind of level of knowledge that being part of this mastermind can help you. Kevin King: Welcome everybody to this webinar. Like Bradley said, we do this every single month, usually on a Thursday. It varies on the exact Thursday, sometimes around the middle of the month, but we do a Helium 10 Elite training and what I want to do today is basically, like Bradley says, open up the doors and share some of this with you. So I've gone through from the last few months, some of my favorite stuff. Then I'm going to share that with you today, absolutely free. So some of it will be the ninja hacks, the first six or so things that I have seven ninja hacks. That's what I do every single month. So I have seven of them here for you today as well. I'm going to share six of them with you, and then the seventh one, which is the one Bradley just talked about, where someone made a million dollars selling over a five-day weekend. I'm going to show you that hack. You've got Easter coming up, Mother's Day coming up. It could make a huge difference for some of you. So that'll be at the very end, so make sure you stay to that. If you leave earlier, you're going to miss the number one hack that could make you a lot of money and I've taken a few slides from some of the presenters that have been in the Helium 10, the guests and a couple. Just a little section of some of what they presented, and you know, when they presented it, they presented it their way and in their voice. I'm just going to give you a quick little summary of those, just so you can get a taste of the kind of stuff that you find in Helium 10 Elite and share that with you. And you're going to find some actionable, good stuff today. Kevin: Number one this is something that you're going to fail at. You know, everybody's always like PPC. I hate PPC. It just drives me crazy. You know, and you're going to actually fail at PPC unless you fix this metric. This is something that nobody really talks about. Aaron Cordova is actually the one that shared this, and I think Destaney Wishon has talked about it and a few other people have talked about it. But if you don't actually take a look at this metric, your PPC is just going to drive you crazy and cost you through the nose. Kevin: What you want to do is you want to check the benchmark conversion rate for your brand. Now you're going to need brand registry. So if you don't have a trademark filed and you're not brand registered, you won't be able. What you want to be checking for is, if you're not at the bare minimum median conversion rate for your category, you're most likely going to be spinning through the nose on your PPC and it's just not going to work like you want it to be. Your ACOS is going to go and your TACOS are going to go through the roof. This video here is about a minute video. I'm going to play it. I'm going to have to hold up a little speaker next to my microphone because for some reason the Zoom is not letting the sound, but Aaron is going to explain this to you on this video. Here we go. Aaron: Basically, you find your conversion rate compared to everybody else. You go to campaign manager okay, campaigns. If you know how to get the campaign manager that you have other problems, campaign manager, you go here. Then you go to the side it's called insights and reporting. You're going to get a brand metrics okay, the brand metrics are awesome. Okay, in here you're going to pick your brand. You're going to get brand metrics, okay, the brand metrics are awesome. Aaron: In here, you're going to pick your brand. You're going to pick a category. In this case, I'm going to pick sports water bottles. Okay, select that guy and continue. Okay, then you're going to go in here and you're going to press this little view detailed metrics for your brand in this category. This is going to be horrible. I apologize, this is something we haven't really worked on very well. Check out this. Customer conversion rates your brand 4.9%, category median 10 and sometimes a lot of them, they show the category top okay. This is an embarrassment. This listing is an embarrassment. Okay, it is half as less than half as good as the median, which, when you're just at the medium, your product probably will not even be profitable because you're literally average, essentially horrible. But this is how you open the door to see if you're going to have a best seller at the very, very, very, very minimum. You got to be at the category median. Kevin: If you're not, at that category median then you need to adjust your listing. You need to fix your product page. You need to fix your product page. You need to fix your listing so that you can convert higher. Otherwise you're going to be fighting an uphill battle on everything. All right, that's number one. Number two this is how you can boost your brand entity score. How many of you ever heard of a brand entity score? I bet there's hardly any of you out there. There might be a couple of you have heard of a brand entity score. Does anybody know what the brand entity score is? Everybody has one on Amazon. Kevin: If you're a seller on Amazon and this affects your rank, it's a score that Amazon does. There's a lot of factors in the A9 that affect your rank. There's a ton of factors but the brand entity score plays a major role in how do you rank and you can affect this with your Q&A section. Amazon doesn't just look at your keywords. They don't just look at your title and your bullet points and your back-end keywords. They're reading everything. They're reading the Q&A section. They're now using AI to analyze your images. They're taking a lot of stuff into account when they're going to rank you and the Q&A section plays a major role. So if your Q&A section is fairly empty, that's a problem. You section is fairly empty, that's a problem. You need to get that full. That's one of the ways that some people, when they first start out and they have no reviews, they fill their Q&A section and you watch what you can do. You can rank a lot quicker. But this brand entity score is something you want to pay attention to. Kevin: How do you find it? There's something called Amazon Comprehend. Now this was shared by Matt over at ClearAds, originally on LinkedIn, and then he presented it in detail at my recent Billion Dollar Seller Summit and then we've shared it here as a hack. He's allowed me to share part of it, so I can't show the whole thing, but he allowed me to share part of it in my newsletter and here. Kevin: But it's called Amazon Comprehend and what you want to do, you can access this. There's a link there at the bottom. It's on AWS, on Amazon AWS, and it's an API. So it takes a little bit of programming know-how or how to get into this thing. It's not too bad but it's not like straightforward. Kevin: But with this Amazon Comprehend, once you get access to the API, what you can do is you can maximize your Q&As for keyword ranking. So the Q&A section on Amazon on your product. You want to maximize that for keyword ranking. So what you want to do is you want to remove the bias from search. So your description and all the content on your listing, they have a bias towards the seller of the product. So Amazon knows that you're optimizing your listing like you're making this the best and you're like saying that my product is the greatest thing since sliced bread. But Amazon's like how do we know that Kevin can say his product's the best, but maybe it's actually not so good despite what he says or whatever claims he's making? So we want to know from the customer what do they actually think? And let's take what they actually think and factor that into how we're going to rank this product. So they use the Q&A section and reviews both of those to do this. So if you don't have reviews and Q&A, you have a bias. Kevin: So what you want to do is you want to come in and gather questions that people might be asking about your product. So how do you do that? If you don't know, if you don't have legitimate questions and people haven't asked real questions yet, you can go out to tools like Ahrefs or Semrush. Those are big SEO tools so they have a free aspect and there's a paid aspect. Or you can go to answerthepublic.com. That's Neil Patel's company. Neil spoke at the Sell and Scale Summit Helium 10 did about a year and a half ago. But answer the public and you can just type in a keyword. You can type in you know, if you're selling dog bowls, slow-feed dog bowls, you can type slow-feed dog bowl into answerthepublic.com and it'll spit back. It goes out and reads Reddit and all these different forums and says these are the questions people are asking about slow-feed dog bowls. So you can take those as a seed and you can then use those and have someone ask those on your Amazon listing and then you, as the seller, answer them just to get some in there. But you're going to answer them in such a way that you want to make sure that you answer yes or no. Amazon is looking for yes or no answers. Big answers are great, but if you can start, if someone says, does this slow feed dog bowl keep my dog from having diarrhea, you want to try to phrase your answer in the form that you say yes or no and then you can say other stuff and put additional keywords in there for ranking and all this. Kevin: But they're looking for yes and no answers to questions and that's how they can guide. Like, if someone types in slow-feed dog bowl stomach problems or something they're going to know, yes, this one actually helps it. So you want to get multiple questions in there and then what you're going to do is you're going to use Amazon Comprehend. Before you put these questions in, you're going to actually and the answers, you're going to use it to actually get a score. So it's going to return the sentiment. So you're going to ask the question, show that, upload that into Comprehend, put the answer and then make sure you're getting a high percentage of confidence. Amazon Comprehend will give you a score back. It's on like a zero to one scale and it will give you a score back and you want a high level of confidence towards Amazon interpreting your response as positive or negative. Kevin: Now you can also do this and go look at your competition's reviews. You can gather it from there. You don't have to go to answer the public. You can get what people are asking on other people's products and use those and once you find the ones that have the high confidence. Then what you want to do, uh, which one? Like I said, is zero to one, but one is the highest. Those are the ones that you want to get onto your listing and those are the ones you want to put onto your listing. Kevin: So what you're going to do is you're going to these newly found questions that score high on the confidence, using Amazon Comprehend. You're going to go and actually, either maybe you have a buyer account that you buy stuff from Amazon you can ask the question or you can get your friends or family or someone to ask a question. Remember, this is not review, so it's okay. You can get someone to ask a question. Or, if you're on a Facebook group, say, can you ask this question? And then you go in there as the seller this is important, it gives you a little bit more weight and answer the questions. Whenever someone asks a question, Amazon pings. I don't know what the number is now three to five, ten people says, hey, do you know the answer to this question? But one of them is always the seller. You want to be the first to try to get in there and answer before someone else does and messes it up. They may answer too but you want to get yours in there as quick as you can, so you go in and answer it with that yes or no or whatever. When you ran it through Amazon Comprehend whatever it gave you as the highest score and this is going to help you rank on Amazon. It's a pretty cool little technique. Kevin: Here's another way. Everybody's always got cash flow problems. Money, money, money, money, money. How do I pay for this? How do I pay for that? Not everybody has a rich uncle or deep pockets. If you have decent credit, this is a way that you can actually extend your supplier payments for 60 days with zero interest. It's pretty cool. It's called the Amazon Plum Card, so if you have decent credit I don't know if this is available to people in other countries. I'm not sure what their exact rules are on what countries you have to live in to get this. Obviously, US citizens can get it, but Amazon has a whole bunch of, I mean sorry, American Express has a whole bunch of different cards. The Plum Card actually gives you discounts for paying early. So if you charge all your PPC or you charge whatever you want to charge suppliers. Whatever you want to charge, if you pay it early they'll give you a 1.5% discount. Or they have an option where you can extend it for 60 days and don't have to pay any interest as long as you pay the minimum due. You got to make a minimum payment. As long as you pay the minimum due, they'll give you 60 days to pay that. So this can be a great way. If you're trying to juggle some cash is to use this card. Kevin: A lot of you are saying, Kevin, that's all great, but my supplier doesn't take credit cards. How am I supposed to pay my supplier with credit cards? I always have to wire money or use Alibaba Escrow or something or whatever. Actually, there's a service called Melio. This one right here, Melio Payments that allows you to actually pay by credit card anybody, so you can pay suppliers. They do charge a fee, so it costs you about 2.5% to 3% roughly. So they do charge a fee because they get hit with processing fees but that fee is often less than what you would pay in interest or to get a loan, or origination fees or something else, and so that is an option, especially if you combine this. Kevin: If you're really cash flowing, you can go to bankrate.com and you can do a search for 0% interest credit cards and there's a lot of credit cards that have 12, 15, 18 months of 0% interest. So if you go there and actually apply for one of those credit cards, you have decent credit. You can get a 0% interest credit card that you can ride out for a while, while you're growing your business and use Melio payments to pay it. You're basically paying a 3% fee, which is basically a 3% interest, which is dirt-cheap in today's world. Now another credit card you might want to consider, if you're already selling and you're running a lot of PPC especially, is the Amex Business Gold Card. This is not the regular gold card, not the consumer gold card. It has to be the business gold card but it gives you 4x points on all your PPC spend up to $150,000 per card. So you can get 600,000 points on one single card in a year. Kevin: And I know one of the guys that comes to one of my events, the Billion Dollar Seller Summit. He actually, and I'm not sure if he's in Helium 10 Elite or not, but he has like 10 of these cards. He lives in Brazil and he cycles through them, so as soon as one hits that $150,000 on his PPC spin, he just swaps out the card. He says he's flown first class everywhere in the world and hasn't paid for a plane ticket in years and flying first class with him, his wife, his family, that this card is an amazing card for that. So there's different credit cards for different purposes but those are two that you might want to consider and you can transfer these to different airlines. You can transfer them to hotels. Kevin: You know Bradley is always going out to the, he's always doing the Maldives honeymoon strategy. He's been out to the Maldives three or four times. A lot of you may not realize that's not Helium 10 sending him out there. They're not saying man Bradley, good job, dude, here's a free trip to the Maldives. No, he's using his miles and his points to go out there on his own and do this stuff for you. But this is one of the ways he knows how to do this. There's another site called points.me where you can see what's the best place to transfer stuff. Kevin: There's a ton of stuff around this but I just want to show you this. Really cool. We could talk about this for hours of all kinds of cool stuff you can do, but I just want to show you these really quick. Now here's some AI. AI is the hot thing right now. Everybody's AI, this AI, that. There's some stuff that everybody's just sticking AI on the end of everything, even if it's not really AI. But I want to show you 11 really cool tools. There's a lot more but these are just 11 tools that you may find useful in selling e-commerce, that may come in useful in helping you with your images or helping you with research, or helping you with a few different things. Before I do that, if you have not seen this, this is from Sora, S-O-R-A, and this is video. It's not publicly available yet, but karavideo.ai has a wait list right now and they're gonna be the first to offer this. Kevin: This is studio level quality imagery on by video by prompting. So you type in a text prompt, you type in a paragraph, say I want a video like this and it will make the video up to I think it's 30 or 45 seconds right now, maybe up to. It's going to get to where it can do much longer videos and entire movies, but it's amazing. I'm going to play this for you. There's no sound on this, so I'm going to play this for you. Kevin: But this video here of these mammoths walking and these people walking through a Tokyo with the cherry blossoms, this little animation here. This was all done in minutes by typing in a prompt. So, like those mammoths, this was the prompt that was used. That's the exact prompt. Several giant woolly mammoths this was the prompt that was used. That's the exact prompt. Several giant woolly mammoths approached, treading through a snowy meadow, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That's what made that video. Kevin: In fact, there's movie producers now that are saying this is going to change everything. We're going to be able to do entire movies without movie studios. It's crazy. You're going to be able to do product videos and lifestyle stuff and all kinds of crazy stuff with it. So keep your eyes on this, and I would recommend you get on the list at karavideo.ai so when this opens up, you get some of the first access to it. They're a little bit worried about how authentic this is right now, so they're putting in some safeguards, but it's really cool technology. Kevin: Now, notice there was no sound on this one, because this doesn't make the sound, it just makes the video. So you need sound. So what has happened is ElevenLabs has a tool that will take a quiet video for example, that mammoth and it will analyze what's in the video and it will make the sound of, like the mammoths crunching the snow or making their horns their sound, you know. Whatever. This is an example of a video I'm about to play here. It may be a little bit hard to hear I'm going to hold the speaker up to it of a video I'm about to play here. It's maybe a little bit hard to hear, I'm going to hold the speaker up to it, but this video was made with a prompt, silent. And then this ElevenLabs went in, analyzed the video, what's in the video, and added all the sound effects using AI in a matter of minutes. So let me. AI audio: In a place beyond imagination, where the horizon kisses the heavens. One man dares to journey where few have ventured. Armed with nothing but his wit and an unyielding spirit, he seeks the answers to mysteries that lie beyond the stars. Kevin: This is pretty cool stuff. You're going to be able to do some amazing stuff with your products, with your advertising, with everything. This is coming and it's important to stay on the cutting edge of this, because if you're first mover in a lot of this stuff, you're going to have major, major advantages over your competition. Now there's more to this, though. It even gets cooler. You can actually now do ads with AI. These ads will go out and this adgen.ai will actually go to your Shopify site. It will go to your Amazon listing. You can put in the URL of your Amazon listing and it will create ads formatted perfectly for Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, everywhere, automatically based on that. Then you can do some modifications, but it's really cool. So you can give it a brand name, you can give it a URL, you can give it a subject and it will automatically create the ads for you. This is another one Pika Art which will take a still photo and add animation to it, and then you can automatically change it. You can just type in the background and it automatically changes. It's called pika.art. You can change your top. Here you have a monkey. Let's put some sunglasses on him. You can do this. You can just drop in a still image that doesn't move and you can add movement to it. It's really cool where this stuff is going. This is a prompt. You can take a screenshot of this. I'm not going to go through the whole thing or you'll get this in the replay. They'll show you actually how to use peak art to add movement, which can actually dramatically increase your engagement rate on social media or any kind of advertising you do. It's amazing stuff. There's crazy stuff that's out there. Kevin: Now some additional tools, Chad Rubin went through a bunch of AI tools and he said these are some of the ones that he considers to be the god mode of AI frameworks. I'm just going to buzz through them really quick. You can take notes and go check them out later. One is called booth.ai. It generates studio-quality product photos in minutes, so you don't even need a photographer anymore. Another one called CopyMonkey. This optimizes your Amazon listing. There's others like Shoelix, and there's quite a few out there that will do this, but CopyMonkey is one you might want to check out. There's ReviewScout, which, if you're a reseller or a wholesaler, it'll give you deep insights into the competition and buyer box trends for wholesalers or resellers. There's one called MContent, which also helps you do all kinds of great imagery change out backgrounds, put your product in special scenes. They just introduced some new cool tools just this week, so MContent is really good. He's presented on the Helium 10 Elite as well. Kevin: DoMyShoot’s another one that will help you do all your visual content. So basically it's AI as your photographer. Instead of spending $5,000 to take everybody to the beach, you can upload your product and put it in any kind of scene that you want. frequently.ai is another one that's really, really good. Another that has all kinds of answers to all kinds of questions. Another one is the valky.ai, or some people know it as Shoelix. That one's another one that's really popular. So these are all some cool Amazon or AI tools for Amazon sellers. Another one is iphoto.ai will help you create your listing images where you can upload your product and drop it into all kinds of scenes, modify it, do testing on different images and different backgrounds. It's really really cool. So those are some of the AI tools that are out there. Kevin: The number five here. This is from Ayana at YLT Translations. She presented on the Helium 10 Elite and she said you know, this is a cool little trick on how you can get more reviews. So you have to be selling in additional marketplaces. If you're just selling in the US marketplace, this won't work. But if you're set up to sell in other marketplaces, you know Amazon combines the listings. When you don't have a lot of combines the reviews, I'm sorry. When you don't have a lot of combines the reviews, I'm sorry when you don't have a lot of listings from other marketplaces. So what she's saying is you can create dummy ASINs and of your target products and then list them in all the different marketplaces. Now someone buys it, that's okay, but you can also create dummy ASINs and then what you do is you and each one of those make sure they're in all the same browse mode. She has the steps here make sure that the localized listing is live, at least the tile and some bullet points, so you put a legitimate you know it's localized and it's in the right language and it's written right and put a really low price so that viners don't get hit, because most people don't realize that sometimes, when your price is high, vine reviewers don't take your product even though they might want it, because once they hit $600, they have to pay taxes on it. Kevin: So a lot of people don't realize that in the United States that anything over $600 in gifts, they get a 1099 from Amazon at the end of the year. So if they got $10,000 worth of products at retail price and they then have to pay, Amazon says this is what we gave you in gifts. It's just like winning. If you went to the Price is Right or a game show or Jeopardy or something, you have to pay taxes on those winnings. Or if you went in Vegas over $10,000, you got to pay taxes. So this is a lot of times, they won't take your product if it's a $49 product because they're like ah, that's just going to add to my taxes. But if it's temporarily $9.95 while you're getting the vine reviews and then you put it back at $49.95 later, they might take it. So you want local low pricing and then you go out and you get. Kevin: You do vine reviews everywhere and then they'll all combine together. If you do them in multiple marketplaces and if you really get do this right, you can get up to 2,400 different ones. And some of the ways you can do these. You know these quote-unquote dummy listings that she's got on the right-hand side there. You just do different colors of a product. That's kind of like a dummy listing. It's like, okay, I have azure, I have a cobalt, I have a navy, a sapphire sky teal, and then you could have your supplier make just a couple of each of these colors and then you send those out. This is a really cool way to actually get your reviews up and then, once you get enough reviews in a marketplace, it wants to keep sharing these. It'll just share that marketplace usually, but this is a way that you can get a running start. It's a pretty cool little technique. Kevin: This is from Matt Koston. He presented a couple months ago on Helium 10 Elite and this is one of his tricks. That he showed is this is how you can convert like crazy with what he called an index image. This he calls it the. It's the image in your listing that will be the top reasons why your product is the best. This is not your main photo. This is not your photo number one. This is what he calls this photo number two, and it's an index of your products. Is why I think it's why he calls it the index damage, and what he says is you need to number the benefits. A lot of people are using call-outs, they use infographics but they don't number them. He runs a company that does testing and split testing and all kinds of stuff and he says that they've tested this to the end of the earth and back and this is what works. So you want to actually have numbers like this. So something like this should be your second image the five reasons you love, or the seven reasons, or the three reasons. Kevin: Odd numbers are always better than even numbers. Three, five or seven or nine always work the best. Why do I do seven ninja hacks every month for Helium 10 Elite? Seven is a magic number when it comes to psychology. But here he's got the five and look, there's numbers. That's important. He just doesn't list them. People like order and when they see numbers, their mind can sort it and they can read it quickly and it makes sense to them. So the numbering system here is critical, not just the fact that he put the main point, the main benefit and capital, and then explained it in bold and a little bit larger and then explained everything else below it in light blue. But he's got these numbers. That's the critical thing is numbering it. Kevin: And then you notice here. On the third one, there's a US flag. US flags for Americans can up your conversion rate dramatically. You don't have to have a product that was made in the USA. You can say you're a USA company. Now, if you're going to say it's made in the USA and put a flag, it needs to be made in the USA, don't lie. You can say we're a small US company and you can have a flag. Kevin: Now, I see people sometimes make mistakes where they put a flag and they put it inside their graphics or their photos and they don't put it in red, white and blue. They put it in green or they put it in some other color. Never, ever, do that. The flag always needs to be in red, white and blue and look like an American flag. Don't change the colors on it to make it fit the graphic it needs to look because that instantly says a message. But these little things can convert really really well for you. Kevin: It also says add a golden guarantee. Amazon automatically guarantees if they don't like the product they can return it. But you want a golden guarantee. You almost want to name it. Give it some sort of crazy name the PX22G guarantee or something. Don't just say it's money back guarantee or 100% money back or satisfaction guarantee. That's all just common. Give it some sort of crazy name - the dog barker, the tail wagging guarantee or something like that. The outlandish almost ridiculous in your guarantee name. So here's some examples 100%, no mosquito bites guarantee. Bottom of the bottle guarantee, lifetime never lost guarantee. Give it some sort of name like that, not just money back or your satisfaction guarantee or some general thing. Give it a name. It resonates with people and will help your conversions. Like I said here, the generic like 30 money-back guarantee gets just lost in the noise. Test your guarantee names too. You can use Helium 10 to do that. There's other tools out there, but Helium 10 has it built in. Where you can, actually they have a relationship with PickFu but you can do it through Helium 10 and test the guarantee names as well. The number of sales you make is far higher than the people who will take advantage of the guarantee. So don't worry about a guarantee. Kevin: I have something in one of my things I do direct to consumer and I have a $4 insurance charge. It's optional but it's automatically on the order form. They have to cross it out. If they don't want it, it fills it in, but then they cross it out and about 30% or 40% of the people pay that $4. And every year, if I send out 5,000 orders, I might have three people take me up on it. And so, out of 5,000 orders, if 40% take it, that's 2,000 people that pay me $4. That's eight grand and I had to replace three orders. There's big money in this. So don't worry about a lot of people taking advantage of it. Some will. Kevin: There's also something called the squeezed benefit test. You take a look on the left. This is the original graphic that someone had. Has all the bullet points. This is what you normally see and what most of you're probably doing. But look at the one on the right same type of stuff but much easier to read, numbered, organized with icons. This converts people on Amazon buy photos, they don't buy products. I think Perry Belcher originally said that they buy photos, they don't buy products. So your photos are crucial to your conversion and they're going to become even more crucial with AI. This is the test. And look at the difference, even of people, it's 76%. That's 100% certainty that this is a much better option. So this is a cool little tactic that you can do.

32m

Mar 30, 2024

Could Amazon's reign be waning as headlines buzz about a shrinking user base? We're slicing through the noise to bring you the real score on Amazon versus Temu. This and more on today’s episode! ► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast ► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension ► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup  (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life) ► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft ► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos We’re back with another episode of the Weekly Buzz with Helium 10’s Chief Brand Evangelist, Bradley Sutton. Every week, we cover the latest breaking news in the Amazon, Walmart, and E-commerce space, interview someone you need to hear from and provide a training tip for the week. Down By 2.6 Million Users, Amazon Could Keep Losing Customers To Temu https://www.forbes.com/sites/petercohan/2024/03/21/down-by-26-million-users-amazon-could-keep-losing-customers-to-temu/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/petercohan/2024/03/21/down-by-26-million-users-amazon-could-keep-losing-customers-to-temu/Sellers who use FBA Donations now have access to donation certificates https://sell.amazon.com/blog/announcements/fba-donation-certificate https://sell.amazon.com/blog/announcements/fba-donation-certificateWalmart's Beauty Aisle Blooms With New Products, Bigger Savings https://corporate.walmart.com/news/2024/03/27/walmarts-beauty-aisle-blooms-with-new-products-bigger-savings https://corporate.walmart.com/news/2024/03/27/walmarts-beauty-aisle-blooms-with-new-products-bigger-savingsAmazon’s latest Brand Protection Report: How we’re cracking down on counterfeit products https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/policy-news-views/amazon-brand-protection-report-2023-counterfeit-products https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/policy-news-views/amazon-brand-protection-report-2023-counterfeit-productsAmazon will have to publish an ads library in EU after all https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/27/amazon-dsa-ads-library-cjeu/ https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/27/amazon-dsa-ads-library-cjeu/If you're wondering about details on the Amazon Remote Fulfillment with FBA program, I should say formally the program formerly known as NARF. Let’s dive into the details on how you can be selling in the Amazon US marketplace and then, with a click of a button, start selling in Canada, Mexico and now even Brazil. Make sure to check this episode out. http://h10.me/547For savvy Amazon sellers looking to stay ahead of the curve, this episode is packed with insights on the latest features from Helium 10. Discover how 'most clicked' labels and the X-Ray Chrome extension can enhance your competitive analysis and advertising strategy. Plus, Carrie shares the good news for Helium 10 Platinum members who now have access to the ABA top search terms tool. Whether you're a new listener or a seasoned veteran seller, this episode promises to arm you with the knowledge and tools to refine your product strategies and make informed decisions in the bustling marketplace of Amazon and Walmart. In this episode of the Weekly Buzz by Helium 10, Bradley talks about: __ __ Enjoy this episode? Be sure to check out our previous episodes for even more content to propel you to Amazon FBA Seller success! And don’t forget to “Like” our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/Helium10Software/ and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/serious-sellers-podcast/id1453455876, Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/31CTCHQGSghLavsf0otYQq, or wherever you listen to our podcast. Get snippets from all episodes by following us on Instagram at @SeriousSellersPodcast https://www.instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast/ Want to absolutely start crushing it on Amazon? Here are few carefully curated resources to get you started: __ __  

21m

Mar 27, 2024

Ever dreamt of expanding your Amazon empire internationally with just a few clicks? That's exactly what we're unpacking with Jaisal Jivanji from Amazon Canada and Irias Garcia Enriquez from Amazon Mexico in our latest chat. We're tackling the Remote Fulfillment with FBA program head-on, discussing the seamless process of selling across borders using your US FBA inventory. You'll find out how this can lead to a significant boost in product visibility and sales in foreign markets, which now includes the vibrant landscape of Brazil. Struggling with keyword research for an international audience? No sweat, because we also dissect how Helium 10's Magnet tool comes to the rescue, enhancing your targeting prowess. We spill the beans on Bradley’s journey leveraging the program, the automatic translations of listings for local markets, and the nuances of handling images and A+ content across different Amazon platforms. It's a great episode to watch for logistical insights, from managing shipping times to utilizing Amazon's metrics, complemented by third-party tools that could be the game-changer you've been looking for. Now, let's talk money. Navigating the currency exchange and pricing strategies can be daunting, but we're breaking it down to make it practical and straightforward. With Amazon's handy Build International Listings (BIL) tool and Amazon Currency Converter for Sellers (ACCS), we explain how to keep your pricing strategies smart and your international profits in check, even with fluctuating exchange rates. Say goodbye to pricing headaches and hello to transparent, surprise-free customer experiences in Canada, Mexico, and Brazil. Big thanks to Jaisal and Irais for their expert insights—it's just what you need to consider taking the plunge into these exciting markets. In episode 547 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley, Irais, and Jaisal discuss: __ __ ► 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 representatives from Amazon Canada and Mexico who are going to talk all about the remote fulfilling with FBA program, where just in three clicks you can instantly be selling your products in Canada, Mexico and now Brazil. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. I want to enter in an Amazon keyword and then within seconds get up to thousands of potentially related keywords that you could research. Then you need magnet by Helium 10. For more information, go to h10.me/magnet /h10.me/magnet. Magnet works in most Amazon marketplaces, including USA, Mexico, Australia, Germany, UK, India and much more. 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 a special episode because for the very first time, we have got somebody who is from Amazon Canada, also Amazon Mexico on the show. I've had people from Amazon USA, I think, Amazon Singapore and different places, but I'm just expanding out the marketplaces here. We've got Jaisal and Irais here. Welcome to the show, guys.   Irais: Hello everyone. Thank you for inviting us.   Bradley Sutton: Now, right before the show, I was like now the way you pronounce your name is Irais and that's how I would say it, but like that just sounds like so awkward. So I'm just going to go with Irais and she says she's not going to be offended there and Jaisal I couldn't even begin to exactly pronounce it, but so I'm going to start with Jaisal. What is the origin of your name?   Jaisal: So my name is actually originated from a town in India called Rajasthan, and there was a princess back in the day whose name was Jaisal, and there's also a city called Jaisalmer, so that's kind of where my name came from.   Bradley Sutton: See, I like knew there was a good story behind it. You know, Bradley, there's no, there's nothing going on there. You know, like Irais is or at least the English spelling is like a flower, you know kind of thing. So, all right, we've got. So I was already pronouncing it wrong, so it was Jaisal instead of Jaisal. I don't know why I was saying it the right. Okay, I got it now. Now, Jaisal, you we're in Canada, are you at right now?   Jaisal: So I actually live in Dallas, Texas. Bradley Sutton: Dallas Texas, okay.   Jaisal: Yeah, our team sits in Seattle and in Arlington, and then we also have a team out in Canada.   Bradley Sutton: Okay, all right now. How long have you worked for Amazon?   Jaisal: For a little over two years, so it's been a really fun ride so far.   Bradley Sutton: Now, have you always worked on the? You like Amazon Canada in different marketplaces, or did you do something else like for Amazon USA, or what's going on there?   Jaisal: Yeah, so the whole time I've been on Amazon Canada, I've been on the Remote Fulfillment expansion team for the entire time, so it's been I've definitely gotten really used to this team and I've learned a lot from the team as well.   Bradley Sutton: Now we're gonna be talking, we're gonna go in depth here, but just something I've wanted to know. I always you just said Remote Fulfillment. Now I have always referred to this as NARF right North, because I swear it used to be called like North American Remote Fulfillment. But now I don't see that those initials anywhere on Amazon did it? Was that an official term or is that something I made up, or did you guys have that and then you just erased the NARF and now it's called something else.   Irais: Yes, you're right, it was called North America Remote Fulfillment, but the thing is that the moment we are now expanding to other countries, it doesn't make sense to call it North America. That's why we only, we're only staying with Remote Fulfillment with it.   Bradley Sutton: That's all. We're almost giving a spoiler alert right there about later on in the show. We're gonna be okay now. Okay now, I guess. So like I gotta start calling it something, but that's. That was such a cool name though, NARF, you know, it's so easy to remember that. All right, let's. Let's switch to Irais. Now, where are you located?   Irais: So I am in Mexico City and I worked at the office that we have in Mexico City.   Bradley Sutton: Is that where you're born and raised?   Irais: Yes, yes, I haven't been living all my life here. I went to give my tour of the world for 10 years and came back to Mexico City, and I've been working at Amazon since four years now four years, and I hope.   Bradley Sutton: Let's just start in an degree. You know the reason why I brought you on kind of like representing Amazon Canada. By the way, that's a really cool sweater you have on there. I haven't seen that one special edition, but is you know? I want to talk about Remote Fulfillment now in general. You know, I'm an Amazon seller in the USA now me personally, I don't remember when I enrolled, but I'm already enrolled in it. But there's probably a lot of people listening to this show maybe who haven't. This might be the first time they're even hearing about Remote Fulfillment. So you know what? Let me take a step back. What is Remote Fulfillment? Either of you can answer this.   Irais: So Remote Fulfillment, it's a program that allows sellers to use their US FBA inventory to expand to other countries like Mexico, Canada and now Brazil. What we do is like the inventory that you are sending to the Remote Fulfillment Center, to the sorry, to the fulfillment centers in in US. Amazon uses to fulfill the orders internationally once there is a sale in another country.   Bradley Sutton: Cool now. So that's just basically in a nutshell what it is. Now I'm a seller who's maybe hearing about this for the first time. How do I know if it's something that I should probably look into? Or maybe there's a kind of seller where it's like nah, this is probably not for you yet.   Irais: Well, really, for I think, for any seller that is already selling in in US BISBA I think it's something really great to try, because you're already selling with FBA in US, you already have your products there. The only thing you need to do is enroll. Actually, we are I'll explain further down but we are doing automatically enrollment for some eligible sellers and once you're enrolled, you're basically instantly selling in other like internationally, because it's Amazon who takes care of the rest. We are basically, once we enroll you, we are going to duplicate your ASINs or your offers that's how we call it in Amazon ASINs and you're we're going to duplicate your offers and products to the other countries and then you will be offering those products to new clients and you will have more opportunities to sell right. So I think it's very easy. You don't really need to worry about sending inventory to other places, you don't need to invest on that and everything is taken care of by Amazon. So I think it's very easy. You don't really need to say, oh, am I ready?   Bradley Sutton: I'm not ready, because Amazon takes care of everything now, Jaisal, you know, for me when I first enrolled in it, when it was called NARF like the very first one that I made sure to get into was Canada, would it be safe to say that probably most people are, you know, who are selling in the US probably make that one their first enrollment. And then how does somebody enroll in it these days?   Jaisal: yeah, of course. So from the way to enroll standpoint, we do have that auto enrollment that I used to talking about earlier. But also if you want to double check to see if you are enrolled, you would go into your US Seller Central side and check the inventory tab and go to Remote Fulfillment and there will be. We have like a new UI as well and there you should be able to see like which countries you have launched in, and it's literally just like a click of a button all right.   Bradley Sutton: So I'm here for those watching on YouTube. I'm going in one of my accounts right, I'm pretty sure it's enrolled inventory and then Remote Fulfillment with FBA, all right. And then here it is right here. So I would hit then marketplace enrollment, right, and then there it is All right. So then you would be able to see the three marketplaces and it says I'm enrolled. And if it wasn't enrolled I would have just selected it here and then hit update. So everybody who's listening if you guys are, you know, if you guys are running on a jog right now or you're in your car, you know, please Pull over to the side of the road or just wait till you get home, but go into your Seller Central, hit the Menu button on the left hand side, go to inventory, mouse over that and then select Remote Fulfillment by FBA and literally right after there It'll be just maybe a couple of clicks to enroll. If you are not now, let's say somebody wasn't like me and it said not enrolled, enrolled, just like. If I. From the moment right now they click on this, is it instantaneous that they're now in the program? Does it take 24 hours about? How long would it take them to get up and running?   Irais: If you do it manually, you will go through a small flow like after this page. You have another flow when it will just let you know that we are duplicating your ASINs with building international listings tool and once you are enrolled it can be Instantly. It may take up to for you 24 hours, but most of the times it's on the same day.   Bradley Sutton: Excellent, excellent. Now, for me, there were some of my products that, even though, as everybody just saw who saw my screen I am fully enrolled, but some of my products that weren't activated. So you know, that leads me to assume that, hey, some products maybe are not eligible. Um, I know, way back in the day, like six years ago, when I was working for seven years and when I was working for a different company, like they were doing Uh, a diet pills and like nothing was available for Canada because there was like regulations about that. But just, I don't sell any diet pills and this is where I sell coffin shelves and egg trays and stuff like that. But what are the kind of products that might not be just Able to qualify for this program with this click of the button?   Jaisal: Yeah, so for each country they all have different importation roles. Um, products that are not eligible due to exportation rules Will not be copied to other stores by the build international listings tool, also known as the bill tool, and you'll generally see like an ineligibility message through that same UI that you were showing earlier. However, there are some cases where a product is eligible for cross-border fulfillment under a different fulfillment method, such as local FBA fulfillment or seller fulfilled, but it's not eligible for the Remote Fulfillment with FBA, and that could generally be because there are additional documentation requirements for customs or specific shipping or packaging requirements. Um, a good example is Remote Fulfillment does not export consumer goods, as those products often do need labeling in local languages. And if your product is not eligible for Remote Fulfillment and is not restricted for sale in the target store, you can still send it directly to the country for sale through FBA in each country, or you could list it as a seller fulfilled offer. Um, a good rule of thumb is like if you want to see a full list of restricted products per country, you can visit our Remote Fulfillment page and review what you can sell in the manager listing section now I think, oh, one of the most common or I have.   Bradley Sutton: I have a list of common questions that, I gathered from people in our community, when you know, asking about this program, but I think that probably the number one thing that people want to understand is the, the shipping. So, first of all, if I turn this on and it's tied to my FBA US inventory which, by the way, I'm not, um, not sure if I want to make sure everybody understands that it's what we're talking about here, I am not sending inventory, physical inventory, to Canada warehouses or to Mexico warehouses or to Brazil warehouses, it's taking from my us inventory. So Somebody sees, though, a prime batch. If they're shopping on Amazon Mexico, like they, they search for a coffin shelf, how would you say something? The atahood right here and it says Amazon Prime right there.   Irais: Yes, yeah, I think that's one of the main benefits of the program is that your ASINs have a prime batch when they are Distributed by Remote Fulfillment. So, although they might take longer, a little bit longer than the ones that are currently already in Mexico, but they are considered prime.   Bradley Sutton: That was my next question there. So they see the Prime Badge. Now what is the average shipping time that they might see, assuming obviously even in America you could have a Prime Badge and it might say 10 days because the inventory is being checked in. But let's just assume that the inventory is completely checked in. You know I have got tons of inventory. What's the average shipping time somebody in Mexico or Canada might see on my listing?   Irais: Yeah, uh. So On average to Mexico and Canada it takes Less than seven days. That's the time that the around you will see is that the target?   Bradley Sutton: I know it's completely brand new this month of, but is that the target also for Brazil or might take a little bit longer for there?   Irais: Yeah, so for Brazil, given the distance and obviously the size of the country, we are targeting now around 30 days, and which is also an average for products that are coming from other countries, locally Brazil.   Bradley Sutton: Excellent, excellent. Now, obviously for Spain or for Mexico, it's automatically translating my listing into Spanish. For Canada, is it changing it at all to like Canadian English? Not that it's that different, but you know, like, like, for example, British English. You know a diaper is called a nappy or something like that. It's still English, but it's, it's different. Like is there any translation happening? Or like. Does it translate to French? For, like the people in in Quebec who view Amazon and French?   Jaisal: Yes, it'll translate to French whenever you're looking in that for the French.   Bradley Sutton: But not changing it to like a Canadian vernacular or anything like that, right, yeah, okay now. So that's my second part of my question. Is all right, so Amazon is automatically translating my listing to either French or Spanish or Portuguese, I'm assuming for Brazil. Now what if I, being a Helium 10 user, and I like might know the keyword that people are searching in Spanish and Portuguese and the keyword that Amazon translated might not be what I like? Am I able to go in and override that translation?   Jaisal: Yeah, so it depends on the listing. If it already exists in the target country, just as it works in the US, you can propose changes and seller support will make the adjustment when they believe it's pertinent for the listing. However, if the listing is new in the target store and you're the first one to list it and you own the information, you'll be able to make changes as needed after localizing with the build international listings tool.   Bradley Sutton: So then it wouldn't be editing the listing per se and, like manage inventory, I would need to go to the build international listings to change the. You know, like I want to change a couple words in the title, that that would be the tool I go into. Yeah okay, perfect, perfect. What about A+ Content? How does that translation work? I'm not. I don't think I've ever looked at my A+ Content. In my North American remote fulfill, or see, I keeps using the old term Remote Fulfillment by FBA Listings. I don't think I've ever even looked at how what's going on with my A+ Content.   Jaisal: Yeah, so honestly, similar to how you do it in the US side for Canada or for the store that you're selling in, you can go exactly to where your A+ Content listings would be and upload it there. It doesn't automatically translate over, you may have to tweak some things, but it'll be in the Seller Central for that respective country speaking about localization, one thing, another thing I have not done is my change my images.   Bradley Sutton: So, for example, I have some infographic images right where I might have some text on there. Obviously, Amazon is not changing. You know, editing my images for me, changing that to English, it is it possible? If I'm using the same as in and smart, it's my product, you know. I've got Brand Registry, you know and everything. Can I change the like a certain image in the Mexican marketplace to put Spanish? You know, if I have like the features you know listed in one of my images and I want to change the Spanish, am I able to change that image or it's now going to overwrite that to my US listing?   Jaisal: It won't overwrite. So whatever you do on like, for example, if you do it on your Canada Seller Central, your Mexico Seller Central, it's not going to override or impact anything that you do on the US Seller Central side. It'll just stay for that target country.   Bradley Sutton: Give me good stuff here, like I was worried about. I was worried I think a lot of sellers might have been worried about that one. You're telling us what we want to hear. Now one thing I noticed to you know, like I don't ship inventory directly to Canada, but something that's cool is I can. I can still see them. We have some high and cool metrics here. Let me just show my screen to the listeners who can see this. But, like search, career performance and things like that, I can actually go to Canada and Go to Mexico and see that, even though, like again, I never registered to just for FBA in Canada or Mexico, but since I am part of this Remote Fulfillment, I can actually see the really cool metrics that Amazon has been giving for these different Marketplaces. And then, obviously, you know, if anybody's using Helium 10, you guys all have access to the same functionality for Amazon, for Amazon USA, Amazon Canada, Amazon Mexico, Amazon Brazil, our tools like Cerebro work and magnet where you can do your keyword research and things like that. So in the past, a lot of stuff that Amazon USA sellers had, you know, like they didn't have it right away for Mexico and Canada and the other marketplaces about at least all of the main things, definitely has access here now, where you know I talked about this a little bit before. But for again, for the, for those just joining us, where, at what point Should I be like, hey, this is something that I need to go all in on, and then maybe I've been doing it for a while and then I'm like you know what I don't want to have 30 days for shipping to Brazil. I don't want to have those eight days to Mexico or something. Maybe I should consider actually doing the whole process of taking my inventory, some for a certain product and shipping it to FBA in those countries.   Irais: I think that's a great point. It's really good considering at some point, migrating to local FBA Just because FBA has better seller experience, like you say, is like it has shorter shipping times, for example, and which can benefit the sellers. Conversion now. And but to the question one. I think it depends on multiple things. I think the minimum seller should consider is first, having a stable demand of the products they want to sell. You know to make sure the products you're going to send they are actually going to have a Sales. The second one is that sellers need to have figure out the export logistics. You need to have a Look for the information like what products can you send? You know that sometimes our Exportations about the materials that you can export and like maybe having the support of a broker sometimes. And finally, also making sure that you comply with the local laws of the country you're targeting right. Some countries and ask you to have, for example, a local tax ID, which is a process you need to do in in that country. Or some other countries, for example, they ask a specificity, a specificity story about labeling Products, know, and so all of those things we need to think about before, just like sending the inventory to the countries.   Irais: But, like I said, it's a good Option to think about it because it will. It will help yourselves and also one another point that I want to mention is that you don't need to decide of Removal filming or FBA. You can always choose both. Actually, it's something that we recommend because, for example, you can use FBA for the ASINs that they have a high turnover rate or they have a stable demand, but if you want to try new ASINs, you can enroll them first in removal filming and so that you can try you know the demand, see how it hits, how they work, and you can use be using both Programs at the same time. Also, FBA is a good option and for the products, like Jason said, for the products that are not Eligible in removal filming, you know, like, for example, if you also sell consumables, you can try to sell consumables via FBA and the rest of your products in removal filming.   Bradley Sutton: Interesting now. Now, Jaisal, you know, one question I had was you know she just mentioned about like tax implications and things like that, for when you're actually sending inventory there. I think that's a very top of mind Topic for sellers is like, wait a minute, like anything has to do with another country, like, alright, my product is crossing the border, am I gonna get tax? Like do I? I'm doing Remote Fulfillment? Am I gonna get a separate tax bill? Or do I have to clear customs for each order? Like all these, all these questions they might have, like which might be holding them back? Um, but correct me if I'm wrong, but in removal filming, is it true that I really don't have to worry about those things?   Jaisal: This is probably, like our, one of our top five questions that we always get. So when customers buy products through Remote Fulfillment with FBA, the buyer is actually the importer of record and must pay any import duties, taxes and fees. Amazon kind of simplifies the import duties process by estimating the amount that will be due and adding it to the amount the customer pays at checkout. You also do not have to present income taxes in other countries, since your sale is occurring in the United States, so sellers may continue with their tax-specific obligations in the US in the same way as before joining Remote Fulfillment.   Bradley Sutton: If I'm looking in Helium temp profits or in Seller Central, when I'm downloading my financial reports and everything, the order might show that it went to Canada or something. But is everything pretty much the same as far as the numbers go? My shipping, my fulfillment cost is the same and there's no extra fees. That's affecting my profitability. Is it almost 100% the same?   Irais: We can talk about also the fees. I can already explain how it works. So in Remote Fulfillment the products have two fees, just the same as any product in USFBA. So the first fee is Remote Fulfillment fee, which replaces the USFBA fee it's the same one. And we have the second fee, which is the category referral fee, which depends on the kind of product that you're selling and that will be. It varies depending on the country where the sale is occurring. So, besides these two fees although they can be higher because, for example, in Remote Fulfillment, fees varies depending on the size of the product, the weight and also the country to which you are sending the product Although these fees may be higher we have the tool bill that we have mentioned. But the tool does is it adjusts the prices in the targeted countries with those fees, including those fees in the price and any other extra costs that you might have, so that the price already includes all these additional costs and sellers will get a similar profit as they get in US. So to the question what we are doing with PIL is protecting the margin of the sellers so that they have a similar profit as they get in US, and that's how we can comfortable say that you will be having almost the same profits as you have in US.   Bradley Sutton: Okay. So let's say for whatever reason, the currency exchange rate is fluctuating greatly, day by day or week by week. Is once a week or once a day? Is the price maybe showing up as something like is BIL changing my price to reflect the currency fluctuations?   Irais: Yeah, so maybe it's easier if I give an example. But for example, so what BIL is going to do is have your US price as a base. It will stay connected to the other listings or to your products in Canada, Mexico and Brazil and the moment that you do, for example, a manual adjust price in the US, it will adjust all other countries, considering the fees difference in each of those countries and it will also consider, like you say, exchange rates for each of the countries. One point that I want to make sure is clear and that sellers know is that if sellers do a change manually to the price in the target country for example, they go and they make a change manually in the price in Mexico that will break the connection with the US price. So BIL will not be connected anymore, and that's something that selling partners need to be careful with. Sellers can totally go and manually change prices in the targeted countries, but that will be breaking the connection. So there is a way to connect the sellers, the listings, again through the BIL international listing tool, which is in global selling. You can reconnect all your listings, but it's just to have this in mind. You know, like not making manual adjustments if you want to maintain the connection with your US prices.   Bradley Sutton: That's super interesting. So if I never have touched it, it's going to go ahead and edit that for me, but if I mess with the price once, just like in Seller Central or something, then that breaks the connection. I literally have not seen this page in probably years, but I'm looking right now on my BIL international listings page and, for example I guess at one point I selected these things as default, but it's interesting. Like it says here for Canada, it tells me what the exchange rate is right now. And then it says, for price synchronization, I can choose the list price and the sale price, or list price only. So that's good to know. If I'm doing a sale in the US, that means, if I have this selected, it'll go ahead and reflect as well in Canada. And then it says here I can for Remote Fulfillment with FBA. The choices I have are same as the source marketplace adjust for fees, which is what I have. The other options, though, are same as just same as the source marketplace percentage above the source marketplace, or percentage below the source marketplace, or fixed amount above. So very interesting. And then I also have self-fulfilled options here. Like me, I have a lot of skews that I actually self-fulfilled myself, and I don't know why I put $25. I guess I didn't want anybody ordering from Canada or something. I put a markup of $25 here. But, interesting, I had not been on this page at all. I had no idea about these things. So, as a matter of fact, you just told me I'm working on something with our product team where we can do prices, and I didn't realize. So if I'm manually editing a price, it is no longer gonna go by these rules.   Irais: then yeah, just to be clear, it's manually adjusting the price in the target country. So if you change to the store of Mexico and then you change the price in pesos, no, if you change it in US, obviously it will stay connected, and exactly that's how the tool helps to change accordingly the prices in the other countries.   Bradley Sutton: Okay, all right, interesting, interesting. Now here we're talking about all these foreign currencies and things like that. Jesso, If I'm trying to open this up, do I need a Canadian bank to get my disbursements from? If I'm just an American seller, do I need a Mexican bank to be able to receive the payments, or how does that work?   Jaisal: Yeah, so now actually, Amazon will manage this for you through a tool called Amazon Currency Converter for Sellers, or otherwise known as ACCS, that you can set up in Seller Central as a deposit method. That way, your funds from other countries are transferred to your assigned bank account to receive deposits in the US.   Bradley Sutton: So literally at that moment that we talked about earlier in the show, when I'm enrolling, that's it, like there's not a bunch of other steps I'm going to have to jump through. All right, we talked about the cost. We talked about taxes and fees and banks and disbursements. I'm sure I'm forgetting some other things, but just in my just thinking about this program, a couple other questions a seller might have is maybe on the customer side. You said that they're the importer of records. So just out of curiosity, you're no tax code expert or anything, but on average, is it a lot of fees that they're having to pay? Like if they're buying my coffin shelf back there for 25 bucks that's the base price with shipping. The typical Canadian customer, though, what's their bill going to be like? Is it going to be double that? Is it just a certain percentage of that?   Jaisal: Yeah, I mean, I think it's an important aspect. But what we really want to highlight is that with the Remote Fulfillment program, buyer will be charged for the taxes.   Bradley Sutton: The price that the customer sees, though, is it just the listed price, you know, after the currency conversion, or is Amazon automatically building those you know taxes and things like that, into that retail price?   Jaisal: Yeah, so whenever the seller is going on to Amazon.ca and they want to buy your product, they will see actually what the price point is plus the tax and the shipping fee. Ah, so that's good.   Bradley Sutton: So it's not like you know like, see, that that's, that's a worry, like when I used to export to Canada and other countries, you know, off of Amazon. You know, maybe 15 years ago or 20 years ago, I would get some customers that would sometimes reject the shipments because they're like, I got this crazy tax bill that I had no idea you know this is how much, but kind of like, there's no surprises because Amazon is telling them how much, how much it's going to cost. Oh, that's a comfort to hear.   Irais: I was just going to compliment that. For example, for Mexico, the price of the AC versus US is very similar. It will only get adjusted by the, by the shipping fee which is going to be added to the price if there is no taxes, Amazon is not going to add any, any extra fees and, like you say, it's really convenient, for example, for me when I'm like I want to buy a brand that is not available in my country and that I want to bring it, and it's really nice to have you know like a exact date when I'm going to get it and that I don't have surprises of when the package arrives. Like you say like, oh, I am due another 50 bucks for what I am ordering.   Bradley Sutton: Okay, good to know. Good to know. What about returns? So you know, Amazon obviously has a generous return policy. Is it kind of like the same for people who buy through mobile film? I don't even know what it is like. You know 30, let's just say 30 days. They have 30 days, is it the same? And then what's the process? You know, like for like, I had to return something from Amazon the other day and it's just like all right here, go drop it off at UPS or we'll send you a label to return. How does it work if it's a Remote Fulfillment product?   Irais: Yeah, it's exactly the same from a buyer's perspective. You also have the Amazon promise that you can return items within a certain time First, I think Mexico is 30 days and you'll get a label, a shipping label, that you can paste on your package and you'll deliver it to the same place, where, or even you can also call for someone to pick it up at home, and it works exactly the same way. Amazon will take care of bringing back the product to the US. So that's I think it's important for sellers to know. We don't bring the product to the FCS and locally, we take it back to your inventory in US. So once it gets to the US, it will be re added to your inventory.   Bradley Sutton: Now, what are some educational resources that people can search for, maybe in Seller Central If they want to find out more about this? How would you suggest people can learn more?   Irais: inside Seller Central. I think there is two main resources sellers can use. One is the help page of Remote Fulfillment with FBA that you can search by using the search bar. You can place Remote Fulfillment. You will find the help page. We also have a revenue calculator that sellers can use. Also, by typing revenue calculator, you will find it in the search menu. The only thing you need to make sure is that once you are in the revenue calculator, you need to choose the store where you are targeting and the store where your inventory is in, and you will see the option of calculating fees with Remote Fulfillment so that you are able to compare what is the best channel for you or what will be your net profits using one channel or the other one. And finally, you always have seller support, which is a really good resource for a lot of sellers.   Jaisal: Just like sending your question or requesting a call, and they will be able to help you, yeah, and also just to add on to that as a seller, if you do have any country specific questions, one piece of advice that I like to give is search for those questions in your Seller Central that is accounted for that country. So if you have a question, for example, on Canada right and you're looking on how do I expand into FBA in Canada, you would literally go into your Seller Central side for your Canada account and type in selling in Canada from the US with FBA and you'll get information on how to expand that way.   Bradley Sutton: Excellent, excellent. Now just to give people an idea of what this could mean for you and everybody's accounts is different, but I have literally done no optimization. I haven't even edited my keywords or anything to make it right. All I did last year in one of my accounts is just turn on the Remote Fulfillment. Let me just show you, guys, my Helium 10 profits window here. But in one time period in Project X, my Project X account, I did $132,000 in USA and by never even looking at it, not even touching it at all, never having to ship something myself to Canada, I did $10,000 in Canada. So is that going to make me a millionaire by selling in Canada? Mexico only did a couple of hundred dollars, but still that's almost getting to 10% of my revenue by not even lifting a finger, just clicking a couple of buttons to enroll, and I was able to increase my sales in this one time period by $10,000. So, guys, if you haven't enrolled into this program, definitely do it. Not only are you going to be able to sell in Canada, but also Mexico. And now the newest member of the team is Amazon Brazil to really tap into that marketplace. So, Jaisal and Irais, thank you so much for joining us today and giving us all this knowledge about this program. I hope that all of our listeners are going to be enrolled by the end of this episode and maybe we'll bring you back next year and see what's new with the Remote Fulfillment program. So thank you so much for joining us.

37m

Mar 26, 2024

Ever wonder what it takes to turn your Walmart product listings from lackluster to lucrative? Ryan King, the savvy CEO of BlueRyse, joins us on the airwaves to share his expert strategies for maximizing your presence on Walmart's digital shelves. Together, we navigate the intricacies of PPC, the subtleties of listing optimization, and the crucial metrics that could make or break your profits. Ryan's advice, drawn from the cutting-edge tools of Helium 10, affords a masterclass in finessing your financials and leveraging Walmart's ever-growing online platform for unparalleled brand growth and diversification. In the vast sea of selling at Walmart, standing out is an art form, and we've got the brushes and palette to help you paint a masterpiece with your product listings. Our journey reveals how to ensure your offerings are not just indexed, but also scoring high on Walmart's listing quality score. We cover all bases from the precision of backend attributes to the finesse required in product type optimization. We also dissect the importance of competitive pricing and swift delivery, how to ace the A/B testing game, and even how Walmart's fulfillment services can provide a much-needed boost in ranking. As the curtain falls on this episode, we've left no stone unturned in the realm of Walmart PPC and the emerging tactics of brand conquesting. Imagine targeting competitor brand terms, a concept newly possible on Walmart, and the advantage it hands you in the grand chessboard of ecommerce. Wrapping up with a flourish, we dabble in the complexities of SEM strategies and the nuances of bidding wars, closing with a heartfelt word of thanks to Ryan for his insights. So, tune in and equip yourself with the secrets to selling success on one of the world's most formidable marketplaces. In episode 546 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Carrie and Ryan discuss: __ __ ► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast ► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension ► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup  (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life) ► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft ► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos Transcript Carrie Miller: Walmart PPC and Listing Optimization Strategies to increase sales on the Walmart marketplace. This and so much more on today's episode. Bradley Sutton: How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. What was your gross sales yesterday, last week, last year? More importantly, what are your profits after all your cost of selling on Amazon? Did you pay any storage charges to Amazon? How much did you spend on PPC? Find out these key metrics and more by using the Helium 10 tool Profits For more information, go to H10.me/profits. Carrie Miller: Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast brought to you by Helium 10. My name is Carrie and I will be your host, and this is our Winning with Walmart Wednesday, where we go over all things Walmart, we tell you the latest and greatest news about Walmart, we answer your questions and we have an amazing Walmart expert guest. I'm going to just tell you a little bit about some Helium 10 tools, because I haven't really mentioned these a lot lately. I wanted to make sure that everyone is aware that Helium 10 does have a lot of amazing tools that support Walmart. So we have X-Ray. It's going to help you with sales estimates and so much more. We have our Cerebro and Magnet tools that help you find amazing keywords for your listings. We also have our Profits tool and our Keyword Tracking tool. In addition to that, we have Adtomic, which is our paper click advertising management software, so that is extremely helpful. We've added day parting and a lot of other amazing things to Adtomic, so it's definitely the best it's ever been and highly recommend checking that out if you haven't checked it out. All right. So today I want to bring on our guest, and I'm really, really excited to have him on today and his name is Ryan King, and so thanks so much for being on. Ryan is a CEO and co-founder of BlueRyse, which is a Walmart agency, and I've actually known Ryan for a few years now. We met at the Billion Dollar Seller Summit and we definitely connected on Walmart stuff, so he's definitely an expert in the field and I'm really excited for him to share all of his knowledge with everyone today. I know he was on last year, but for anyone, Ryan, that doesn't know you, can you go ahead and tell a little bit about yourself to the audience? Ryan: Certainly. Yeah, thanks for having me on here, Carrie. Glad to be on this episode here of the Serious Sellers Podcast, specifically talking about Walmart. So yeah, BlueRyse is a full managed service agency focused specifically on Walmart. We've been operating with third party and first party brands since early 2020. And our focus is on everything from content optimization, ad management, catalog management, interfacing with Walmart personnel, all these other elements with regard to, ultimately, the focus of maximizing Walmart brand's performance on Walmart.com. Carrie Miller: I want to first start out and just ask you, because you've been in this Walmart game for quite some time, what do you think the main advantages are for third party sellers to start selling on Walmart and do you think it's a really good opportunity? Ryan: Yeah, absolutely. It's a great opportunity. I think the advantages have continued to grow over the years. They haven't diminished. One of the reasons we saw the opportunity on Walmart was as brand owners ourselves. We began and launched and grew brands on Amazon back in the day, starting in early 2013. And we were looking for ways to, as brand owners, de-risk a bit, diversify revenues back during the aggregator boom. Part of the factor was how do we increase multiples, all those kind of elements? I think all the principles remain the same as to why those would be advantages. If you're truly building a brand, then you're looking to identify what are the channels that make sense to increase sales, increase profits overall and to de-risk. So that's one advantage of finding other marketplaces, other channels to sell through. Beyond that, there's just the fact that Walmart is pushing heavy and has been pushing heavy into the online marketplace space. They understand that for them as a business, as a retailer, while they're the number one retailer in the world, e-commerce certainly has been a major growth factor for others competitors like Amazon and everybody else, and so Walmart understands that they need to compete in the digital shelf. That means they want more sellers, they want a broader assortment, they want great products so that more shoppers come and have a great experience. So that has led to Walmart heavily focusing on building out their third-party marketplace over the last several years. I would say a couple other that come to mind social proof and reviews and ratings have been always on the forefront of e-commerce sellers' minds, especially in the Amazon space, such large motes. I haven't looked at this example in a while, but earbuds, Bluetooth earbuds. When I looked at it, probably two years ago, the average review count for Bluetooth earbuds on page one for Amazon was somewhere around 40,000. At the time, the average review count for that keyword, which was a high volume keyword, on Walmart was around 800. And so just the opportunity to enter the market. You know, if you had wished you had. You know the buzz for a long time was Walmart is Amazon of 2012 or whatever it may be. Walmart is in its own right of maturing marketplace these days, but the opportunity still exists. In that way, I think, the other ones. There is a bit of a different shopper base, and so if you have a broader assortment, your heroes on Amazon or other marketplaces may also translate to be your heroes on Walmart and you can just get a continued growth of that assortment. However, we also do see because it is a different shopper, a different marketplace, sometimes some other products that may not be performing as well in your catalog on Amazon might be your top performers on Walmart for various reasons, and so it breeds new life into your catalog, potentially. And then, finally, if you really want to identify ways of growing the brand, and maybe brick and mortar retail is a desire of yours at some point, then there is a credible pathway to getting products into brick and mortar. We work with brands all the time. Who that is part of their play, whether they've begun with conversations with merchants first, and it's a let's test and see and let's get it in, or if they're native e-commerce or D to C first, and they're, they're engaging with us in order to optimize and maximize performance planning on that conversation in the future. We see those dots connect quite consistently to at least get a conversation. So all the above and then, for those who have FOMO you know, to kind of trigger the FOMO, that it's, it's a bit of this is the opportunity to get in now, even if it's maybe a mid to longer term play for some brands. Get in now while you, while the opportunity is there, while there's more access to account managers and others who are aligned incentives with you, to get your assortment online on their marketplace. Carrie Miller: Yeah, amazing, yeah, those are all really amazing reasons. The next question I have for you is you know, people are always wanting to know how can I, you know, increase my sales on Walmart. So what are some strategies you have for listing, optimization and just increasing sales on Walmart? Ryan: Yeah, you know, I know a lot of these have probably been covered repeated ways, but it bears repeating again would be step number 1 is making sure you're not just If you're gonna, if it is a secondary or tertiary marketplace in your mindset and strategy and you're not paying attention to the unique ways you need to optimize for Walmart, then unless you're kind of the you hit the trend at the right time in the in the search volume at the right time, Walmart with an optimized listing, you're not gonna see great sales lift. And so Step one would be, know the Walmart marketplace. Understand how the algorithm works, understand what product listing optimization means, understand that it needs to be original for Walmart's marketplace and how that impacts sales. And so if I was looking and we can talk about I know we've talked about this several times in the past to some key things to look at, let's just jump forward and assume you're on the marketplace, you're trying to grow sales in your troubleshooting, first step I go to is on the listing itself. Or actually the first step would be double check search term volumes, and this is easy. Segue into talking more about Helium 10 tools, because that's what we use is look at your category. One simple way to do it you can either start with your own listing or you start with competitive listings. But one way we like to do it is as well as you go to Walmart.com, go to the category and sort by bestseller, you'll probably get a lot of 1P brands, meaning in store brands, those they're popping up at the top list. But go ahead and pull up X-ray if you have Helium 10 X-ray and scrape the Top 10 out of there and then plug those in, analyze them through Cerebral and get that, that search term volume list, and identify where are the search volumes? Are you optimized for those? One thing to call out if you're in a consumable space or anything that might be more related to grocery, for example, Amazon search volumes, you might have found success with different types of search terms. But there might be high volume search terms on Walmart you haven't even optimized for Because Amazon wasn't a grocery first type marketplace or that type of place. So there's, there can be high volume keywords that would not even exist really On the Amazon marketplace that are going to be high drivers on Walmart. So identify, get, make sure you're looking at the right search terms. Secondly is just make sure you're indexing and ranking before you even think about ranking. Are you indexing? And one of the fundamental areas that you've got to look at to make sure you're indexing properly is your category. Are you on the right shelf path? But if you go into growth opportunities and you click on your listing in your kind of table of products that show up there product type widget will show up and look at that product type and I didn't try and identify. Is this the right? Does this fit? Product type determines what the back end attributes are on your listing that you need to fill out and, just as a quick aside, you need to fill those out as exhaustively as possible. It's only getting more and more important to do so. While your listing quality score is not as heavily Impacted by attributes as it used to be, your visibility and relevance are, and they only increase increasingly. Be so. So fill those all out. If, even if it's a not applicable, you know, even if it's saying sports team and you're a toothpaste brand, you know, make sure you just say none are not applicable, whatever is there, and then test the product type. We've talked about this in the past and we can talk about it again if you like. But testing that makes sure your listings are optimized. So the algorithm on Walmart's giving you quantitative feedback Between your content, which is your back end attributes, your title, images of long and short descriptions, and are you at? You get mostly ranking benefits around 80%. But if your long term play is really to be best in class and to open up other doors with potential features and other things, 95% or higher is your goal offer. So price parity with other marketplaces is key, and speed of delivery. So, whether it's using something like a deliver, we heavily recommend just using Walmart fulfillment services. They continue to get broader distribution. You're instantly credited in the score with utilizing theirs and getting 2 day delivery. So use the levers that Walmart’s given you on the marketplace, and we can talk further about other ways. If someone's listening saying I've done all that, I'm at 95%. I don't know what else to optimize. We're using WFS. There are other things to continue to do. We could talk about whether that's how do you look at imagery in a way to convert? How do you utilize advertising? How do you drive external traffic to listings? What's its impact? We go a variety of ways. Maybe the last thing I'll say, though, is the first question. The last thing I'll say is maybe the first question you should ask yourself is what's your overall business case? So sometimes we have sellers come to us and they're saying I don't want to do anything, Amazon's my main channel. I would like to sell in Walmart. What can I do? And there's going to be certain limitations. If you're saying I don't, price is going to be determined by my other marketplace, not by Walmart, or something like that, you've got to be aware of those and what you're long, how the impacts, the levers you can pull on Wal-Mart. Now there's some interesting features coming out, like couponing and different things that can maybe allow for greater flexibility there. Carrie Miller: Can you talk a little bit about how to product AB test your product type, because I know you mentioned that In there. Just how to optimize, because I know you know certain product types reach more keywords. So how do you just keep track of the keywords that you? Maybe you Get impressions for an ad or like how do you really determine which one has better keyword reach? Ryan: You can do. There's various methods. It's whether you're doing advertising. You're just saying we're not. We're not getting on to your goal when you're running advertising for any keyword. Really, if you're using search and grid, which is a sponsored product, that's what most people are thinking about when they're leveraging advertising on Walmart, you're competing for Page 1. It makes sense that from a conversion standpoint, most people aren't going to Page 2, Page 3, but literally you're competing for Page 1 because the Top 4 positions are awarded potentially for the keywords in the categories for sponsored product and the next 2 out of every 10. But you've got, on average, around 40 products on Page 1 of the listing of the search results. Those same positions are being repeated across every page. There is no, I didn't get position 1 Page 1. Maybe I'll get position 1, Page 2. Position 1, Page 1 is repeated across every page. You've got to compete for those top positions. In order to do that, keyword relevancy matters. You'll get the signals If I'm showing up and position 200 from my ad reports or whatever. Or if you're using Helium 10 again and Keyword Ranking Tracking and maybe turn on boost for those keywords where it may be and track on a real-time basis best you can, how you're performing on those keywords. Obviously, make sure it's in your title. Title has the highest ranking, has historically had the highest ranking influence on keywords. You can only get about 1 or 2 in there because you don't want keyword stuff. Then in your description both points, all those things as well. Make sure it's in your listing. If it's in description and key features, repeated just a couple of times, make sure it's readable and flows naturally. Once you've made sure it's in there, then track, get your baseline. It's not truly an experiment if you didn't really record ahead of time. Am I running an experiment? Otherwise, we use the word experiment like when we just tried something and failed but we don't know what we learned. Get your baseline, see what your rankings were. Before you try something, use Helium 10's Keyword Tracker. Then go into growth opportunities, go into pick that listing, get to that middle widget that says product type. Make sure you record which one you are right now. I've used this example in the past with you, Carrie, I believe. But one case study we did was involving a client who was in herbal supplements. Their product type it was an herbal supplement and their product type was actually an herbal supplement. The product type was a one-to-one exact match. You would assume this is the best product type to be in, but we weren't indexing for them, no matter what we did for probably 10 to 15 major keywords that we knew they should get. We went to that widget. You pick. I think it's a reporting issue. It doesn't say switch product type or anything. You have to click the link that says reporting issue. It'll give you usually 4 to 5 choices of other product type. You think it is. Basically what it's doing is creating a support ticket for you and you can submit that request of change. It's not a guarantee that it'll happen, but persistence pays off. We recommend making requests of that change once you've been informed that changes happen. Then watch for us. What we saw was in that product, all the keywords we needed were instantly indexing for and began ranking within the first couple of pages of results. That was the beginning of the journey. That's a general standard practice for us in making sure we're in the right product type as well. Carrie Miller: All right, that's really good. Yeah, that's a really good strategy. I've used your example many times because people ask me about that a lot. Usually, when they get in the right product type, they start to see a lot more traction. Thanks for sharing that. I want to get into advertising because we haven't talked a lot about PPC on Walmart, on our podcast here for Walmart. I think a lot of people have questions about it. I wanted to just get your. I know you have some basic strategies or just thoughts about PPC and then also some new things that are coming that you think people should take advantage of. Then, once we're done with that, we'll get into some questions from the audience. Ryan: By way of really brief recap for those that have been around the Walmart space, I've heard of it over the past couple of years. A lot of people were shy about getting into Walmart PPC in the earlier days because it used to be a first bid auction, which meant fundamentally different than how you would be used to utilizing Amazon. Whatever you bid is what you paid. People were just blowing through their entire budget because they were trying to figure out if they could get a keyword to rank and they thought if I just spend more, I'll get placement. In those cases they were bidding $4 a click and they were winning position 40. They were getting the click and they were spending $4 for a click on position 40. The good news is shift to second bid auction. That's been around for quite a bit now. Really, what you're talking about when we're talking about PPC is fundamentally you've got a sponsored product, which is broken down into two types of campaigns: auto and manual. You've got search and grid placement. You've got item carousels that you can get in search results. You can get item carousels on product detail pages as well as next to the buy box placement. You've got on the manual campaigns, you've got exact match, phrase match and broad match, then auto campaign is what it sounds like. You're letting the algorithm do its thing. You've got some placement modifiers. You can do modifiers for app, desktop and mobile. In some other ways you can tweak things. The big thing to know still with Walmart PPC is it's heavily influenced by algorithms. Determination of are you relevant for those keywords, and so that has a. I mean that's common practice and most ad retail media platforms. But it's a heavy influencer on Walmart. So you do need to approach it from an organic signal, cell signals as well as PPC. When you're trying to rank through PPC you just can't spend your way to the top. You need to be in striking distance. The top 256 organic ranking results qualify for placement and searching grid, but you're ultimately trying to outperform whoever's in position at least 40, or at least position 30. And so it's usually a hand and glove kind of operation of how you're going to drive signals to the platform for purchase intent, showing that relevancy, and then continue increase your PPC so that you're stair stepping your way up to, ideally, somewhere in those first four positions or somewhere on that page 1. Carrie Miller: How do you get to those 200 and it's 256?, like if you're at spot 300, how do you get down to that spot? Ryan: Yeah, it depends. It's really specific on the categories. You know, the one other element when we're talking about keywords and search volumes on Walmart is there's not as many long tail keywords. The keywords just don't go as long. So you're probably going to see a significant drop off on volumes after some of the major keywords in a lot of categories. Maybe long tails, around two to three keywords long, are going to start dropping off significantly. As kind of a frame of reference, we would say, if you can find keywords up over, if you're finding 10 keywords in your category that are relevant to you, up over 7000 in search volume, that's pretty good. There's. There are ones way bigger, but identifying those to go for to get in the top 256, you may pretty quickly already appear there. I would say pick your, maybe not the biggest keyword to put in your title right away, but maybe that second tier keyword to put it in your title and some other places, and then plan on changing it over time as you grow. But some ways to drive traffic you know whether a lot of sellers already have, whether it's influencer traffic, whether it's Google ads traffic, whatever else, if you already have a traffic funnel that's leaning to DTC or anywhere else. Consider splitting a little bit of that traffic over for a period of time to Walmart at least, and you'll be rewarded. A lot of the signals of external traffic are rewarded heavily on Walmart behaviors like certainly purchase, but even behaviors like we've, you know, add to cart purchase. Any of those elements are signals that register with the algorithm and help sending signals of relevancy to get you in that top 256. The biggest one being someone searches, finds your products and purchases. So anything you can do to do that is a big help to get that going. Carrie Miller: All right, that's very interesting. And then also, you've mentioned conquesting as something everyone should be doing. Could you just explain what that is on Walmart and you know how people can start utilizing this? Ryan: Historically you could not do brand cron questing on Walmart. You can't. You obviously can't put trademark terms in your listings. That's just a copyright issue but an advertising. Until just very recently you haven't even been able to brand conquest. Really, there's kind of some ways around that. But now you can kind of the headline. So what we'd recommend is for those brands that are starting to show some relevancy or do things and you know there are heavily branded search terms on Walmart. We've noticed Walmart is leans typically more in a lot of categories towards branded search terms with high volume. So this has been untapped opportunity for a lot of brands. Unless you're running an auto campaign to get you, you get buy box placement, you know, just under their buy box on their PDP. So now you can actually set up a manual search, a manual campaign, and you have to have, you have to use exact match keywords and you can use. Just put in every variation of that brand name in there and you can win. You can't win position 1 or 2 with that brand, but you can get beyond position 2. In most cases you're eligible to actually show up in grid for their terms and so that's one that most brands that have not been playing defense as much may still be asleep on right now. So it's a good opportunity, at least for now, until some of those brands start allocating defensive budget in that way, those brands will be again because of relevancy and how it impacts how much you have to pay to win versus someone else that's more relevant. Brands are going to effectively get a discount for defending themselves because they're the most relevant one, so they're going to have to pay less than you to defend. But if they're not really bidding on it at all, this is a great opportunity. Carrie Miller: I think that's really exciting because I haven't actually done that strategy at all yet. So I'm going to definitely get on that today and see what I can find, because I have found so many branded search terms that I think would be really great to target in the past, but I wasn't able to. So that's really good, okay, so let's go ahead and get into questions from the audience. So I'm going to start with this question here. It says I have two questions. So what type of keywords are better for sponsored and manual campaigns? And I guess that's one. Ryan: I would kind of say what I said earlier probably is it depends on what stage of the lifecycle you're in at Walmart. So if you're trying to build relevancy and it's a new product without much sales history yet, I would probably recommend starting with exact and maybe phrase in a manual campaign of those kind of second tier keywords. Go after the long, the longer tail, build the relevancy there. Every conversion is going to help with relevancy of other keywords in your listings. So begin and stair step up. Another great strategy is at the same time you might want to often will will wait a little bit to do auto campaigns or maybe do it also at the at the same time that we're starting some manuals, but with a low spin threshold, so it doesn't go crazy and pick unirrelevant keywords, irrelevant keywords, but using ultimately gold. Also be using automatic keyword campaigns or automatic campaigns to harvest the performing keywords into your manual and put those into exact match. And then the last tip I would give is using the bid modifiers in manual campaigns to really kind of take over. If you have auto campaigns as well, manual campaigns are going to perform really well in search grid and so you want your manual campaigns really doing the work for those high, high volume keywords in your grid versus maybe your auto. So that'd be a few of the tips I'd give you. Carrie Miller: Let's go to the next one. It says I heard you say that more 1P sellers for more might be moving to 3P. Is that good or bad for other sellers? Ryan: I certainly thought I didn't. I don't recall saying it, but I made up. Yeah, so the Walmart basically is leveraging the third party marketplace for a lot of reasons. One of those is historically with 1P Brands, meaning brands that Walmart has entered into a contract relationship with, where they're owning inventory and setting the retail price, those things. One of the ways that Walmart wanted to test out more of the assortment with a brand, develop a meaningful relationship, would be they would select a small subset of the products, get them in-store and distribute or online and Walmart would manage everything. Then they used to tell brands that they would do. Another program called DSV. I won't go into all of it, but it was still in an owned relationship. What we've seen is a shift more towards merchants, buyers, telling brands to put the remainder of their catalog on the third party marketplace now that it's become more mature. Is it good or bad for sellers? On one hand, good in that as you have more recognizable established brands continue to increase their assortment on the marketplace. That's bringing more shoppers, more eyeballs to the marketplace. That's good for everybody. Bad, meaning more competitive. Advertising on keywords, certainly retail media ad spend we've seen increase year over year as Walmart grows the program. That's the natural life cycle of any platform. It will certainly get more competitive. Margin's may decrease over time. If you maybe have had your business model has been dropshipping and just trying to find those places where 1P brands are there's gaps, where 1P brands aren't really owning the marketplace. I still think there's a lot of opportunity there on the third party marketplace, but they're starting to catch wind of it on Walmart as well. There's challenges there bit of both. I think there's plenty of opportunity as Walmart's marketplace continues to grow. I don't think we need to be worried right now about, are you getting squeezed out of any opportunity? This is still early stages on Walmart's marketplace. Carrie Miller: I agree there's still tons of opportunity. The next thing is is there a way to get your products from WFS or Walmart probably into in-store? Do you have to apply or be invited to have your products in Walmart stores? I think this is a good question because it seems like with open call, it's just US products, but is there a way for products that are made in other countries? If you can expand on just that whole process, I think a lot of people are curious about this. Ryan: Yeah, you mentioned open call, which is for US manufacturers. There's been different times where I think two years ago, two to three years ago, they gave FirstBot at the Apple to Walmart marketplace sellers. They got to apply first and got an opportunity. Outside of that opportunity there is if you're growing an account, if you're seeing sales and showing volume, showing growth. Some of the stepping stones would be identifying if you could get an account manager or a strategic account manager to work with on your account, identifying category manager, somebody else to begin discussions with. That starts with usually getting opportunities turned on and growth opportunities, whether that's seasonal promotions, whether that's flash picks, other elements as you continue to invest and show performance there. Walmart's team they are brick and mortar team and they're a marketplace team or basically one team. A lot of buyers and merchants will look across their whole category, even on the third party marketplace, as they're evaluating opportunity. These conversations could happen and you could ask for an introduction. We've had clients that have just a category manager. Somebody else has reached out and said would you be interested in talking with a merchant about potential opportunity for in-store? There's a lot of pathways. I don't think there's a defined Walmart's probably not going to lay out for you. Here's how every marketplace seller can contact a merchant but continue to invest in sales and growth on Walmart marketplace and those conversations certainly can happen. Carrie Miller: Yeah, that's exactly what I always hear from Walmart directly. They say to prove it on the marketplace, basically All right. Next, this is a good question: Any insights on the new SEM feature? Will that feature help ranking or index on keywords used as a GG search, maybe Google search? Ryan: We've had a few that we've worked, we've tested out. Sem. Vertic is still out right now in the early stages. Any kind of early testing. As far as depending on the goal, if the goal was measured by, do we see direct conversion at a higher row, as than you would for sponsored products, which is lower in the ads funnel, more towards conversion anyway than earlier consideration steps in the funnel. It's a lower conversion at this point but there are potential advantages. I'm still waiting to clarify this element. I believe it's true, but again because we haven't worked with a lot of resellers or people that are competing with others for their own buy box. I did hear in a recent webinar and I haven't been able to go back and fact check again by one of the product developers for SEM that one of the impacts of SEM is that you could run SEM even when you're not presently in the buy box and you could drive traffic to your instance to get the sale. For those who are struggling to win buy box, that may be a pathway to getting more sales and conversions by ads aren't going to serve on marketplace when you don't have buy box but if you're running SEM. It sounded like and again I need to. I try and fact check everything before I say it and I heard it said once and I want to make sure I heard it specifically, but that definitely perked me up and I need to go back and verify. I believe what was communicated was you can run SEM through Walmart when you're not in the buy box and direct to your instance of you owning the buy box when traffic gets there. That's one opportunity. Carrie Miller: Let's see. I've only been selling on Amazon since October. I have 9 reviews and 1 seller feedback. Is this enough to apply to sell on Walmart? Ryan: The exact criteria aren't shared publicly as to what is in that decision factor. There's a lot of factors. I'll see you all next video. What ultimate? I think that the safest thing to say is what Walmart's looking for is that you have established yourself as a company that shows that you're making good products, strong history of seller satisfaction, so customer support, and that you're a legitimate company looking to do business. The other factors they're looking for are your products, a meaningful addition to the marketplace? So are you adding products to the marketplace that makes sense to them? That's a really broad filter and subjective maybe. So I can't tell you what that looks like. If you have 9 reviews, maybe on one product and it hasn't been as long I'd probably have a lot more questions as to why you want to jump to Walmart at the moment. Maybe you see the opportunity and that might be the primary marketplace that you want to pivot to. Those are my initial thoughts. It'd be hard to answer further without knowing more context. Carrie, I don't know if you have any things. Carrie Miller: Well, they said something, too, about that. They have one product with multiple variations, and I actually have seen other sellers that have one product with multiple variations get on there as well because it's a new, interesting product or really something that would work well on Walmart. So it is really dependent on that, and I've seen some people get on very easily, having not sold for very long, and then others have a harder time. So it is kind of interesting how it's a little bit subjective on there. Ryan: And what? Carrie Miller: Definitely want to be established. Make sure all of your stuff is matching. That's the biggest thing. Your address needs to match and everything needs to be tight on your application. But yeah, anything else that you want to add. Ryan: Yeah, no, sorry for stepping on you there. Yeah, no, that was basically what I was going to say too. If you get an initial reject, don't assume that is because a human looked at your application and determined you were not a fit. A lot of the rejections can happen because the bot has looked at, maybe your information, has did not match between what you submitted and what maybe is included in your business documentation. To illustrate the point is we talked about 1P brands coming over to a three P marketplace at the request of merchants. We still get  1P brands that get rejected when they've applied on their own to 3P marketplace after they've been through even more rigorous vetting because they're in a 1P relationship already. So the bots may trip on it and it's worth reaching back out to try and appeal if you need. Even if you get the message of there is no appeal, there are usually ways to find out. Carrie Miller: And I'm going to just take one last question. We've had a lot of amazing questions. We're kind of running out of time here, so this one is what bidding strategies have you found most effective for optimizing Walmart PPC campaigns, and why? Ryan: Big question yeah. Carrie Miller: That's all I'd like to just answer. Ryan: We could do a whole another episode on this one Bidding strategy found most effective optimizing PPC campaigns. So depends again what your goal. What do you mean by optimizing? Do you mean optimizing for growth, which is going to be a lower TACos, ACoS, low RoAS, potentially because you're looking to increase market share and it's a longer play? In that case, that sponsored brand, sponsored video. I didn't talk about sponsored video. If you're looking for what's the quick wins with a higher ROAS, things like look in your category, look at the search terms Our other brands are already using sponsored video. There'll be one placement on mobile or on desktop for that search term on any page, and if you're not seeing those, that's low hanging fruit. I would go for a sponsored brand. You've got to be brand registered first, but once you're brand registered, you can create sponsored video ads. So that's one way out. Optimize I would just make sure that to optimize a PPC campaign, I think that the basics of making sure your listing is relevant and make sure your listing is optimized first, and so that'd be one major factor that we see just a lot of brands miss. They think they've got the bid strategy right and that they've got the campaign architecture correct. But if you don't have high relevancy already for those keywords, you're not going to take a lot of ground. So in general I would say you want to, in any given campaign, not oversaturate your ad groups and not oversaturate with keywords in each ad group. So maybe up to five keywords in an ad group and maybe three to five ad groups in a campaign so that you can be tracking where that spend is really going and tweaking from there. But then I'd also say the biggest level ups we've seen is when you combine really the PPC optimization with organic. So blend consider offsite traffic advertising as well in some way to blend and improve the performance of PPC. So PPC will get cheaper for you when your relevancy grows and you'll be able to maintain it more. So that's often an efficient way to optimize a bit more. No otherwise to that. But I'll end there for now. Carrie Miller: Thank you again so much for joining us. I think this has been a really fantastic episode full of a lot of information for everyone. I'm sure everyone that's listening will want to go back and listen to this again. But thanks again for all of your expertise in sharing the secretive strategies and we really appreciate you and we'll probably hope to have you on again another time soon.

40m

Mar 23, 2024

Join us as we unpack the latest buzz in the Amazon and Walmart world, from their exciting announcement of their conferences to TikTok Shop's strategic enhancements amidst shutdown rumors. ► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast ► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension ► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup  (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life) ► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft ► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos We’re back with another episode of the Weekly Buzz with Helium 10’s Principal Brand Evangelist and Walmart Expert, Carrie Miller. Every week, we cover the latest breaking news in the Amazon, Walmart, and E-commerce space, interview someone you need to hear from and provide a training tip for the week. Mark your calendar—Amazon Accelerate, our fifth annual selling partner conference, is returning to Seattle from September 17 to 19, 2024! https://sell.amazon.com/blog/announcements/amazon-accelerate-2024-save-the-date https://sell.amazon.com/blog/announcements/amazon-accelerate-2024-save-the-dateWith a Ban Looming, TikTok Pushes Forward with New Commerce Features https://www.retailtouchpoints.com/topics/digital-commerce/with-a-ban-looming-tiktok-pushes-forward-with-new-commerce-features https://www.retailtouchpoints.com/topics/digital-commerce/with-a-ban-looming-tiktok-pushes-forward-with-new-commerce-featuresWalmart replaces plastic e-commerce envelopes with recyclable paper https://www.greenbiz.com/article/walmart-replaces-plastic-e-commerce-envelopes-recyclable-paper https://www.greenbiz.com/article/walmart-replaces-plastic-e-commerce-envelopes-recyclable-paperWalmart Seller Summit 2024 Announcement https://www.walmartmarketplacesellersummit.com/ https://www.walmartmarketplacesellersummit.com/Switching gears, we talk about how you can get discounts on your Helium 10 membership with the refer a friend feature. We also share a handy tip on leveraging historical search data to capitalize on seasonal trends, proving that strategic advertising on low-volume keywords can give sellers an edge before peak season hits. So, join us for a riveting exploration of these developments and take away actionable strategies to enhance your Amazon and Walmart selling journey. In this episode of the Weekly Buzz by Helium 10, Carrie covers: __ 07:25 - Pro Training Tip: Historical Ranks And Search Volume __ Enjoy this episode? Be sure to check out our previous episodes for even more content to propel you to Amazon FBA Seller success! And don’t forget to “Like” our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/Helium10Software/ and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/serious-sellers-podcast/id1453455876, Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/31CTCHQGSghLavsf0otYQq, or wherever you listen to our podcast. Get snippets from all episodes by following us on Instagram at @SeriousSellersPodcast https://www.instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast/ Want to absolutely start crushing it on Amazon? Here are few carefully curated resources to get you started: __ __ SellerTrademarks.com https://sellertrademarks.com/vsl: Trademarks are vital for protecting your Amazon brand from hijackers, and sellertrademarks.com provides a streamlined process https://sellertrademarks.com/vsl for helping you get one.  

12m

Mar 22, 2024

Unlock the full potential of your Amazon advertising efforts with the expertise of PPC maestro Destaney Wishon of BTR Media, who brings a wealth of knowledge to our illuminating discussion on Amazon PPC strategies. Listen as we dissect the limitations of relying solely on ACoS metrics, advocate for sales volume and profitability harmony, and delve into her firsthand experiences with Helium 10’s powerhouse Amazon PPC tool, Adtomic. The conversation takes a turn into the synergy of PPC and organic ranking approaches, providing you with actionable insights to enhance your ad campaigns and achieve success in the Amazon marketplace. Get ready to navigate the tricky waters of Amazon PPC campaigns for non-repeat purchase products, where we tackle the tactical acceptance of losses to build organic rank and the criticality of budget allocation for long-term gains. The episode is packed with rich strategies, including leveraging Amazon's Search Query Performance reports and optimizing bids with precision. Discover the art of juggling multiple product variants in PPC and the effectiveness of single keyword campaigns, all while managing to maintain a robust presence in a competitive niche market, like supplements.   Our TACoS Tuesday program culminates in a robust discussion on keyword match types, revealing how exact and phrase matches can coexist without cannibalizing each other's potential. Destaney shares her valuable insights on sponsored brand video ads, the finesse of managing bids outside of Amazon's console, and the tactics for handling unprofitable long-tail search terms. From the strategic considerations for small-budget brands to the nuances of keyword research and Amazon PPC tips for new sellers, this podcast episode is a great resource for anyone looking to elevate their Amazon advertising game and carve out their brand's success. In episode 545 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Destaney discuss: __ __ ► 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 one of the top minds in all the Amazon PPC world, Destaney, back on the show and she answered all of your live questions on Amazon advertising that, actually, this was no doubt the best set of questions we've ever had on the show. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. 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 http://h10.me/adtomic for more information. That's h10.me/adtomic http://h10.me/adtomic. 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 is our live monthly TACoS Tuesday program, where you go over anything and everything Amazon PPC related, and we throw in a little bit of Walmart here and there, as well. And so, for those who this is your first time to the show. What we do is we bring on an outside expert once a month to answer live on all of our platforms, your top PPC questions. There's no question that's too basic or no question, hopefully, that's too advanced. We'll answer them all. So let's go ahead and invite our very special guest. For the first time since last year from BTR media, we've got Destaney in the house. Destaney, how's it going? Destaney: Whoa. Well, now you have me a little nervous. You said you know, hopefully we don't have any questions too advanced. We'll see what happens. Bradley Sutton: Well, for you, like, I might not say that for all of our guests, but you know, since Destaney's on here, it's like, nah, like you can ask anything. Destaney: We'll see what happens. Bradley Sutton: Give us a quick bio of yourself for those who might not have heard your previous episodes and previous years here and this is the first time I'm listening to you. Destaney: Yeah, of course. So I've been in this space for seven years, worked everything from some of the largest brands on the platform to also the small sellers. I feel like we've worked with a lot of people that have gotten up and gotten ready and launched, and I've done nothing but Amazon advertising for seven years straight. So I think personally, I've managed over $500 million worth of spend, every category, every scenario I think I've dealt with this point. Used to be founder of better AMS, we've now rebranded to BTR media. Bradley Sutton: Now that we've established, you know, what you're talking about, we're just going to hop right into it. Before I get to the user's questions, I had some things I wanted to ask. I'm going to ask some questions about Adtomic. I have got some general questions, but actually, first let me get to the general question. So I know there's been a, I don't want to call it a movement lately, but maybe there's more awareness of in the industry about, hey, it's not always just about ACoS when you are trying to, you know, determine or strategize with your PPC. But my question first of all is there a certain level that that statement applies to? Like, if I'm a brand new seller and you know I don't have, you know, this big budget to and I'm not trying to build this humongous brand and try to get awareness out there, should I still be maybe using that as my primary metric? Or if so, is there a certain level where all of a sudden, I need to be shifting my metrics I'm looking at? Destaney: I think, in simplest answers, you should always be shifting your metrics. In the beginning, cash flow is king. That's what matters the most, right, especially as a individual seller. You are financing every next round of inventory and if you can't afford that inventory, you're not going to have a brand. And how do you make sure you can afford that inventory while making sure that, marginally, you're in a good spot, which is where ACoS comes into play, right, you can't just hemorrhage money. Destaney: That being said, when you're launching, you also need to make sure you're driving volume and improving your organic rank and getting more review. So I think, in the very beginning, ACoS may be less important as you're driving that velocity. It's more about margin. So, all that to say, I think there's a million different variables. We have brands that come to us and like hey, our only goal is a $3 row. As this is a marketing budget, it doesn't influence anything else. We have brands that come to us that are solely focused on profit margin at scale. So we need to make considerations for what that looks like. Bradley Sutton: Love it. Love it. All right, excellent. Now let's go hop in Adtomic because, you know, for the first time you and your agency are getting into, you know, using Adtomic and using it for some of your clients. You've only been doing it for a couple of months now. What are some of your initial kind of reactions, like how, what are the strengths that you guys have been noticing about it? Destaney: Well, I think there's a few things I want to hit on here is one, our agency has always used Helium 10 from like a keyword research, organic rank, BSR tracking perspective, which is why I was like, hey, let's see if there's better integrations we can do. Destaney: Everyone who's been following me knows I preach the relationship between PPC and your organic rank. So that was what was really insightful for us is like okay, let's see what it looks like. Managing it all within one tool and being able to track that overall relationship. At its simplest, I think Adtomic drives a lot of value. And giving you one view of all of that, I mean, you can go immediately into your search terms tabs and pull up search volume, and that you know. As anyone who's managed a brand, I get millions of questions of why are my sales down week over week, and being able to overlay things like search volume is super important, I mean beyond that. Day parting hourly parting is always a hot topic within the industry and being able to stay in tune with all of those new rollouts or generative AI. Those are things that most of the industry is behind on right and you've always relied on native ad console to make those adjustments. But now having in a tool that allows the simplicity of scale has been a major value add. Bradley Sutton: Awesome. Awesome. Now, one of the things that Adtomic has released in the last few months or so is the ability to make your own custom rules. You know, we always allowed you to make a certain level of custom rules but now even for your bid management. And so you know, as we just mentioned, you know, obviously you know some people might still be doing ACoS, people might be doing RoAS impressions. There's so many different things and we pretty much allow anybody to choose like, hey, whatever you do, this is what you should. Bradley Sutton: This is, you know, you can go ahead and implement it in Adtomic. Now, you know, having, you know, spent some time in there, what would be your suggestion First of all for, like you know, maybe a newer seller or, you know, medium sized seller, if I'm looking to, like, create my own rules for bidding. There's literally a million possibilities so I might be overwhelmed. I know there's no one size fit all answer here, but maybe can you give a couple ideas about what you would suggest somebody to do to put in Atomic so that it manages their bids effectively. Destaney: Yeah. I'm going to start philosophically here, in that I always say that anytime a software opens up the Black Box and allows for rule creation, they're putting themselves in a risky position because, in my opinion, most sellers don't actually understand bid management appropriately, right. It's only like the advanced sellers that can really hop in and truly understand bid management. So the fact that you all have opened it up for everything and taken that risk is huge in my opinion because that is the biggest flaw of some of the softwares in the space is they don't give you that customization. All of that to say everyone who's like hey, I have all of the power to, you know, give myself a 5% ACoS. Be careful, because a tool is only as good as your ability to use it. Like, truly. I've audited and vetted almost every single platform. Destaney: I feel like we've gone through building our own rules customizations. Most people don't actually know bid management well enough to build their own rules, but if you do, I think the biggest things that we look at is we create rules for the different outcomes we want. If we're launching a brand new product, then we're creating rules that are based off sales. So we're going to be taking a deep dive into hey, what is the conversion rate and what is the sales? And we're going to build rules for maximizing that increased bid when I have a certain conversion rate. Destaney: On the flip side, if our goal is profitability, we're going to work backwards from our ACoS or our RoAS goal. We're going to say, hey, let's build rules that are based on lowering bids when our ACoS is too high and maybe layering in our conversion rates also low, let's go even lower, right. So those are the two simplest ones that we look at, but it really needs to be strategic. You can create rules that are based off the phase your product's in, whether it's launch, consistency, profitability, organic rank. You can create rules based off your overall business outcomes, which is always an important one is what is that key RoAS that you're going to optimize for all of your campaigns, but just making sure not to over complicate it in the beginning. And once you start to understand the correlation between CPC and RoAS, then you can start building in a little bit more customization around lifecycle and things like that. Bradley Sutton: One more of my questions. I get to be selfish and stop in the host here and decide when to bring in the user's questions. But just going back to that topic of ACoS versus other metrics, I think there's so many people who have for years, just that's all they've thought about and they're like well, doesn't it make sense? Like hey, if I'm losing profitability because I'm spending more for my advertising and this is how much it's costing me per sale, like should I always just automatically lower my bids because I need to be profitable? But can you explain why? No, that's not always the case. That might actually be hurting you in the long run. Destaney: So the reason it's become so much more important to not always focus on a low ACoS is because Amazon's search results have become more saturated with ads. I think everyone amen right from the pews here. The reason being is obviously Amazon's making a lot of revenue off their advertising but also they've done a great job of their relevancy and still having a clean customer experience. The problem with that is if you start slipping an organic rank and you fall to page two or page three. There's a joke of, you know, the best place to bury a dead body is page two of Google. Well, Amazon's very similar right. A lot of people don't go to page two and page three. So if your organic rank starts slipping, you're going to be in a tough spot. Now, why does your organic rank slip? Well, you either have a decrease in conversion rate or you're not driving the amount of sales or units as your competitors, right? Destaney: Anyone who's watched Bradley's honeymoon period philosophy knows that a lot of these factors influence your organic rank. So there's a level of Amazon advertising that just drives sales, and we know sales improve your organic rank. So your PPC directly correlates with your total sales, right. The more sales you drive, the better your organic rank is the more reviews that are going to be left, which is going to improve your conversion rate, which is going to drive more sales, which is going to thus spin the flywheel. So that is why it's really important to understand the PPC relationship between your total sales. You know some people we've had quite a few clients say I'm going to stop PPC completely, which is fine for 30 days. Your profit's amazing. And then 60 days or 90 days or 45 days later, their rank starts dropping and now their total sales are decreasing even more. And, as we know, with profit there's economies of scale. You may want to drive a lot more units at a lower profit margin, but still end up with a higher overall profit if you improve your organic rank. Bradley Sutton: Let's go ahead and hop into the live questions we've got from YouTube. RH says we're optimizing a mature campaign. How frequent should I do it and what is the look back window you prefer? Destaney: I'm going to start with look back window. That one's easier to answer. We typically look at last 30 days. The reason being is you don't want to really look longer than that because there's a lot of variables that are going to affect your look back window. If you start going to 60 and 90 days, you're going to be getting into seasonality. You could have major conversion rate changes over that time frame. So we like to look at last 30. Last seven's almost too small because of your attribution window. That being said, if you lower your price or you have something crazy going on that changes your conversion rate, you probably need to look at a smaller look back window. Destaney: When it comes to how frequently do you optimize, there's a lot of different opinions in this space and I don't think it matters too much. If we're being honest, we optimize when we have enough data to optimize. So once I get a certain threshold of clicks, I typically start making bid optimization decisions based off that click threshold, which is something that you can build out again within Adtomic. So if you have $100 price point product, you're going to need more clicks to have enough data right, because customers like to think and click and take a longer time to purchase, so really depends. Bradley Sutton: Next question here. This is from Steven from YouTube. How long do you think you should run PPC at a loss to establish a product? It's not a repeatable purchase product. Destaney: That second part of that question is super valuable. If it's not a repeat purchase product, we typically run on a loss during the organic rank period, right. When we're trying to get up to closer to the top of the page. So that way, as we go higher up on the page, that means we don't have to rely on PPC as much to drive all of our views. So that is what we use as our lever of success. If we get into the top 40 for some of our top keywords, then maybe we're going to start focusing more on profitability. Again, it also depends on what your general margins are. If you have $50,000 set aside where you can focus on organic rank, then maybe it makes sense to start from the beginning at a loss. But if you don't have that money set aside cash flow is important then maybe you need to focus on layering in more profitability-focused keywords and bid optimization. Bradley Sutton: And Amazon Girl says do you have a strategy to increase brand share in Amazon using PPC and what do you recommend? Destaney: 100%. So Pacvue actually released a study, I think, two years ago, that 70% of click share goes to the top placements on the page, which, as we know, are typically sponsored ads. So we've ran this for a lot of our original CPG brands. We'll create campaigns specifically focused on top of search for two to three of our top keywords that we want to increase brand share for. So we're creating campaigns that are solely focused on brand share. That's what the name is in the campaign title. We only focus on the exact match. Destaney: So we have really good control and we just bid really high. We bid high enough that we're winning as much impression share as possible. Now we may not be able to afford to win that impression share 100% of the time. It can be really expensive at top of search. But we have those campaigns set aside so we can increase and decrease our budget as needed. Then you can go into your search query performance report and say, hey, for this keyword that I'm focusing on brand share. What is my search query performance and am I actually increasing brand share in that scenario? Bradley Sutton: Yeah, I think search query performance is amazing, that Amazon has released that data first of all, and so powerful, I think, for sellers. But I think one popular strategy let me just get your viewpoint on this is like hey, let me see where my conversion rate for a keyword is better than the average since Amazon shows that. And then hey, if I'm not doubling down on or if I'm not showing up at the top of search, I need to go ahead and double down on that, increase my bid, whereas on the flip side, would your strategy be like? Maybe my overall conversion rate is not as good as my competitors, maybe I should even consider pulling back a spend. I know that's a kind of over-generalization, but is that kind of like your general strategy there? Destaney: 100%, especially on the advertising side, like that's where a lot of people waste spend. They're saying you know, I'm selling a purple pin, this is a maroon pin, right, and maybe they bid on purple pin and their conversion rate is terrible and they're like let me keep spending on that turn, let me drive more people to there, because maybe they're going to start converting. They're not right, unless you adjust your listing to say, hey, this is purple and not maroon, and it'll hurt your organic rank if you drive a ton of traffic to terms that are converting really poorly because Amazon's saying, hey, customers are landing on this page but they're not buying. They don't need to be at the top of the page. I want to put products at the top of the page that are going to drive sales. Bradley Sutton: A YouTube question from Silver Arrow says how, on sponsored products, can we promote all variants to take up real estate to dominate the niche? Amazon only allows one variant to display. This might be promoting all colors on PPC, so yeah, in most categories. Destaney: Most, I was going to call that out. Bradley Sutton: You know, like you can only show up organically for one. You know, I've seen like energy drinks. Destaney: Yep. Bradley Sutton: You know like I've seen other categories too, or every single variant, but on PPC it's usually the same. For sponsored product, yep, but would I mean, I'm not saying I suggest this strategy, but theoretically, if somebody's really just concerned about real estate on page one and they are in a category where only one sponsored product or one organic can show up, would it be all right? Here's my organic rank and then maybe my sponsored product for that keyword is another variation, maybe my three. I put three sponsored brand headline, you know, ads for three different products, maybe a sponsored video for another one or something like that. I mean like other than that. Is there a way that you can force Amazon to get multiple things when it's not natural? Destaney: There's no way to really force it. Like you said, there's also a lot of inconsistency in Amazon testing how they're breaking out variations, so we've never found a great way to do it. Sponsored brand headline search ads the best way to show all of your variants. We do have a few brands that have actually split up, especially if it's like flavor variations chocolate protein versus vanilla protein. They've seen a lot of success splitting those up. That's not for everyone because now you're having to put PPC costs behind two different variations, right. It gets a lot more costly even though you are making up more market share. The only other small thing I would say is like from a cannibalization perspective, like you said, make sure you're running different ads at the top than what you're organically ranked for and make sure you're running brand defense ads on your product detail page. Bradley Sutton: Jalil says when using a single keyword campaign, do you use a top of search modifier, and what percentage do you find the best results with? I usually do 10% to 20% when using a top of search. Destaney: This one's a difficult, right, if you're coming from some of the other software companies in the space whose placement modifiers to optimize all of their bids. We don't recommend that strategy at BTR media because it gets really complex. If my only goal is to win top of search, I just bid really high and then also put a modifier on. Bradley Sutton: Thank you. Thank you. If somebody else says I like that, I always felt like it's not so popular to say that and I'm like man. Am I in the minority here? Like, why am I the only one still old school? Destaney: I will go a tiny bit deeper. The problem with modifiers and a lot of people haven't probably dove into the documentation on this is there's a little asterisk that says Amazon will only apply the modifier based off the likelihood of a sell. So a lot of people are assuming that every single time the click happens that modifier was applied, and that's not true. So it just, in my opinion, causes a lot of inconsistency. You want to win top of search? Go bid $50. Within five minutes you'll see you're at it, top of search, and then you'll see the CPC. It took you to get there. Bradley Sutton: What I tell people is, you know, maybe without Helium 10, I might do that. But the reason why I always stayed old school and just was controlling my bid was I don't need a top of search modifier. I'm not going to give Amazon the wheel in cases where I don't have to. You know like and just trust that Amazon's going to do exactly the right thing. I'm going to fully control the bid because I just put that keyword in Keyword Tracker, or actually in Adtomic, you can actually see the keyword ranks too, and within three hours I'm going to see three consecutive ranks where I can see oh, I obviously need to increase my bid, or, man, I'm already at the very top of search, you know, naturally, on sponsors, so maybe I can pull back and just see where it is. So it's like you don't have to guess where you're showing up because you just put in Keyword Tracker, put boost on, you'll know right away. It's refreshing to hear somebody else say the same thing here. Bradley Sutton: Another question from YouTube, Rebecca says is it still recommended to put the same keyword in all three match types? And also, does it hurt your organic rank to pause keywords that aren't relevant to your product but are not performing? Destaney: This is a great question. We run in all three match types for our brands because there's different purposes. Our exact match we know exactly where they're showing up on the page. We have a lot of control. Our phrase match opens up a little bit more opportunity for keyword research. So if I'm bidding on Chapstick, I'm going to start finding oh, people are typing in I don't know peppermint Chapstick or vanilla Chapstick, so it helps me expand that. Broad match does the same. It's a good keyword research methodology for us and if you have good bid management, it's going to allow you to harvest a lot of new keywords. Destaney: If I'm a really small brand and I don't have a big budget, I would probably only focus on exact match and phrase match internally. They do not compete. That's a misconception and I pulled our agency data yesterday on this. Exact match has driven $9 million in sales for us at a 15% conversion rate. Phrase match is also driven $8.9 million in sales at a 13.5% conversion rate and broad match was a little bit under that because we lower our bids on broad match conversion rate I think was the lowest at maybe 12%, but because we had good bid management. Our RoAS and ACoS was the same on almost all of them so they act in a different manner. Destaney: Right, it's still expanding. And then the other quick question is does it hurt your organic rank? Not necessarily, but you got to think it's slowing your sales volume down so it could in the long term hurt your organic rank. The better answer is just lower your bids. Right, if it's a great keyword with a great conversion rate you can't afford, maybe top of search, lower your bid to make that term profitable, even if sales slow down. Bradley Sutton: A lot of great questions say this is pretty cool. Destaney: Good questions. Bradley Sutton: Gregori says my ad sales are driven by 60 to 70% by a sponsor brand video. Because of that, I'm not well ranked on my main keywords our sponsor brand ads. I'm assuming he's talking about both sponsor brand and sponsor brand video. Are these helping with ranking at all? So I think what he's talking about is like maybe he's got a video and it's showing up on the Coffin Shelf page or a Coffin Shelf search results. Somebody typed in Coffin Shelf now if it was just regular sponsored product ad, that's definitely going to help the algorithm. But if somebody clicks the sponsored brand video ad from that same search. Me personally, when I tested this maybe one year, two years ago, it didn't have as much impact, if anything at all. What are you seeing lately? Destaney: Pretty much the same. So sponsor brands video has almost no impact from what we've seen, other than the fact that again, you're still driving sales. So there's a small factor there. But let's talk about why, really fast, sponsored products make up 70% of your sales, when ran appropriately, because they have more real estate on the page than anything else. Sponsored brands video have two placements on the search results and one on the product detail page so their real estate is so much less that they don't really drive enough overall volume to make a difference. And then when they do drive sales, it's being distributed across multiple ASINs typically. So if you just look at like the math, they drive a lot less sales to specific keywords and that's why and then sponsor brands video again is considering all of your brand halo, not necessarily correlating a keyword to a product from an organic rank perspective. Bradley Sutton: All right. Rebecca said hey, do you think there will be a chance to create bid rules where we can lower the bids on certain days and times? You can do that in Adtomic, so make sure to do that. We call that schedules. A lot of people just call that day parting. But Amazon, I mean, do you think Amazon will allow or will have that in seller central? Destaney: I do. I think it's on the roadmap. Actually, one thing I'll throw out there is I don't recommend using Advertising Console for this. So put this in the shortest way possible. Amazon has an API called Amazon Marketing Stream that actually shows you hourly insights on spend and sales. Adtomic uses that all the software providers use it. From an API perspective, Advertising Console does not give you that access into the insights. So within ad console, you cannot see when someone clicked on an ad at 3pm on Tuesday but purchased on Wednesday at 9am. Adtomic’s giving you that so you can actually day part appropriately. Advertising Consoles not. That being said, what you can do in this scenario lower your bids to the level that you need 100% of the time and then increase your bid when you're performing best right. So just inverse what a typical day parting is. Lower the hours that you think you're performing poorly, increase when you do incredibly well and just run the inverse of day parting. Bradley Sutton: My buddy DotadaSilva says he's got a two part question here. So what's your suggestion on a bunch of my unprofitable long tail search term reports? If he combines it all he sees $9,000 in spend with zero sales, but they have less than 15 clicks. So maybe he's got some rule that says, hey, if I find a search term that has 25 clicks, let's go ahead and negative, but this doesn't qualify as that. He says all are very relevant keywords impression is good. So what should I do? Should I lower the bid or should I negate them, or should I put them in a separate campaign? Destaney: If your brand is only focused on profitability, I would just pause them. I would not negate. I don't think so. And this is again. This is a difficult situation to pin on the brand. My personal opinion is 10 to 15 clicks is not enough clicks to actually make a decision. What I would do is I would lower your bid on all of those data collection long tail keywords so that way, even if you have 200 of them each getting 10 clicks each, you're not spending enough money to really make a big enough difference. You're slowly collecting data until you figure out whether or not that keyword converts at a $1 bid. It's going to be really costly to collect that data across 200 keywords and 15 clicks, right? I don't really know if it'd be valuable putting them in a separate campaign. I would just lower bid. Bradley Sutton: Do you skip the last two days of the look back window? Destaney: Yeah. That's traditionally recommended 100%. If something crazy happens then no, it's not necessary. You could still look. But fun fact, I believe the window Amazon last presented between the time that someone searches for a product and makes a purchase is over five days, right, which is crazy. So if you run an ad and you see your spending driving law spend on Monday, there's a good chance that person's not checking out until Friday, which is my whole day parting soapbox. But we don't need to get into that. Bradley Sutton: Yeah. It's kind of, you know, like it's funny, because this is why, as Amazon sellers and this is a completely generalized statement, but we as Amazon sellers should not be looking at our strategy based on what we do as consumers, because me personally, if I click on something, I'm buying it. And then what opened up a whole world to me was when search crew performance ran. I was like, why are these numbers so low? And then, yeah, I talked to Amazon about they're like no, this is only looking at those who take action in a 24-hour window after a click. I'm like and like who doesn't buy something when they add it to the cart? And then I, all of a sudden, I started asking people and I was the weird one. You know, people are like. Destaney: Yeah, yeah, like. Bradley Sutton: I had a whole bunch of stuff to my cart and I think about it for a couple days and then I'm like what? So? So like again. This is not necessarily just PPC, but if you guys are running your businesses based on your own consumer behavior, guys, that's not the majority out there. You got it. You got to have strategy that applies to more people. Destaney: Yep. Bradley Sutton: Get the next question we got or do our first one from LinkedIn, from Tobias. What is your approach about auto campaigns? Do you just use them for keyword harvesting, or is there something more about it? Destaney: Auto campaigns do win unique inventory, like in stop, so they actually influence the frequently bought together section. Occasionally, you'll see a sponsored ad there. Sometimes you'll see a sponsored ads and like the lightning deal section. So that's a good reason to continue to run auto campaign. So we do continue to run them for almost all of our products. We also aggressively keyword harvest. Like all of our systems are built out for quick keyword harvesting, so we run them in segmented close match, loose match, compliments, substitutes in order to go ahead and make sure we're consistently getting great keyword research. We don't really recommend running your auto campaigns with more than 10% of your spend historically because you don't have a lot of control. But we do continue to run them because of the unique inventory. Bradley Sutton: Any circumstances for which you would recreate a new exact match campaign, or why a key phrase would do well under broad match but not exact. So I'm not sure this is what she's asking. But, like you know, sometimes I've heard people say, hey, I've got a good keyword. It's in my, my exact manual campaign. It just gets like very low Impressions. But then I put it in a new one and all of a sudden it gets impressions which doesn't, you know, make sense. But is that just what we should do? If we don't see it have good impressions, just try it again in a new one. Destaney: Yeah. It's definitely worth testing. I think you know let's talk about Chevalier's. Second point here is sometimes when you harvest a keyword from your auto campaigns or broad match and you put it into exact match, it doesn't perform as well, or the reverse. The reason being is your campaigns and your keywords attract or collect relevancy, right, Amazon's an algorithm, so they like to make database decisions. So maybe you have the keyword Chapstick in an auto campaign. Destaney: That's always done amazingly well for you, and the reason it did well is because it was a 17-cent bid on page 5. And then you go ahead and you pull it out and you decide to try to put it in a manual campaign at a $2 bid and all of a sudden it does terrible, and that's because it's showing up a different placement on the page. You put it into a new campaign and now you're showing up at the top of page one and all of your competitors have 50,000 reviews. So your conversion rate looks worse, right? So all of that to say test like we definitely move our keywords around and harvest a hundred percent. We also will create exact match campaigns for different purposes. We have ranking campaigns then we have profitability campaigns. They're both bidding on exact match. One of them is just focused on ranked ones, on profitability, so we do recommend that. Bradley Sutton: Okay then just one other tip out there for people who maybe it's on a brand new product and, no matter what you do, you can't get many impressions when you know that there's search volume for this. It could be a relevancy issue where Amazon just doesn't think that your product is what it is and the way you can kind of have visibility and not using Helium 10. Guys, put the product in Cerebro and then look at the column that I would say 99% of Cerebro users don't look at, but in my opinion it might be one of the top three things in the entirety of Helium 10 is look at the Amazon recommended rank for it. This is a live pool directly from this one thing that, for whatever reason, Helium 10 is the only one that's been showing this for like years, but it's what Amazon thinks the product is. Bradley Sutton: So if you see Amazon recommended rank one through 20 and it's a bunch of keywords that aren't really what your product is, it means Amazon is confused. And if that keyword is like at number 300 or maybe not even on the list, then yeah, you're not gonna get impressions for it because that's literally how Amazon decides what it's going to show you for. So that's just another way you can get some visibility at least into that. Steven says how do you, oh, it's a good one, how do you approach keywords that used to convert very well but they've fallen off for a month or more? Destaney: I want. I'd be very curious if conversion rate is the metric Steven's actually calling out here, or if he's looking at it for, or if he's saying ACoS used to be better and now it's not. If your conversion rate has changed, the biggest thing I'll take a look at is did your listing change? Did you have a drop in review count to review quality? Did you make a change to your images? Why? Like? Destaney: The real question you're asking, Steven, is why did customers stop buying my product after landing on my page, which isn't necessarily a PPC issue, right, that's a listing issue. Now there is a small portion of this which could be a PPC issue, and that's maybe. You used to show up at the top of the page and now you're showing up at the bottom of the page and your conversion has changed slightly because share of shelf is different. You're now being compared to different products depending on where your ads are, but more than likely, if it's a conversion issue, that is a listing issue. It's rarely a PPC issue. When you talk about conversion, if it was an ACoS or a RoAS issue, then more than likely your bid management changed or your conversion rate changed. Bradley Sutton: Jillil says, when dealing with supplements that are in a, that are a complex and not just a singular ingredient, how would you do your keyword research and PPC strategy? For example, a joint support supplement with five ingredients versus something like vitamin C, which is a singular ingredient? Destaney, what is up with these good questions? Destaney: I know it's a great. . . Bradley Sutton: I don't know like you just attract, I gotta have you on all the time you can track some of the best stuff. Destaney: This is a great question. I'm very familiar with this category and the core answer is Stop getting caught up in just the keyword research, right? This is one of those things where, to Bradley's point earlier, stop thinking as a seller and start thinking as a customer. No one is typically tight. Well, that's a lie. Most people are typing in joint supplements. Most people are typing in vitamin C supplement, right? So target those. Destaney: The problem is knowing that category. Your CPCs for both of those are typically around $20. I've worked in them very familiar. You can't afford those usually. So you do start layering in more ingredients because if a customer types in vitamin C, they don't know what they want. Right, they want some type of vitamin C. But if they type in vitamin C deficiency for so and so and so it's going to be a lot lower search volume, but they're going to convert much higher because they've done their research and they know your product is what they're looking for. So just create campaigns for both. Create campaigns for your top singular keywords that you probably can't afford but you're going to give a low budget to anyways, and then create campaigns based off the ingredients. Maybe it's one ingredient, maybe it's probiotics with fiber, I don't know I'm totally making that up and then create another campaign for probiotics with vitamins or collagen and then figure out what's performing best and scale what's best and pull back on what's not. Bradley Sutton: Toseef says I'm getting good sales of the good ACoS on a keyword. Should I always keep on increasing the bit of that keyword or not? Destaney: It depends, really. You know you're looking at this on a micro level. If your overall account is within your ACoS, then maybe just keep it. If you have a little bit room to grow, then raise your bid and drive more sales. Bradley Sutton: But looking at the keyword rank also is good too. If you're already at the top of the page, you know there's no sense to necessarily, you know, increase your rank because then maybe somebody else is just going to do the same thing and now you're everybody's just driving the cost up needlessly. Brent says I've got multiple products that I'm targeting the same search terms. If I have multiple campaigns for multiple products bidding on the same search terms, am I artificially driving up the bids? Destaney: No, the only time you have to worry about this is if you're running out of separate seller central accounts and then competing. Bradley Sutton: Were you surprised when the keyword report added for ASIN targeting? What's your approach about ASIN targeting and how much sales do you need for extra campaigns for specific ASINs to push them separately? Destaney: Not surprised. This has actually been a thing for quite some time and pretty much it's saying, hey, I'm targeting this product, but this product also indexes for these top five keywords, so let me show up there. In general, you got to consider, Amazon is moving into a more AI model. It's going to be a lot less paper click and a lot more shopper intent. That's included. I, theoretically, have seen sponsored products also run retargeting. So when things are out of my control, I try not to worry about it and what I do instead is be more concise with my campaign structure so that way I can break out my reporting. Bradley Sutton: Matt says I've got a variation listing. I got a 10 pack and a 20 pack. Should I drive people traffic to the cheaper option which tends to sell better? Destaney: Yeah, I would. So you got to think about it from a PPC goal. The only thing you want is to bring people into your listing. The lower price point is going to bring them into your listing. That doesn't mean they're not going to buy the 20 pack. We almost always recommend running on the lower price point even though your margins are going to look a little bit worse or your performance is going to look a little bit worse RoAS wise. You're going to bring them into the listing and then they're still going to buy the more expensive if they want it. Bradley Sutton: Tracy says how many keywords per campaign or ad group and what's a good way to structure. Destaney: So one thing I'm going to run through really quickly is we personally run one campaign, one ad group. We run multiple ad groups because your budget is on the campaign level. Amazon makes you set a hundred dollar budget, whatever that number is, and then, if you have multiple ad groups, you can't control if this ad group is getting $50 or $20 or $30. So I run one campaign, one ad group and then we typically put 10 to 15 keywords. There's no perfect answer. There's a lot of myths in the space. The end of the day, it's however much budget you have. I have brands that have millions of dollars of budget so I can set 200 keywords in a campaign because I know I have enough budget to collect data on all those keywords. For most people, we recommend anywhere from one keyword for your top driving to 20 keywords and not going over that. Bradley Sutton: Just a quick one before I forget. This is one of my questions. Obviously, one of the rules that we can do for keyword harvesting in Adtomic is like say hey, this is, if I find a keyword in an auto or broad or phrase campaign at this threshold, I want you, as an Adtomic to move this to my exact manual campaign. What is? Obviously there's different strokes for different folks, but is it two purchases? Is it three purchases? Is it two purchases or three purchases, or four purchases plus a certain ACoS? What is a decent rule of thumb? Destaney: When I originally started, so I'm going to throw that out there from simplicity's sake. I think I did two sales under like a 100% ACoS. The reason I kept my ACoS high is because I knew when I harvested that keyword I could just lower my bid at the end of the day. What really matters is that it's driving sales. Conversion rates another important one to layer in is like your average conversion rate. As long as it's higher than that, you're fine. Bradley Sutton: Sandy says we're thinking of lowering retail to. I'm assuming he means maybe the retail price to improve conversion rate. Have you seen a better conversion rate when using a lower everyday low price or a coupon? Destaney: It depends on your competitors. Of course, a lower price is probably going to improve your conversion rate. At the end of the day, would you be better off optimizing your listing better and maintaining a high price? Would you be better off adding more value to your product? Those are things you can consider, because the problem with lowering your price is you get into a race of chasing the bottom. All of your competitors can also lower their price. The real value add is improving your product. Bradley Sutton: What's been working for BTR media and your clients as far as custom images in sponsored brand campaigns and types of sponsored brand video campaigns because I feel like this changes year over year what performs best. Destaney: Yeah, I think the biggest thing is obviously CPCs have gotten a lot more competitive with video and creative, as people are doing it more and more. Destaney: So, yeah, I think that's it, thank you. I have gotten into arguments about the generative AI sponsor brands and a lot of people are like, yeah, and you know it's not working, it's terrible, but we've seen amazing performance. We've actually split test against commercial grade creatives that, like, professional brands have used, and generative AI is in line with it. Of course, it's up to your prompt, but don't over complicate it. When customers are on Amazon, they're not looking to click on commercials, they're looking to click on something that looks native to the platform, which is where I think AI does a decent job of simplicity. So, you know, for Christmas last year, we took a brand that has like 2000 ASINs and we used AI to make every single ASIN like Christmas. We just added a little Christmas tree and it did incredibly, incredibly well because people knew it was a seasonal item. Bradley Sutton: All right. Last question of the day, it's from a brand new person to the Amazon. I'm sure there's a lot of brand new people out there. Maybe they were too shy to ask a question, but real simple. Hey, Ashlyn says I'm a first time seller. Just give me some tips about what I should be thinking about when starting with PPC. Destaney: I think the first and foremost is obviously going through all of the resources available for Helium 10. I don't know if people actually deep dive on everything that's available, even if it's as simple as going through like the Adtomic training. I know Travis. I watched a few videos where he was like training on concepts, not just the software itself. Amazon advertising also has an amazing accreditation program I have to shout out. We send, we've hired interns out of high school, sent them through the accreditation program and they've been managing accounts after like three months. Obviously, we also do a lot of training on top of that but Amazon's invested a ton in their accreditation program. So when you log into Amazon advertising, you can see their learning console. Highly recommended. Every brand owner, every team needs to get certified in Amazon advertising accreditation. Bradley Sutton: Last thing of the day is just a hey, what's your 30 or 60 second tip, PPC related that you can share with the audience. Could be about anything you want. Destaney: Everybody needs to better understand the correlation between your bid and CPC and your CPC and ACoS and RoAS. That is like one of the most important things as a brand owner to understand if my increase, my bid, what happens? Right, our bid is the number one we can control. To Bradley's point, you have accessibility with the Adtomic. Dive into those resources and start understanding bid management. If you don't learn anything else, learn bid management within your tools and your brand. Bradley Sutton: Well, Destaney, thank you so much for joining us again. We're definitely going to be seeing a lot of videos that have training that we've been filming, that you're going to help users out there, you know, expand their knowledge in PPC. And if I saw some questions in chat asking about Adtomic, so if again the website to get a free demo, h10.me/adtomic http://h10.me/adtomic, and then how can people find you on the interwebs out there If they'd like to reach out directly to you? Destaney: Can I answer a bonus question, just because it came up. Okay, so I'm going to talk about suggested bids because I see it nonstop in the Helium 10 groups and it just came up here. When Amazon's giving you a suggested bid, they're taking the average of what every single competitor's bidding and the placements on the page top of search could be $30, bottom of search could be $2. So their suggested bids are an average of all of those placements. So, yes, you can bid a lot lower and still win impressions, because you're probably showing up on page two or page three or the PDP, and you may not. You may bid the suggested bid and still not show up on page one. You may have to bid 20 times higher because you have one person increasing the auction, which doesn't influence the average. So keep that in mind. If you want to learn more, find more, I post a ton of content in the groups, on Facebook, on LinkedIn. I think is where we post the majority of our content and you know, check us out btrmedia.com https://www.btrmedia.com/. Bradley Sutton: All right. Thank you so much, Destaney, for joining us, and we'll see you in a little bit.

43m

Mar 19, 2024

Listen in as we welcome Delaney Del Mundo, a veritable goldmine of e-commerce expertise with a rich background from Walmart to the pulsing beat of TikTok Shop and the competitive arena of Amazon. Our conversation traverses her journey from the sunny streets of Los Angeles to the pioneering days at Walmart.com post their Jet acquisition. Delaney is now the Director of the Amazon strategy team at Vendo, where she masterfully balances profit and loss management, SEO support, and listing optimization. As we explore her current role, you'll discover the ins and outs of her approach to fostering brand success across diverse marketplaces. Tune in to hear Delaney shed light on the complexities of affiliate networks and content-creator partnerships that can make or break a brand's profitability. With the ever-evolving landscape of e-commerce, we tackle TikTok Shop's growing influence on content strategies, emphasizing the critical shift from keywords to engagement. Delaney also provides valuable insights into Amazon's new inventory fees, offering strategic advice for navigating these changes without sacrificing the bottom line. The conversation pivots to a holistic view of business health, focusing on the vital lifetime value to customer acquisition cost ratio. In our discussion, Delaney takes us through the intricate process of using Amazon’s Search Query Performance, revealing how strategic analysis can lead to improved visibility and sales. By leveraging tools like Helium 10’s Cerebro and Market Tracker 360 for competitor analysis tools, she unveils techniques to stay ahead in the competitive e-commerce landscape. Delaney's enthusiasm for these tools' potential to revolutionize market analysis and her anticipation for future enhancements are infectious. Whether you're a seasoned seller or just starting, this episode is packed with strategies to propel your brand forward in the dynamic world of selling on Amazon. In episode 544 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Delaney discuss: __ __ ► 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 an industry expert with a lot of experience on Walmart, TikTok shop and Amazon who's gonna be giving us tons of cool strategies, including some that no one has ever talked about on this show before. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Sellers have lost thousands of dollars by not knowing that they were hijacked, perhaps on their Amazon listing, or maybe somebody changed their main image or Amazon changed their shipping dimension so they had to pay extra money every order. Helium 10 can actually send you a text message or email if any of these things or other critical events happen to your Amazon account. For more information, go to h10.me/alerts https://h10.me/alerts. Bradley Sutton: Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that's completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And now we are having for the first time in the show, Delaney. Welcome to the show. Delaney: Thanks, Bradley, happy to be here. I think it's long awaited on my side, so glad to be joining you today. Bradley Sutton: Yes, yes, Now we first met at least you know, I've known about you because we've worked with Vendo a lot in the past, and I think I met you first at the maybe in Puerto Rico, at the billion dollar seller summit, and I looked across the room. I was like she looks like a white flip like me, which, for those who don't know us, half Filipino and half American, and that's what I am. I don't look like it. She does, and so I was like are you just what Filipinos do? Like? There's that Jokoy’s joke where they're like oh yeah, my mom was Filipino when she sees somebody. But I did that exact same thing. I'm like Filipino, American. And she's like, yep, I'm like, oh, I could. Then me too. And anyways, we bonded there and I was like all right, a fellow Filipino American in the Amazon world, we got to have you on the podcast. So no, that's not the reason why I had you on the podcast. I heard from your boss that you are an A player and know your stuff and I'm like that's the kind of person we want on the show. But anyways, Delaney, enough about me and my rambling here. Let's just start with where I mean we met Puerto Rico, but where in the world are you right now? Where do you live? Delaney: Yes, Bradley, I'm out in Los Angeles, so actually not too far away from you today. But speaking of the Filipino American, yes, you're right, it seems like my mom's genes might be stronger than your Filipino side. I got the Sinigang and the Adobo in the fridge. Don't worry, I'm more than I think. Bradley Sutton: Yes. There we go. Delaney: But yes, I'm out in LA. Bradley Sutton: Awesome, is that where you were born and raised? Delaney: Yep, born and raised in LA, lived for a few years out in New York but made my way back here. So, plans, where do you live? In New York? I lived in the city for a few years and then also in the upstate New York area, so Nice. Bradley Sutton: I lived in Brooklyn myself for a couple years. Where'd you go to high school? In LA? Delaney: High school. I went to Burroughs High School out in Burbank. Bradley Sutton: In Burbank? Okay, nice. And then how about college? Delaney: College, Hamilton College in upstate New York. Bradley Sutton: So a really very rare that somebody gives me a college or university I have never, ever heard of. Delaney: Yeah, there were 1800 kids in the entire school. So super small community, but small and tight. Bradley Sutton: Well, what do you study? Delaney: I studied economics. Bradley Sutton: Interesting Now, when you graduated, did you work at all into there, or did you already find e-commerce by that time? Or what's your journey to e-commerce like? Delaney: Yeah, so I actually got my start over on the Walmart side of the business, so working for Walmart.com as soon as Walmart had acquired Jet. So I was part of that group of individuals and then found my way on the brand side for a few years working at Walmart. Bradley Sutton: What did you do at Walmart? Delaney: So you might have told me that, but I forgot it. No, no, no, I managed the beauty category there. So on the dot-com side worked closely with the store merchants and grew the beauty channel. Bradley Sutton: Interesting, okay, and then how did you get to the Amazon side of things? Delaney: Yeah. So then from there, ended up shifting over to the brand side. For a few years worked for a beauty brand and at that beauty brand managed all their retailer.com channels, so Zulily, eBay, Walmart.com, Amazon.com, etc. So a bit more full circle. And now here at Vendo, leading, of course, the Amazon team as well as TikTok shop, which is one of our newer channels that we launched just a few months ago now. And then, of course, as you know, Bradley, you've had some of our Walmart.com teammates on the podcast as well. Bradley Sutton: Okay, and then what do you specifically do, like what's your specialties? I guess what's your daily? I know actually you actually do a podcast as well, but outside of the podcast, what are you doing for clients? Delaney: Yeah, so I'm the director of Amazon strategy, so I lead our team of account strategists here. But in terms of what Vendo does everything from P&L and forecast management towards direct management of the Amazon channel, managing advertising, marketing etc I'm more on the strategic side. So a lot of what you would look at from listing optimizations, SEO support, ranking, impact and really just understanding what strategies were implementing to hit brands top line and bottom line goals, both on the three-piece side and our one-piece side of the business through vendor central. Bradley Sutton: Awesome, awesome. All right, we're going to start broad here and then go narrow as we go on. But you know, since you have, you know, your company and you yourself have dabbled, I guess you could say, in a lot of different marketplaces. Be it, you know, amazon, Walmart, TikTok shop is kind of like the top three. What's just your state of the union in 2024 about the trajectory of each of these? Are all still going up. Is one skyrocketing over the other? Is one of them going down, one of them staying flat? What's your outlook for this year? Delaney: So I think, as far as trajectory, TikTok shop has the greatest potential Just being. Their affiliate network is so strong and the platform itself is extremely simplified, so it's not hard for a lot of sellers to join TikTok shop right now, and just in terms of their affiliate network. We obviously know that creator connections on the Amazon side has been in beta for quite some time, but I think TikTok shop has the upper hand when it comes specifically down to affiliate, just because of the ease of the platform and the fact that you can set these targeted collaborations per item, per creator that you reach out to. So Vendo has an in-house influencer and affiliate team which we're able to leverage, of course, but that allows us to glean great insights on the targeted collaborations and the open collaborations on TikTok shop. Delaney: Amazon specifically, I mean we'll see. I think they're always on an upward trajectory, given the amount of data that they have access to and just as far as shipping and logistics, they're always ahead of the curve there. But we have to look out for specific categories. If we look at platforms like Temu, which I know generated a ton of buzz after the Super Bowl with how much they're investing in different ads, Fashion categories, we know that Amazon referral fees are dropping in some of those categories. So we'll see. Right, I think Amazon's going to probably have to take some action across categories if Temu starts to undercut price and we'll see if Amazon also starts matching there. Delaney: And then Walmart.com is a silent killer. I mean, they have their stores that they're able to leverage. So with their store specifically, that opens up a ton of opportunity. I think that oftentimes a lot of Walmart.com sellers don't realize that if they are, or if they have the potential to sell on the one-piece side of the business, that opens up a whole new avenue with online pickup and delivery. And many times Walmart.com sales are grossly underreported because unless you're investing in to illuminate, you don't see those OPD sales naturally. So you might think the channel is smaller than it is, but it's really larger than what it appears to be on paper, just given the level of data that Walmart actually has versus what it discloses. Bradley Sutton: All right, I know you're a little bit out of the Walmart game, but I'm going to ask you a Walmart-specific question because I just want to see how relevant this is. This is something that I've been telling people, but my experience is about six, seven years old now. So I used to work for this company that does supplements and they're kind of like a famous company. They would do infomercials and things like that and I was their sales manager and people don't understand the size of Walmart brick and mortar because it was like, you know, like I was so proud of myself, I grew their Amazon sales from like $500,000 a year to like $3 million. I would have Walmart PO. That was for 20 SKUs, by the way. I would have Walmart POs for their one SKU that were like in the one to $2 million, just because of how many stores you know Walmart has, etc. So it was like it dwarfs Amazon, you know, unless you're like a huge whale on Amazon. Now, that being said, like what I, a couple of things I did was I started a couple brands or not a couple of brands a couple of products on the brand on Amazon, and then I moved it to Walmart. First of all, we already had a somewhat of a relationship with Walmart and then Walmart.com buyer, you know saw that I was dominating one of the subcategories and they're like all right, let's bring this I don't remember what it was called, but it's kind of like what Amazon calls vendors, a vendor central or something, where it's like, hey, we'll buy this from you, so that's shipped and fulfilled by Walmart because it's doing well. And they're like cool. Bradley Sutton: And then they're like hey, it started doing well there. And they're like, hey, let's take this and let's add this to brick and mortar. And that's when, obviously, you know, sales blow up. Now For me that's what I tell people of that story about like, how, why? Even though maybe if you just start something on Amazon or Walmart, you know sales could be 10 to 150 to one Amazon or Walmart. But the reason to start on Walmart is if you start, you know, making some waves, you can start selling to Walmart and then potentially, you can just get in front of a buyer because you can't, you know, just come in off the street and say, hey, I've got this cool new product, you know, would you just put it in Walmart brick and mortar? You know, unless you've got connections, is that still valid in 2024? Like is that kind of like the process that could potentially not guaranteed, obviously, but that could potentially happen. Delaney: Absolutely 100%. And I think that is sometimes what a lot of brands make a mistake with on Walmart.com or just in Walmart stores in general, is they go to Walmart stores too early. And if you go to Walmart stores too early then that really does a number to your brand from a profitability standpoint. So that's why Walmart marketplace is a great avenue for you to start, because you can even get Sam support, which is a strategic account manager on the Walmart three P side of the business who can help you and make sure that you're pulling those levers and in growing your brand on Walmart.com to go to stores. So yes, Bradley, 100% a great avenue to start. And looking at again just Amazon versus Walmart strategy, it isn't just let's go bring all of our Amazon's use over to Walmart, because both algorithms are getting a lot better from a pricing standpoint at identifying different prices. So we've seen pricing down to the price per ounce standpoint. So it doesn't even matter sometimes if you're launching completely different UPCs, they're still matching. So it's really important that before you launch on Walmart.com even if you've been selling on Amazon for quite some time you think about maybe differentiating different pack sizes or just different flavors of your product. That way there is a difference there that you can grow a completely new set of products. Bradley Sutton: Before we get to your specialty, which is Amazon, let's talk a little bit about TikTok shop. It's a different marketplace in that I've never sold in TikTok shop, so please feel free to correct me if any of what I'm saying is wrong, but to me it's different because it's not like something that you could do traditional keyword research. I know there's some tools and helium tents working on some things now that can analyze hashtags and things like that, but you don't really have control over what's necessarily indexed or getting to page one. It's like so just dependent on just the virality of something or a famous influencer showing it. Is that kind of what you see? It's kind of like completely hit or miss, where you have the least amount of control over your success. As far as on just regular TikTok shop, obviously you have control over how you advertise and how many impressions you get, but as far as just a post going viral and getting a lot of sales from it, do you feel like you have not as much control as on other platforms, or is that changed? Delaney: No, 100%. You're correct in that as well. I think that's why the affiliate network is so powerful, but is also. You need a defined strategy there. You need to know your exact demographic. You need to know which subset of creators you're looking to target, based on their engagement rate, their follower count, et cetera and you really need to do a deep dive into their content to make sure that they fit the brand, because you can reach out to as many creators as you want to through there, but at the end of the day, if they're not gonna generate sales from your brand, you're now giving away free samples and that could impact your bottom line. So I think yes as a whole. Definitely from a ranking standpoint, I think TikTok shop's going to evolve in that sense. When you're setting up items, there's specific keywords that they want you to be focusing on, but those are all of the benefit driven keywords or the main claims and the listings, so it doesn't appear that, from a ranking standpoint, those hold as much weight. It's literally how many pieces of content are you pushing out and how is the engagement of that content? So it is incredibly important that you have a solidified content strategy, and TikTok shop allows you to. There's like a get inspired section and you can see a bunch of content that's currently working on the platform that you could pull from in different categories and get ideas on how you can be capitalizing on that for your brand too. Bradley Sutton: Moving to Amazon. I'm not sure if you have experience in this much at all or if you've looked into it, but last night I for the first time, kind of like, took a deep dive into the new inventory placement fees that are coming. I was just seeing here and there, like some I don't know, I don't want to say horror stories but people are getting really scared, like, oh my goodness, my shipping is going to be 2x, mine's going to be 3x. I'm like what, for reals? So I went and what I did was I looked in my own account and by the time this episode is airing it's going to be in full effect. So I'm sure we'll know more. But I was like, yeah, there was a shipment that I had sent to one location only. I didn't choose to just, amazon had me do it. I guess it was like a hundred units of some coffin shelves, right, and it was like 77 bucks or something, because it was like shipping from San Diego to LA and so you know like it's obviously 77 cents per unit. And then I was looking all right in under the new world if I shipped to one location in California, which is obviously my preference, because it took probably a day to get there right. And it was cheaper. It was like a 68 cents per unit charge. So I was like, wait a minute, it is like double. You know what it is Like. Have you looked into this at all and started like thinking about for your clients, like what you're going to have to suggest to them to do or if they're going to have to change the way that they send replenishment? Delaney: Yeah, I mean most of them right now don't send to a single location, but it is very category dependent and so that's what we've seen. So for some categories specifically, there's actually a savings attached to it, but others, like yours, of course, Bradley, you're seeing a steeper charge there. So I think it does 100% matter and that's something in which we keep PNLs on an item level and are updating those PNLs whenever a new FBA fee is introduced, whenever a new inventory placement fee is introduced, just so we can understand the impact of some of these newer fees. But majority across the board, we are seeing increases due to the inventory placement fee. So it's just something that now a lot of our brands that do ship to a single location they're really going to have to evaluate whether that is worth it for their business or not 2024, what is different than a couple years ago or even then, then last year? Bradley Sutton: like what are your? You and your clients having to do a lot differently. There's a lot that's the same. Hey, keyword research is keyword research. Sure, I you know there's some people who might are predicting changes that might happen when Amazon rolls out new AI stuff. My personal opinion is that might, may or may not happen, and even it does happen. I still think traditional, like you know, keyword research and stuff is still going to be important, because you still have to let Amazon know what the product is. But, aside from speculation and stuff, just what are you having to do differently nowadays, whether it's advertising, whether it's listing optimization, whether it's a plus content, whatever that you weren't doing last year, maybe a year ago or two years ago? Delaney: The biggest change, I think, has just been the continued focus on profitability. I think that into last year as well, profitability was at the forefront of the business, where maybe a couple years ago it was more so focused on top line growth. But now really, as brands diversify their channel strategy, their understanding that, you know, with some rising Amazon fees, their bottom line maybe doesn't look as good as it did a couple years ago. And that's where, on the vendor side of the business, we're really looking at LTV to cat ratios, because a lot of our brands might be more hesitant to discount. Bradley Sutton: I know what that means, but explain it to everybody else out there. Delaney: Yeah. So LTV lifetime value, cat customer acquisition costs. So you want the LTV versus cat ratio to be healthy. A lot of agencies will probably tell you a three to one ratio is more so on the healthy side, which basically just means that what you're paying to acquire for a new customer, they're generating at least three times that rate in their overall lifetime value. In other words, they're coming back to repeat purchase from your brand. And I think that as we run promotions and we participate in some of these tent pull events, we're getting more and more pushback from brands who don't want to engage in, let's say, a Prime Day or a Black Friday, cyber Monday or any other tent pull moment that exists for their brand. But we're able to pull reports in which we analyze okay, how many new customers are we generating during these periods? And then for that cohort of new customers, what is their lifetime value in the next six, nine, 12 months? And in many cases that metric is healthy. And if you look at Helium 10 Market Tracker 360, Search Query Performance, keyword tracker, you'll see that in keyword tracker, your non branded keywords are experiencing an increase in overall organic rank during that time. Because of that increase in organic rank Search Query Performance, your purchase share is growing on that particular subset of keywords. And then you pull back a larger time horizon and for many of our brands looking at Market Tracker 360, they're doubling overall market share, while brands that aren't participating are decreasing in market share, and for extended periods of time. So thanks, Bradley, for all the innovation on that side, because that has helped tremendously. But it's really understanding what are the dynamics in the market and when we're not participating in these events, how does our market share change? Bradley Sutton: Okay, let's definitely talk in a little bit about some Helium 10 tools like Market Tracker 360, but Before then you mentioned, like Search Query Performance, how what's your best use cases for Search Query Performance? And or, if you're using it, product opportunity explorer in Amazon, because I think it's so cool that Amazon has is releasing so much more data than back in the old days. Some people say, what at Helium 10, aren't you scared of like? No, it's great. Like every time Amazon releases something, it helps us make even our tools better and actually validate some of the things that we've always shown. So we love it when Amazon opens up new data points. So, how are you using like what's the? You know you could probably have a whole episode about Search Query Performance or OX, but maybe the top, like one or two things that that you think sellers can be getting value out of. Delaney: Yeah. So on the Search Query Performance side, it's really identifying. First and foremost we look at where is your click share greater than your impression share? This is going to be your probably subset of keywords in which there's a ton of opportunity. There just might be a visibility standpoint You're not showing up. Let's see what we can do in terms of optimizing our listings for these keywords. Looking again into Cerebro and doing a reverse look up there to see what are my opportunity keywords in which I can improve my ranking on page one four and then tying that into okay, once I do that, how is Search Query Performance cleaning insights into changes in my overall click share, impression share, add to cart share, purchase share and what does that look like over a prolonged period of time? So a lot of people might look at okay, I want to look at a larger subset of keywords to go after, but really you should narrow this down to probably your top five to 15 at the onset subset of keywords that you're tracking regularly in keyword tracker and also in Search Query Performance to see how that changes. So in Search Query Performance again, just understanding, is my purchase share growing on these terms as I prioritize them more and then putting that back into our ads. And where am I ranked in terms of my top of search impression share for these particular terms? Is my top of search impression share now growing as I want to invest more and two and more relevant for these terms? And then three, let's look back at Search Query Performance and see how my purchase share is growing. Delaney: And then, on the opportunity explorer side, I think that's a great tool. Just understanding, okay, how saturated is my niche? Looking at the top 90% of clicks, is there opportunity in this niche? If my brand is looking to launch a new item, that's where we see the most value in it is okay. How many products have been launched more recently within this niche? What does the opportunity look like for pricing? What does the opportunity look like for reviews? Where do we need to be at within that particular niche to be at the category average so that our conversion rate is benchmarked within the category average? And then I really love the review aspect of things, so being able to really update your content to see positive review sentiments, negative review sentiments, and how are we tackling some of these things that are going wrong within the category as it exists? So, as you said, brad, that we could talk about it for probably three episodes, but that's the basis. Bradley Sutton: Good stuff there. I'm just waiting in anticipation for it to be available, like in the API. Then that's going to allow Helium 10 to do a lot more, even fun things, and combining it even more with Helium 10 data points I love looking at. For example, what is your impressions compared to the search volume? Because theoretically, the impression should be a little bit higher than the search volume, because if you're showing up at the top of the page, maybe an organic and in sponsored, you would have that more. But then it's like all right, let me bring in the exact two graphs of sponsored and organic over the last week or month and like oh okay, this is why it's not where I need it to be. I need to improve. You know there's just like so much fun stuff that that could definitely happen. Now, another tool you mentioned Market Tracker 360, a lot of you know, or some of Helium 10 users out there, might not be familiar with that tool, because it's actually one of the first tools that I think Helium 10 has. That's kind of like really for large sellers or agencies. You know, like you guys like almost everything Helium 10 has. You know we've got billion dollar companies like Lego or something using it, and it's just as applicable to a brand new seller. But this is one of the probably the first tools where I was like wow, I'm not sure I need this. Personally, I'm not that huge of a seller anymore, like maybe only I think I might have only done like half a million or 750,000 last year. I'm like I'm not sure this is for me, but some people just like yourself, you really get a lot of use. So for most people they've never even seen what it does. Can you just briefly talk about how you guys use Market Tracker 360 and how it helps you guys? Delaney: Yeah, absolutely so. In Market Tracker 360, you can either choose a subset of products so oftentimes you're going to choose your competitors or you choose some top keywords within the space. Those are the two most heavily used use cases that we use here. So we'll choose a bunch of the non-branded keywords within the space and we'll put those into Market Tracker 360. And then what it will do is it will pull a bunch of competitors and also your product that are relevant for those specific keywords and literally build a market for you. So, using this market, you can see what is the percentage of overall sales that each competitor is generating, as well as what is this track back to a dollar value. And, yes, we have spot checked that multiple times and it is a pretty accurate there in terms of the sales that it's pulling. So what we do is we'll include that in our product launch phase. When we receive a new brand into the Vendo pipeline, we look at okay, how are they situated within the market right now compared to these top competitors? And of course, we know who the top competitors are. The brand has shared that with us, and then you can dive deeper into different filters that you can set so you can say, okay, I only want to filter this to a title that includes this keyword, like, let's say, the title includes protein powder or it is situated in this specific category or subcategory. That way you can really define that market even more so, and now you don't have as broader of a set of different competitors in that market. It is a lot more specific to your overall market. Or, if you only want to benchmark it towards like five competitors versus the entire market, you can do that too and exclude specific competitors from showing up there. So that's the basis of Market Tracker 360 and how we use it. But then it goes even further deeper into there's different keyword insights that you can see through Market Tracker 360. And where are those competitors now winning? How has the ranking of those competitors on the organic and the sponsored standpoint changed with time? So that's probably my favorite tool in Helium 10, Bradley. Bradley Sutton: Nice, nice. What about the regular side of Helium 10, which I know you have a lot of experience with? What's your favorite tool? And then my secondary and it's use case. And my secondary question would be if you had a wish list of your top thing that Helium 10 doesn't have currently, doesn't have to be Amazon, could be about Walmart, could be something about TikTok shop. What would be the number one thing? If you were like, hey, I can be the Helium 10 director of product for a day, what would you make our team get started on working for you? Delaney: Yes. So I'll start with your first question related to my favorite tool. It has to be Cerebro. Just going back to the roots, looking at the time tracker function that you guys have more recently added, it's probably been probably not even a year yet, right, Bradley? But that tool is extremely powerful because, again, if you have a brand that experiences a ton of seasonality, you can go back to those specific periods in time to see how you were ranked on specific terms, as well as how your competition is and also what are seasonal terms that you need to be taking advantage of. And I think that is often something that a lot of brands miss is hey, there might be 500 searches per month for this particular keyword now, but three months from now there's going to be 5,000. So what are you doing with that information? How are you getting ahead of it from a creative standpoint? How are you optimizing your listings to make sure that those specific keywords are being highlighted? And then, on the advertising side, your competitors probably aren't going to know to be winning on those specific keywords either. So you could get the upper hand by understanding I need to be ranked on page one at this exact moment of time, on the top half of page one, ideally in the top three to five slots. And once I can get there, then I know that when this search volume hits its peak I'll be the competitor that's getting a majority of the conversion share there. So that's got to be my by far my favorite aspect there. Delaney: And then apologies, Bradley, I'm on the second question, related to what I would like to see from an agency side. My vendor central experience probably speaks to including a few more vendor central aspects in there, just because from a purchase order standpoint that is a huge area that we would leverage. But honestly, I think from an FBA standpoint I would have to say forecasting, because I think that inventory management is a huge challenge for a lot of brands and forecasting allows us to better understand what our projections and what our inventory demand is going to look like throughout the year. And then my second one, if we're throwing things in here, would just be variations. So I know with inventory protector you can update maximum order values and things like that. If we could directly change variations in Helium 10 or really be able to decipher, maybe even submit cases for variations that are wrong some more technical things there, but all things that I feel like would be extremely powerful, because that's where a lot of time is spent trying to update things that maybe Amazon is using. It's not updating, even after multiple cases. Bradley Sutton: Cool, cool. Now, before we get into some of your final strategies of the day, if people want to reach out to Vendo Commerce guys, one of the easiest ways is just go to hubhelium10.com and type in Vendo, which is Spanish for I sell. So whoever made that company name is a genius and you can reach out to them there. But if people want to follow you or reach out to you, how can they find you on the interwebs out there? Delaney: Yes, you could find me at delaney@vendocommerce.com and, as Bradley said, also have a podcast that I know Bradley will be joining me on in a couple weeks Vendo Commerce Velocity as well as on LinkedIn. I'm on there, delaney@vendocommerce.com. Bradley Sutton: A couple, maybe quick hitting SST, what I call my 60-second strategies. By the way, that's also something that comes from my Filipino side, because I think that's how our mothers or grandparents would call us when they're trying to. You know, come over here. But anyways, for everybody else, that just stands for a 60-second tip. So what is a couple of 60-second tips or strategies that you can talk about that our sellers can influence? Delaney: Yeah. So, from a more data-centric standpoint, make sure you're leveraging both Helium 10, Search Query Performance and product opportunity. Explorer tons of insights and the way in which you're telling a cohesive story for your brand. If you combine those tools, they're not meant to be used in silo, they're meant to be used together, but also from a competitive aspect, using the video placement aspect and sending videos. Putting videos on your competitive ASINs is something that's really fundamental, but at the basis of it is just more organic visibility for your listings. So, again, you can add your own branded videos onto competitors listings within the video manager. A lot of brands don't do this, but they will show up if the full video stack is not filled by your competitors. So something to look out for. Delaney: Also, from a cross-sale standpoint, a lot of brands aren't currently leveraging things like targeted cross promotions in which you buy one product and you get 5% to 10% off another product, or the add an accessory widget. A lot of brands think that, yes, that's probably only a SaaS core function if you are investing in that program, but we've seen through filing of multiple cases, you can have that add an accessory widget pop up there and then, just in terms of prime, exclusive discounts. I know that sometimes, and more often, you're seeing that when you add SKUs and prime exclusive discounts they might be getting rejected. So for that I would suggest creating a new SKU, and what we've seen that is that if a SKU is being flagged specifically for FBM or for internal policies, then you can create a new SKU. Add that new SKU instead to your prime exclusive discount and it will still run because that history won't be tied to that new SKU. So those are a few things, but on a larger basis. For a 60-second hack let's say a very not even hack, but tip is to know your PNL, and Amazon has a lot of different tools. Helium 10 has a profits tool to help you understand that. But you do need to understand how much margin you have to work with and evaluate your PNL on a weekly and even a monthly basis. Bradley Sutton: All right. Well, this has definitely been a strategy field episode. Now, on the personal side, you got married last year, so congratulations. Where was your honeymoon? I was living vicariously through your Instagram honeymoon, but where was it Wasn't Maldives. It wasn't the Maldives honeymoon. Delaney: I know, but where'd you guys go? You're going to need to change the name of your honeymoon launch strategy, Bradley, but we went to Italy and then we ended up in Santorini. So a bunch of different spots in Italy and then Santorini in Greece was my favorite. Bradley Sutton: What's some of, overall, your favorite travel spots. Is that something you do, or was that you know? Do you travel with any kind of frequency, or are you more of a homebody? Delaney: Trying to travel more usually, stay stateside, go to Hawaii a decent amount. I can't really get tired of Hawaii, but in terms of some of my favorite places I've been, probably Spain is at the top of the list. So many great places in Europe. But I would say if you haven't been to Santorini, I don't think I'd ever be able to go back, but it is definitely worth a visit. Bradley Sutton: Speaking of Spain, you got to get Darren to send you in May, probably our next Helium 10 Elite workshop. You know we do a quarterly workshop is probably going to be in Madrid in May. So business, business trips/second honeymoon bring your hubby along and, you know, soak up the nightlife in Madrid and the museum. I like, I like how it's both. You know like I can hit those like really cool museums and architecture, and you know they've got good restaurants and nightlife over there. So tell Darren, I'll put in the good word for you. Let's, let's hang out in Madrid next year. Delaney: Yeah, we'll put in the good. I will definitely be bringing that one up to him. So thanks for that, Radley. And then we'll have to make a trip to the Philippines. Bradley Sutton: Yes, well, I'm actually going soon. The Amazon is doing their first event, or not? For the I missed their first event, actually in March, but or in February, I should say. But they're actually doing another event in a couple of months, so, offline, I'll give you some details that they haven't finalized a date on that. But yeah, there's second every event in Manila, and so there we go. You can go and visit some family too and support the community out there. Delaney: There we go. That sounds great. I definitely need to go back. Bradley Sutton: Awesome, all right, well, thank you so much for joining us and it was great to see my sister from another mister right here on this show, and I look forward to being on your show in a couple of weeks.

35m

Mar 16, 2024

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, interview someone you need to hear from and provide a training tip for the week. Amazon’s new Big Spring Sale is coming March 20-25—here’s everything you need to know to shop deals on spring essentials https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/retail/amazon-big-spring-sale-faq https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/retail/amazon-big-spring-sale-faqAmazon now lets sellers create listings through a URL by using AI https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/13/amazon-now-lets-sellers-create-listings-through-a-url-by-using-ai/ https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/13/amazon-now-lets-sellers-create-listings-through-a-url-by-using-ai/Exclusive: The FTC is probing Amazon’s new controversial fees in its $140 billion seller business https://fortune.com/2024/03/08/ftc-amazon-seller-fees-inbound-placement-low-inventory-antitrust/ https://fortune.com/2024/03/08/ftc-amazon-seller-fees-inbound-placement-low-inventory-antitrust/Everything you need to know about Amazon Business, one of Amazon’s fastest-growing ventures https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/what-is-amazon-business https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/what-is-amazon-businessNEW Store Spotlight format https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7173438505535176704/?updateEntityUrn=urn%3Ali%3Afs_feedUpdate%3A%28V2%2Curn%3Ali%3Aactivity%3A7173438505535176704%29 - Custom Image links to store subpages!! Also on the docket is Kevin King's upcoming free live strategy webinar http://h10.me/kevinkinglive which promises to be an invaluable resource for Amazon sellers of all levels. Discover new earning avenues with Helium 10, and get the scoop on the expanded day-parting schedules for ads that could change how you place your ads based on time-of-day performance data. Plus our training tips of the week talk about how to use the Helium 10 Profits tool’s Expenses tab and the Inventory Heat Maps tool. Don't miss out on these insights that could make all the difference to your e-commerce success.  In this episode of the Weekly Buzz by Helium 10, Bradley covers: __ __ ► 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: A non-Prime Day event was announced by Amazon. You can use Amazon AI to create your listings. If you've got a website. Soon, you have to use two-factor sign-in for signing into Seller Central. These stories and more on today's episode of the Helium 10 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 going on in the Amazon, Walmart, and e-commerce world. We let you know what new tools and features Helium 10 has come out with and we give you training tips of the week that will give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Let's see what's buzzing Couple news articles that might be of note, and something that just kind of came out of left field that I didn't even know about was that Amazon has this sale event that's coming up out of nowhere next week.   Bradley Sutton: It's not really a prime day, but it's kind of like a prime day. It's called the Big Spring Sale. It's going from March 20th to 25th. Now, I haven't been paying much attention to announcements. As far as deals and my deals dashboard, was there something announced about this? Could be, but maybe I missed it, my bad. But basically this is not a Prime Day because it's not only for prime members. Now, some prime people get exclusive discounts on some things, but this is the very first ever event of its kind and there's going to be all kinds of different discounts. Amazon says here People are going to be able to shop these deals at Amazon.com forward slash big spring sale starting on March 20th. Now again, I don't know too many details about this, but Amazon is really pushing this out. It was all over the news. So even if you didn't jump in and run a deal during this time, well, first of all, you might be able, you might want to do some kind of deal during the 20th to 25th or, at the very least, be on the lookout for increased traffic during this time, all right, so it might be a time to do a coupon if you were so inclined, or might want to check your PPC budgets a little closer, just in case there's a lot of extra traffic that might be happening due to Amazon promoting this event.   Bradley Sutton: Next article is from TechCrunch and it's entitled Amazon now let sellers create listings through a URL by using AI. All right, so in the list your products basically let's say you haven't sold on Amazon before, or at least you haven't sold a certain product Instead of just putting the name of the product in the search bar. You know, like normal, let's say you've got a Shopify website or your own.com website where that product is listed, you can paste the URL of your product into the Amazon Create Listing page and it's going to use generative AI to kind of like extract the details of the listing and create like a description for you. So it's interesting, you know, if you're somebody who trusts AI a lot for this kind of thing, this is a completely free service. From what I understand, it might be worth a try. So I know Amazon really wants to promote off Amazon brands, to get on Amazon. I think that this is one of those things that could definitely help them.   Bradley Sutton: On the flip side of Amazon news, fortune.com is reporting that the FTC is probing Amazon's new controversial fees in its $140 billion seller business. All right, so this is the fees we've been talking about on this show for the last few weeks, and so many sellers are in an uproar. First of all, don't forget, guys, check back on our weekly buzz. The last couple of weeks, we show how it's not as bad for many sellers as it seems to be due to the reduced FBA fees. But, yeah, like there's some serious stuff going on, especially for those people who are doing pallets and truckloads and containers and things like that. I'm seeing people having to pay thousands of dollars more for shipping. Now the funny thing is, what have I been saying for like a year about this FTC case? The FTC case is like full of nonsense that not one Amazon seller could care less about. They think that they were pulling a gotcha on Amazon for this, that and this, and literally they have no clue how Amazon sellers feel, because there are so many other things that Amazon sellers are concerned about, the things that the FTC was trying to like focus in on. However, that being said, for the first time, hey, this is something that is concerning to Amazon sellers, and so it's going to be interesting how this plays out. For the first time, the FTC might actually have something that Amazon sellers are worried about, and so let's see how this investigation pans out.   Bradley Sutton: Next article is from your Seller Central dashboard and it's entitled to factor authentication will be required for Seller Central sign in. Some of you guys have that already, but this is going to go in on March 28th and you're going to have to use a mobile number or authenticator app to do it. All right, so this, guys, is is, in my opinion, highly recommended even before March 28th. There's so much like hacking going on out there and password hacking and things like that. I think on most critical websites, especially your Seller Central account, you should have two factor authentication. On matter of fact, you should have two factor authentication on a helium 10. All right, guys, you know the helium 10 always has that available. So if you don't have that on Seller Central or helium 10, go in there, turn on two factor authentication to keep your accounts secure.   Bradley Sutton: Next article is from Amazon. Now, this was interesting to me because it says everything you need to know about Amazon business, one of Amazon's fastest growing ventures. All right, so I think most of us have known about the Amazon business program, where you can kind of, or businesses who are registered with Amazon, when they shop, they have a little bit different experience. They can get like quantity discounts and just business discounts and they see different things. It actually reached $35 billion of sales in 2023. All right, so this is quite interesting. This article goes on and say more than 6 million customers are now buying on Amazon business. This includes small and medium sized companies, and also Fortune 100 companies use Amazon business, such as Intel and City and John Hopkins University, et cetera. Now if you want to get more information to see, are your listings, are you enrolled in Amazon business? You know what's going on there. Just just going to Seller Central guys and type in Amazon business and you'll go to this dashboard where it talks about the Amazon business Seller program, all right, and has a whole bunch of frequently asked questions, tons of details about the ins and outs of this program. But it's kind of a surprise. It was kind of surprising to me to find out that that is actually one of the fastest growing programs that Amazon has.   Bradley Sutton: Next article is not really an article, just a post from Destaney’s LinkedIn, where she discovered, or her team discovered, a new ad format. All right. So this is something that she says combines the traditional sponsored brand format of showcASINg three ASINS with a custom image, but also layering them in the value out of a store, spotlight add and the sub page navigation and she put here a sample of that where you can see like the different links here in that custom image. So that is going to be interesting if this is going to be rolled out to everybody. Has anybody actually had access to this and been able to test it out? Let me know. In the comments below Last article, something that we have now reported on, I think four years in a row that's how long we've been doing the weekly buzz. Always around this time of year the same little article comes out, just as a reminder. So I'm just going to go ahead and throw it out there again.   Bradley Sutton: By April 15th, guys, you have to remove multiple inventory from Amazon. Now, a funny thing is is when I was typing out, the little ticker that you see here on the side, meltable, doesn't seem to be a word that my spell checker understands, like I always thought meltables are. Anyways, I digress, meltable is a word to Amazon and you should know what your multiple inventory is Heat-sensitive products, you know, chocolate, gummies, jelly and wax based products. You have to get those out from April 15th to October 15th or else Amazon's going to toss it All right. So just make sure to go ahead and take care of that. All right.   Bradley Sutton: One thing I wanted to give you guys a heads up on is that Kevin King is doing a live strategy session. He hasn't done this in probably over a year from helium 10. It's going to be a live webinar and you guys can actually tune in. H 10.me forward slash Kevin King live. All right, so you can register there. H 10.me forward slash Kevin King live 100% free webinar that he's giving on March 21st, Thursday at 9am. All right, this is so important. I'm going to be doing it at midnight from the Philippines. I'm going to be on the webinar with him and he's going to give such strategies as two proven techniques to make a million dollar main image, seven AI tools Every Amazon seller should be familiar with and a lot more high level strategy. So, regardless what level Amazon seller you are, make sure to register for that workshop. h10.me/kevinkinglive.   Bradley Sutton: Let's go ahead and hop into the Helium 10 New Feature Alerts of the week. The first one is a way to make money now with helium 10. Just as a regular user. There's two different ways, all right. The first way is you guys can actually go to your dashboard and on the on the very right hand side where it has your name. Might be hard to see it here on my window, but if you click on your name on the right hand side of helium 10, you're going to see a button that says become an affiliate, all right. So that's, if you have, like a community or you know, YouTube channel and you think you've got people who are, who are following you out there, well, becoming an affiliate, you could get 25% commission for life, all right. So somebody clicks on your ad for helium 10 or a video or a link that you put out for helium 10. They sign up for helium 10. You don't even know who they are. You've never talked to them and you never talked to them again for the rest of your life, four years from now. If they're paying helium 10, a hundred bucks a month, guess what? You're getting a check for $25 every single month for life, all right. So that's a pretty cool thing. There's also, for some reason it's not in my account, but I think most everybody else if you click on that your name you also have something that says refer a friend or something like that, or refer a customer, where it's not an affiliate whole plan. But if you just have, you know, like a buddy who wants to start learning Amazon, you want to get him started. In the freedom ticket program you can get discounts on your own membership by signing people up. So there's two new ways to make money with helium 10 becoming an affiliate or doing the customer referral. So again, check that out on the right hand side of your dashboard.   Bradley Sutton: Next update is in our tool inventory management. All right, so something that people have wanted for a long time is the ability to have multiple warehouses, multiple 3PLs A lot of people they have, they don't have or they're not like me, and they have all of their inventory in one warehouse. They might have a East Coast warehouse, a Texas warehouse, a West Coast warehouse. Well, now, if you go to your inventory, you're going to have the ability to add multiple warehouses. So it's right here on your warehouses page, you can add as many as you want and then put the specify the inventory that is in each of those warehouses and then, basically, when you send inventory to Amazon, you choose which warehouse is coming from. The inventory is going to be drawn out from there. So remember, last week we announced that we now have inventory management for all of the European marketplaces. Well, now we have multi warehouse management for this tool. Anything else that you guys would want for inventory management, please let us know.   Bradley Sutton: Last Helium 10 New Feature Alert is in atomic and it's our day parting schedules now released for all ad types. And then it's also across all of North America, all of Europe and all of Asia. All right, so you can look at your sponsored product, sponsored brand and even sponsored display, heat day parting, like heat maps if you were. So that's like. Here I can see, hey, for my whole account. Oh, my goodness, my a-cost at 3 am Is absolutely abysmal. You know, maybe I want to turn off my ads or lower my bids at that time, but hey, my a-cost at this other time might be pretty good. Maybe I want to increase my bids, maybe I want to pause my bids, maybe I want to increase my budgets. All these things that you want to do, you need to do it based on information, and so what helium 10 is showing you is the performance of your PPC by Time, hour of the day and by day of the week, and even by your Campaign. So make sure to check that out. If you have atomic day parting across all marketplaces, all ad types. All right, let's get into our training tip of the week. There's actually two things you know.   Bradley Sutton: Thinking about the Amazon fees, I think that a lot of sellers are very conscious about, hey, I need to save pennies wherever I can. I need to know where my money is going. So there's a couple things that I want to show you that every single helium 10 member has, whether you have platinum or diamond, or even if you have the starter plan. All right, so these tools are in profits. Now the first thing I'm going to show you is your expenses, all right.   Bradley Sutton: So did you know that with it, just a couple of clicks, you can find out how much you are paying Amazon per month, like, for example, my FBA fee charge for storage in February last month? I can see right here is a hundred and eleven dollars. That was actually up by forty dollars over the previous month. If I'm wondering which are my products that are getting those storage fees, I just hit that button for the February month and I can see at the ASIN level everything that I am paying storage on. I can see Wow, I got fifty dollars worth of storage for these bat bath mats that I just launched. All right, kind of sucks I shouldn't have, maybe. I'm like why do they have to pay fifty dollars? When I just launched it? You know How's that, but whatever, if I think it's right or wrong, at least I have visibility and I'm not just throwing money at Amazon Without knowing where it's going. All right. So make sure to check that out and then, as you guys might have seen from my workshop last week that, or a few days ago that we did you have a way to automate this where, if you're getting more storage fees or more refunds, things like that, you can actually Automate this alert and have helium 10 let you know that your storage fees are going up. All right, so that's on your insights dashboard. One more thing that is going to help, like when you're launching and help me when I was launching is Are the heat maps inside of helium 10? All right?   Bradley Sutton: So, for any of your products, if you are just about to launch, you might want to make sure that your inventory is Distributed across the country. So the way you can do that is go down to one of your product tables like I'll go ahead and pull it up here for the bat bath Matt and then you want to hit inventory maps. Okay, and then now you're going to see the map of everywhere where your inventory is, and I can see here. I don't even have any in Texas, maybe they. That seems weird to me. You know Austin has some of the most bats in the world. Why don't they send any inventory to Austin? You know, for for my bat shaped coffin mat, but tons of inventory here in New Jersey, more inventory in Maryland, over here, Utah and Florida, and then I could also see my sales distribution based on certain times of the of the month, or I can look at it at the state level, or in the past week, in the past month, whatever, and I can see wow, okay, I've got a lot of sales in Florida during this couple day time period, so maybe that's why there's they sent so much of my inventory to Florida. So make sure to check out those heat maps.   Bradley Sutton: Sometimes, when you're launching a product, you want to wait until Amazon distributes that inventory a little bit more evenly across the country, so you might have your maybe listing closed for a couple days until they distribute it more. And then that's when you turn on your PPC. Well, instead of being blind about where Amazon has distributed your inventory or trying to find some hard to find report inside of seller central. Just go into profits. Go into inventory heat maps and see every single warehouse when your inventory is across the country. All right, guys. Thank you so much for tuning in this week. That's all for the news and feature alerts. Make sure to tune in next week to see what's buzzing.

16m

Mar 15, 2024

Join us on this episode, as we sit down with Jerome de Guigne, a seasoned expert in international business and Amazon marketplace strategies. We take a trip across Jerome's impressive business career, which stretches from France to Luxembourg, and uncover the crucial steps he took to carve a niche in the world of Amazon. Listen in as Jerome lays out the intricate process of aiding brands in scaling their operations and mastering the art of value creation on this global platform. This conversation also welcomes Jacob McQuoid from Avask and throws light on the hurdles U.S. companies face when stretching their commercial footprint to European shores, such as VAT intricacies, regulatory hoops, and the ever-present language barriers. But it's not a one-way street; European entities eyeing the U.S. market have their fair share of VAT tax complexity to navigate. We bring in perspectives from professionals at firms like Avask and explore tools like Pacvue and Helium 10, providing a lot of insights for Amazon brands planning to cross these transatlantic bridges. Finally, we touch upon the wisdom of starting small and testing the waters when it comes to international expansion. This approach allows businesses to minimize risks and optimize for market receptivity, a strategy underscored by the shared knowledge from this episode. So whether you're an experienced Amazon seller or new to this realm, this episode is packed with invaluable advice and strategies for taking your Amazon business to new international heights.   In episode 543 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley, Jerome, and Jacob discuss: __ __ ► 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: Are you a North American seller interested to expand to Amazon Europe, or maybe vice versa? Are you interested in advanced Amazon advertising strategies? Well, today, I went to Germany to interview in person two experts on these topics. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Bradley Sutton: Want to keep up to date with trending topics in the e-commerce world? Make sure to subscribe to our blog. We regularly release articles that talk about things such as shipping and logistics, e-commerce in other countries, the latest changes to Amazon Seller Central, how to get set up on new platforms like New Egg, how to write and publish a book on Amazon KDP and much, much more. Check these articles out at h10.me/blog. Bradley Sutton: Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I'm Bradley Sutton and this is the show that's completely BS-free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Another episode here coming from the opposite side of the world. I'm in Frankfurt, Germany and was able to interview a lot of different people. For the first time on the show, we've got Jerome here. Jerome, welcome. Jerome: Thank you very much. I'm super happy to be here and it's nice to see you on this part of the world. Bradley Sutton: Excellent. So you know, like I do with first time guests, we need to find out about you. And this is important too, because, like I don't know much about your back stories. What country in Europe are you from? Germany, France, so I have. Jerome: I'm all about going international, so my background is international also. I was born and raised in France but my mom is British. My dad is French. I lived in France but I also lived in Turkey. I lived a bit in Germany, in the UK and now I'm office design Luxembourg. So a lot of different experiences all over the world. Bradley Sutton: Okay, excellent, excellent. Now, what did you? Where did you go to university? In what country? Jerome: So I went to university mainly in France, so first in the nice city of Grenoble, which is not too far from Lyon. It's in the Alps Mountains, really nice to do like business and management. And then afterwards I did an MBA in a school in Basin Paris but had campuses in Germany and in the UK and also in the States. I did a week in Texas, for example. It was really interesting. So like multinational is really my thing. Bradley Sutton: Okay, excellent. Now, upon graduation, did you enter right into the business world and what you had studied, or what did you do? Jerome: So I went to work two years into the chemical business at that time it was called Atofina Archema. Now, it's like I was helping the head of the subsidiary there. So doing a lot of things, helping on IT topics, on business topics for two years. And then I came back and I worked for 10 years for a Chinese group and that's where I started to work in Luxembourg. And then afterwards, I was looking for a job and couldn't find one. So I said I'll start my own company. Bradley Sutton: Okay, and what was that company? Jerome: So at the beginning my idea was say, okay, I want to bring value, because when I did my MBA it was all about okay, how do you create value for your ecosystem? Because value has a price and you know, and then you can sell. So my first idea was to help people expand and grow in terms of sales. But I had been doing a lot of Amazon business in my previous company and like, step by step, I found out that a big pain point for people in Europe at that time so 10 years ago was not understanding Amazon and I said, oh people, it's simple, let me explain to you. So I went into step by step into the Amazon business and that's where we become specialized in Amazon. Bradley Sutton: Amazon is not a typical segue from somebody just coming from the business world. How did you first, just you know, think about that as a good aspect, you know, like Google or friends? Jerome: So my background was really distribution, since I was head of Europe and EMEA for this Chinese brand and we were expanding into countries having subsidiaries, having distributors, and so it's about selling right and then I started to work with companies and helping them expand and actually even 10 years ago, the or even more 10 years ago, the fastest way to expand was Amazon and it actually really started when a German brand I knew from before told me okay, take care of the international distribution of our brand, which was binoculars, and I said, okay, well, you know, the best way is really Amazon and that's where we really started to go there. So we mostly started from vendor background because bigger brands were working on vendor and now we have probably 70% seller, 30% vendor in terms of people we help. Bradley Sutton: So what about you? During this time, were you selling on Amazon yourself as well? Jerome: So I never sold on Amazon myself. I was always selling in the name of a company and, like I said, I started as a vendor, so selling to Amazon rather than selling on Amazon, and I've been helping a lot of sellers but never sold myself. Help friends. But, yeah, never went into it. It's a bit of a dream at some point to do that. Bradley Sutton: For your agency for the last few years, are you focused on any particular aspect of Amazon or like PPC, for example, or it's A to Z? What is your focus on? What you help sellers with? Jerome: It's very much A to Z we focus. We've got three main topics we focus on. One is global expansion, so it's helping anyone to go from Europe to the US, from US to Europe to US to Japan, to anywhere in the world, and it's really whatever they need. That's the first thing we focus on. The second thing is retail media. It's one of the big topics we do is like how do we help them expand better thanks to retail media. So advertising, PPC, DSP, AMC, whatever there is. And the last thing is technology. Jerome: So we're not a SaaS company but we use a lot of tools. So Helium 10 is one, Pacvue is another one. We also partner with SalSify, for example, on the PIM side, and we have built our own dashboard. So those three topics Global Expansion, Retail Media, technology are three topics we're very focused on and we try to help people through those different things. So it's really, for me, it's A to Z especially in those aspects. So anybody, for example, we've started to sell on our own accounts for brands who can't sell. So for me, it's like an additional. We're not really a distributor, but if a brand can't sell themselves, it's okay. We'll set up a seller account and we have one in the US. We have a seller account in Europe and we have one in India also, for example. So anyone who wants to expand in any way, we are here to help them. Bradley Sutton: Let's talk about the first thing you mentioned about the international expansion. I mean, there's probably 35 different combinations you can have. You know, Japanese person selling on America, European person selling in Japan, a person from Dubai selling in Mexico, you know, etc. etc. Let's talk about some of the more common ones. Probably the most common for our listeners would be I'm a US-based company doing pretty well. Now I want to get started in Europe because that's the second and third biggest marketplaces, UK and Germany. The thing the elephant in the room for a lot of people is like oh my goodness, VAT and things like that. So what are some of the main obstacles and maybe difficult things to navigate for an American company who wants to get started in Europe? Jerome: Great question. For me, the three things. The first thing is regulations and taxes. Regulations. So the thing is like am I allowed to sell those products in Europe? We're talking with a supplements brand, for example, in the States, and it's like okay, the way you talk probiotics, for example, or can you have that keyword on your listing all of that? So that's a first hurdle. We today were speaking with AVASK and AVASK is a great partner. We partner with to deliver, like VAT services and also help on regulation. Jerome: The second thing is languages. Obviously, you need to have a great service and you need to have great content for the local people and that's something we are partnering also with a company, YLT Yanak Krekic, who's delivering great service, for example. So typically, we create a hub of people we work with. And the third part is logistics, supply chain. It's like, okay, how do we? Will you get your products to Europe? Like, will you have a warehouse in Holland? Will you go directly to FBA? Who will be your importer of record? That also we work with AVASK and some logistics company. So, even before going into advertising, content and everything, you've got those three things as regulation, translations, in a sense and supply chain. Bradley Sutton: What are some of the steps that somebody needs to take as far as the basics that everybody needs to do? Like you know, there are some things that are kind of like nice to have. There's some things that are need to have. For example, let's talk, you know, let's talk about the need to have for getting started in Europe. I don't need to form a company in Europe. I can use my US company, but I need to. What something that everybody has to do? Is it the VAT register for VAT? Jerome: Yeah. So one thing you can't. Well, same way as in the US you can't play around with IRS, right, and in Europe you can't play around with the tax authority. So VAT is a must and my recommendation is that, typically, Amazon tends to underplay and when they sell the service of expansion, they tend sometimes to be a bit optimistic about the simplicity of VAT. It's not that simple, it's not over complicated, but you need to speak with people who know this stuff. AVASK is a great example of people who really know this stuff. So that's the one thing you need to be set up in at least one country. I don't know, we want to go in all the details, but you need at least one country. Best is to be listed in or having VAT in every countries in Europe but you need at least one to be legal and compliant. Bradley Sutton: Let's do the opposite. I'm a European based company. I want to sell in the biggest marketplace in the world Amazon, USA. You know, I know like way in the old days and now on Walmart, you know, actually still for in some situations you do have to have like a US corporation, but nowadays I can. You know, I'm registered in Germany. I can go ahead and register as an individual or as a person. What are some things that I, absolutely, have to do that are in obstacle to some Europeans for selling in USA? Jerome: So our assumption as Europeans that everything is simple in the US and generally doing business in the US is much easier than in Europe. Like you have much less regulations, there's less hurdles. Now on the tax side, it's still quite complicated and as a European, I had to learn okay to navigate that. Because you can have a company in the States, in one state who's like, its addresses one state but if most of your sales is in another state, the other state where you're doing the sales might say no, no, I want you to pay your taxes where you're doing your turnover. Or if you have employees, it will start say no, then there's a fight between the different states. Jerome: For us in within one country, that doesn't happen. Like if I'm living France, you won't have the south of France trying to fight for you to pay your taxes and south of France doesn't make sense. Yes, so this you have to learn. So here again, you need to speak to the professionals, because taxes, you can't play around with and it's once you've understood, you've understood it or you have someone doing it for you it really goes smoothly. It's also that in some states in the US the tax accuration is automated between Amazon and the states, but in other states it's not. So it's like navigating that and understanding that is a bit complicated and if you're not an accountant, you'd rather work with someone who's a specialist and we work a lot with, like AVASK, for example, or specialists who will help you navigate that. So for me, it's focus on what you're good at and try to outsource what you're less good at to make sure you don't make mistakes. Bradley Sutton: What are you using Pacvue for? For your clients and maybe you know, some people out there might be wondering what kind of amazon seller or large corporate or large company might have use for Pacvue as opposed to Helium 10. So what are you using now Pacvue for? Jerome: So I think, we probably started to work with Pacvue and Helium 10 both the same time, a long time ago. So I think we started in 2019. I think, the first agency in Europe using Pacvue. Basically, we were looking for a tool and what I did is I asked the teams. I said I don't want to take the decision. I wanted the really the users to audit the different tools and decide which one they wanted to work with. And they decided to work with, at that time, to with Pacvue. Jerome: What we did is there's a lot of rules on a lot of features sorry on Pacvue, for example, rules to like improve your campaigns and as an agency, you've got you know 50, 70, 100 brands you work with. So you have a lot of campaigns and you have to have rules which help you optimize. You can't be checking every campaigns all the time. So you have rules really helping you optimize things. So we've been using Helium 10 from day one also to understand the market, make research, and we've used Pacvue really to optimize campaigns and do a better job in terms of advertising for our customers. Bradley Sutton: Are you using Pacvue for non-Amazon platforms at all? Jerome: Yeah, so we've started to go on Walmart, for example, in the US. So we are using Pacvue on Walmart on the platforms in Europe. Not all of them are linked on Pacvue because some of them are smaller. So it really depends. But on the major, we try to use Pacvue, as much as possible, because it's our sort of system of record today in the company. Bradley Sutton: And Helium 10, what is your team using Helium 10 like? What particular tools or what kind of strategies are you guys using? Jerome: So they are using it every day, I would say. So they are checking on the consulting side. Our consultants are checking, like the Market Tracker, for example, or the keyword researchers, like, example, when you were saying, okay, should we go into a new market? Okay, let's see what. You know how many researchers are done on the brand or on the type of product. Then the teams are also working when they're doing their SEO, like checking, you know, keywords and backing keywords and also campaign keywords. They checking all of the tools. Jerome: For me, Helium 10 is amazing because each time I go, it's like, wow, there's so many tools and I feel like there's a new one each time. So I have a hard time keeping track of all of them but I know they're using it daily to really on one or the other bit to improve things altogether. And because we have a content team, we have an advertising team, we have a consulting team, an analytics team, they check different things, each of them for different purposes and Helium 10 has always been amazing to me, like the amount of wealth and value they provide on so many things and that's as a day, as I said, a day to day tool we use. Bradley Sutton: Okay, excellent. Now what kind of, you know, strategy help that can you give to our users? We usually ask our guests like, hey, give us a tip or a strategy. You know it could be about international expansion, could be about PPC, could be about health, could be about which French football team to follow. Anything that you want to talk about. What some strategies you can give our listeners? Jerome: So, yeah, I'm not a big soccer man so I won't go there because I might embarrass myself. No, the thing I typically say when you talk about global expansion is there's a lot of potential but there's a lot of hurdles. So probably you want to start small or start focused. So if you're in the US and you want to go into Europe, maybe you start in Germany and or in the UK because language is easier. Just make a proof of concept, go there, be successful and then start to expand. Because if you start to go in six, five, six, seven countries, then you have five, six, seven campaigns to build, translations to do. There's a lot of work. Jerome: So probably do one, show that you can be successful in one of the European countries and then expand. Same in the US, you probably don't want to maybe take all of your catalog and take a smaller part of the catalog, make sure you're successful and then expand. So for me it's like start small and grow from there. Learn, try to learn. Because international we're talking about earlier with other people today is like, you know, we say they're saying culture eats strategy at breakfast is like cultural things are very strange, like what happens how customer behaviors are different. So get used to it and to start with something and build on it. Bradley Sutton: Love it, alright. Now, one way I know people can find and reach out to your company is if you go to hub.helium10.com type in E-C-O-M-A-S. Is that right? What are other ways that people can find you, your company, on the interwebs out there? Jerome: So we're very vocal on LinkedIn and the team produces a lot of content on retail media on the street topics like retail media, technology and global expansion, so we do try to share as much as possible with everyone. I was honored to be named one of the Amazon Retail Media Advertising Ambassadors, so one of our job is really to share as much content as possible on advertising specifically and one of the advice I gave it was about globalization. If I talk about retail media is like AMC. Amazon marketing cloud is one thing which today is open. Really, if you're doing DSP and PPC, hopefully tomorrow it will open to PPC also only. I would really recommend people to look into it. This is giving you advice, like learnings, which will get you to the next level in terms of advertising. Bradley Sutton: What is the first thing that somebody just getting into DSP or AMC? What is the first thing they should maybe if they're just getting their feet wet? Jerome: So one feature, for example, which is already in Pacvue, which is day parting with AMC you will get even more granular information, a bit like with Facebook. You will know we've run some studies for some of our brands where you get information on the persona, like who is buying your products, like is it you know male, what age, what location, and then you can tailor your messaging, your content, everything you're doing, to really focus on that target customer you have. So that's one example and there's many others you can bring on AMC. We're just starting and people are just starting to get like insights from it. So for me, it's like get first, get into it, and it's not super easy so there's a bit of a barrier to entry. So, once again, either you can, you have got enough knowledge to go in yourself or ask for people for support, and there's a lot of great people. We can help. But there's a lot of great people on AMC which can really help you. Pacvue, for example, has got embedded some AMC features already. So I really look into it because that will be a game changer and for me, like they will probably be a change of like a crossroads people getting into it and who will win? And the others lagging behind. Bradley Sutton: Okay, all right. Well, thank you so much for coming on and hopefully, see you on my side of the pond next time. Jerome: Indeed, thank you very much. Bradley Sutton: All right. So our next guest is one of the hosts for today from AVASK. We're in AVASK, Frankfurt office. This is not your main office. I believe the main office is in London. Jacob: Southampton, so it's about an hour south of London. Bradley Sutton: We're here in Frankfurt, Germany. And this is Jacob, who I met originally in Korea, spoke at an event that I did over there. And what is your title here? Jacob: So I'm the head of business development and commercial services, so responsible for client acquisition. You know have a team based here in Germany, in UK, in Spain and in Italy. So we're supporting, consulting clients, helping them expand. Bradley Sutton: Okay. Now, how did you get into the e-commerce world? Like, what's your backstory? What did you? Where did you go to university? What did you study? And then your entry into the job world. Jacob: Okay. So in terms of studying, I actually did Creative Media in college and then just directly went into working straight from there. So I started as an Account Manager for a finance company and then transitioned to AVASK. I've been here for five years. So that's the kind of a short background but yeah, been at the company for a good amount of time now. Bradley Sutton: Okay. Now, last time we had somebody from AVASK was Melanie, was on maybe, probably almost three years now ago. There's some people who might not know about you guys. So you know elevator pitch with an amazon seller and elevator. How do you tell them what you guys do? Jacob: Yeah, so we help people expand cross-border, so getting to different markets and try and make it as frictionless as possible. Kind of the biggest area for us and kind of the one we've been working in the longest is Europe. So supporting US sellers, you know, Chinese sellers, European sellers, sell all around Europe but that's not it. But like kind of in a nutshell, that's our main service, but essentially we help people get into different markets and make it as frictionless as possible. Bradley Sutton: Okay, so now you know, we just had Jerome on a couple minutes before you. He talked about some of the you know things that people need to be concerned about going from US to Europe, vice versa, maybe going to another marketplace. And he mentioned you guys too. So let's talk a little bit more in the weeds. About some of the you know, like this is what I call the unsexy side of e-commerce. You know the sexy side is PPC and Keyword Research and finding new products and developing your brand. The unsexy side is stuff that actually is arguably even more important, you know, getting your taxes in order and your business entity. So we touched a little bit with Jerome about the VAT and things like that. Bradley Sutton: But let's, let's dig into it because, like me, it just I've never sold. I've never done VAT here myself in Europe, and it's for a lot of, you know, US base sellers, like it's kind of like this monster of a thing that we have to worry about. Like, do I need to get it in every country? Do I have to report to every single country? Is it only if I am at a certain level of sale? So you are very familiar with what American sellers probably need to be educated on as far as this goes. So just take it away and let us know what we need to know about VAT in Europe to start, I would say, there's a bit of a, especially in the us. Jacob: I've been at the company for five years. Especially now over the last few years, has been a lot more regulation introduced in Europe. So when I first started at the company, there was a lot more US sellers who were interested in expanding because there was less regulation and people weren't as advised. But governments have caught up a little bit. There was a lot of that fraud so people weren't actually paying VAT. And that's not just you know American sellers, that, sellers from all over the world. But now marketplaces are Amazon a lot more regular, regulated, so they have to enforce it. So it stops people from wanting to expand. You know a lot of Americans they say, okay, VAT, how do I do of that? Okay, they don't worry about it, and I think that's quite a lot of the story in America. Jacob: For a lot of clients that I've spoken to, essentially VAT, like the system that we have in Europe, and in lots of other places as well, is completely different to the US system. Obviously, the US system, you have tax added on at checkout so you only have to worry about pricing your product and then in the majority of places, i.e. Amazon, and they're going to add the tax on, whereas here in Europe, you are responsible for adding the tax. So when you're listing your product, so you know, if you create a new listing and you need to make sure you include VAT. So I've had lots of customers who want to expand into Europe. They've gone for it. They didn't consider that the VAT would be part of the price that they actually put on the listing. And then you know, a month later, two months later, they've got the VAT bill and they have to pay that and they hadn't actually priced it into the product. Bradley Sutton: So like you're saying, like the buy box price should indicate it or it needs to be, it's separate? Jacob: No, it's just inclusive. So like, if you list your product for 24 pounds, for example in the UK, that 24 pounds is inclusive of the VAT. That's not going to add any VAT at the end. Bradley Sutton: What is the approximate VAT? Jacob: So for the UK, it’s 20%. Bradley Sutton: So that means if I've got a product that I'm selling for the equivalent of 25 dollars, let's just say, I need to make that at least like 30, 31, 32 dollars, to include that VAT, because that's what I'm going to end up paying the government. Jacob: Yeah, exactly. So you have to look at the net price. So 25 dollars add to the 20 percent, so add another five dollars to get it to 30. And then out of that 30 dollar sale, once it's converted, the portion which was the five dollars would be paid to the government and the rates are there or there about. So like we're here in Germany right now, the rate here in Germany is 19% so slightly different, but there are there abouts. Bradley Sutton: Now in America, you know, after three years ago or so, we have the Marketplace Facilitator Rax. You know, like that was a huge headache before, where people didn't know in America. Like, all right, I live in California, I know I got to pay California Sales Tax, but you know, do I have a Nexus or whatever we call it in all the different states. And then Amazon's like or actually all online marketplaces were like there's some law passed or something where it's like, all right, you guys are the ones who have to collect it. Now we as Amazon sellers, hopefully we don't have to. That's what I've been doing. We don't have to worry anything about it. We don't add it to our price or anything. The customer is paying for it but Amazon collects it. They remit it. Now in Europe, what it sounds like number one, we do have to add it to the price, as you just said. And also, Amazon is not remitting that. I've got to hold on to that money. Jacob: And then so previously that would have been correct. But as of a couple of years ago, Amazon and now and marketplaces are responsible for collecting and remitting VAT for non-European and non-EU sellers in the EU. You still need to price it so, like in that example we had, that was $30. That $5 would actually be deducted from you and be paid to the government on your behalf. However, you still need to report all of those sales via VAT returns in different countries where you've got different liability, like similar to Nexus. Nexus means you've got a liability, basically. You'll have to get a VAT number when you have a liability and you can create different liabilities and free different kinds of means, but the actual money will be deducted and paid by Amazon but you still have to report it. Bradley Sutton: So that's at least one burden off. And then now is Amazon withholding that from your disbursement? Then each two weeks? Jacob: Yeah. So that would get completely withheld. So Amazon should be withholding it and then paying it on your behalf. Bradley Sutton: Okay. Scenario A, I plan to open in all European marketplaces plus UK. So UK, Germany, France, Netherlands, Spain, Italy, et cetera, et cetera. How many VATs am I needing to register for? Jacob: Depends. So you've got options. So with Amazon, you've got options for how you can actually use the FBA system. So, like obviously, in US, you send to a single FBA center. You have no control over where they're good to go. Amazon can transfer them to different warehouses. It's one country. It's lots of different states, lots of different tax laws, but it is one country, whereas with Europe you've got many different countries. So UK, we separated from the European Union the free flow of moving goods essentially. So whenever good to travel from UK to EU, they need to go through official borders. So customs checks, there needs to be paperwork, there needs to be declarations, et cetera. A lot of sellers now treat the UK separately and they just have their own separate supply chain directly into the UK. You need a VAT number there as a US seller so you can store your products there and sell your products, whereas in Europe, for FBA purposes, you've got options. Jacob: Amazon have their main fulfillment centers in Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Poland and the Czech Republic. You can select which ones you want to have your goods in. Whichever country you decide, you allow Amazon to store. You've got an Enable Infantry Replacement on a Seller Central so you can disable and enable. If it's enabled, you have to have a VAT number because Amazon store your products there and that's creating a Nexus. Essentially, you create a liability. You've got to have a VAT number there. Jacob: So you could just start with one for the EU and you can list your products. So you could say right, I'm going to store my products in Germany, I'm going to list them in Italy, I'm going to list them in France, I'm going to list them in Spain, but they will all be fulfilled from Germany. Now the pitfall to doing that is Amazon charges you a significantly larger fee for fulfillment. So whenever I speak to sellers as long as they understand that because I've got people who you know they only want to get the one VAT number, because getting six or seven or however many you need to get is complicated and it means a lot of paperwork et cetera to get set up but at the same time, they don't quite realize the Amazon fees that you get charged. And I've come across cases where, yeah, it was an extra three or 4,000 pounds to get the VAT numbers but they ended up spending extra 40,000 pounds in fulfillment fees. So, like understanding, that's quite clear, but you can start off with not too many, which makes it easier for sellers. Bradley Sutton: A lot of American sellers are very familiar with rough costs of like tariffs and importing custom duties from China to the United States. Some have more. That's why you know maybe some people are moving their factory to India or other places. How does it compare, though, because most I would say 90% of Amazon sellers are probably manufacturing their products in China or India? How does the custom duties and tariffs compare on a percentage wise importing to the US as opposed to importing to Europe? Are there differences between like UK and EU? Jacob: Yeah. Depending on the products, the UK and EU used to have the same tariffs because of the UK separation. We've got the UK Global Trade Tariff and EU's got what's called the TARIC system. The rates for those two systems I would say probably 99% of the same and that will change over the course of time, but it wasn't going to all change immediately. There is some differences but you might find certain products have much higher rates in Europe. So you also get anti-dumping duty. Jacob: I'm not too sure if there is anti-dumping duty in the US, but this can be products that might be damaging to the environment or harmful to the environment so they put the rates up really high. But understanding it before you actually start shipping the products is easy to do. As long as you've got the right people to do it. You can understand the rates, understand if there's a difference between the rate. One thing you do need to be careful of, especially as a US-based business, not just US as a non-EU-based business, the particular country we're in right now, Germany the way that they look at imports for non-EU-based companies is sometimes different to an EU-based company. So I've had a lot of clients who they've imported stock directly from their supplier in China or in India into Germany, and the German customs office have revalued that stock. So instead of using the transactional value, so the cost of your products, the insurance and the freight, say €10,000, they've looked at it and they've taken the retail price and then minus Amazon fees, minus VAT, so to say 60% of retail, which then that 10,000 does end up getting to 50,000, and then they've been charged 5% on the 50,000 instead of 10,000, so suddenly you've got five extra costs. So that's something to look out for and be aware of, because I've seen it happen quite a few times. Bradley Sutton: Okay. Now, before we get into your last strategy of the day, just as a reminder, if this is all overwhelming to you, it's not something that you just can't ignore and pretend that it's not there. It's stuff that you have to take care of if you're doing cross-border or getting into new marketplaces. If you guys want to reach out to AVASK, the easiest way to remember to contact them just go to hub.helium10.com and then just type in AVASK, A-V-A-S-K right there inside there you can have the portal. There might be some specials depending on your level of Helium 10 membership that you might have available to you. Other ways that people can find you guys on the interwebs out there. Jacob: Yeah, so all the general means like LinkedIn, Instagram or just avaskgroup.com, so A-V-A-S-K group.com, and yeah, you can contact us directly for those means. Bradley Sutton: Okay, all right. Now what's your last, you know, something I like to ask some guests is like a 30 or 60 second tip or strategy, that it could be about any topic you've talked about today. Jacob: Yeah, okay. So I would say, first of all, do consider Europe, but maybe take it slow, because there's a lot of red tape and there's a lot of history with American sellers in Europe and people getting stung by governments because of certain situations that happened in the past. Things are different now, so there's a lot more regulation that makes it easier for sellers to make sure they're doing the right thing, but it also puts more barriers to entry. You can start small. Like I said, you don't have to go for all of the countries. Start small with one. Start looking at the other countries, so like if you wanted to start in Germany, what are the biggest markets? Open your listings in the other markets and see if you start getting sales trickle in and then kind of make targeted decisions based on where you start to see growth. And that's what I think is good because we get a lot of people that are like right, I need to go for everything, I need to go for it straight away. Some cases really good, some cases they don't get the sales they expect and then they have to attract. So, depending on your position, obviously, would depend on what you decided to do, but if you're just considering it, you're not sure. Try that way because you're limiting your exposure in terms of compliance. You can start off small, your costs are lower and you can just see how the market goes. Bradley Sutton: Alright. Well, thank you very much for sharing your knowledge and thank you for hosting us here for our first onsite podcast here in Germany and our AVASK and Helium 10 Elite event, and maybe we'll be seeing you at a future conference again. Jacob: Thanks, Bradley.

35m

Mar 12, 2024

They say the best businesses are built on the foundations of friendship, and that's exactly what Samuel Loo and Singchuen Chiam, childhood pals, prove with their journey from elementary school to dominating the matcha scene on Amazon. Their tale is not just about the green goodness of matcha but a story of two friends who took divergent paths—law and business—only to converge into a powerhouse duo. With Sam's sharp legal acumen and Sing's Alibaba experience finesse, they've brewed up Naoki Matcha, a brand that resonates with quality and customer delight, nurturing it from a side hustle to a multi-million dollar success. Our conversation steers through the meticulous craft of standing out in a saturated market, with Sam and Sing revealing their three-year grind to perfecting their matcha blend. They share the trials of juggling full-time jobs while planting the seeds for Naoki Matcha, a testament to their enduring patience and entrepreneurial spirit. Their business acumen shines as they discuss the potency of Amazon PPC in propelling their revenue growth, and the strategic decision to maintain a premium on their product—ensuring Naoki Matcha is not just another tea on the shelf, but a premium experience for the discerning consumer. As we wrap up, the future of Naoki Matcha gleams with potential, from its lean operational approach to its plans for product diversification and international expansion. Their story isn't just an inspiration for Amazon FBA sellers and matcha aficionados but to anyone with entrepreneurial dreams, demonstrating that with the right blend of passion and strategy, even the smallest idea can grow into a thriving E-commerce empire. Join us as we toast to the success of Sam and Sing, and keep an eye on your social media feeds—you might just catch the upcoming viral sensation of Bradley Sutton’s matcha flan!   In episode 542 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley, Samuel, and Singchuen discuss: __ __ ► 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 two childhood best friends from elementary school who linked up as adults and started a matcha Amazon business that now does millions of dollars a year. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.   Bradley Sutton: Black Box by Helium 10 houses the largest database of Amazon products and keywords in the world. Outside of Amazon itself, we have over 2 billion products and many millions more keywords from different Amazon marketplaces, from USA to Australia to Germany and more. Use our powerful filters to search through this database for pockets of opportunity that you might want to get into with your first or next product to sell on Amazon. For more information, go to h10.me/blackbox. Don't forget you can save 10% off for life on Helium 10 by using our special code SSP10.   Bradley Sutton: Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that's completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies or serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And we are going to the opposite side of the world today, to I believe they're in Singapore, and it's funny because the way they were introduced to me by Crystal and somebody else from Amazon she was like oh yeah, I want you to meet the Macha Bros, but I don't think that's their official name, so I'll let you guys go ahead and introduce yourselves to our audience. This is the first time we'll be on the show   Sam: Sure. So my name is Sam and this is my business partner, Singchuen. We're not actually brothers, but we work together quite closely on a business that we started together. Our business is called Naoki matcha and, as the name suggests, we sell matcha green tea powder in the United States, in the United Kingdom and in Singapore.   Bradley Sutton: You know what I've known you, of you or about you? I literally thought you guys were blood brothers entire time, not just because of that name, and so I've already learned something new. I literally thought, you guys were.   Sam: No, no. We get that a lot. We get that a lot.   Bradley Sutton: Brothers from other mothers.   Sam: Yes, I think we can go with that, yeah.   Bradley Sutton: Okay, all right, hold on now. Let's you know like I already learned something new, so let's just take it. Take it way back, both of you born and raised in Singapore.   Sam and Singchuen: Yep.   Bradley Sutton: How did you guys meet? Did you meet like some story, like you met in university, or how did you guys meet each other?   Singchuen: Sam and I met oh, this is Singchuen, by the way, so I'm the business partner. Sam and I met in primary school, so we have known each other for quite a long time.   Bradley Sutton: So that is a good story, all right. And then you just went to that. You went to the same one, or? Or you just met in the neighborhood, or what?   Sam: We went to the same one and we actually were in the same school so like 10 years, and then our paths kind of diverged for a little while. But we reconnected in university because we were both interested in like business and entrepreneurship and I think that's how it kind of like reconnected and we started exploring different things and that's how we started working together again.   Bradley Sutton: What did both of you major in in university?   Singchuen: I studied business and Sam, he was actually a lawyer.   Sam: Yeah, I studied law at university.   Bradley Sutton: Upon graduation, did both of you guys go into that field that you had studied law and business?   Singchuen: I guess in a sense that because we started a business, business would be quite relevant. But in that in another, in another complete sense, it wasn't really that relevant because the things that you studied in school were geared to get you a role in a company, so it wasn't very practical. But the concepts, they were useful.   Sam: Yeah, so after graduation I did practice law for like a couple of years and then, while doing this business, and then at the end of the two years, I realized that, like you know there was I had two opportunities and like this one kind of showed itself to be a bit more, have more potential, so I left the law and I went into e-commerce.   Bradley Sutton: Who discovered e-commerce first? Was it you, Sam?   Sam: Yeah. So I think I really found out about this opportunity on Amazon and FBA the ability to like sell in another country that is not yours. I think back in like 2015-2016 this is like early days, right but at that point in time I was still like a university student at Seoul 6th year, so we really didn't have like the kind of resources that we needed to really tackle this, this, this opportunity, right. So we spent some time like learning about how to approach it and we only really launched it like late 2016 and from then we went on our careers. We kind of like grew it slowly along the way and then after a few years, we realized that okay, the time is right, this is a good time to go all in.   Bradley Sutton: Okay. So in 2016 you guys had reconnecting, like, hey, let's do something together while still having day jobs at that time.   Singchuen: Yeah, exactly, Sam was a lawyer. I actually worked in e-commerce as well. I worked in Alibaba for quite a number of years, so it helped that I could bring a certain kind of context to how the Amazon platform worked, and so we decided to start this sort of like to see where this would be going, because it was exciting, it was an opportunity and we always wanted to have our own business. So that was sort of like the paradigm in which we started off on.   Bradley Sutton: And so at the time in 2016, when you first just started dabbling in e-commerce, it sounds like you weren't all in. Was it matcha that you got into? Was that your first thing, or was it other things?   Sam: Yeah, so when we first started, we started, as most people do, with like a search query on Alibaba.com. The first products we actually sold were like these glass teapots, so we realized that they were not too bad to sell. Actually, we reached like five figures in multi-revenue by like within a year, but we met the same problems that I think a lot of people encounter, which is that after a while, people see that you're somewhat successful and then they'll try to launch a complicated product and therefore, when we found that happened to us and we found it very difficult to grow, so we really were like scratching our heads to think about like what other types of products or categories that we could do, and that's why we landed on matcha.   Bradley Sutton: Okay, so when you landed on matcha, were you still working your day jobs, or by that time you were all in on Amazon already?   Sam: No, we were still working out day jobs because for matcha category and the grocery category we found that, like you know, it's not so much of like a quick win kind of situation. You need to invest the time and energy and you need to have quite a lot of patience before your results actually bear fruit, and for us that took actually a number of years because you need to kind of like build your credibility and gain experience in what you're selling as well.   Bradley Sutton: Are we still talking 2016? Are we already now in 2017 in the timeline, or where are we at when you guys decided matcha?   Sam: Right. So in 2016, we dabbled in matcha and then we spent the next two years essentially trying to improve the product and better understand the category and the product market fit as it is in the US, and we took like a couple of years to do that properly, and I think it was only about 2020, you know, right after COVID hit, when we realized that, okay, the product is good, we have a good product that can stand up against the other competitors in the space, and you're going to go all in and grow this thing.   Singchuen: On the side of this, because our matcha green tea is from Japan and there was a requirement I want to say it's a hard requirement, but there is an understanding that in order to get the good product in Japan, especially from suppliers, you kind of need to cultivate the relationship a little bit and take some time for them to trust you. And so it's not as though, as we didn't want the best product right in 2016. Number one it's not. It's a learning process, right, especially when what the market is telling you of a certain kind of taste that they prefer. But it's also bringing back those requirements to the suppliers and the factories to let them know this is the taste that we want and, barring communication barriers, there's still that they need to feel, feel each other out to exactly ascertain what we're looking for. And that took quite a bit more time than what you would be doing on Alibaba.   Bradley Sutton: That's what has been curious. This is not something you would just like find on Alibaba. So where did the like, how did you guys land on matcha? Was it something you guys just liked? Was it because you were doing tea cups and you just like it was a side thing? Like how in the world? Or did you find it in Helium 10? Or how in the world did you say you know what? I think there's opportunity in matcha. Let's go ahead and examine this further.   Singchuen: In Singapore, generally we are exposed to Japanese culture quite a little bit already, but more closely, I guess it's also because I liked green tea. So at the point of time I didn't drink a lot of matcha, but I knew about it. So we explored that as a potential item to try to sell and in a sense it checked all the other boxes as well right. Whether it is for the economics, the logistics, the business, fit, branding, pricing. And that's how we started off on like taking the first step.   Sam: I think also at that point in time this is like 2015, 2016, right, I think matcha was just beginning to get popular in the US. So, yeah, that's when I think the craze started, right. So I think we were also at like the right time in the right place and we realized that, you know, we could marry like our interests and the market opportunity in front of us, and that's how we really landed on matcha.   Bradley Sutton: I don't have any matcha shirts or anything, but you mentioned like Japanese culture. So I got my Astro Boy jacket here. I got my old school Japanese Tokyo Giants hat here. You know, I used to live in Japan when I was younger and and that was why you know, like matcha is not exactly a natural thing for an American person to like, but I kind of liked it. Before it was cool and now, now, like you said, it's just like booming. Everybody's like, hey, matcha, you know you can go to Starbucks and get matcha, this and you can get matcha, and you know non Asian markets, which before it was different. So that was, you know, a little bit of foresight. Now, when you first started with the matcha, you know you had said, until then you were doing dabbling in other things, were you profitable on the Amazon side? Or, up to that point, you still hadn't made profit in the first year or so of your Amazon business.   Singchuen: We tended to search for products that were more profitable on the first sale. So in that sense, the first products that we went to more like glass cups, g-ports, things like that they were already profitable. So it's not as though, as we were dabbling in things that were really difficult to do, low priced or otherwise.   Bradley Sutton: Your first matcha product that you launched? Was that the one that was successful, or did it take a couple of tries before things really started taking off?   Sam: Well, I think it is still the first product that we launched, but what we had to do was tweak the formulation over the years several times and each time we're trying to improve it and fine tune it to better suit, like the feedback that we were getting. So it is the same product, it looks the same, but they're always like tweaks over the years and this kind of like helps build that, I guess, average review score. That goes up because, like you know, you're getting closer to what people like with each iteration.   Bradley Sutton: To find that like perfect blend and everything. You kind of mentioned it and I know this about your history. So can you talk a little bit about, like we just said, this wasn't something. Oh, let me find something in Alibaba, let me just put my sticker on it. How did you look for I don't even want to call it factories, but producers of matcha in Japan like we said, it's not on Alibaba and then talk about the long process of? Actually, I believe you would fly to Japan and meet different places and try things. Talk about that long process how long did it take and what were the steps involved in that.   Singchuen: At the start, we asked for samples from willing factories and once we tasted them and we realized that this was something that could be in a ball pack of what's considered as good tasting to the market, we would ask the supplier whether they are willing to sell us a certain volume of matcha. So there are several factories in Japan that do just green tea, and their idea was sort of branch out to selling matcha as well, because there was where the growing market was, and these were the factories that were more suitable for us to go into, and once we spoke to them their experience with matcha may not be the best at the point of time, mind you, but they were willing to work with us and over a period of time, once we let them know exactly what we're looking for and they were willing to tweak to our preferences, that's when we got a good fit and from then, as our volume started going up, more and more, various factories started.   Bradley Sutton: Until that part, though. How long was that? Were we talking a month? Were we talking multiple months?   Singchuen: No, that actually took quite a long time. I think about three years at least so around 2016 to 2019,. On the marketing side, Sam was trying to define a market fit, but on the supply side, we were just trying to make sure that factories produce what we needed and the trust and formulation. That takes a while.   Bradley Sutton: How can somebody have that kind of patience? That's very rare, not just in matcha industry, but just Amazon or business industry to have that kind of patience to you know to like, hey, I'm spending two or three years to get this right. Like, is that just in your nature or what's going on there?   Singchuen: To be fair, I think we were not so much in a hurry, just to share a little bit. Personally, it's a little bit more of we always wanted to get a business eventually, but the timeline wasn't so important. We weren’t in a rush. Sam, as Sam has mentioned just now, both of us had decent careers, so we were optimizing on that front as well and we're happy to wait.   Bradley Sutton: Like you said, you still had your day jobs, you know, for a time. So it wasn't like you know, like you were about to go out of business and I think that's important. You know, like people sometimes just like, all right, I'm going to quit my job before they even have like a viable business and that's what you know. That's not going to allow somebody to have the patience. That's interesting. Now, at what point in this three years did you finally have like a product just start taking off? And was it just random, like it was just one day that it started going viral and never looked back? Or was this something where it was like, all right, you know, over a few months you were selling 10 units a day, then 15 units, then 20, was it a gradual thing? Or when did what? Was that moment where it's like, oh shoot, we got this right and this is going to take off.   Sam: Yeah, I think it was really like a gradual process. But that point for us, I think, when the old shoot moment, I think, was when we realized that, like the monthly sales for this Macha product alone was quite significant and this was enough to basically sustain ourselves, number one and number two provide a good base and recurring cash flow to kind of grow the business from there. Yeah, and this was really about, like you know, as I said, 2020, mid 2020, early to mid 2020, after COVID started, where we realized that, hey, this thing has snowballed into something quite significant. So it was really a gradual process.   Bradley Sutton: If you can recall either of you, what was your sales the year before, in 2019, when you were still just dabbling in Macha and maybe still had some of the other products?   Sam: I would say that it was like maybe like six figures a year, low six figures a year, and then, okay, yeah, we was at that point in time. We were, we were often optimistic about, about close to doubling each year. So that was, that was where we were at.   Bradley Sutton: And then. So at that point, obviously still working full time jobs. And then it was at 2020, when it took off, and then you quit in 2020, your jobs or you still, even though it started taking off, you still were working your full time.   Sam: I wouldn't say it took off right. It was just at that point in time with, like, the good momentum that like we know that there's some something to stand on. So that was when we decided, okay, time to go all in. And then we know that the product was ready. And then we started doubling down on marketing in order to kind of know that, you know, this optimized product is available to everyone. And then that's how we kind of grew from there.   Bradley Sutton: What kind of marketing? I mean, obviously Amazon PPC is part of it. Was that it or other things as well?   Sam: So we did try a bunch of things at first, but by the late by late 2020, we realized that Amazon advertising PPC mainly is that engine that's going to give us the growth for the next few years, because we realized that, like on a cost acquisition basis, like you just can't beat it.   Bradley Sutton: You said 2019, low six figures. What about 2020, that your first really good year. What did you end approximately with?   Sam: I think we were just under seven.   Bradley Sutton: And then how about 2021?   Sam: Yes, somewhere, seven.   Bradley Sutton: All right. So now it's like you guys knew you had something. It wasn't just a fluke, you know. You had some consistency. Do you mind if I show your product on screen right now? For those watching this on YouTube?   Sam: Oh yeah, go ahead.   Bradley Sutton: So let me pull it up here. Was this variation family here of the superior ceremonial blend it says here, was this like your first product that you got into?   Sam: Yes, it was.   Bradley Sutton: Okay, now I'm looking. Now it's like you know, according to Amazon, according to Helium 10, you are selling throughout this variation family here, thousands of units, multiple six figures per month, just with this, with this fam variation family. So this is the one that is your, your big seller. So I mean, if I'm looking at these numbers correctly, unless this is just a very nice month here, you're like what in the you know mid seven figures now, or higher?   Sam: I think that's fantastic yeah.   Bradley Sutton: Okay and explain this product. You know there's a lot I like matcha. I understand it, but there's a lot of people who might like think like what? Like? Do you just like dump this in tea or do you actually use it to cook something? Like what? Like? How in the world are you selling almost 10,000 units of this a month? Like, what are the people buying this to use?   Sam: Right, I think the way to look at this product is that it's a form of tea and in Japan it's enjoyed as a form of tea. Now in America it's usually enjoyed in a, in a form of a latte. So imagine you have a tea and then I think in some parts of the US, like milk tea is popular, right. So in the same way you can add milk to matcha and then you get a Matcha Latte. So because people find that coffee is not working for them for various reasons whether like they feel, like you know, nervous or anxiety after that they try to find something else, right. So matcha kind of ticks all the boxes because it's got a little bit of caffeine, so you don't feel that like that anxiety that you get with coffee sometimes, and also there are like amino acids inside that help you stay alert for a longer time. So that was kind of like the health food appeal of matcha. But that's, I think, why it got popular and that's why people drink it. So we also wanted to kind of share a bit of that Japanese heritage of matcha in our product, which is why it looks the way it does, because in Japan actually the traditional way of preparing it is to take like a teaspoon of the powder, add some water and then whisk it up with this bamboo whisk until it becomes like nice and froth.   Bradley Sutton: I see that here in your A plus, your premium A plus content, so I can see a little bit of that here. You're telling that story. Really great branding here, I like that.   Sam: So they whip it up into like this frothy little mixture and I guess if you could kind of relate it back to coffee culture, I would say like it's like a Matcha Americano. That's the way that they would drink it and that's the main way it's consumed in Japan.   Bradley Sutton: Okay, now you've got just a beautiful listing here. You know, looks like premium A plus content. You're educating people here. You have a frequently asked questions, and then obviously you've got some great pictures here where you've got infographics. You've got, you know, like kind of like a history lesson of matcha. You have pictures of it. I mean what else? Like you even show the origin. I think I saw somewhere there's like different cities where this comes from. Where is that here, here? It is here Like you're like oh hey, this one is from Kyoto, this one's from Fukuoka. You have the city. So like I'm assuming that I mean, did you start this from like day one such in depth like information here, or is this just gradually how you were able to kind of hone your branding?   Sam: I think we didn't know that it would take this form at the very start. We knew that, like you know, instinctively this is the branding angle that we want to work with. But as we grew with time we know we were reacting to what's happening in the market right and how we need to kind of distinguish our brand and our product from other people and to make sure that, even though, like, they like the product but they need to have like some visual reference to kind of like make that association, to know that like, oh okay, this is now Kimatcha and I like now Kimatcha.   Bradley Sutton: You know what I'm going to check something. Hold on, let me see, I'm actually gonna run Cerebro on one of your products. I'm curious, you know you mentioned, hey, people are actually searching for Naoki Matcha. I'm just curious, like, what kind of brand recognition you have. So I'm just running Cerebro on here on our YouTube and podcast version. We'll speed this up. Let's see here, because I have a feeling, you know you've been selling for a while now and you're doing so well that there are literally people who just search for your brand name. So let's take a look at how many people are searching for your brand name here. Hold on, all right, here in Cerebro I'm gonna put phrases containing Naoki and let's apply that filter and wow, there's 45 different keywords that have Naoki in it and with thousands of search volume a month. So people like know your brand. You know just Naoki Matcha by itself has 1200 search volume and there's 45 other versions that people are actually searching for. So I mean that's kind of like what the goal is. When you're selling on Amazon, hey, sure you want people to buy you on the generic searches, like you know, Matcha Tea or Matcha Powder or something. But you know you've kind of made it when there's actually search volume for your brand.   Bradley Sutton: You guys are getting, you know, using expensive you know matcha directly from the source in Japan. You know I'm sure there maybe are some competitors going like a cheaper route. Or maybe you know, like I'm just looking here in the search for Matcha Tea and I even see you know listings that are like $9, you know $9.95. And you guys are at like $40, $39. I see some that are, well, that's a different product, but like $7, you know $15. How can you guys stay at around the top? Like I'm looking at the BSR, you're like one of the top three in the whole Matcha category. Like some people think, oh, I have to. You know, like if cheaper sources come on, I'm just going to have to try and price match and then you know race to the bottom and I like to tell people no, no, no, there's ways to still succeed even at a higher price point. What's your guys secret where you can stay at this $40 price point and still make a lot of sales despite these cheaper alternatives coming into the market?   Sam: Well, I think it's all about getting people to try it once. And once the person tries it once, right, and then they compare it to like the cheaper one that they bought before they realize, like you know, the difference is like night and day, right. So what we want to do is to make sure that they realize that they're getting like a good price for this level of quality, and once that kind of barrier is unlocked and then they realize that, hey, actually, if I pay $25 for one ounce, right, I'm getting a lot more value if I'm paying $40 for like 3.5 ounces, so the $40 one actually becomes like a good idea, even though, like it's like four times whatever is available on. You know the results when you search for matcha.   Singchuen: Just to add on to that, the cheaper matcha products are by nature of how it's grown and how it's produced. It tastes incredibly different from how matcha products of a certain price level are like because of how much more expensive it is to produce. So matcha is actually in quite a bit of a supply crunch and so there is actually not that much matcha supply to go around at the higher quality price range. In that sense, because it's so expensive, it's not possible to match the quality level if you're to go below the price. So the market kind of like segmented itself in a way. So we, as Sam has just mentioned just now, as long as we are sort of value for the price that we are offering, it's good enough for us and that's how we managed to stay above the competition. If you notice that there are other competitors that are also doing well with high BSR and they are similarly high priced. But once you do the math you realize that in addition to our better tasting product our price per gram, if you want to put it that way it's still much better than our competitors.   Sam: It's pretty competitive still.   Bradley Sutton: What's the future hold? Now you actually have Naoki Matcha in the brand name. So if you just stay with this brand, you're kind of I don't want to say limited, but it's not like you can start selling something completely off the wall under this brand, like do you have are there still enough new kinds of variations and blends that you can come up with to keep this brand going? Or have you considered, like maybe we should start something completely different, like I start a new brand? Or what's your goal for growing the business?   Sam: Right. I think for this brand there's still some room for growth, because actually so far we haven't touched the whole products that deal with, like matcha accessories. We're just starting that this year and also there are different grades of matcha right. So honestly, we are really at like that middle to high kind of grade, but we haven't really touched the other grade so far. So those are kind of like the growth opportunities that are available to us, yeah, but of course, once we hit there's a ceiling for category, once we hit that, yeah, I think you do have to choose another brand.   Bradley Sutton: Obviously, Amazon USA is your main market. Are you selling on other Amazon marketplaces? If so, which? And then also other marketplaces at all, like Walmart, Shopify or other websites?   Singchuen: We are in the UK. We're selling the exact same brand in the UK as well. It's sort of like an offshoot. We started it because some fans who have tasted it in America have gone back to the UK and so they are wondering why aren't you in the UK? So we decided to launch it over there as well, and so far the growth is okay, but not as high as in America, obviously, and in Singapore. We are on e-commerce platforms as well, and I'm not too sure we can confidently say this, but we are in the top few brands on those platforms selling decently well too.   Bradley Sutton: You know, talk about some specific strategies that you guys think have helped you get to where you are, because it's not just like I mean somebody could spend 10 years and develop like the most perfect, pure form of matcha known to mankind in history and it's meaningless, you know, without the strategy that is going to get it in front of people. So what are some of the things that set you apart from maybe the 10 other matcha people who maybe have started and gone out of business, you know, because they didn't have your strategy? What do you think set you apart from others?   Sam: Well, I think a handful of things. The first one is okay, so I think you can use. You can rely on Amazon PPC. You can look at your search term impression share reports. You can look at your keyword ranking and all that kind of stuff and that will help you in the short run. But honestly, the thing that really helped us the most was patience and making sure that your product is on a sensory level it's actually good and people like it. Once you have those two things covered, then you know you just need to get people to try to get them to tell their friends, and then, like people, their friends who are interested in matcha will buy, and then they are buying again and then this whole thing kind of grows by itself. Your PPC and all of these other tools that you have are really just like fuel that you add to this engine   Singchuen: And on the other side of things is obviously you kind of need to make sure that you treat your supplier well as well. Make sure that they understand what you're going through and make sure that you try to understand what they're going through. If language is a barrier, hire an interpreter, right, it's not too difficult. Decency goes both ways. So you may be pressed, but you got to recognize that the factories themselves, they, are pressed as well. So working together for compromise, understanding each other and not drawing too much, just to be a little bit more understanding towards each other, goes a long way. I think what tends to happen is that if you're not patient, as Sam has mentioned, you may cut off communications with factories that may help you in the future, and you don't want to do that.   Bradley Sutton: Now I'm looking, speaking of PPC, I'm looking at just what I see on Amazon and I see everything. I see sponsored product ASIN targeting campaigns right here on this one page I see you're targeting your own ASIN and sponsored display ad. I see sponsored brand ads in the search for Matcha tea. I saw sponsored brand video, regular sponsored products. So you guys are just like going all out with all the different kinds of PPC that Amazon provides. Any one of those, like you think, has performed better for you or gives you the best ROI, or is it kind of just kind of even across the board?   Sam: Well, I think at the start sponsored products perform very well, but as you get more and more ad types and different you know SV, SD, SP you mix that in. You have some DSP thrown in. The attribution for which ad actually did the sale for you gets a bit more tricky.   Bradley Sutton: That's true. That's true, yeah, because you know. But the good thing about that is you're just your top of mind because you're advertising everywhere you can. You know, like sure, maybe you don't know exactly what got the attribution, but the point is you have such a big share of voice you know, potentially, maybe compared to your competitors, that you're your top of mind for your, for your customers. Okay, so PPC is important for what's on Amazon. I'm sure you use Amazon data points as well. What about Helium 10? What's your favorite tool in Helium 10 and how has it helped you?   Sam: I think, honestly, the keyword coverage and Cerebro is still like my favorite tool. I've been using it since like 2017, when it first launched.   Singchuen: As you use, you search on Amazon and you search on other platforms take a look at how Helium 10’s are like compared to others. You always use that. There's a certain sense that Helium 10’s information is letting you after it. It's more of a sense. I can't really explain it, and then that really goes a long way, I think.   Bradley Sutton: Now for either of you. If there was something on your wish list for Helium 10, like, like something, maybe we don't do right now, you're like, wow, it would be so cool if Helium 10 could do this. Here's your chance to tell me what is on the matcha bros top wish list, for what Helium 10 can help now give matcha with?   Sam: Right. So I think my number one wish list would be cohort analytics. So if, for example, I can see in January how many new customers are acquired and how much, and how much of that repeat over the next 12, 24, 36 months, that would be awesome. I don't think there's none of the big analytics platforms do this. There are some specialized ones that do it that we subscribe to, but they're expensive and I'm pretty sure that you guys can do a better job.   Bradley Sutton: Awesome, awesome. Now my last question is just, you know, you guys have reached this level of success, selling millions of dollars. Obviously you two are working together. How many people total does it take to run the Naoki Matcha machine? You know like, are you guys doing 100% of the work? Do you have virtual assistants? Do you have, you know, in Singapore staff? How many people does it take to run your business?   Singchuen: Right now we are actually quite an entity, Sam, as I'm sure you can tell from this conversation. Sam does most of the marketing and I do more of the supply side operations kind of activities. So in total we have about five people running the entire business.   Bradley Sutton: Well, this has been very enlightening. I've you know, despite knowing about you guys, almost 95% of this I think was completely new information to me and obviously new to our audience. It's great to see this success story. I love matcha, so I'm going to have to purchase your, your product, and make some. I'll be your influencer. Make some matcha, some kind of matcha. Let's see I'm going to. I wanted to make a matcha flan flan like a. I don't know if you guys know what that is. That's like a Mexican dish. So that's, I'm going to make something and then it's going to go viral on TikTok and make you guys another few million dollars just for me.   Singchuen: Thank you for your support.   Bradley Sutton: You could take me out to dinner   Sam: Yeah. Thank you and looking forward to that.   Bradley Sutton: Thank you so much for coming on, and let's have you guys back on the podcast in 2025 and let's see how you guys have grown at that time.  

34m

Mar 09, 2024

Get ready to navigate the buzzing twists and turns of e-commerce from some curious buzz around the COSMO document to the significant Amazon FBA fee hikes, we break down what sellers need to know to stay ahead. ► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast ► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension ► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup  (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life) ► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft ► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos We’re back with another episode of the Weekly Buzz with Helium 10’s Chief Brand Evangelist, Bradley Sutton. Every week, we cover the latest breaking news in the Amazon, Walmart, and E-commerce space, interview someone you need to hear from and provide a training tip for the week. COSMO: A large-scale e-commerce common sense knowledge generation and serving system at Amazon https://www.amazon.science/publications/cosmo-a-large-scale-e-commerce-common-sense-knowledge-generation-and-serving-system-at-amazon https://www.amazon.science/publications/cosmo-a-large-scale-e-commerce-common-sense-knowledge-generation-and-serving-system-at-amazonTarget will launch unlimited rush shipping subscription to rival Amazon Prime https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/6/24092880/target-circle-360-free-delivery-shipping-annual-plan https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/6/24092880/target-circle-360-free-delivery-shipping-annual-planWalmart and Amazon Race to Provide Best Virtual Try-On Experiences https://www.pymnts.com/news/retail/2024/walmart-and-amazon-race-to-provide-best-virtual-try-on-experiences/ https://www.pymnts.com/news/retail/2024/walmart-and-amazon-race-to-provide-best-virtual-try-on-experiences/We tested Amazon’s new shopping chatbot. It’s not good. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/03/05/amazon-ai-chatbot-rufus-review/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/03/05/amazon-ai-chatbot-rufus-review/Exclusive: Walmart opens new front in same-day delivery war https://www.axios.com/2024/03/07/walmart-hours-delivery-early-morning-online-orders https://www.axios.com/2024/03/07/walmart-hours-delivery-early-morning-online-ordersUse persona builder to create and get insights on your personas https://advertising.amazon.com/en-us/resources/whats-new/use-persona-builder-to-create-and-get-insights-on-personas/ https://advertising.amazon.com/en-us/resources/whats-new/use-persona-builder-to-create-and-get-insights-on-personas/Amazon will no longer underwrite loans for sellers in its $140 billion Marketplace business https://fortune.com/2024/03/07/amazon-lending-loans-sellers-marketplace-discontinuing/ https://fortune.com/2024/03/07/amazon-lending-loans-sellers-marketplace-discontinuing/My name is Alexa and I loved it until Amazon's smart assistant came along and ruined it https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-ruined-name-alexa-2024-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-ruined-name-alexa-2024-3Cap the episode off with an inside look at how Amazon's FBA fee changes are reshaping the game for sellers. Discover how you could turn the tide on FBA fees with savvy shipping strategies. We also dive into Helium 10's latest feature alerts that promise to bestow an edge to Platinum Plan users and European sellers. Join the conversation, test out these new tools, and let's tackle these changes together. In this episode of the Weekly Buzz by Helium 10, Bradley talks about: __ __    

34m

Mar 08, 2024

Ever feel like you're playing a game of chess with the Amazon algorithm, constantly striving for that checkmate which is a perfectly optimized Amazon listing? We're peeling back the curtain on the new secret weapon that the Listing Builder by Helium 10 has that could give you that winning edge on the Amazon battlefield. Prepare to be armed with knowledge as we take you through a live optimization of the Project X "coffin shelf" listing, dissecting the art of keyword research to uncover those high-traffic phrases that could propel your product to page one of the marketplace. Marinate your brain in the sauce of Amazon seller strategies as we stir in the nuances of listing optimization and the significance of performance scores to outsmart your competition. The Helium 10 score may not be part of Amazon's official playbook, but it's a valuable benchmark we explain in detail, showing you how to leverage different types of keyword matches to boost that all-important performance score. And it doesn't stop there; we dive deeper, sharing actionable tips on how to strategically position those keywords for maximum impact, ensuring your listing is as tantalizing to Amazon's search algorithm as it is to potential buyers inside the online shopping platform.   In episode 541 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley discusses: __ __

30m

Mar 05, 2024

Join us as we explore the intricate art of keyword research with Jason Mclellan, the mastermind behind Vitacup's impressive $20 million e-commerce achievement. This episode is a great resource for anyone looking to enhance their Amazon selling skills, where we unravel sophisticated strategies to optimize your Amazon product’s online presence. With tools like Helium 10, Amazon’s Brand Analytics, and Product Opportunity Explorer at our disposal, we dissect the methodologies that lead to keyword research excellence, pinpoint niche markets, and boost your brand's visibility. This is not just another chat about keywords—it's an immersive experience of how big sellers operate their Amazon business. We navigate through the ever-changing landscape of consumer trends, driven by the influence of social media platforms like TikTok, to keep your listings fresh and relevant. Together with Jason, we dissect the strategies that make products rank for the keyword "extra shot coffee" stand out in a crowded space. It's about refining, optimizing, and capturing the essence of what your customer is looking for, turning clicks into conversions, and conversions into Subscribe and Save loyal customers. Wrapping up the conversation, we dive into actionable insights for harnessing the full potential of keyword strategies on Amazon and Walmart. It's about more than just being seen—it’s about resonating with your audience. We share how to weave the benefits of your products into descriptions that speak directly to your niche and discuss the significant impact of organic search success on platforms like Amazon. So pour yourself a cup of Rapid Fire Protein Coffee, pull up a chair, and let's unlock the secrets to catapulting your products to the top of the search results.   In episode 540 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Jason discuss: __ __ ► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast ► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension ► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup  (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life) ► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft ► Watch The Podcasts On YouTube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos Transcript   Bradley Sutton: Today, we're going to have an advanced deep dive into some of the top keyword research strategies for 2024, including some strategies from a seller who does over $20 million on e-commerce per year. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Did you know that just because you have a keyword in your listing, that does not mean that you are automatically guaranteed to be searchable or, as we say, indexed for that keyword? Well, how can you know what you are indexed for and not? You can actually use Helium 10's Index Checker to check any keywords you want. For more information, go to h10.me/indexchecker. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton and this is the show. It’s a completely BS free, unscripted, and unrehearsed, organic conversation about serious strategies for Serious Sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. We're going to be talking today about Keyword Research. And just like last time, I'm not going to have a bunch of slides that I'm going to be showing. Basically, what we want to do is show you real life examples of how we have done keyword research for some of our products, how we would do keyword research in 2024, and not just in Helium 10, but also we're going to be showing you some things for those who have brand registry and are able to access search query performance. Okay, we're going to be showing you some things that even if you don't have brand registry, a way you can find good keywords for your listing using something called product opportunity explore. Now, a couple of things just really quick. I want you guys to bookmark this one page. I want you guys to go to forum.helium10.com. And that is our new Seller Connect Forum where you're going to be able to interact with different helium 10 members in addition to our Facebook groups that we've already had, we're going to have one where it's right inside of Helium 10. Okay. And so we've got some information already there. I posted some blogs, but make sure to bookmark that guys. And I want you to regularly connect. So before we get started into, I want to go ahead and introduce a special guest that we had teased on today, a real live person who is going to show us his products and his keywords and his keyword research too. You know, how many of you Amazon sellers out there, if I ask you in the chat, what is your product? That's how it is. People usually don't want, the majority don't wanna sell their product. Show their product. Today, we don't have that. So Jason, go ahead and come on and let's introduce Jason. He has been on the podcast before, but for those who haven't met you Jason or haven't seen your podcast episode, go ahead and introduce yourself, please, and brief history on Amazon and what company you work for. Jason: Hi, my name is Jason McCallum. I've been with the last five years of the company called VitaCup. We are a vitamin and superfood -infused coffee and tea. We're probably the number one functional coffee on Amazon right now, a wide variety of modalities. So, there's just always keeping us busy between the K -Cup format, instant copy and ground. So I've been in this market space since the early 2000, starting off in eBay. So I've kind of seen the evolution of the place from eBay to Amazon and where we're kind of going in the future with some other things that are developing on other marketplaces. And just... love online marketplaces. Bradley Sutton: All right, so I take his products too. Here's his VitaCup Extra Shot. This is very important for the morning. So I am running a little bit on empty. So we are gonna test this now because I've stayed up most of last night and then this morning, like I said, did back to back webinars. So I am actually taking this product and we are going to go ahead and I'm going to be drinking it live right here. First of all, stir it. Hold on. This is one of my tests for if products are good or not, like how easy it is to open this. How am I supposed to open this there? Oh, look at that. Easy, easy, open, easy, open.   Jason: Much better than the other one you try..   Bradley Sutton: Last year, I didn't like how to open it. It was like impossible. And it's sprayed all over my face. We won't mention it.   Jason: And we're changing it just for you. No one asked for. Just for you. Yeah, Just for you.   Bradley Sutton: All right. So now I'm making my instant coffee and stirring it up. So again, like I said, the reason why I'm just going overboard here in this product is like I said, hey, Jason is somebody who has opened up his product and listings to us before. And although most Amazon sellers don't want to do that, he is doing that. So we thank him. And now Jason, just as you know, you're kind of a humble guy. So people won't, you know it just by the way you talk. But what kind of gross revenue is your, is VitaCup doing on Amazon and Walmart, if you were to combine both of those marketplaces per year about?   Jason: Around 20 million. Bradley Sutton: About 20 million dollars, all right? So, you know, there might be a couple of people here on the call or on this call who do a little bit more, but I would say most of us, including myself, don't, aren't at that level. And that means we can probably learn a thing or two from Jason. Now, Jason does a lot of the same strategies, maybe that are common practice as far as finding new keywords for listings. But he also has got some unique things that he does as well on and off of Helium 10 on and off of Amazon. So I would like to I would like to go ahead and turn the stage a little bit over to you. What is the first keyword research strategy that you are going to help us? Give us the background first. Like, is this something that helps you find a product? Is it something that you already had the product and now you are like, all right, I got to find this, some keywords that are going to convert for me. Set up the stage here for this first one. Jason: So great question. The first thing I'm going to start off with is product opportunity, explore something that's been released for around the last four years. It's been evolving. I really call it at this point, the Swiss army knife of Seller Central. There's a wide variety of uses you can use for it. We look at it and research it for when we're developing new functional blends and flavors. I try and keep my process simple. A lot of people you know the more complex you get, the harder it is. Starting with product opportunity explore, we're researching and launching a new product. It's great to see what the market potential is, what customers like, what they don't like, sort of those keywords that are driving sales can start doing some research on what's the average CPC projected for those. Is it going to be something that we think we can do some conquesting on keywords and how much is it going to cost and is it even worth it? We started hitting over X amount of dollars for keywords. It really is not that viable. So, and then we also use for refinement, and the example I'm going to show right now is we start off in product opportunity explore and we're continually doing improvements and testing new things on our products and just how we go through and find those keywords and then the competing products on it we're going to be using. We'll use the extra shot coffee as example and then Bradley Sutton: What do you mean by refinement? Jason: Because we're continually refining your content and your images and we utilize the data to improve our images, which improves your conversion and increases your sales dramatically at this point, you got to consider 70, 80% of all Amazon shopping today is done via mobile experience. Your hero and your secondary images are actually more important than your product description, your bullet points and your A plus content at this point because of how everything's delivered. I mean, if everyone has their phone there, you can pull it out and at some point you can get ready by the cup, extra shot K Cups and we can take a look at that as we're going through and why. And so we're utilizing the keywords. We're pulling a product opportunity explorer and the keywords we're pulling in refinement. We're pulling out of Cerebro and we're directly addressing the data that we learned from that into our images, not just our bullet points, not just our titles, and because of that we're seeing a great conversion like extra shot. We just ran this through where we've seen it wasn't one of our stronger performing products, but we've seen in the last 30 days we've seen basically doubling the sales on that my lead, my number one product. In my rolling 30 day sales average over the last two weeks I'm up 16% on sales because we applied the same methodology. You continually have to be updating content. New words enter the ecosystem, Amazon new consumer trends are going on. TikTok drives a lot of different trends depending on the categories you're in, and that introduces a lot of search relevancy. People see things on TikTok or other social media forums. and they come to Amazon looking for it and necessarily you're not just trying to compete for your own space, but when these new trends come on board, sometimes that product isn't there and Amazon will see for those terms that your product is really relevant. And if you've been running for a while and you have some relevancy, you'll start getting delivery. And if you have sharp titles, bullet points and images, your conversion will be great and you'll continue to grow and accumulate on these new trends that are just kind of ancillary to what you're doing. So we see a lot of growth in that. So we're always just in a constant rotation of just testing out all content, all aspects, and then kind of refining and judging, through catalog performance, what your different points in the chain through click through to purchase, conversion, our improvements being made.   Bradley Sutton: Now, a lot of your sales comes from subscribing, save and maybe certain things like sponsor display ads and a lot of other ways. Now, have you ever looked at search career performance for a week and looked at your brand's overall search career performance attributed sales, which is very limited? As far as hey, it has to be from a search, it can't be sponsored brand or sponsor display ad. They have to have clicked it, they have to have purchased it within 24 hours. Have you ever compared the amount of sales for a week that came through search career performance with your overall unit sales to see, like, hey, how much of your keywords or how much of your sales are coming from the normalized searches, which for some people it's 15%, some people it's 50%, some people more.   Jason: You know I haven't broken it down that more when I generally start, because where I generally start to look at what branded searches and everything is what we're running off Amazon. Amazon, there's no like. Amazon actually is great, but if you use it for a while you understand that it's not capturing the full thing. Or if you're just doing, especially doing stuff on TikTok, it's not capturing hardly any of it. So I track by week, by month on branded searches to see if there's any spikes in overall, like wide a cup searched terms, and then we can start to correlate. And if there's a spike in sales we can start correlating. It is what we're running off traffic to educate the consumer about a particular blend or a particular product. Is that having a positive impact in customers coming back and searching for it? Because, as you're saying, like you know, we're running a lot of DSP, we're on search display and so we have all these lovers we're pulling. So we want consumers to touch our page, because we want to get them in the flow, because we want to acquire a new customer and move them to subscribe and save, and that's the way you kind of take the approach on it. So first one is is you're finding the niche in which your product exists, and so mine is looking at extra shot. I know it's already strong coffee. You can search by ASIN and the ASIN will generally allow you to select it. So you pin your product ASIN and sometimes there's enough affiliation. Where it can drive up. So two niches under strong coffee is for the K-Cups and the high caffeine coffee. I've already been through both these. The keywords are kind of similar. We're selling in a K-Cup format so I wanted to focus on that one Initially. You kind of can see the total search volume over the last three, 60 days, kind of how the product niche has been growing, the estimated unit sales on an annualized basis. What we're starting to see more and more is really kind of interesting. Is this return rate percentage. So for other, this is a consumable item and you're not technically supposed to be even be able to return it, so it's always going to be pretty low. But if you're looking at researching products that you're going to potentially get into, you can say, hey, does this statistically have a very high return rate, or does it have very low return rate? Because you're going to want to build that into your business model for the product. It gives the price range and then the kind of that sweet spot, the average price. So you know, from a pricing point of view, when you're thinking about pricing it, where do you fall in line? So we're going to select strong coffee K-Cups and then just there's such. They keep adding a wealth of information to this. What you're going to see on the first tab for products is all the ASINs that make up 90% of the volume that are associated with this strong coffee K-Cups. The second portion is the search term. These are going to be your top search terms for the niche. So this is where you can come up with a search term. So you can come up with a search term, your top search terms for the niche. So this is where you can kind of start getting an understanding of 90% of the volume that has been driven by the volume that's being driven by 90% of the search terms. So I tend to look at, what are the search terms that are non branded? so definitely, which I'd kind of ignore. But you know high caffeine, coffee, K-Cups. So everyone remember that term high caffeine, coffee, K-Cups, strong coffee K-Cups, extra caffeine coffee K-Cups, double caffeine coffee K-Cups, and then you start seeing some variations. So we've got strong coffee pods search less than strong coffee K-Cups, but still has relevancy. So you know that when people are coming to search they're not always necessarily searching for K-Cups, but they're also searching for coffee pods in some form or another High caffeine K-Cups, double caffeine K-Cups and etc. Also, it's really interesting as you can use this as a tool to monitor how you're performing within a product niche. So for this instance, if you're interested in going after high caffeine coffee K-Cups, this need. All the niches are updated once a week, so over time you can start seeing am I making headway into being one of the number one top click product on it, which is Deathwish, the number two, which is a variety pack of high caffeine coffee pods, or the number three clicked on is Wake the Hell Up, dark Roast. Keep that in mind. Like these are your top keywords. This is where I start with. I get my top keywords and then I'll eventually be going over Cerebro to find out what are those medium to low end keywords, and you're also gonna see these. The beauty of Cerebro is when we run the top three, our product with the top two products in it, we're gonna see a lot of the same keywords. It's gonna give a lot of validity. This real data that we're getting out of Amazon live, from the source, is being mirrored what's coming out of Cerebro, and so it's giving validity to Helium 10's authenticity, to those lower and mid keywords. You can then trust the data that, hey, for long tail keywords, I'm gonna grab these and build them into the text. For just some organic ranking. I wanna run some long tail keyword strategies on my Amazon PPC. I wanna build some of this content into my images. The next thing I go through and I look for keywords customer sentiment is on Customer Review Insights. This is amazing. So what it does, it takes all these products and starts aggregating that. We're on the product page. It starts aggregating the reviews together and looks for themes and looks for what consumers want. So the first one is aggregated haste. We can start seeing what customers are saying, and I love when I see things like just delicious, or the coffee is delicious. That tells me when we're communicating to the end consumer, we have to be communicating in the text, in the imagery, in the bullet points, in the A plus content that it's gonna be a delicious cup of coffee, so talks about flavor quality and we start smooth, so we start stripping this information out and that's what we're gonna use to help build. So in Cerebro what I do is I take my product extra shot plus two or three of the leading ASINs and I run it in Cerebro to get my top keywords.   Bradley Sutton: And for those who aren't familiar with Cerebro, what this is doing is it's pulling up all the keywords where, in the last 30 days, any of these three products have shown up in the organic search results. They have shown up in sponsored search results or that, according to the Amazon algorithm, it suggests is relevant for the keywords, regardless if it's in organic or ranking. And so you know there's what? Oh my goodness, 24,000. 24,000.   Jason: So we don't want yeah, that's pretty Two of the keywords. So, honestly, one of my favorite like filters is just the quick top keywords filter that's built into Cerebro, this, you know it at down to 83 filtered keywords. I do a little bit more refinement. I wanna exclude phrases like death, death wish, black rifle, pistachio and wake. For what I'm trying to do, regardless. This bumps it down to 59. So, and we'll search by search volume, things that are gonna be important we have a shot of espresso in our, so the espresso K cups, that's a great one. Blackout coffee I'm still trying to figure out how do you work out blackout within the text, cause blackout is a branded term, so utilizing it within blackout coffee Same as danger coffee. You're picking up a lot of these things, but then you start seeing like hey, strong coffee, k cups, high caffeine coffee, dark magic I know dark roast is really important to this, so that dark magic is a blend and so on. So you know, I'll go through and I'll delete out the ones that I don't like from this. I'll pull these out and I'll start using both these sets of data, to start building out what this should look like in as far as new content for both imagery and bullet points, and I-.   Bradley Sutton: Now one cool thing. You know you might not have been looking at it, but just in this sense, guys, they're the column on. You guys see on the very right hand side, a match type. This also kind of shows you where if we have seen one of these products doing other placements. You know I said that Cerebro's showing keywords where you have shown up in organic results and sponsor results, but it's not just those two. If they're coming up in one of those widgets that says Amazon recommended, if you see something that says SBV, that means a Sponsored Brand video. So now you can know where your competitors are advertising in the video sections. Maybe the Sponsored Brand ad at the top, maybe if it comes up in highly recommended. So these are other ways where you can kind of look for holes in the market on the keyword side. So right now Jason just showed us two ways. Hey, look at Product Opportunity Explorer. Look at which products are dominating the niche. Remember, like he said, Product Opportunity Explorer isn't the products that make up 90% of the clicks and also the keywords that make up 90% of the clicks of that market. Here he can round out his strategy, using Cerebro to find other keywords that maybe aren't part of that Product Opportunity Explorer niche, but the competitors are probably getting some sales here or there. Do you have anything else for us today, Jason?   Jason: Yeah, I could run through how we're using manager experiments, where we popped it in that we're running experiment now on this board.   Bradley Sutton: Oh yeah, why don't you show that to close things out, and then I'm gonna show some more strategies and then maybe we'll bring it back here for some Q&A.   Jason: Right now we do take that details and we're running on through manager experiments and anyone who is brand registry has the ability to access and manage experiments and you can run A-B testing on titles, bullet points, A plus content and images. So right now we're running one for title and bullet points. As you can see, I totally just deconstructed my listing for this so you'll notice I've started to put in high caffeine coffee pods. Espresso shot. Through some other research I saw not just espresso but espresso shot was very important. Dark roast, strong coffee, espresso powder once again because powder it's a little bit different. People could have used espresso shot and espresso powder, but I saw, just because we had that included in it, there was actually some relevant high volume search relevancy on it. And then you start lacing some of these key words into your introduction double caffeine, strong, smooth and robust. We picked up on strong, smooth and robust dark roast all in like flavor profiles through product opportunity explorer. Customers were specifically using these keywords, so why not use them? They identify with them. It has meaning for them. Then we always have like a functional benefit to our. So we talk about our vitamin B12, there's a sub niche called healthy coffee that we dominate. So I always like layering in healthy coffee, and then we talk about our pods. All this is going to be baked in. It's going to start as we start driving advertising more and more focused on it, on these keywords. We're doubling down to try and gain organic relevancy. Amazon will pick on it, our AI will pick up on it, and this is kind of the process we use.   Bradley Sutton: Love it. All right, Jason, thank you so much for sharing that. I want it. Instead of just being like, oh, this is going to be a Helium 10 training where just Helium 10 employees are showing stuff, I want to show, hey, Jason is a real live Amazon seller with a real live product, and these are the strategies that he's using to get ahead. You don't just randomly achieve the success of making 20 million a year on Amazon and Walmart without some solid keyword strategies, and those are some of the things that he has. Now I want to show you guys some common and some also maybe off the wall keyword research strategies in the next 10 minutes and then we'll open it up for Q&A. One of the things I want to show you and this I mentioned before some things you have to have a brand registry for the first thing that Jason was talking about Product Opportunity Explore. You don't need brand registry for the thing that he showed about how to use the experiments with his manager experiments and showing the alternate kinds of titles and bullet points that had different keywords in it. You need brand registry for that. This next one I'm going to show you also requires brand registry and it's because it's utilizing brand analytics. Now I could do this inside of Amazon, but it's much easier to do it inside of Helium 10, because I can search multiple weeks a lot faster. So let me go ahead and share my screen and while he was talking I just loaded up that search for one of the keywords yeah, strong coffee K cups. So I'm just going to take and look at VitaCup. Right here at the very top is advertising. Let's say I'm not VitaCup and I'm just going to copy him and copy his ASIN, and I want to go ahead and see where he is, has been ranking or one of the top three clicked. All right, now. What I want everybody to do is, right now, go into Black Box inside of Helium 10. And then, if you have a Diamond account, all right. I don't think it is available for Platinum just yet, hit this new tool called ABA top search terms. ABA stands for Amazon Brand Analytics and I'm going to be pasting in a few ASIN. So let's go ahead and put that ASIN in here. Did I copy it? I must not have copied it. Oh, there, it is. Okay, I pasted it and let's go ahead and take in the red alert coffee. This guy is selling about a thousand units a month and maybe a couple more ASIN’S here. Death wish, he was mentioning death wish, or there we got three ASIN’s from the top ones. All right, so now what I can do is I'm going to look, let's just say, going to February 4 to February 10. I'm going to hit apply filters and now what is going to come up is where any one of these products was one of the top three clicked products for that keyword. Now, not that many keywords came up, only 17, because I only put in three. But imagine I could have put here maybe 20 or 30 products and then for any week or any month I can say hey, show me where these are these products. At least one of them was one of the top three clicked and I could say I want to see the ones where at least maybe one ASIN had more than 1% of the conversions, meaning that there's got to be some conversions on there and theoretically, all keywords said have that, but there might be some like lower level keywords that have no conversion. Sure enough, there was one, because now there's only 16 keywords left here. But look at this I am now looking at any keyword where at least one of these products is one of the top three clicked, and I could start going in deep here and seeing all right, what is the history of how this product, who are the top three clicked? Like, for example, look at this one protein coffee K cups. All right, protein coffee k cups is not a branded term, and so I'm looking at the Search Volume All right, 735. This is not that much search volume. Is this something that's newer or is it trending? I personally have not seen this keyword before and I'm looking at the last year on Amazon and I could see that, hey, it's actually gone up from like in the 200s and 300s and slowly it's on the rise. So, right off the bat, you know this is not some crazy amazing keyword 735 searches but it's on the upper trending. You know I'm probably one of the ones who's trying to search for out because I'm looking for like hey, is it? Is there a chance to get some protein when I'm drinking coffee, you know? So I would keep looking at this keyword. Now I'm like all right, well, who has been some of the ones who are converting for this keyword? So I click the total click share chart in Helium 10 for the keyword. And now, if I'm looking on a month to month basis, I just put my mouse over and I could see who are the top three clicked products and are they similar to my product? Right, like, for example, look at here in the month of December, VitaCup Keto Coffee Pods was the top the sick, the third most clicked product. Now who is dominating, though? The rapid fire protein coffee. Right, they've got protein in their title of their product, so it's no doubt that somebody searching this is actually a great example. I completely just by chance, found this is a perfect example of keyword research and how it's important and how it actually kind of like will give you an idea about who's going to be one of the best products here. Think of somebody who is actually typing in protein coffee, k cups. All right, I look at the search results and I see all three of these products this Corelatte one, the VitaCup Keto one and the Rapid Fire Protein one. But just the fact that in their title and the name it just so happens to be the name of the product is protein coffee, it's going to get them a lot more clicks. And then, look at that. I don't have to guess if it did or not. Look, amazon is telling me this product got 28% of the clicks right and total makes total sense. The VitaCup one is just a keto. One might give some protein but it only got 6% of the click. It's still top three. But you can understand now all of a sudden why this product is dominating. So that means if I really wanted to dominate this product I might have to think I can just make up protein and say, oh yeah, my product is. You know, this extra shot. VitaCup is a protein coffee. If it's not a protein coffee, that's false advertising, right. But if I'm developing a product I really got to take that in consideration. Now this is how Keyword Research ties in even to your product development. Right, I've got to think about putting that keyword in my title if I want a chance at kind of like busting into this rapid fire proteins market share here. I can also see the history here on the right hand side about how organic and sponsored rank ties in to being one of the top three clicked. For example, this protein coffee in December, in January, in November, they, for this keyword, were not running any sponsored ads. Nowadays, you know, somebody might think you know you got to be running, you got to be having a high bid on this, on any keyword that you want to have a big sales, but for whatever reason, this protein coffee comes like nah, I'm good, I don't need to do sponsored after this keyword because I'm dominating without it right Now. What about VitaCup? VitaCup here in December. This is pretty cool, guys. All right, this is exactly why combining Helium 10 data with Amazon data is so cool. VitaCup was one of the top three clicked ASIN’s, right. The number one clicked ASIN was this protein coffee. Rapid Fire All these brands are really great, right,Rapid Fire. And then you're looking oh, no wonder they're the top click ASIN. They were Organic Rank one. Now, if you were just looking on Cerebro, right, and you saw our Keyword Tracker and you saw that VitaCup Genius Coffee was ranked 12th, you might think, oh, there's no way it's one of the top three clicked because it's kind of like towards the middle of page one. But this is one of the top three clicked and you don't have to wonder why or how. Look at the sponsored rank average. So in December of this month, this variation family was showing up on average right there on the top. So you see how, in some situations, organic rank is all is all that's needed, but if VitaCup was relying on their organic rank only to get clicks for this keyword, would they be one of the top three clicked? Absolutely not, because their organic rank is all the way down here, but they were able to be one of the top three clicked because of their high sponsored rank. So this is, guys, this is like not your grandfather's keyword research strategy we're talking about today. This is like next, next, next level, where you're going into seeing who are the top click to try and like, understand, buy your intent, and then now you're reverse engineering the strategy with how these different companies were able to dominate this keyword. For this company, it's a matter of hey, they named this product after this keyword. It's in their title, right there at the beginning. They're able to dominate this. For VitaCup, it's completely opposite. Their path to being one of the top three clicked was through sponsored ads. So for every product there's always going to be different strategies, but this is the once you guys are experienced sellers, this is kind of the level of keyword research you need to do. It's not just hey, let me throw in an ASIN and a group of ASINs in a Cerebro. You obviously have to do that, exactly what Jason showed and find those 24,000 keywords and then whittle that down into what are the most important ones. But you also need to take a step farther and start using Product Opportunity Explorer and the Brand Analytics Data to kind of understand, well, what are companies doing after they find that keyword and how are they getting their sales. So that's Brand Analytics. For anybody that has the Diamond plan, I highly recommend it. Now let's say you're on the newer side and you just have a Platinum account, which is totally fine. What is the easiest way to get the top keywords? Let me just show that. Let's go back to that page that's Coffin shelves. Where are we at More Coffin shelves? Where's my coffee one? Here we go, all right. So I'm going to choose the top products on this page that I just want to go ahead and measure my success and my keywords versus them. Or maybe I'm just I don't have my own coffee product yet and I want to know what are the top products here. And, by the way, you can still see there's VitaCup still right there with their Genius Cup right there as one of the top three sponsored ranks, and this is kind of cool. I bet that Jason is actually spending slightly less than Deathwish Coffee and what is his wake the hell up Dark Roast, but he's probably getting a very similar click-through rate. You don't have to be position one or two on sponsored to be one of the top clicked or sponsored Dial back that spend, be the number three or number four and you'll still get almost the same kind of click-through rate and clicks. Let's go ahead and hit Red Alert. I got the Deathwish and I don't want to do Pete's. Let's do community coffee, right. And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to hit run Cerebro. Now this is going to open up in Cerebro, kind of like just what he showed. Now I wasn't paying attention to. If these products are all pods and if they're definitely competitors I'm assuming they are. But you guys need to really take a closer look at who you are putting into Cerebro and make sure that you're doing very similar competitors or that, like Jason was talking about, you're pulling it from Product Opportunity Explorer and you know by definition they're in the same niche. But I just picked four random ones just from the search results, but within seconds here, or a minute or so, I'm going to be able to get where all of these keywords or all of these products, the keywords that they are ranking for and that they're doing sponsored ads. The very first thing that I'm going to do once this shows up is I'm going to hit the button top keyword right here, top keywords so everybody can do this anytime they run Cerebro, and basically what it's doing is it's like hey, where are most of these keywords are ranking for, or most of these products ranking for on these keywords very highly? And look at that. I came up with 24 keywords and a lot of these are branded. But, just like Jason showed, there's a lot of non-branded keywords here as well, like, for example, high caffeine coffee cake. I'm almost positive. He literally found that in Product Opportunity Explorer and I guess randomly guys, this is the first time I've ever searched these things in my life. It just shows how Helium 10 is validated by the Amazon data. That exact keyword that he found is showing up right here Strong coffee. There's the other keyword that he found that came up right here Protein coffee K cups. That's the keyword that I had found just on my own that I put up here. So these are the top keywords. Another thing, though I like to do, this obviously, is going to just show tons and tons of branded ones. I like hitting this button Opportunity Keywords, because, instead of looking at the products or the keywords that everybody is ranking highly for, this button allows me to see, in seconds, products where only one or two of these competitors are ranking high and, by definition, of course, the majority of those are going to be branded. But every now and then I'm going to be able to see unique keywords that other competitors might not be able to see, they might not be paying attention to. Like here, instead of k cups, here's a keyword that I didn't realize. Some people are typing in kpods. Now why did this kpods keyword come up here? Let's take a look at the Relative Rank here. All right, perfect, look at this. I don't know who is who, but look at this Of these top competitors. Let's say these guys are all kind of equal, competing with each other. Do you see where everybody is ranked here on this page? One of them is 78, one is 107, 241, 245. There is only one of these competitors getting sales from this keyword cake pods with no spaces, and they're ranked on page one, position 12. What does that mean? That means that if I were to kind of like, do a campaign on this keyword. It potentially could be easier for me to rank for this because I'm not having to go up against all of my main competitors. So that's why this button, guys, is a sleeping giant of a button right here. Opportunity keywords let's see if we can find any of the hidden gems in here that aren't branded keywords. Let's take a look here: Coffee pod, bulk k cups. Maybe some of these products think, well, we're not really bulk so we don't think we should put that in our listing. But there are some people, for one of these products at least, where they are heavily ranked for bulk k cups, even though they're not really a bulk and they're actually getting sales from it. So this is just another way to get some keywords that can help you. I want to give you guys some deep dive strategy sessions on keyword research. To kind of round out your on Amazon and off Amazon, your on Helium 10 and off Helium 10 strategy. So let me go pull up those episodes right now. We did a three-part keyword research series on Helium 10 a few months ago. That really is going to help you, in about three hours of time, get all of the keyword research tips that you need. So you guys got a pen handy, write this down. And the way you can find this is everybody, go ahead and pull out your phone. If you have an iPhone, type in podcast and open up the podcast app. Or Spotify if you have a Spotify and type in Serious Sellers Podcast, all right, type in serious sellers podcast, and then go ahead and hit subscribe. And then the ones I want you guys to look at are these three episodes here keyword research masterclass 100% free, doesn't it? And you don't have to be a Helium 10 member to listen to these. All right. Episode 506, 507, and 508. All right, so again, go to the podcast, Serious Sellers Podcast. Type in episode 506, 507, and 508. If you guys are more visual, it's h10.me/506 , h10.me/507, and h10.me/508 . If you go to those links you'll go to a page where you can actually even see the video too of it. But either way, subscribe to the podcast and go to those episodes and maybe next time you're on your treadmill or you're taking a drive or a run, listen to those and then go back later to the video to kind of like have the overview. But what Jason gave and what I gave are maybe only like six or seven different research strategies. We have over 33 in those videos that will help round out your knowledge, and not everything is Helium 10. Half of them just have to do with Seller Central. Liz says I'm a newbie to Helium 10. I want to know where to start. All right, the podcast is a great way to start. If you don't have your first product yet, product research is what you want to get into. I would go and go into Blackbox and look at hit the Learn button, Liz, and watch all the videos there. And definitely, if you're brand new to Amazon altogether, don't even go there first. Go into the Freedom Ticket, go into the Learning Hub. At the very top of your Helium 10 dashboard you'll see a button called Learning Hub or Freedom Ticket. Hit that and start going through the training there. That'll give you a good way to start. So, Jason, are you looking at what's more important that, a high search volume or not a high search volume, a trending up search volume, kind of like that protein K Cup, or a keyword that already has like 3000 searches? Compared to that one only had 700 and thus has a lot more sales. Which one is more important for you?   Jason: It depends. So let's if we take protein. We actually released a protein coffee slim protein coffee back in December. That's because of the AI and the way Amazon runs broad and other campaigns, it started picking up on that search term. So it started delivering on Genius. Genius gets delivered on every new search term that gets in. It's trying to find relevancy just beyond what other one product you're carrying. So we developed slim protein coffee because we saw a high search increase on protein coffee in general, which was a trend off Amazon as well. So but I also have baked into our slim protein coffee high search terms such as instant coffee and some other ones. So it's kind of a mixture of both. I always like high search term keywords built into titles and bullet points because it's going to bake in some organic relevancy that it's gonna be cheaper for me to try and build long-term. That it is versus advertising on.   Bradley Sutton: Okay, excellent. Does Amazon auto translate keywords from different languages? One of my organic ranked keywords is Spanish, but I never added to my listening Great question, and the answer is yes. So in America and different countries, it's different languages. In America, Spanish is the main second language that Amazon is on, and if you turn your Amazon browser into Spanish, it automatically translate your listening and then those keywords a lot of them you are already indexed for, and so sometimes, if it doesn't, I highly recommend looking for organic keywords that you're ranking for, and then what you might have to do is adjust your listing optimization, because the Amazon auto translator sometimes doesn't use the exact phrases, and so you might not be that relevant to the Amazon algorithm, even though you're indexed for it. So definitely look at what are the top Spanish keywords and then, if your translation is not good, talk to Amazon and see if you can get your translation updated with better keywords. Jason, thank you so much for joining us. Appreciate the extra shot I had today, and thanks to everybody for joining us today. Hope you guys enjoyed this session. We'll see you guys next time. Bye-bye now. I'll see you guys next time.  

45m

Mar 02, 2024

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, interview someone you need to hear from and provide a training tip for the week. TikTok Shop listings are surfacing on Google Shopping https://www.modernretail.co/technology/tiktok-shop-listings-are-surfacing-on-google-shopping/ https://www.modernretail.co/technology/tiktok-shop-listings-are-surfacing-on-google-shopping/New Feature: Now advertisers can convert high-performing Posts into Sponsored Brand Ads. https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7166461642057142272/ https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7166461642057142272/Chinese TikTok experts are teaching Americans how to sell https://restofworld.org/2024/china-livestream-studios-train-tiktok-influencers-in-us/ https://restofworld.org/2024/china-livestream-studios-train-tiktok-influencers-in-us/Top Amazon aggregator Thrasio files for bankruptcy https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/28/top-amazon-aggregator-thrasio-files-for-bankruptcy.html https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/28/top-amazon-aggregator-thrasio-files-for-bankruptcy.htmlMonthly Fees May Be Coming to Etsy https://www.ecommercebytes.com/2024/02/25/monthly-fees-may-be-coming-to-etsy/ https://www.ecommercebytes.com/2024/02/25/monthly-fees-may-be-coming-to-etsy/The episode continues to buzz with discussions around the benefits of the Helium 10 Elite program, including expert training and exclusive networking events. Plus, don't miss out on the insider scoop about Helium 10's new feature enabling price adjustments directly from the Insights Dashboard. We also encourage our community of Spanish and German speakers to connect through upcoming networking calls, ensuring a global touch to our Amazon selling conversation. Tune in for these fascinating updates and more, as we provide sellers with the tools and knowledge to thrive in the ever-evolving world of online commerce. In this episode of the Weekly Buzz by Helium 10, Bradley covers: __ __ ► 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: TikTok shop listings showing up in Google results. Amazon posts can be now made into sponsor brand ads. The most famous Amazon aggregator has filed for bankruptcy. These stories and more on this week's Weekly Buzz. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the 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 on all the news stories and goings on in the Amazon, Walmart, e-commerce world and we also let you know what new tools that Helium 10 has released. And we also give you a training tip of the week that'll give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Let's see what's buzzing For two weeks in a row now. Not too many articles, couple of big ones out there, a couple of interesting ones for sure. We're gonna hop right into it, but make sure to stay to the end. We got a really cool training tip from Shivali and we also have a pretty cool new feature update from Helium 10.   Bradley Sutton: So let's go ahead and go into the first article here, and this is from Modern Retail and it's entitled TikTok Shop Listings are surfacing on Google Shopping, right? Have you seen that in Google? This article talks about how listings from TikTok Shop have begun to pop up in Google Shopping, especially results for beauty and skincare products. So, through Google searches for trendy beauty products like Nail Art or Dior Lip Oil, dup results now feature links that go directly to smaller sellers on TikTok Shop, and the actual TikTok team did confirm that this is something that TikTok is dabbling in. Now this, to me, was a little bit interesting because you know, like traditional keyword research tools, you know, like Helium 10 for Amazon, don't necessarily like, don't have as much oomph. Right For TikTok Shop because it relies on so much virality, right, TikTok? You know kind of like influencers are the ones who have like these viral posts and that's what sends tons of traffic to videos. You know it's not like oh, let me get to page one for a certain hashtag on TikTok, right For TikTok Shop. But this could be interesting Depending on how Google is indexing some of these products and how TikTok Shop is integrating. Now, all of a sudden, it could open up a new thing for keyword research on TikTok Shop so you can get some maybe outside traffic that don't come from another TikTok videos directly to your TikTok Shop. So pretty interesting stuff. It'll be definitely worth taking a look at in the future.   Bradley Sutton: Next article is actually not an article, but it was a post from our buddy, Jeff Cohen, from Amazon, and this was from his LinkedIn last week. Just in case you guys missed, it was from a few days ago, but I missed it the first couple of days that it came out. But you can now have high-performing Amazon Post which are free, as you guys know. You can now convert them into sponsored brand ads. All right. So right in the ads console in Post Manager, you can just take an Amazon post that's doing really well and make it a sponsored brand ad. Now, this hasn't been rolled out to everybody yet, so go ahead and check. Go into the Post Manager in your Seller Central ad console, click on the boost button if you see it, and then you're gonna be directed to the sponsored brand campaign builder to review the creative setting. So in his LinkedIn post that we'll link to below, you'll be able to see kind of like some graphics of how it might look. But that is gonna be interesting If you can turn your Amazon post into sponsored brand ads.   Bradley Sutton: Next article is from restofworld.org I should say. Again about TikTok, and seems like I've been beating a dead horse for almost two years now about how US consumers haven't really adopted live shopping. Well, this article says Chinese TikTok experts are teaching Americans how to sell and it says, convinced, a live stream shopping boom in the West is inevitable. Entrepreneurs are sharing Chinese playbooks with aspiring US influencers. And there is just one kind of like tidbit here, guys, that blew me away. Listen to this quote right here In China, 25% of online sales in 2023 took place through live streams. Let that sink in, guys. 25% I mean, if you think about all of online sales in America, like the minor ones, you know, like Walmart and others is not even 25%, a lot, lot less. But out of every single thing that was sold online in China in 2023, again, let it sink in 25% were from live streams. Now, I don't think America will ever, ever get to that number absolutely not right. But I mean it would be kind of crazy if it even got up to like 5%. 10% might be asking for too much. If it gets up to 5%, that's gonna be, you know something, that's going to be pretty, I think, big, and that's what these people are making on.   Bradley Sutton: So this article talks about how they've got these agencies that are training influencers on how to do like TikTok shop lives, perhaps some Amazon lives, et cetera. Here's one agency that has more than 10 streamers in the US. So these are kind of like streamer factories that they're pumping out and they're giving them the literal Chinese playbook. Like the documents they get is in Chinese and then it has English translation. Now one of these agencies said hey, on a regular day there's about 100 people watching simultaneous sales. This is even the agency. Just shows you how much it hasn't really taken off in America. The professionals can only get like 100 people watching a live stream live, but it says that some days the streams can attract over a thousand viewers at the same time.   Bradley Sutton: Now, thinking about the cultural differences, of how different things work, you know one influencer said hey, I saw many Chinese live stream sellers screaming at the top of their lungs, counting down until a product is live to encourage rush buying. And this person said I don't think that's gonna work in the US. You know American customers don't like to be told what to do or just because somebody's yelling at them, right, but this influencer who has been doing lives here in America on TikTok shop. She says that she closed over 200 orders on her third day on the job, worth more than a hour with $11,000 worth of products in one afternoon. So again, it's not like completely, completely dead. It's just nothing compared to what's going on in China. But everybody keeps saying, hey, we expect this thing to take off in America sometime. So it's something that I think you know Amazon sellers, e-commerce sellers should be kind of paying attention to what's going on. You know, if we're selling on Amazon, amazon already has Amazon live. Walmart probably will come out with something if it kind of takes off, and then obviously it's a big part of TikTok shop. So do you have a plan ready to go for if live shopping starts taking off? I think it would be great because it's kind of something that's going to be net new. I think it's going to have a lot of impulse buying if it starts taking off and it's not like it's just going to take away from your sales that you already get during search. It's going to be like net new sales for Amazon sellers if this ever takes off.   Bradley Sutton: Speaking of Amazon, you know some more sad news Going to. CNBC says top Amazon Aggregator Thrasio files for bankruptcy. Now, there wasn't too much information in this article. I don't understand the whole, you know bankruptcy thing. I know it's not good, but basically what it says here is that the company agreed with lenders to shave off about 495 million off of its debt loan. Doesn't take a bankruptcy specialist to understand. Half a billion dollars is a lot of money, and some creditors committed to provide it with up to 90 million dollars in fresh capital, which it said will go towards ongoing operations and enable to keep running brands as portfolio, so all the brands that it bought. You know it's not like, oh my goodness, they're all going to just run out of stock and go out of business. It still looks like it's going to keep going. But this is, like you know, for those of us who have been in the Amazon game for a few years. You know might be kind of. You know, for some of us maybe not a shock because we could see some things coming. But if somebody were to tell us three years ago or whenever Thrasio was at their peak, you know, hey, they're going to be bankrupt in a couple of years, like we, probably like no way. It seems like they've growing money on trees over there, right, but just the state of the world that we're in ice. There's still a lot of people who are buying and selling Amazon businesses. All right, the that model of buying and selling Amazon business is absolutely not dead. Make sure to check out a recent Kevin King podcast, amp and podcast, which talked about this this model still going strong.   Bradley Sutton: Last article of the day is coming from e-commerce bites and for those of you, if you're like me and sell on Etsy Something real small it says monthly fees may be coming for Etsy sellers. I didn't realize there was no monthly fees, you know like. So I don't really think this is big. I mean, we're all used to it. You know we pay Walmart, right, we pay Amazon a monthly fee. I don't even know how much I pay Amazon right now. It's like what 30 bucks, 40 bucks, 50 bucks don't really care, because it Etsy sellers are kind of like scared that this is a fee might come. But if you're scared about $20 a month fee or $10 a month fee, you know you probably Shouldn't be selling on the platform, but still, hey, money is money. We got to count all our money. So this is something to watch out for. If you are an Etsy seller.   Bradley Sutton: All right, a couple of things before we get into a really cool feature update I wanted to remind you of is. You know, a couple weeks ago, for the first time in over a year, helium 10 elite is open. So remember, with helium 10 elite, you can have one-on-one calls with me, one-on-one calls with Carrie and Shivali. Hop on private trains with Kevin King twice a month. You know one where he gives you the seven ninja hacks and brings on expert guests, and another would just him where you can literally Face-to-face, ask Kevin King anything. You want. A lot more perks, you know private networking, big events that we we do around the world. We just did one in Germany, we're gonna do one in Madrid, Spain, in a couple of months. So all of this for only $99 extra a month.   Bradley Sutton: So if you're interested in more information about the helium 10 elite program, go to h10.me forward slash elite, h10.me forward slash elite, and Once you sign up for elite, make sure the first thing you do is go ahead and book a one-on-one call with me. I'd love to help you out with what you need. Now, if you speak other languages, we have some other networking calls coming up that are completely free, open to anybody. If you speak Spanish, we have our monthly networking zoom call coming up with Adriana, so make sure to sign up at h10.me/llamadaconadriana https://h10.me/llamadaconadriana, and that's the link to go to that call, which is just gonna be in a couple of days. And if you speak in Deutsch, if you speak German, the one that you want to sign up for our monthly call happening this weekend is h10.me/elite-de https://h10.me/elite-de.   Bradley Sutton: All right, next up we have a new feature alert from Helium 10, pretty cool feature that a lot of people have been asking for. So you're in your Helium 10 account. You might see some insights from Insights Dashboard about your competitor has lowered their price, they've raised their price, competitors out of stock, competitors running a coupon. Your sales are going up, your inventory is going up, your inventory is going up. All these different things you can see inside of Helium 10's dashboard right, well, on some of these things, the action that you might want to take is you might wanna raise your price or lower your price that is appearing on Amazon, and sometimes you might want to go ahead and do that to a big group of products, like maybe you're selling leggings, like my buddy Yizhak in Israel. I mean, he's got hundreds and hundreds of SKUs. You know, some product lines have 100 SKUs with all the different colors and all the different sizes. When he wants to go change his price. It's like a very tedious task to do inside of Seller Central. Well, that's why I'm happy to introduce that on your Insights dashboard.   Bradley Sutton: Now you can go ahead and change the price directly from your dashboard. So what you do is you go down to your product table, make sure that you're on the SKU view and then you can go to like listing and you will see this column that says price. So first of all, you click this button and you'll be able to see the history of the price. But right directly here in Helium 10, you can go ahead and, one by one, enter a price. So if you watch Carrie's training last week, maybe you saw how to do tags in your dashboard, where maybe you give all of your coffin shelves a tag. That's what I did here. So I can click on coffin shelf. All of my coffin shelves appear automatically here. I can select everything and then I can hit this button edit price and then go ahead and put the price that I want, to put all of them at once and it's going to go ahead and update in Seller Central.   Bradley Sutton: There's a lot of use cases for this. I would think that the bulk one is especially appealing, because that really is not easy to do inside of Seller Central and especially for those of you who've got a lot of variations. You just wanna say, hey, all 60 of these variations. I want the new price to be $12.97 or whatever. Instead of going one by one, do it with just a couple clicks of the button. Let us know what you think of this product. Would you like to see some other feature? Me personally, when I saw it, I was like, hey, I wanna be able to see, or be able to maybe make a sale price. I don't wanna lower my price too much, but I would like to be able to make a sale price with a beginning and end date. Other people have asked for coupons. I'm not sure if that's even available for helium tend to do, but if that's something that you want us to try and investigate, make sure to reach out to customer support and let them know what you think of this new tool, but give it a try.   Bradley Sutton: Next time you wanna change your price for one product or multi-products, go ahead and do it directly inside of helium tend without even having to go to Seller Central. So pretty cool update there, all right. Last up, we have got a really quick hitting tip from Shivali. So maybe you're examining some of your competitors and you wanna know what is their PPC strategy. How are they allocating their spend? Now, you might not be able to just hack into their account and see their seller central advertising console, right, but using Helium 10, there's a cool way that within seconds, you can pretty much see all of their strategy. Check it out in this video.   Shivali Patel: Hi there, let's talk about how you can analyze your competitor's PPC strategy so you can figure out which keywords and phrases you want to go after. Theoretically, let's say, you found a good seller in your niche that's generating decent volume. What you could do is run a single search on Cerebro, as we've done here with this product, which is the Goer gift Woodcuff and Tray and then you could slide over to check out the keyword distribution. The keyword distribution tells us we have 646 paid terms for this ascent, of which, by hovering over the eye icon, we can see that 287 are for sponsored product placements, 41 are in highly rated spots and 318 are sponsored brand video. What's cool is we can filter for those match types. Let's say I wanted to check out which keywords or phrases is this ascent running sponsored brand videos on. I could go ahead and select that, tap out, click apply filters and you'll see that we have 318 filtered keywords right here. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Or let's say that instead of sponsored brand video, you are interested in just the regular PPC keywords and phrases. I could change out my match type to sponsored product, click apply and all of a sudden, the 287 placements for sponsored product are now visible. You could always further refine this search by inputting in something like a minimum of 200 for search volume and a sponsored filter of one to five. This is going to show us which keywords they seem to be concentrating their PPC spend on Applying just a couple more filters takes us from 287 filtered keywords down to a more feasible 22.   Shivali Patel: Of course, as sellers, we wouldn't be bidding top of search unless those keywords are actually profitable. So now you can use this information to your own advantage. This contrasts to this other ascent we have here, where you can instantly see they're not running any paid ads. We have zero for all of these placements across the board. Now compare that to this last ascent, where we have 22 for paid search and, guys, anytime you see such few keywords underneath paid, then you're probably looking at an ascent that's not running any auto phrase or broad match campaigns and you can leverage this information. Especially if that ascent is in similar standing to your product, you can figure out whether that's something you want to duplicate or completely stay away from all this to say there is so much you can do with Cerebro. We have so many filters and I just showed you match type. Make sure that you go in and do this for your own products to figure out maybe how you want to change up your strategy or what are some new keywords and phrases you want to add. I'll see you next time.   Bradley Sutton: All right, Thank you, Shivali, for that. That's actually pretty cool. Did you guys know that you can pretty much reverse engineer some of your Competitors Exact Strategy, especially those who aren't doing broad or phrase or auto campaigns? So make sure you guys are utilizing that. A lot of those features are available to any level of Helium 10. Well, that's it for this week's Weekly Buzz guys. We'll see you next week to see what's buzzing.

18m

Feb 29, 2024

As the landscape of Japanese e-commerce undergoes a seismic shift, we're fortunate to have e-commerce experts Nick Katz and Gary Huang join us again to unpack the transformation. It's a world where Amazon goes toe-to-toe over local stalwart Rakuten, a surprising twist given the resilience of Japan's physical storefronts during a pandemic that skipped a full lockdown. Their insights shed light on Rakuten's gamble to step away from their cornerstone points program, a move that has sellers keenly watching the horizon for its ripple effects. Steering through the complexities of international logistics, this episode covers the strategic use of freight forwarding when entering the Japanese market, a journey our expert guests navigated firsthand. We dive into the benefits of Japan's proximity to China, the advantages of trade agreements with other Asian nations, and reminisce about the global hiccup caused by the Suez Canal crisis. These discussions are not just theoretical musings; they're actionable insights for bolstering your bottom line and carving out a niche in one of the world's most dynamic Amazon marketplaces. Finally, we celebrate the cultural tapestry that is Japanese business ethos, examining the surprising competitive edge that international sellers can unleash with astute analytics and Amazon product reviews. These narratives of success and support—from local sellers to global players—culminate in an invitation to an upcoming event http://h10.me/japan in Okinawa, promising to be an epicenter for networking amongst the entrepreneurial elite. It's here where the theoretical becomes tangible, and where the future of selling in Amazon Japan takes shape before our very eyes. In episode 539 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley, Gary, and Nick discuss: __ __ ► 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 two of the world's foremost experts on selling on the one Amazon marketplace that you probably aren't selling in, but you need to be Amazon Japan, where sellers are making more profit than all their other Amazon marketplaces. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think. We know that getting to page one on keyword search results is one of the most important goals that an Amazon seller might have. So track your progress on the way to page one and even get historical keyword ranking information and even see sponsored ad rank placement with keyword tracker by Helium 10. For more information, go to h10.me/keywordtracker https://h10.me/keywordtracker. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the series sellers podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show. That's a completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And it's the middle of the night almost middle of the night here, so I'm in my normal attire of what I wear every night here in my house, but the only people that I can go ahead and keep this on and not have to change back to work clothes when I do something at this hour of the day is the two guests here because they are actually in Japan right now. So we are, makes me feel right at home here with what I'm wearing. We have a back on the show, Nick and Gary. Welcome back, guys. Nick: Thank you. Gary: It's great to be back and for those of you guys that are listening, I can see Bradley. He has like a black and white sumo themed what they call you could tell or like a robe, but he wears it very well. I love the Japanese motif you got going on. It's great to see you. Bradley Sutton: Yes, thank you for that. Likewise I haven't seen Nick in a year. But, Gary, you know we saw each other. We had some nice Tonkatsu right there in Ginza a while back a few months ago with my favorite place to eat over there. So it was nice to see you there. But you know, for those who want to get the full backstory, go back guys to episode 426 was the first time Gary was on. Nick's been on before then as well. But 426 was from last year and we had a lot of updates on what's going on in Amazon Japan and since then there's been new things. So I wanted to, you know, invite you guys back. But I'm not saying this is the reason. But we were talking earlier about how my LA Dodgers was able to sign Ohtani and Yamamoto, my two favorite baseball players, both Japanese, but I'm looking on the 7 Figure Seller Japan Mastermind website at last year's event. Let me just show everybody this. All right, I'm not saying that the Dodgers have me to thank, but last year at this event I wore my Helium 10 Dodgers themed jersey and you can see me here in this picture. I'm explaining something. I'm like think about it, man Ohtani is going to come to the Dodgers. He's like oh, I'm not exactly sure, but I was telling him that the Dodgers are coming. Well, we're going to talk about your new event this year for sure. I just wanted to call that out, though. You know, dodgers, you know. Let me give you my address. My check should be in the mail. You have me to think I set the ground, I set the standard there last year early. Anyways, let's start with Nick. How many years, now total, have you been Japan? I know Gary's newer, but how many years do you have under your belt? Nick: I can't even count how many years now, but I came in 1995. So whatever it is from then? Bradley Sutton: 1995. Yes, that's quite a while. Right after a few years, just after I moved out. Now You've been there so long. Just like you just said, the years kind of just bleed together. But if we were just to start off with one of the biggest changes in the e-commerce landscape in Japan in the last year, what would it be? This is maybe like the first kind of full year after COVID and dust is kind of settled. In America at least, there's a lot of the boom that was happening in e-commerce, I wouldn't say one crashing down. It's a steep decline to pre-COVID time. Something similar in Japan, or how do you view the landscape over there? Nick: Yeah, well, I mean, e-commerce is very, very strong here. It still is very, very strong. Japan, unlike a lot of other countries, has always traditionally had very strong brick and mortar retail. People do like going to stores, but I mean, Japan never had a full-on lockdown, so most of the stores were open for most of the time. There were small periods where they weren't open, but because we also do retail, we actually do distribution to stores. We've seen that they are really starting to cut back. So there has been a real shift to online and I've noticed, certainly in the last year. I hope no one from Rakuten is hearing this, but I think they're starting to feel a little bit of pain. They've made a few adjustments and I think there is definitely more of a swing towards Amazon over Rakuten. They are pretty much half and half for the section of the market, no, of the section of the market, so they've both got about 20%. Bradley Sutton: Yeah, no, I mean, I thought Rakuten was still way ahead. Nick: No, I think Amazon has now overtaken Rakuten. It's kind of hard to compare apples to apples, but it does look like Amazon has overtaken Rakuten and Rakuten have started to do some strange things cut back on their points program, which has always been their main strategy. That it was their strongest point the fact that you can collect points. Japanese people get Rakuten points in their lives, doing everything, and even my company has a Rakuten bank account. People have Rakuten. They have Rakuten for everything for travel, for insurance, for everything and it's to get points. But Rakuten started to cut back on those points. I'm not entirely sure why, but I think that is going to encourage more people to move over. So that's kind of something that I'm seeing personally, all the Rakuten is still a very, very good marketplace here. Bradley Sutton: All right, interesting. Now, going back to Gary, let's take a step back from e-commerce. This is only what is it? Second, third year in Japan for you? Gary: Third year in Japan, one year in Tokyo. Bradley Sutton: Third year in Japan. Gary: Yeah, two and a half or two years in Okinawa. Bradley Sutton: How has your family settled in now? Japanese speaking, culture, food. Is it home now or still feels a little bit foreign? Gary: Well, I wish my Japanese was better. I mean, my son is 5, he's in pre-kindergarten. I'm pretty sure his Japanese is going to surpass mine very soon. But yeah, we're acclimating very well and we actually just got back from a trip from Hokkaido, which is in the north, really nice skiing. My wife had, they have this drift ice area in the northern part of Hokkaido like literally the ocean is like frozen, and my wife had that on her bucket list for many years and we were able to do that. So, yeah, very fortunate to be here and, yeah, very happy. Bradley Sutton: That's awesome. Yeah, I used to live right south of there, in Aomori, for about a year and a half. Not quite as cold as Hokkaido, the oceans didn't get frozen over there but it was cold, I didn't mind that. I went back last year. Yeah, I went back to Aomori for the first time in like 20 years no, 25 years and so it was nice to go out there. My son actually went to Hokkaido. My son took his very first trip without his parents. He was friends and he actually went to Hokkaido before me. Now, what about e-commerce for you? Like, what have you noticed on your side that has changed? Maybe specifically more to Amazon Japan for your network of sellers there in the community? Gary: Selling on Amazon. Amazon is still very strong. We can get deliveries very quickly. But, for example, when we went up to Hokkaido, rather than buying like a sled and like lugging it from Tokyo to Hokkaido, we just ordered off Amazon and shipped it to the hotel and you know my son was thrilled. He was ready to go, and so Amazon has that coverage. But one of the biggest changes for e-commerce sellers foreign sellers especially importing into Japan is there was a new import law change October of 2023. So previously you could use what they call a importer of record or IOR. I mean, you're not in Japan. If, let's say, you're a US seller with the LLC, previously you could use an IOR, a company that's importer of record to represent you to import the products. But now they changed the law because it seems the government is getting smarter when it comes to all of these e-commerce sellers. So now you have to go through ACP. I think that stands for Attorney of Customs Process. I might be getting the verbiage mixed up, but basically it's a different scheme and you may have to pay more in the taxes because you will be billed on the total selling cost. So that's the Amazon cost. So that's one of the big changes that we're seeing so far. Bradley Sutton: So if somebody was already selling Japan, they don't need to convert to that. They can keep going with their importer of record. Or do they need now? They needed, you know, even if they already have tenure there, they got to switch to this new thing. Nick: Yeah, so it's actually import base, so it's the time that you import. So if you're importing after October 1st, in theory you can't use IOR. I should probably stress the fact that this is all in theory. I can tell you that there are sellers who are still importing using Chinese freight forwarders, who are getting the goods into totally fine, but in theory there is no more IOR and so you have to use this. As Gary was mentioning ACP, which, although it's not so, the tax and duty is based on the selling price, which doesn't mean it's not exactly on the selling price. You're allowed to remove the cost, like Amazon fees and certain things, but the whole concept is that who is the purchaser of the goods. So if you're, if you're not a domestic company, if you're an international seller that don't have a registered business in Japan, then the goods being sent to Japan, going to Amazon, going to the customer the customer is the person purchasing the goods, so for tax and duty should be based on what they're paying, as opposed to, for example, for my company. We're based in Japan, so we actually do purchase the goods. We can show a paper trail back to the supplier. We are the purchaser, so we only pay tax and duty and what we buy it for and then we set it on Amazon. So it's just the way that the import office is just customs office is kind of interpreting. It's all a bit gray, to be honest, but that's kind of how they're interpreting it. The actual final buyer online is the kind of original purchaser of the goods. Therefore, tax and duty should be based off whatever they are paying. Bradley Sutton: And then what? So is the customer paying for that then? Nick: No, so the customer isn't paying it. So, but that is what they are using. So it's actually the ACP, or so you have to pay. So your company pays, so the customer isn't paying that, but that's what they're basing off and that's their reasoning for it. They are essentially, they're being almost regarded as the importer, which is obviously just ridiculous. Bradley Sutton: Yeah, but it's not something like in Europe, where VAT is applied to what the customer's paying at the time of purchase and then the. I believe that I don't even sell in Europe, so I believe the seller has to remit that or Amazon keeps it, but it's like that price has to include that and so it's kind of like a surcharge. But how much are we talking about, like for somebody like me? I'm selling, let's say I sell in Japan and I'm importing. Like are my duties and all these taxes? Is it comparable to you know what I'm doing by importing from China to US and what I have to pay for customs? Or is it more? Is it less? Nick: Well, it kind of depends on a few different things. Obviously depends on the categories and exactly what the products are, you have to remember. So in Japan the consumption tax is a lot lower than, for example, Europe. You mentioned Europe. So the tax is 10% in Japan, or it's 8% if it's, for example, food or drink. So, but because they base it on the price that you're selling as opposed to the price that you are actually purchasing the goods, for at that point it will be a bit higher. But there are. I say there are lots of ways actually around this and I don't know if Gary is going to mention it. There are a lot of countries that have agreements where you don't actually have to pay duty at all, for example. But it does kind of make things smoother and easier if it's a Japanese business doing the import as opposed to an international business. And one of the main ways around it is that you get a company in Japan to do the import for you and that kind of covers all of the problems. So all the large kind of import companies. That's what they're doing now. They're essentially importing themselves, paying the supplier, and then you only pay the tax and duty on basically the cost of goods, so it will become a lot cheaper. So you kind of have like a bit of a middleman in there. Bradley Sutton: Yeah, makes sense. Now this question is for either of you. So at what point am I having to have my ducks in a row for this like am I? Do I need that already when I apply to sell in Japan? You know, I just go into my US, or if I'm a European seller, I go into my European seller central and apply to sell in Japan. Are they already asking me for this? You know ACP preview, the artist formerly known as IOR, or is that just something I need to take care of by the time? Nick: It's something you need to take care of yourself. Amazon is not involved in this whatsoever. This is completely Bradley Sutton: No. But are they asking me? for it, for like proof that I have that. Just to apply the account? Nick: No. So basically, when you want to send goods to Japan, you just speak to your freight forwarder, whoever you use, and the freight forwarder will give you all the information and sort it out for you. It's not something that you really need to do yourself. The freight forwarder will do that. So the freight forwarder is traditionally done IOR. A lot of the Chinese freight forwarders, as I said, are still doing it and they seem to be getting the goods in quite fine. But there's something that you will do through your freight forwarder so whoever you use and to ship the goods, that. So it's not something you specifically need to kind of go out and do yourself in most circumstances. Bradley Sutton: Yeah, all right, makes sense. That's good, like I thought it was something I had to, like, you know, find and or maybe you know, hire a company to handle it. But that's good to know that. You're like me. For example, when I import from from China to US, I actually don't worry about anything. Yes, there are obviously customs, yes, there's some kind of certification, but actually my sourcing agent, who's also my freight forwarder, she handles all that for me. I'm like, all right, you know apply, you know tell me what you need from me, but you take care of everything. That's nice to know that there's something like that, where you know I don't have to go searching in the Japanese yellow pages for people on my own, so that's good to know. Nick: Yeah, I mean, if it's all set up, you don't? There isn't any extra work that needs to be done by you. Bradley Sutton: Now, Gary, you know like speaking, you know we're talking about freight forwarding. You had mentioned something interesting. You know, in recent months, obviously many Sellers in Europe were affected and actually worldwide about. You know what was going on with the pirates of the Caribbean, there in the Suez Canal, like you know, the Red Sea, you know like that, that affected shipping prices worldwide because you know like ships couldn't go there. You know they didn't want to get shot down and things, and then obviously you know there are shipping delays and that increases prices. You know people felt it here in the States, people felt it in Europe, but you were saying kind of in Japan it was whatever, right, because it's so, so close. Gary: Yeah, I mean the Suez Canal Crisis. It's really impacting ocean freight all over the world, like going from like 2000 something dollars or containers, who you know, over 5,000 and even more right, even if you're not, by passing through Suez canal, because it has a ripple effect, because it's taking longer for the ships to go around, like South of Africa, so it adds like two additional weeks and most people don't realize. You have to factor in for the containers as well, because the containers are used, so you have to have more empty containers to accommodate that. But if you look at the map, you know Japan is China's neighbor, right? So I mean a container from China to Japan can arrive in, you know, like a week, so it's really fast, I mean compared to China, USA, you know 30 to 45 days or even more right, so you can definitely save a lot of time shipping if you're selling in Amazon, Japan shipping from China. And also you can save a lot of money as well because distance wise is very close, I mean literally, I mean their neighbors, right, so you will save a lot of money as well. And then in terms of sellers, you know we were talking to with, you know, Brandon Young Last year and that was kind of like a light bulb moment for him, because if you can reduce the lead time you know from when the factory ships out the good until you land it, you know from you don't have to keep so much inventory, right? So rather than buying up like three, four months of the inventory just staying stock, you could cut that to, let's say, a month or two months inventory so that for the seller, that frees up your cash flow as well. If you were to sell in Japan, from China, Japan, given the shorter lead times. That's why we feel like there's, at least you know, this one big X factor for sellers. You know it would be an advantage to sell into Japan. If you're sourcing from China and actually not only China, because you know, as they could quickly touch upon just a few minutes ago. If you're sourcing from other countries in Asia, there's actually three trade agreements between India and Japan, Vietnam in Japan and Thailand in Japan. So it depends on your exact product, but your product could come in if it's made in India. If you're exporting Japan, if you land duty free right, I mean, it could be zero. So there's and obviously there's no trade war going on between you know, China, Japan. So there's no Trump tariffs and you could significantly reduce your landing cost and obviously that would help every seller, you know profit margins right if you're able to do that. So you know there's a lot of these type of logistical advantages that Japan has. Then not a lot of sellers are aware of, and you know that would it could. I mean you could land your product a lot cheaper, a lot faster. You know if your cash flow selling in Japan compared to other countries. So we feel like that's one big advantage. Bradley Sutton: Yeah, I really need to get off my butt and do it. You know, like I've been saying I would, but I just been so busy at Helium 10 that I haven't been able to expand any of my Amazon business almost like this week. I'm finally launching like three products for the first time in probably a year and a half. But um, but yeah, I need to get. Gary: Can we do a Project X Japan? Bradley Sutton: We should do that, yeah Gary: We should do a project here first. Bradley Sutton: Yeah, Project X will be doing. All right, I like it, we'll do it. Anime with Japanese animation. We'll get Wit studios to do it for us yeah. Speaking of Japan and Japan. So we'll get back to the Amazon strategy. But let's talk a little bit about the 7 Figure Seller Japan Mastermind. I attended last year. I'm probably going to attend this year. I'm not going like it in the official capacity. I think I like it so much I think I'm going to pay my own way, you know, because we have a certain budget for events at Helium 10 and then, you know, usually they rotate things, or one year we'll do, you know, like last year we did Prague European one, this year we're not doing that one, in the next year we might do it again or something, but this one wasn't on the list for our travel budget. But you know I'm a points hacker, so, like I'm sure I could, you know, probably pay for a flight myself or make it not so much. And it's going to be in a place that I have been in Japan 40 times, lived in Japan, have never, ever been, and that's Okinawa. So, Gary, was it your decision to do it in Okinawa, since you had lived there before, or how did you decide that you're going to do this event in Okinawa? Gary: Yeah, well, Okinawa I mean, for those that don't know, it's known as the Hawaii of Japan. So there's beautiful beaches, it's, you know, subtropical climate, and we were able to secure a fantastic resort hotel, that Hilton in Okinawa. So literally it's on the beach. I wanted to do it in Okinawa, and I was talking with Nick as well, because it's Japan, but it's a nice change of pace as well. So it's kind of like the Hawaii of Japan and then logistically, there's, you know, the airport. You can arrive there pretty conveniently at Naha Airport and basically everyone's going to be there at the same place. You know we have 8 figure sellers, 7 figure Japan sellers. We have, like, all these different experts. You know, every step of the way, right from compliance to shipping, localization etc. But yeah, and I kind of wanted to to give back to Okinawa as well, because during COVID I mean, some of you guys know my family story. We weren't able to because we were living in Shanghai before. You know, I'm American and I couldn't go back to Shanghai, even though my wife is Chinese. I lived there 11 years, I paid all my taxes. I couldn't go back because they closed the border and my visa had expired. But Okinawa, you know they allowed us to stay on a temporary tourist visa for two and a half years. So Okinawa also is like the poorest prefecture in Japan and they really suffered a lot during COVID. So I'm just happy that you know people can come visit and that's one of the reasons why I wanted to do in Okinawa, to kind of get back as well. Bradley Sutton: Alright, yeah, I'm a history buff, I'm a travel buff, so, alright, guys, you heard it here first. Like I'm committing that I'm going to go, you know so, April 8th to 10th. If you guys want to join, like, I have a forwarding website here that make it easier. Remember, just go to h10.me/japan https://h10.me/japan and that'll bring you to sign up and there will be, you know, a lot of great speakers talking about local. You know selling in Japan, strategies and, while I was there last year, you know there was a couple interesting success stories. I saw one I forgot his name, but one influencer who was doing 7 figures in Japan. I forgot his name, but, Nick, maybe you can give us some other success stories, maybe of either local Japanese sellers or maybe somebody from a foreign marketplace foreign to Japan. You know Europe or USA getting started in Japan and being successful? Any stories you can relate. Nick: So one of our clients is an international brand, they're an American registered company and last year they cleared 7 figures and we're definitely looking to do a lot more this year and that's in two years. The sales currently are, so they're actually doing very, very well. Bradley Sutton: Seven figures in US dollars, we're talking. Seven figures in Japanese Yen is not too much, but you're saying, you're saying US dollars, right. Nick: No, we're doing 7 figures in Yen a month now. So, no, yeah, they're doing very, very well in America. They sell in Europe and they sell in Canada, but the Japanese sales are now almost comparable to the US sales, but the profit margins are a lot higher. Bradley Sutton: That was about to be my second question. Nick: Yeah, because you know things like the PPC is a hell of a lot cheaper. The ACoS for the account is about, I think it's about 8, 9 percent now. The TACoS is about 3 or 4 percent and it's the kind of figures you can't really get in the US. So, actually in theory you could sell a lot less in Japan and still end up with the same kind of profit as you could in the US. But obviously, if you, if you're getting sales close to the US, you're probably going to have much, much higher margins. Japan really is cheaper. It's a cheaper tax as well. If you are off the threshold to pay tax. But if you're under 10 million Yen, which is probably about 60-70,000 US, if you're under that in sales, you don't have to pay consumption tax. There is no tax. So anybody like me selling in Europe who gets absolutely lost by the tax authorities there you know paying 19, 20, 21, 23 percent in some of the some of the regions in Europe, you could be selling, you know, 50-60,000 US in Japan and not have to pay any consumption tax whatsoever. So there are definite advantages to selling in Japan. Bradley Sutton: Another advantage that I've seen is the kind of Amazon seller culture is a little bit different. So, for example, the Chinese sellers and the foreign sellers there they're used to. You know they're using a lot of Chinese tools. They're using Helium 10, you know to be able to do their keyword research. But one thing I noticed, you know at least last year or the year before, was a lot of the Japanese-based sellers, even some of the bigger ones, it's like not in their business culture to really use like tools, like they're not using Helium 10. They're not using the Chinese tools and so sometimes you can go in there and like you might have these insights about keywords. You know running Cerebro, you know they wouldn't have any idea what reverse ASIN means and you've got keywords that you can put in your listing that they might not even know because they're just maybe relying on PPC to find their keywords. Is that still kind of like the case where you know tool usage is not widespread amongst the local Japanese selling community? Nick: Yeah, definitely. I think it comes from the fact that most of the sellers, most of the largest sellers, were originally on Rakuten and Rakuten there aren't really as many kind of tools available, so they just haven't really kind of built up the systems and kind of the processes to handle that kind of data. So no, I don't think they are using it. Obviously the Chinese sellers are, but the local sellers don't think are anywhere near as much. Bradley Sutton: Yeah, that's definitely what I've noticed. Now, Gary, back to you. You know you've probably heard a lot of excuses. You know I just gave you an excuse of I don't have any time, you know, to do it, but what are some of the myths or excuses that you hear about what people think? Maybe it's just a conception of how selling in Japan is, or obstacles that really aren't there. What are some things that maybe you can debunk for those who might be timid to dip their feet into the Japanese waters over there? Gary: Yeah, I think one of the biggest ones is language, because obviously Japanese language is very different and you know I don't really speak Japanese and you know I figured out how to sell in Japan because you really you don't need to actually know Japanese to sell in Japan. I mean, obviously it helps, but the fact that the number 1 Amazon Seller Central Japan is all in English, so literally, if you know how to sell in the US or Europe, you instantly can sell in Japan. And number 2, in terms of the keyword research obviously we have tools like Helium 10 so sellers can get smart. They're already familiar with how to do reverse ASIN searches and you know all that good stuff. You can do the same thing in Japan. And number three now we have tools like AI, ChatGPT and the translation feature. I mean, it's like miles ahead of Google translate, like you know what we're using just two years ago. So I'm able to use ChatGPT to really get smart and even dissect some of the Japanese competitors listings to extract keywords to better understand that. So I feel like you know that's one big myth about Japan and I feel at the same time, you know like all of these obstacles. You know, talking about culture, talking about language. You know, I kind of. You know I like that book, The Obstacle Is the Way by Ryan Holiday. Like I don't know if you guys read that book, it's kind of like a stoicism book. But like these obstacles actually, if you look at it from the flip side, right, a lot of people are intimidated by Japan. But if the fact that you learn how to do this I mean, if you want to come to our conference, we'll literally guide you through it. You can leave no stone unturned; these obstacles actually become your moat, right, they're like a barrier against your competition, that they're intimidated by it. So I feel you know, for the certain seller that is motivated to do this especially, I mean this selling in Japan is really good, for sellers who are already selling in the US or already selling in EU. They have skews, let's say, with like 700 reviews, 1000 reviews. Why? Because you can actually carry over those reviews from Amazon US to Amazon Japan. So that way when you launch on day one, you don't launch with zero reviews, you launch with 700 reviews and like the review moat, I mean the review, like the average review is a lot lower, like review score is a lot lower in Japan as well. So I mean,Japan is the fourth biggest market, but it still seems like a lot of people are either too intimidated or, you know, they don't know about it. So I'm really trying to help sellers, and you know, Nick as well, right, we're trying to help sellers better, you know, take advantage of this opportunity, even though it's 2024, you know, like, what Nick said before, you know Japan is the niche, right? I mean, we're all talking about the riches are in the niches, I mean in Japan, like the best selling thick yoga mats, like I actually did. Like a comparison, in the US, the best selling thick yoga mat has 4.6 stars and has 75,000 reviews, so it's way too saturated, right? But in Japan, the best selling thick yoga mat only had 3.9 stars and only 370 reviews, right? So you think about it. I mean, which one would you rather compete against, right? The yoga mat with 4.6 stars, 75,000 reviews, or Japan, right? And if you're already selling the US, if you have a thousand reviews, you can actually carry them over to Japan and then you can be like, you know, the king right from day one. So there's all of these advantages that sellers can have if they know how to do this. Just sounds in Japan. Bradley Sutton: What else that we haven't talked about yet are people going to be able to learn about at the conference in April? Gary: I think something that's new that we talked about is Rakuten, because everyone knows Amazon, right, but Rakuten, like what Nick said, they're literally neck and neck with Amazon. So we're going to bring in a speaker to talk about how to sell on Rakuten and this way we can give the sellers, you know, a balanced perspective, right, Amazon and Rakuten. We didn't have this last year, so this way we want to give sellers more information, because certain products may sell better on Amazon or on Rakuten, so this way you can have more perspective there. And then we're also talking about how to get into offline retail in Japan as well, so we're going to have some content there as well. So I mean, if you're a seller, if you're going to make the investment to import your products into Japan, it kind of makes sense to maximize the different options that you have, right? So, beyond Amazon, Rakuten, getting into physical retail stores, and then we're also going to talk about external marketing strategies. There's social media, and you know Nick is really good at this, like using Japan social media platforms. eI think this is information You're not going to get anywhere else and you know we share, like real examples from real sellers. You know what they're doing, that you can take away, you can imitate. So, yeah, I think these are all great opportunities, and also AI as well. I mean AI is like super prevalent now you know Japan is trying to like push AI a lot as well because you know, with like the labor costs and you know Japan has kind of like fallen behind compared to the rest of the world. Right, but they're looking to amplify AI. So we're trying to help sellers use AI to scale your business in Japan, even if you don't speak the language. Bradley Sutton: All right. So again, guys, if you didn't write down that address, how can you get more information on this conference, h10.me/japan https://h10.me/japan. Nick, maybe any last words about selling Japan that you think foreign sellers need to know about the market, good or bad? Nick: So I think one of the main things that people should really understand is that about half of the market in Amazon, Amazon Japan is made up of Chinese sellers. So, although you know we have these kind of podcasts and Gary is explaining to people about the fact that Amazon Japan is a very good marketplace, a lot of people who sell in Europe or the US, they might think about it, they might consider it. The Chinese they know. They know just how good it is because they know there is very little competition, there's very little branding, so they can ship products out to Japan and sell. They don't need to have very many reviews. If you are a brand that already has. Sorry. If you are a seller who already has a brand and you've already got reviews on your products, all you need to do is list them in Japan. Global review thinking has been a thing for probably about three years now. You can start in Japan with more reviews than all the other sellers combined. You don't even need to have very many, even if you've got 500, that might be more than all the people in the top 50. And so it's so much easier to launch in a marketplace where your main competition are Chinese, non-face brands. They aren't even brands, they aren't even brand registered, whereas you are a brand, you look good, you've got the assets, you've got the images, you've got the videos are more importantly, the most important thing you have the reviews. You are starting with more reviews than anybody else. I mean there isn't any other way, any other better way to sell. You'll have cheaper conversions, you'll have cheaper PPC than everybody else and I think that's probably the main thing. Bradley Sutton: Awesome, all right guys. Well, if you're convinced already, well, hurry up and sign up for selling in Japan, and you could reach out to Nick and Gary for help from their network or attend in person the event and meet a lot of these people who can help you in person while enjoying the Hawaii of Japan. So I look forward to seeing you guys in Okinawa and month or so now, and it'll be great to see you there and hope to see some listeners there as well, so look forward to it.

35m

Feb 27, 2024

Listen in as Alvaro Lopez from Solo Stove shares this brand’s incredible entrepreneurial journey that began with two brothers with a vision and has since flourished into a significant role in the Amazon, Walmart, and e-commerce landscape. Our conversation paints a picture of how his academic pursuits in international studies set the stage for a career that expertly intersects with the Amazon-selling industry. We also unravel the story behind Solo Stove's creation by two brothers who dared to dream beyond the confines of their day jobs, skillfully navigating the supply chain from China to North America to deliver a product beloved by outdoor enthusiasts. Join us as we dissect the intricate details of brand strategy and e-commerce optimization for Amazon and Walmart. From the leap of establishing a direct-to-consumer channel to strategic maneuvers post-IPO, our discussion with a global director of marketplaces offers many insights. We dive into the crucial role of consumer obsession and mastery over logistics, and we share invaluable tactics for brand defense on platforms like Amazon. The importance of rich content and keyword optimization to cut through the noise of a saturated marketplace is laid bare, providing a roadmap for e-commerce success. Wrapping up, our chat transitions from the tantalizing secrets of Peruvian chicken to strategic e-commerce maneuvers. We highlight the essential role of high-quality ingredients and cultural heritage in culinary success before shifting to the nuances of effective copywriting and the power of tools like Helium 10's Cerebro tool. Alvaro emphasizes the significance of localization in global branding and imparts wisdom on the 'action over perfection' philosophy that has fueled the growth of many successful brands. This episode is a must-listen for anyone looking to navigate the complex yet rewarding waters of e-commerce with agility and foresight. In episode 538 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Franco discuss: __ __ ► 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: You've probably heard of Solo Stove, a company that does almost half a billion dollars annually and does ads with people like Snoop Dogg and more. Now, today we're going to talk to one of the heads of their Amazon business to see what strategies that any Helium 10 user has access to that help them increase to this level. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.   Kevin King: Hey, what's up everybody? Kevin King here. You know, one of the number one questions I get is how can you connect to me? How can I, Kevin, get some advice or speak with you or learn more from you? The best way is with Helium 10 Elite. If you go to h10.me/elite, you can get all the information and sign up for Helium 10 Elite. Every month, I lead advanced training where I do Seven Ninja Hacks. We also have live masterminds and every single week, one of those weeks I jump on for a couple hours and we talk shop, we talk business, do in-person events. Helium 10 Elite is where you want to be. It's only $99 extra on your Helium 10 membership. It's h10.me/elite. Go check it out and I hope to see you there.   Bradley Sutton: Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that's a completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And again I am here on the other side of the world, here in Frankfurt, Germany, and got to link up with somebody I've known virtually for a while but now got to meet in person Alvaro: from Solo Stove. Alvaro, how's it going?   Alvaro: Good, Brad, thanks for having me. Good to be here.   Bradley Sutton: Now, your accent is not a typical Swiss accent. I know you live in Switzerland. Where, so where were you born and raised? Let's talk about you, the person first of all.   Alvaro: So I'm originally from Lima, Peru, my parents, but I grew up in Washington DC, which is why you hear the accent. So just outside of DC, you know, finished secondary school, started my undergrad in Utah and took a two-year break. During that undergrad, moved around Mexico, different parts of the states for an LDS mission at the time, and then, right after I got back and got into my undergrad, moved to Spain. That's where I met my wife, who's Swiss, German, and that's what really brought us to Southern Germany. This is why you're hearing American accent.   Bradley Sutton: There you go. So how long have you been in Europe then?    Alvaro: That was in 2014. So it's been. It's crazy to think it's been a decade. Yeah, but it's been a decade, a decade exactly this month.   Bradley Sutton: Wow, where did you go to University?   Alvaro: Utah State.   Bradley Sutton: Utah State. Yeah, aggies, oh, I got it. Oh, yes, man I always try to like test myself.   Alvaro: Right, it's like randomly in a very cold part of Utah the coldest part of Utah right on the border with Idaho but it's a pretty big undergrad campus, about 25,000 students, so don't keep me honest, but the international programs are amazing.   Bradley Sutton: What do you study when you're there?   Alvaro: I study International Studies. I'm really an honor trajectory to work for the State Department at the time, and I had already met my wife prior to finishing my undergrad, and so when I finished a foreign service exam right after my undergrad, she had got a gig in Basel. She works in the biotech pharmacy industry and Basel is mostly known for the pharma industry, and I took a job at the time in e-com through some friends in my network, and the rest is history, dude.   Bradley Sutton: Yeah, what was? So when did you get into e-com?   Alvaro: 2016.   Bradley Sutton: 2016? So what? What part of e-com was that? Was that Amazon, or was that?   Alvaro: Specifically, I was working through an agency at the time that was helping North American brands expand on Amazon generally, and I was a first European hire at the time to bring brands into Europe, and that's really we were able to successfully scale certain clients and from there moved around through other European companies, brought me into Luxembourg. I've worked back in between Germany and Switzerland for a few years and it's so now for almost four years. Great as a thing, yeah.   Bradley Sutton: Alright, so that's Alvaro's background. Let's talk about Solo stuff. A lot of this is that household name. I've had all kinds of cool companies like. I just interviewed somebody from Lego here now. We got Solo, so yeah for those who don't know about Solo. So what's the background of Solo? So the company?   Alvaro: Yeah, so you know, Solo stuff is a business. Of course we're in the consumer product goods industry but, like our whole goal as a brand and as a business is to help our customers connect with their loved ones and connect with the outdoors. So I'll kind of get back to that later if we go in detail. But the organization itself, two brothers founded the brand in 2010, as you see my t-shirt here I'm like repping well the company and really what they were looking. They were both entrepreneurs. They're both Chinese, Canadian origin, so both very familiar with the supply chain aspects in China, but, of course, going up in Canada, so many opportunities in terms of producing things in China and bringing it over with healthy profits in the Western market. So these two brothers were just looking for ways to find freedom from their day-to-day jobs. We're both were working at the time some pretty strenuous jobs. So they found a space and so I'm giving a lot of context. I think it's important to understand.   Alvaro: As they were iterating different product lines, they created this ingenious. What was this mini, now known as the light? But it was the original, just only Solo Stove and it was really a camp stove designed to be able to light a little camp stove within 90 seconds from twigs to a burning fire that you could cook with, with just the stainless steel concept, and so that same design and engineering is ultimately what ended up being optimized into grow I almost spoke German there close into bigger camp stoves from the light. And then, back in 2018, we ran a kick starter that introduced the bonfire range, and that's really what helped accelerate our growth and our momentum as a brand. But originally started from two brothers wanting to just have freedom in their lives, to create products that create good moments that leads to lasting memories. And now here we are as a publicly traded business.   Bradley Sutton: Public company having Snoop Dogg. Maybe some of you guys saw the ad campaign like I'm going smokeless.   Alvaro: You did go smokeless. Yes.   Bradley Sutton: So that's, that's pretty cool. Now, you're a publicly traded company. I know like I think you guys had published like in 2022. You've done over like 400 million across all platforms. Were you up last year, down last year, 2023?   Alvaro: Yeah, so from a marketplace perspective, we were up, which you felt really grateful. Obviously, last year, 2023 was really interesting year. We’re kind of pretty much all brands in our sector are reconciling like post pandemic trends. So as a business, overall we were pretty flat, healthy, cash wise and profit wise, very strong marketplace and international saw tremendous growth, which we can talk about this in detail. But I view our partnership with Helium 10 as a core variable to that consistent performance. I'm really helping us understand where the market at scale really is and how we can continue to take part of that market share that we have and grow it. So, from a marketplace perspective, amazon specifically USA was up in Amazon global was up significantly year-over-year.   Bradley Sutton: What percentage? You know what once you get to a certain level. This is similar to what I talked about, Silas, who formerly from Lego is, is like what percentage is from brand search? And then what percentage would you say is just coming from people typing in you know, smokeless Barbecue pit or something? Random keywords.   Alvaro: It's a great question and actually you know it ties directly into what we can do within Helium 10 and tech stack. You guys simplify, but from what we've seen, both within the search query performance on brand analytics and seller central, and from the believe it's Frank and center said, able to remind me where we can find a search volume that I don't yep, yep, we see that the Solo Stove branded searches is almost three times bigger than smokeless fire pit. Wow, which is wow, which is unique, because there's not a lot of brands that can pretty much be synonymous to an entire market. I mean, yeah, of course. Yeah, Lego is.   Bradley Sutton: One of the only examples where it's like I don't know what you would skate toy bricks right.   Alvaro: Kleenex, I guess. So we've been really grateful that we can drive that. Obviously, in the US, Germany, Canada, UK, Amazon is definitely if not the biggest, one of the biggest search engine platforms for consumers looking for a product or looking into a product. So, naturally, the way we have our omni channel sales channels, I should say set up, we leverage Amazon as both, of course, a place where we can drive tremendous growth and profit, but also a place where we need to defend the brand. So I think from a percentage perspective, all over half of our sales come from branded search, which is really a strong attribution to our entire brand and marketing team and, of course, product development team. We can go into detail in this podcast, however you wish, but for us, a marketplace that's really critical is how are we defending the brand, how are we displaying the brand, how's our content, what's that consumer experience like and how are we defending the traffic that's looking for us so we're not losing them in the funnel? It's a critical component of our strategy.   Bradley Sutton: Interesting. I definitely want to get into some specific strategies, but one just general question I'm curious about is from what I understand, Solo Stove in the States has been kind of like a household name for a while. You're a little bit newer here in Europe. What was your expansion strategy? Like, did Amazon play a big role in trying to get your brand out here, or was it a lot of just traditional marketing?   Alvaro: Yes, so we officially. So. I was actually the first European hire fun fact for Solo Stove back in very end of 2020, going into 2021. Originally brought on as a director of marketplaces globally. First for Solo, this was pre acquisition of other brands, pre IPO, so then took that role as we acquire new brands right shout out to Oro, Kayak, Iel, Chubby Shorts. So it was really really interesting experience. And then that fall 2021 is when we launched direct to consumer.   Alvaro: Now, we had a little bit of a head start. We had some great distribution partners, some that we still work with very closely with today, that we had some organic search and so really, from the circumstance in the car that we were playing, that really helped us define, specifically in Europe, the way we're going to market is like where to put our focus in terms of marketing spend and our focus in terms of channels, like where we're actually going to sell. So we immediately noticed that in Europe specifically Northern Europe to be most specific, right between the UK, Nordics, Benelux, the Dach region, right Germany, Austria, Switzerland we knew that would be our focus. So that definitely helped us define where our headquarter would be, which is today in Rotterdam. That was extremely critical. Make sure we staff that effectively.   Alvaro: For us, consumer obsession is our fundamental. We want to make sure customers have a great experience and that logistically which we own our distribution out of Rotterdam we own all of our logistics. That's an extremely critical component. So, in terms of, like, the actual launch right, the setup is critical. Understanding which market we're going to play in.   Alvaro: I mean, these were things that were important to set up, but once actually going live to market, we're a digitally native brand. So when we went live to market, it was an omnichannel mix digitally, meaning that we focused, hyper focused on our website and across Amazon Pan Europe, and we did more our first full year being live direct to consumer than it took solo, so 10 years to do it domestically. So it was, I would say, obviously and this is with the same profit constraints that we have in the US obviously, as public and traded business, we have a responsibility to shareholders, not only to drive top line but also to drive bottom line. So we're really, really proud of that story and we've just seen year over year growth, sustaining those same top and bottom line figures that I'm alluding to.   Bradley Sutton: Awesome, awesome. All right, let's get back into some specific strategies. You alluded to like kind of like brand defense and putting a moat around your brand. And yes, of course, when you're that size of a company, like you guys are, it's important. But even smaller sellers, once they're building up their brand, there's going to be brand search and it might not be at the scale of a Solo Stove or Lego, but they would have to follow the same principles as kind of like you have. So what has been your strategy? I know, like Helium 10, maybe Adtomic and some others tools talk about that a little bit, but what's your strategy at protecting your brand?   Alvaro: One of the most profound conversations I remember the last three years working with Solo Stove and solo brands is a conversation I had with our Chief Digital Officer at the time, who's also one of the founders of Chubbies, Tom Montgomery, who, like what an incredible experience working under his wing for over a year. We were talking one day about like specific tactics for operating on Amazon, and one of those things actually was brand registry, and I was going into detail and he, for lack of better terms or articulating this, he just kind of stopped me and said hey, Alvaro, this is a fundamental, we don't need to go into detail here. So, when it comes to like your defense on Amazon, like make sure that the resources Amazon provides you to defend your brand, be it like the most fundamental basics being like hey, get brand registered. Make sure it's basically like an Amazon trademark right. Or maybe it's a transparency program right If you're dealing with counterfeits or unauthorized resellers.   Alvaro: Maybe it's project zero, which is a more robust element of transparency I'd say, make those fundamentals in your business. I would say that's an extremely critical component. Like, make the resources that Amazon has to give to you now, what Walmart's providing right through their seller platform, make those brand resources to defend your brand of fundamental and exhaust them right. If you're a bigger business and you need to make that cross I'd say cross department focus initiative, like with your legal team or your finance team or your CTO, do so, but just make it a fundamental like don't postpone any resource you have through brand registry. Okay, hope that kind of answers your question.   Bradley Sutton: Yeah, absolutely, so definitely important. And again, you don't need to be a humongous seller. I would say brand new seller. Why not start with brand registry? You know, if you're just an arbitrage seller or something, of course, yeah, you don't even have to worry about that, but everybody should be protecting their brand. What about on the kind of like listing optimization, keyword strategy, advertising strategy? As far as protecting your brand in that sense, though.   Alvaro: Yeah, I mean indexing is critical. You know, as I alluded to earlier, we have a lot more search for Solo Stove than someone who's probably looking for a product that we sell right, similar to our core product, I'd say. But as far as like what we do to defend a brand through the listing, going again back to the principle, fundamentals, we have hundreds and thousands of assets. So this to any brand that's serious about selling on marketplace, where I mean, look, cost of acquisition is more expensive, there's more sellers, there's more listings, you need to make sure that your content is rich, right? So for us, where you know anyone can buy like a random fire pit from Walmart or from Target for 50 bucks, 100 bucks, you know why are you gonna spend three, four, five times more on a solo, so fire pit? And it's because we want to evoke that emotion of creating good moments. And so, for us, part of the defense strategy is hey, is the content, the copy, your A plus for Amazon specifically, is it evoking that emotion that you want to be associated to your brand? Right for us, it's, of course we're selling fire pits, but the end to all these means is can we evoke the emotion on that session that a customer or potential customers having with our Brand, showing that they can create good moments with the brand. I think it's a really critical component of our brand and that defense strategy from a listing perspective.   Bradley Sutton: Excellent. Yeah, I think that is something that smaller sellers sometimes think they don't have to worry about. But you know, people look at that stuff, you know, and in a cookie cutter world where maybe there's 15 people doing the same thing, similar prices, that's the kind of stuff that sets you apart and makes you memorable. What kind of advertising do you guys, you know, focus on? Do you just do pretty much everything that Amazon provides, whether it's sponsored, band, display, DSP, etc?   Alvaro: It's a great question. You know, we actually just had some pretty high-level folks at Amazon in our offices last week in Great Vine. It's really grateful for that experience because we actually had some key members from the Amazon ads team coming to the office and really give us insights into some of the new products that Amazon ads is developing. And so for us, definitely it's part of a strategy broadly is to maximize the way we utilize resources that Amazon has to offer. But as far as like the going back to like the ad console and what we're executing highly and yeah, it's across the board right we obviously see best efficiency across sponsored product, right. And then the way we define that strategy top to bottom, the funnel is critical right, defensive to offensive, and we carry similar strategies across sponsored brand, sponsored display.   Alvaro: And now we're getting to a point as a business where I mean you'll hear high-level team members from Solo, so speak about this over this coming year. But we're really trying to blur our performance digitally, right. Amazon is developing some products that is going to affect more positively performance outside of Amazon and we want to take part of that right through AMC or DSP. So that's gonna be a really critical component is leveraging the experience we have from the ad console right through the three core campaign types that we could have run into new products that they're developing and really blur both performance and our operations behind it with Amazing talent that we have in-house that historically been focused on, like paid social and Google, and trying to blur that operation, if that kind of makes sense.   Bradley Sutton: On Amazon Advertising, how does your team leverage a Helium 10 Adtomic?   Alvaro: You know the biggest, biggest benefit that we've seen with that Adtomic specifically is helping streamline extremely time-consuming things. I mean we're highly tactical, highly experienced and very, very detailed in terms of the, the campaigns and the way we're optimizing. I mean, you're probably looking at our account we have thousands of campaigns just in the US alone and then you can do the multiples of that because we put similar efforts across all of our channels on Amazon and we're in 15 Amazon stores a little bit under once you start to consider international. So what Adtomic has done really I can speak transparently with you here in person is helping a streamline, extremely time-consuming task like bulk changes, bulk edits, in a way that's not just to get it done to save time, but in a way that's it's insightful and data-driven. Yeah, to keep it simple.   Bradley Sutton: Taking a step back, you just mentioned all the different marketplaces you sell in. If you were to say, you know, just gross revenue, top five, you know, I'm safe to say US number one, what would be? Germany, number two, UK.   Alvaro: It's really interesting on Amazon. It's similar performance that we see between UK and Germany. It's funny because off Amazon our British business is more material. So it speaks a little bit to the power of, I think, of Amazon Germany, or maybe even the preference of consumer behavior. Maybe German is just again, we need to take a deeper dive in this but maybe our German customers just prefer to shop on Amazon Germany, for whatever their reason is I'll come back to your answer but an important fundamental as a brand is we want to meet our customer where they want to be met.   Alvaro: That’s why omnichannel is so critical. But as far as Amazon, definitely the top four is Germany, UK after the US. Canada is up there and then in the rest of Europe between France, Italy, Spain and Holland. I think you have a pretty much flat performance competing for that fifth spot. We most definitely can scale our performance in Japan and Australia just from the data we can see in terms of search volume for our brand. But obviously Japan and Australia aren't necessarily right next to Europe, so it requires a bit more effort logistically. Yeah, that runs up the top five. I hope that helps.   Bradley Sutton: Yeah, what about any non-Amazon marketplaces that you guys are doing well in, like you know, be it Walmart or TikTok shop?   Alvaro: It’s a great question. You know, domestically, 100%, Walmart's been a really great partner of ours. Obviously, they as a business have been hyper focused on developing this marketplace that can, over time, become a pure competitor to Amazon. At the moment, from my understanding, at a macro level, it's still, you know, years away from really competing with Amazon, but they've been great partners in terms of giving us the human element and time and attention and placements that I think a brand like ours deserves, considering how much branded search goes into their marketplace. So that partnership with Walmart has been really important for us. Again, going back to the notion of meeting customers where they want to be met, we've found that there's a lot of customers that want to be met there, and so we're excited and eager to double down on the performance on Walmart marketplace.   Alvaro: And yeah, man, look, I'm based in Basel, one of my favorite things about living in Basel is it's on the border with Germany, France and Switzerland, and so I have firsthand, daily I can see how fragmented consumer behavior is across those three countries and so in Europe, way more nuanced in terms of our marketplace approach. It's obviously Amazon Paniu is critical, but I mean we've got other really important sales channels to us, such as Bowl, right out of Netherlands and Belgium, Allegro, which we've heard a little bit about today in Poland, Manor in Switzerland, Galaxies something in our radar, so a few other marketplaces just because it's so much, so much more fragmented that are critical for us.   Bradley Sutton: Do anything in Korea?   Alvaro: At the moment? No, but we do have a great partner in Korea and we do have some pretty strong performance, not necessarily through marketplace.   Bradley Sutton: It's got to be some Korean barbecue, a product you have. I mean, Korean barbecue is so popular worldwide. Yeah, you know, there's got to be something you can do there.   Alvaro: Yeah, I know that for sure there. I mean, if you guys ever want to see like amazing engineering around a Solo, so I mean I hope I don't know of some of your audience if they're looking at Solo stuff. The aesthetics of the product is so simple. It's a beautiful product, but some of the things we see engineered around the Solo sale out of Japan and Korea and China not by our team is incredible. So owe them a lot of props in terms of like giving us definitely some inspiration.   Bradley Sutton: If you make an in-house Korean barbecue table or device, I would be your first customer. You know, because, like you know, like what I do in my house, you know, none of us are Korean but like I've been eating Korean food my whole life and I just only watch Korean TV and everything. But you know, I just got like this burner with a little tank of whatever it is and it's not efficient. Smoke, like you know, everywhere. I got to open up all the windows and I got to, you know, replay. It's like there's got to be a better way and I think you guys would be the ones to do it. So let me, let me beta test.   Alvaro: Don't challenge us. We're one of the key polar of ours is getting indoors, you know, with some of our core lines.   Bradley Sutton: We mentioned earlier how you, you know, did something with Snoop Dogg. You know that now that's something that, no, not you know brand new sellers or even million dollar sellers, you know should be considering somebody of that stature. But at what point should an Amazon seller start reaching out to maybe micro influencers or just you know people, people to promote their product?   Alvaro: Yeah, look, it's a much different answer today than it was even two years ago. Like, if you're coming on Amazon or you're like a newer brand on Amazon and you don't have a strategy to develop your brand off Amazon, you're going to lose. You're going to lose and it's going to make me. Maybe right now you're on a wave and trying to feel as good, but I promise you, the more you can flatten your reach as a brand holistically, the better you're going to be. In this case, like, the best example is we've been able to grow successfully on Amazon with further investments off Amazon by driving more organic search, because Amazon is a beast right, it's a massive search platform. So the more you can drive awareness off Amazon, you're still going to be technically driving awareness into Amazon. So I would say today, when you consider the basics of you, know, increased competition, increased cost, you know.   Alvaro: Then you have some macroeconomic factors to implement in terms of how consumers feel about spending, you know, their own hard earned funds into brands that maybe they've never heard of. It's a lot more nuanced today and a lot more difficult, so you want to make sure you're definitely focused on developing a brand where consumers can not only connect but have awareness about what your brand is, so they can make a more. You know, feed the funnel earlier and get to that bottom much earlier than anticipated, because Amazon, of course, is the bottom of the funnel when it comes to sales channel. Like, people are ready to shop if they're on Amazon. So, yeah, I would just strongly recommend, like, make sure you invest as much time when it comes to branding off Amazon as you do on Amazon.   Bradley Sutton: Alright, before we get into your final strategy of the day, just a couple somewhat off related topics. But first of all, if you guys want to find out more or find you know about their products, you know, just type in Solo Stove literally to any search engine or on Amazon or Walmart or anywhere. If people just want to find you on the interwebs out there is LinkedIn a good place to follow what you do.   Alvaro: Yeah, LinkedIn is great. I'm pretty private on social media unless your part of our online community. My German wife has taught me well in terms of privacy, but LinkedIn is a great platform. If you just look up, there's only one Alvaro. Alvaro, it’s a very Spanish name, very difficult to Germanize or Anglicize. So if you just look up, Alvaro Lopez. All opus, you'll find me for Solo stuff. I think it's the best way.   Bradley Sutton: Okay cool. Random question why in Peruvian restaurants is the chicken so good?   Alvaro: Man, it's a great question. It's definitely a combination of the..   Bradley Sutton: You got some secret spice that you all are using or what's going on?   Alvaro: Well, actually it's funny because I was like in Utah recently and I know the owner of one of the biggest Peruvian chicken chain in Utah called a Red Fuego. If anyone's ever in Salt Lake City, I've got a couple of chains around Provo, Salt Lake City and he invested like his core investment was the kitchen and he imported it from Lima. So I think that's a core component. And then, of course, you get into the quality of the chicken.   Alvaro: I'm pretty pro animal rights here, so make sure that chicken's well taken care of. It's gotta be a healthy chicken that you're going to be putting into your diet. And then just the seasoning. I mean Peru is like I'm very biased here, but it's definitely top five culinary countries, I think, in the planet because of our mix man. It's a great balance between the indigenous ingredients and culture from the yin and beyond that the Spanish, Italian immigrants, Japanese, Chinese immigrants that came through the 19th century and just made a perfect blend of spices and herbs and that's what goes into the marinade of the chicken man. So those three things man.   Bradley Sutton: It's such good stuff, man. When I was living in LA I would always go. I forgot it was something, Inka was the name of the restaurant. Oh my goodness, so good. Yeah, um, favorite Helium 10 tool?   Alvaro: That's very difficult. Yeah, I mean to be transparent, it's a very difficult answer. I want to say the one I'm just going to complete a correlate a tool to success, and I think the way we write our copy has been critical, right cause we do index very specific things that we know have high search volume on Amazon that don't necessarily appear on our website. I say Frankenstein has been very critical in terms of, not only providing a good copy for a customer, but also getting keywords that have attacked. You know, I've added new, uh, new customers that would have never found us anyway.   Bradley Sutton: Awesome. And then if you were to have a wish list, like maybe something that Helium 10 doesn't do, or a feature or a filter or anything, what would you tell me? Because that's my goal this year is trying to get all the features we don't have yet.   Alvaro: Yeah, that's a great question. I knew you were talking earlier. You're going to spend more time in Europe, I think I think for serious brands that have I mean, you've seen now like the proliferation of great brands that are focused on Amazon. Well, a lot of these brands are going to have global reach. So I think the more resources you can offer to better localize and translate within Helium 10, I think, there's a massive market for that the more you can automate maybe it's something with ChatGPT, but something to translate and effectively localized would be critical.   Bradley Sutton: Got it, got it. All right. Something I asked the guest is like give a 30 or 60 second tip, strategy could be about anything in e-commerce or non e-commerce. Could be about anything.   Alvaro: Go ahead, yeah, I mean let me put my consulting hat on, which have been a brand operator for the last few years. So just focus on action and I think one of the most again going back to lessons I've had from the executive leads at, one of the most important things I took away from, our former CEO, John Maris. He said he'd rather have me focus on doing twice the amount of things half as good than half the amount of things really good and that, really, to be transparent, that philosophy of just iterating different initiatives, obviously targeted initiatives that can drive business, drive top and bottom line, has been really critical. In terms of finding out what sticks, doubling down on those and then the ones that don't work, quickly offloading them, have been really good. So I think just purposefully actioning items that's going to grow your business is extremely critical. You need to be. If you're not waking up every Monday, if your business is good and you're not waking up the beginning of the week, if you're not obsessed about how to double down on that growth, you're on a track to lose. And if you're losing and you're not obsessed about how to offset those losses, then you're going to lose even more.   Bradley Sutton: All right, well, Alvaro, thank you so much for coming on here. It's been great to meet you in person and thank you for taking the time out and wish you and the solo so best of success. Maybe we'll have you back on the show next year and see what you guys are doing.   Alvaro: Yeah. Thanks Brad!

30m

Feb 24, 2024

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, interview someone you need to hear from and provide a training tip for the week. Walmart grows online sales in Q4, agrees to acquire Vizio https://www.digitalcommerce360.com/article/walmart-online-sales/ https://www.digitalcommerce360.com/article/walmart-online-sales/Advertise Audible titles with Sponsored Brands https://advertising.amazon.com/en-us/resources/whats-new/advertise-audible-titles-with-sponsored-brands/ Rev up your digital sales engine with the latest tools and techniques featured in this episode. We're talking about Helium 10's releasing a lot of new features in one week! Get the lowdown on enhancing your product visibility with Keyword Tracker's new packs, and learn how to optimize your listings with the newly improved Listing Builder. And for those with an eye for analytics, we'll guide you on customizing your product insights dashboard using tags for a laser-focused approach to product performance. Lastly, our training tip of the week features Carrie as she shows us how you can use groups inside the Helium 10 Insights Dashboard. It's a powerhouse episode packed with insider tips and actionable strategies, so tune in and transform the way you navigate selling on Amazon and Walmart! ► 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 In this episode of the Weekly Buzz by Helium 10, Bradley covers: __ __ Transcript Bradley Sutton: Amazon makes virtual bundles extremely more valuable. Walmart releases latest sales report, the most released features from Helium 10 in a week for the whole year. This and more on today'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. We give you a rundown on all the goings on in the Amazon, Walmart, e-commerce world. We let you know what new features Helium 10 has released and we give you a training tip of the week that'll give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Let's see what's buzzing. Bradley Sutton: We actually have a pretty light week as far as news Like this is one of the lightest weeks I've seen in a long time. Like crazy, crazy. I'm not complaining, though. Hey, sometimes no news is good news, right, and actually let's start off with some good news. There's no like doom and gloom reports this week, but the first article I wanna talk about is actually not an article at all and what it is kind of a beta test that one of our Helium 10 elite members noticed is running, so you guys know about virtual bundles, right? You know historically this is how virtual bundles look Like. Here's an algae cow product and then I'm just scrolling down a little bit and then right under the image you know, above where the sponsored ads go and even above where frequently brought together is, you'll see this virtual bundle section where it shows other products on this brand. You know I've been saying for, oh my goodness, almost two years now about how I think anybody that has two products or more in a brand should be using Virtual Bundles. It's completely free to use as far as there's no pay per click and it takes up, as you can see here, historically, pretty big real estate but, however, it's not something that a lot of people actually use to buy, like, you know, those who do virtual bundles. It's not like, oh my goodness, it's gonna increase your sales by 30% or anything like that, but it's great to push your sponsored ads down and also, you know, take up some nice real estate and cross promote your products now in our Helium 10 Elite and Serious Sellers Facebook group. Bradley Sutton: One of our users, Elizabeth, who has been on this podcast before she noted how hey woke up this morning and Amazon has an update for the Virtual Bundles widget, right above the bullet points, showing it as a variation even of the main product. All right, so this is interesting. Take a look at how it looks on her screen the same exact product that I just showed you. You can see right here that it kind of shows as a bundle right here, right under where the variations are, right to the left of the buy box, and then if you mouse over it it actually shows what products this bundle has. Now that image I was just showing you guys a minute ago on my screen for the first one for the product that's live on my computer. So obviously it's not across the board yet, like where it's universal, where Amazon is showing us, but I really hope that this is going to be something that's permanent. All right, you know, sometimes Amazon does tests and we're like yo, what in the world are you doing? You know I'll go back to how it was, but this is one of those ones I'm hoping they push through On my cell phone, my mobile app of Amazon. Bradley Sutton: Take a look at how it looks. It's actually kind of cool here. Let me go ahead and play this. I did a video here of how it looks on my cell phone, but you can see, here's the image and there's the variations, and then again, right under the variations and right before the Buy Box, you can totally see that there is the virtual bundles that are advertised right there Now on mobile, which is how most people buy these days. Right, this is even going to be more valuable. I mean, I don't know if you guys saw on that screenshot there though, the very top of the listing, it had one of her Sponsored Brand Ads for one of her other products and it showed the main image of her product. It showed the variations and then the virtual bundles and then the Buy Box, like there was not a competitor listing anywhere in sight. So, man, again, here is to hoping that this is going to be something that happens across the board with virtual bundles. I think that will be very that'll be pretty cool for sellers and, again, all the more reason that you guys need to be creating your Virtual Bundles. Bradley Sutton: Next article is from Digital Commerce 360. It's entitled Walmart Grows Online Sales in Q4 Agrees to Acquire Visio. Walmart put out their report. They talk a lot about their regular sales, which only increased just a very slight bit, but Walmart US online sales grew 17% in Q4. And said global e-commerce sales actually grew 23%. Now another interesting part of this article they said, hey, e-commerce sales were led by continued strong growth and store fulfilled pickup and delivery. Over the last two years, store fulfilled delivery sales have nearly tripled and now we're doing over $1 billion a month. All right, so again, that's one of the kind of ways that Walmart is catching up with Amazon without having an extensive warehouse network like Amazon has and delivery drivers and things like that. They've got over 4,000 stores and a lot of these stores are the ones that are doing that final delivery. Now the article goes on to say that Walmart didn't share specific information about the Walmart+ program as far as how many members it has, but it says it finished Q4 with a record Walmart+ membership penetration. The article also talks about how there's over 400 million SKUs on Walmart's marketplace now and a significant portion of sellers are using WFS Walmart fulfillment services. So again, we've been talking about this for years. Now, guys, if you're not selling on Walmart yet, probably something to think about. It keeps increasing the marketplace there and as Walmart expands it's Walmart+ offerings I think you're gonna see more customers shopping on that platform. Bradley Sutton: Last article today is just something from Amazon and it's about something we've never talked about in the show, probably doesn't affect a lot of you, but just goes to show that you can pretty much advertise anything these days. So we've talked about having your own Kindle, direct, publishing books on Amazon, maybe merch by Amazon, things like that. Well, how many of you have Audible books? All right, so books that are for the Audible app that Amazon has, where you can listen to books, right? Well, guess what? If you make Amazon Audible books, you can now run sponsored brand ads to there in North America, Europe and Asia. So maybe it might be something I have to do and episode on in the future, or some training about how can you get on the Amazon Audible platform with a book, because now you can go ahead and advertise to it as well, whereas in the past only KDP and traditional books could have sponsored brand advertising. All right, that's it for the news this week. Bradley Sutton: So one quick thing I want. I'm gonna do a little quick contest here. All right, guys? All right. As you guys know, we've talked about on this show, Helium 10 has a new TikTok channel. I wanna give you guys an opportunity to win a one-on-one call with me. Here's your homework if you wanna qualify to at least be eligible to do it. All right, so go to our TikTok New page, right. It's called helium10_software https://h10.me/tiktok. There's some fake accounts out there. Don't click on helium underscore or helium10_software https://h10.me/tiktok, all right. And then scroll down all the way towards the bottom of our feed. Once you get there and find my video when it says best Amazon ranking hack. I talk about something inside of helium 10. I want you to go ahead and watch that video and comment on it and say you've heard about this from the Weekly Buzz and Make sure to follow helium 10 as well and those who follow the helium 10 channel on there and who go ahead and comment on that video, or we're gonna pick a random person to have a one-on-one call with me, all right, let's hop into our new feature alerts of the week. Bradley Sutton: And there was not that much news on the Amazon side this week, but oh my goodness, we have released tons of things this week. A lot of them you guys ask for the first thing want to talk about real simple. A lot of you Definitely use Keyword Tracker, but then those of you who have tons and tons of of skews, you always ask a hey, I don't have enough keywords to track. Well, if you don't have enough keywords to track, don't worry, you can now go ahead and go into your Keyword Tracker. At the very top of the page there's this button that says need more keywords and you can now buy like packs of keywords that so that you can have more than whatever your plan has for Keyword Tracker. So that's the first tool that we have. The next announcement that we have is actually I'm gonna go ahead and let Kevin King Do it himself. Kevin, take it away. Kevin King: Hey, what's up everybody? Kevin King here, you know one of the number one questions I get is how can you connect to me? How can I, Kevin, get some advice or speak with you or learn more from you? The best way is with Helium 10 Elite. If you go to h10.me/elite https://h10.me/elite, you can get all the information. Sign up for Helium 10 Elite. Every month I lead train advanced training where I do 7 Ninja Hacks. We also have live masterminds and Every single week, one of those weeks, I jump on for a couple hours and we talk shop, we talk business, do in-person events. Helium 10 elite is where you want to be. It's only $99 extra on your helium 10 membership. It's h10.me/elite https://h10.me/elite. Go check it out and I hope to see you there. Bradley Sutton: All right, guys. So don't forget, Helium 10 Elite has tons of perks, you know. Kevin just mentioned some of them, so I highly recommend checking out the program h10.me/elite https://h10.me/elite as soon as you get into Elite, book a one-on-one call with me. If you don't win that TikTok contest, you can book a one-on-one call with me or with Carrie or Shivali If you're a Helium 10 Elite member. And that's just one of the many, many different Perks there are of being a Helium 10 Elite member. Last week, we announced a new tool and Listing Builder for being able to see the score of how your listing kind of like stacks up compared to your competitors, to the Amazon algorithm for SEO, right? Um, a quick update to the tool once you get into Listing Builder. This is something that people Requested right away once we launched. This is we. We brought back the root keywords when it was, like in the old scribbles, we would tell you what individual keywords were in the phrases that you put in. Well, now we have the One word roots. So you click on one word roots. It'll say what are all the individual keywords that make up the phrases down below and, in addition, how many times you have in your listing. But now for the first time, we also have two words or three plus phrases, like, for example, if I hit two word roots on this page, coffin shelf comes up, coffin makeup, gothic wall, and that's because those are all in multiple phrases below. So maybe there was coffin Shelf for men, coffin shelf for women. Well, that means coffin shelf is in those phrases twice, and so I can see how many times I've used that root for two or three word phrases. And then down here at the bottom We've got the competitor performance score right here on the right hand side and the search volume that's listed and which keywords I have used and not used. So a pretty cool update there for our Listing Builder. Next week there's even gonna be more updates to that tool that we'll be Announcing shortly now. Bradley Sutton: If you guys are on the Supercharge plan right, not Diamond, not Platinum, not Elite, but Supercharge there's one update I want to let you guys know about. You guys have the ability to now make custom dashboards. So you would go into your just regular dashboard here and hit new dashboard and Now you can create just tons of different things, like whether it's a chart or a graph about anything in your Amazon, in your account in Helium 10. For example, I can select your graph and then now I can graph, maybe, hey, what's my PPC click-through rate and graph that compared to my unit sold. Let me graph my RoAS and my ACoS. Let me check my ad spend, compare it to my refunds over time. I mean, you can pretty much chart anything here in your dashboard. So those of you who are supercharged members, make sure to go ahead and check that out and play around with your first graphs that you can now make. Bradley Sutton: One quick update in our Chrome extension and this is what I suggest doing any of you guys doing if you're selling in one marketplace is you might not know that there's potentially people in other marketplaces that are hijacking your listings, like maybe they're selling on it. So what you should do is go to your listing page any of your listing pages and the Helium 10 Chrome extension that comes up at the top. What you do that you're gonna see this All Marketplaces button. Hit that, see more data there. And now, instantly, I can see all of the different marketplaces that my product is being sold in. So, like, maybe I'm selling this garlic press only in the US and I'm like, wait a minute, I don't sell in Germany? How is somebody selling it for 35 bucks in Germany? How is somebody selling it in Great Britain? Right here, that's not me. So now you can go and click this and go check. All right, who's the seller that is selling my product in these other marketplaces? Sometimes you'll be shocked to know that other sellers are selling your products and you might wanna take action on that. Bradley Sutton: All right, the last update of the day comes from Black Box. I told you guys there was a lot of updates today and all of the black box tools now are available for Amazon Brazil. All right, so you would just select it right here in the drop down menu of all of the different marketplaces that we service and and just enter in a search, just like you would in your marketplace. So right here I'm in Black Box Keywords and I said hey, here in Brazil, show me a keyword with a search volume of a thousand. So, for example, right here I see hardy met BC, that category, I think that's garden and pool category. Right, I'm saying, hey, show me this keyword with a thousand search volume and it has at least three words and a title density of less than five and I have a whole bunch of Portuguese keywords from Brazil. Here's a Basel de planta, a racket electric, a mosquito electric mosquito racket. I guess a lot of interesting products here. I don't speak Portuguese so I don't even know what these mean. Here's one I think that means a garden hose 20 meter garden hose. But here's some just keywords that came up in the Amazon Brazil marketplace. Bradley Sutton: That's our latest marketplace, that we have tons of tools. Already Amazon Brazil was working for profits and Keyword Tracker, Magnets, or Cerebro, or more, and we're adding more tools as the time goes by. Don't forget that soon everybody who sells in Amazon United States is going to be able to sell an Amazon Brazil with this a click of a button. Some of you already are able to do that, but by March everybody's going to be able to do that. We'll have a podcast all about that program coming up soon. All right, next up we have our training tip of the week and it's actually a newish filter that a lot not a lot of people are doing, where you can group some of your products together on your Helium 10 Dashboard. Carrie, take it away. Carrie Miller: Hello everyone, today I'm going to show you a new feature that is available in Insights Dashboard. Now, if you're not using insights dashboard, you are missing out. It helps you to see so much that's going on with your products. Like you know, it'll basically it's a dashboard where it's kind of like a hub, where everything that's going on with your products is very visible. So, if you need to add keywords, if you need you know, if, if your listing got suppressed or if there's an alert, you know, maybe your dimensions changed, there's something that's going on with your products. It's all shown in the dashboard. And you can also monitor your competitors to see, you know, have they added a coupon, have they changed their price? They changed their listing? There's so much more than that, but it really saves you tons and tons of time monitoring your own products as well as your competitors products, and now we have the ability to tag an insights dashboard, so I'm going to go ahead and show you what that looks like. So this is insights dashboard. You're going to want to go over to where it says my products. Okay, so click on my products and this is going to be a list of all of your products here, and so, basically the way that this populates is if you connect your Helium 10 account to Seller Central so that it automatically pulls this information in. Carrie Miller: But sometimes you have tons and tons of products and a lot of different types of products, so maybe you're wanting to look at a specific type of product. You can actually group these with these different tags. So, for example, we have a bunch of different coffin shelves. We also have egg trays, so I made two different tags. One is coffin shelf, and so if I click on coffin shelf, I'm going to be able to see all of the coffin shelves that we sell that I tagged, and then, if you want to untag it, you want to see everything. You just click back on the tag. So to create your tag, it's super easy. All you have to do is, you know, go in here and click on the settings wheel that I just clicked on, and you're going to click on add tag. Carrie Miller: Okay, so on this, you can actually tag your competitors and your own products, okay, so, um, that is one really great thing about this is that you can. You can, you know, find and group them all together if you want to, so you can do competitors or you can do your own products. In this instance I, you know I actually just tagged my own products, so all of these are my own products but say I wanted to go in and I wanted to kind of edit this tag and I wanted to add some competitors. And take a look at the competitors, I can click on the competitors tab and I can search those competitors and add them on there to have them grouped kind of in a similar way. So there's a lot of different ways you can do this. You can also even go over to the competitors tab. So I'll close out of this and I'll go over to the competitors tab. And in the competitors tab you can also just create you know the same place here. Carrie Miller: So you can just add a tag here and you can say you know you can name it like increasing revenue or something like that, maybe you want to track those people, that you can do whatever you want in these tags and you can group your competitors in your own products in any way that you want to. Um, or maybe there's groups of products of your own that maybe you, you know, have started to see fall. You want to keep an eye on them. There's a lot of different ways you can do this, um. So all you have to do is unclick the tags so you can see all of your products. And one cool thing is you can actually even go through and say, oh, I want to add a tag here or here. Oh, I didn't add this one to my egg tray one, so I'm going to click and add it to my egg tray tabs tags so that I can see it there. So you can do this. You know in so many different ways. Carrie Miller: Um, you can you know, maybe also tag something that's on promotion, or if you're launching different products, you can say you know in launch phase. Or you know ranking. If you're working on ranking, you can tag those and say you know ranking. Um, because you're doing a lot of outside traffic, maybe an influencers, and you want to keep an eye on those and you want to sort them out. You can do literally anything with these tags. It's the sky is the limit. So what's great about this tool is that you can customize it to whatever you want to do and it helps you to just sort through the products very quickly based on what you're looking at or what you want to look at. So go ahead and check it out. If you haven't checked it out, I think this is a really great um feature to be able to categorize your own products and your competitors products and to be able to find them and sort through them very quickly and easy. So check it out and we'll see you later. Bradley Sutton: All right, thank you very much, Carrie, for that. So you know you might be wondering how do I use that. You know, like, for example, me, I've got four products right now that I'm launching all at the same time, and so maybe I just want a quick way to see those four products, about what's going on with my keywords, my sales and everything, instead of having to like filter through them. Well, now I can just give those products a launch tag and this with a click of a button. Now I can see everything that's going on for those four products on my Helium 10 Dashboard. So play around with that guys. Make your own custom tags. Let me know which ones you put in the comments below. That's it for the news and features and training of the week. Hope you guys enjoyed this episode. We'll see you next week to see what's buzzing.

20m

Feb 23, 2024

Have you heard the latest buzz about Walmart's marketplace? It's time to tune in as we chat with Michael Lebhar of SellCord, the brain behind the surge in sales for countless Walmart sellers. Our discussion is packed with strategies and insights, from exploring the alluring incentives for new sellers to the secrets of wielding the latest metrics to skyrocket your sales. Imagine mastering the art of ad automation or creating a brand shop that takes your visibility to new heights; that's exactly what we're unpacking in this episode. Michael and Carrie dissect Helium 10's Adtomic and its advanced features, designed to empower Walmart sellers with precision ad management. We're also sizing up the impact of Walmart Brand Shops on your sales figures. The conversation then shifts gears to the nitty-gritty of search engine marketing (SEM) and how Walmart's beta coupon program is shaking up the game – a potential goldmine for engaging customers. But wait, there's more! Are your listings primed to pull in buyers, or could they use a tactical tweak? We're laying out a blueprint to boost your presence and sales on Walmart's marketplace, emphasizing the vital role of high-converting keywords and how Walmart's Fulfillment Services (WFS) and flash deals can be your ace in the hole. We wrap up by dishing out pro tips on navigating Walmart's evolving landscape, from optimizing product categories for approval to the influence of title density on your Walmart listing’s performance. Walmart sellers, buckle up – this episode is your roadmap to conquering Walmart's bustling bazaar.   In episode 537 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Carrie and Michael discuss: __ __ ► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast ► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension ► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup  (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life) ► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft ► Watch The Podcasts On YouTube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos Transcript Carrie Miller: In today's episode, we are going to be talking with Michael Lebhar about strategies that sellers can utilize to help grow their sales on Walmart, and we're also going to be talking about some new metrics that Walmart has made available to sellers and how you can use them to your advantage. This and so much more on today's episode.   Bradley Sutton: How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. If you guys would like to network with other Walmart sellers, make sure to join our brand new Facebook group called Helium 10 Winning with Walmart. You can actually just search for that on Facebook or you can actually go to h10.me/walmartgroup and you can go directly to that page. So make sure to join. You can tag me and Carrie with questions and ask questions of other Walmart sellers or even share your own experiences in that Facebook group.   Carrie Miller: Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the serious sellers podcast brought to you by Helium 10. My name is Carrie and I'm going to be your host today, and this is our Walmart Wednesday, where we go over all of the things Walmart and we answer your questions live and we give you any updates that have to do with Walmart. So we'll go ahead and get into it. So today I do have a special guest that I'll announce in just a minute and he is going to be great for answering questions and I will answer some as well. But before I get into that, I wanted to talk about some incentives that Walmart is having for new sellers. So if you have been considering selling on the Walmart platform and you haven't pulled the trigger yet and you want to get into selling on Walmart, there is a really cool incentive right now. I'm going to put the link to this special deal because it's not for everyone. You have to apply through our Helium 10 link. Basically, what it is is, if you apply through this Helium 10 special link, then you can get up to 100% of the referral fees taken off, basically for 90 days. So you won't have to pay referral fees for literally up to 90 days, so actually up to 100% for 90 days. So the way that it works is basically everything that you do kind of unlocks something. So the first 50% off that you get off is you get 50% of the referral fees for just signing up and getting your products up and running, and then the 90 days start. Once you're up and running, then you get another 20% off your referral fees if you start utilizing Walmart Fulfillment Services. So that's WFS and you can enroll in that pretty easily. The next thing is you'll get another 20% off for using Walmart Connect, which is the ads platform, so you can start advertising on Walmart. And then, finally, if you want to start automating with the repricer, you can. You get another 10% if you start using the repress repricer. So that adds up to 100% off of your referral fees. Now, not everybody's going to use the repricer, so at least up to 90% off referral fees, which is absolutely incredible, such a good deal. So I will add that link in. So if you haven't started selling on Walmart and you really want to get started selling on Walmart, definitely click that link and take advantage of that. And this goes for US sellers and international sellers. So they're they're allowing anyone who clicks that link, that is a seller on, or wants to sell on Walmart and gets accepted, you can have that great deal. So that's great.   Carrie Miller: And then the next thing helium 10. As you all know, we have Adtomic for Walmart, which is our ads program where we help you to manage your ads. It makes it a lot easier to manage your ads, and so we've added some rules and automations. You can now do day partying so you can advertise at certain parts of the day that are more profitable for you. You can add in bid rules. You can add a target, a cost max, impressions max, or you can create custom bid rules. So the new Add Tomic is absolutely incredible. If you want to book a demo, we'll also put that link below as well, because you can book a demo with one of our Helium 10 Adtomic experts that can help you. Not only you know, show you how it works, but then get you up and running on that. With ads. It's super easy. There's so many automations that will help you to manage your Walmart ads. All right, so I'm going to go ahead and get into our special guest, because I think a lot of you are very excited to have him on and his name is Michael Lebhar, so I'm going to go ahead and bring him on. Hello, Michael. Hey, so Michael Lebhar is from SellCord and many of you have seen him on Walmart Wednesday and a lot of other podcasts. He's been speaking, I pretty much all over the world, haven't you? He's been talking about selling on Walmart. He owns an agency called SellCord and he is doing really, really well on Walmart, has some products in stores, so we have a wealth of information available to us by just chatting with Michael. So thanks so much for joining us. What’s up Michael?   Michael: Thanks for having me here. It's fun to be back.   Carrie Miller: Yeah, yeah, you were on here last. It's been, I think, a year since you've been on, so I'm very excited to have you back so I wanted to talk to you about a few things like new updates, and so we'll talk about some updates with Walmart, and then I'm gonna also ask you about some strategies that you can give to sellers. So the first thing I want to talk about, though, is sales rank, because this is something that's new. In the back of Walmart seller center, under search insights, you can actually see your sales rank for your product, and so I was wondering if you had any insights on how any Walmart sellers could utilize this information, or what you know, what you can do with that, or what you've been using it for for sure.   Michael: Yeah, that's a pretty new data that Walmart started adding in and basically, if you go to your growth opportunities and you go into search insights, there's actually a lot of helpful data there conversion rates, click rates, and they rank it kind of high, medium and low select you could have a good idea of how you compare against competitors in your category. But what you're specific specifically regarding is Sales rank, and sales rank is a number that they basically rank how well you're doing Compared to the other. You know your competitors in the space, so it's pretty helpful number. I like seeing when we have also multiple items within certain categories, seeing how they rank against each other, how the search links against each other, and then you could see the difference in sales rank and obviously the difference in sales between those items. You could kind of gauge a little bit more on like the type of sales you should be expecting from other items. So I would definitely make sure to take a look at that. Look, go, look at the data and start getting more comfortable with it. As you know, time goes on, it'll start becoming, you know they'll start there again. It's gonna start being more and more data there. So I would definitely take a look at that data and try to utilize it another thing.   Carrie Miller: I mentioned this on our last Walmart Wednesday and that is that brand stores are now available. So I was wondering if you have started utilizing those, because I know you manage a lot of brands. Have you started creating brand stores and how are you utilizing them? What kind of success have you been seeing so far?   Michael: great question. Yeah, so brand stores been. You know We've been waiting for them for a while because there's been brand store functionality for years. But you used to have to pay seventy, five thousand dollars, if I'm not mistaken, to get a brand store. Now it's actually free. You just have to apply mom, not all brands get accepted to the most brands kind of that we've been applying. I've been getting accepted to the brand store. It's through Walmart connect. So it's through your Walmart connect account, you apply and you get access to there. There's a few great reasons. Number one like on Walmart, the brand shows pretty prominently on top of the title. A lot of people click on there. They look at your expanded assortment. So you're able to actually you know, you know, utilize it to bring all your items into that one link. A lot of times when you're it's just done by shelf and it's not by your brand store, like you'll see, random items that are you're not your brand show up when you click on your brand. So it's important to. That's one great way. Number two is for advertising. You're able to start sent. You're able to send ads to certain shelves. Now, sending it to a shelf that just has items on it because of a filter and doesn't. It's not like a. A set shelf Through brand shops is way less effective. Also, you can't have any banners and things like that, so we've been using a lot for advertising and that proves to be pretty effective. So, yeah, definitely exciting and there's definitely a lot of Opportunity there. A tap into creating ban shops We've been creating a lot of them for brands over the past. What would say mainly like month and a half, two months.   Carrie Miller: Awesome. Yeah, I think a lot of people have started to work on those, so I think that's definitely a huge opportunity as well to not only get your sales for the one item but, you know, showcase all of your items and increase the court order court cart order value. The next thing I wanted to ask you about is the search engine marketing. It's called SEM on the growth opportunities tab. How has that been working for you? What? What kinds of things have you been seeing with with SEM, or I guess they might call it Sem on the back end there. And, yeah, just go ahead and get some insights on that this was an interesting one because you know it's.   Michael: If you know in the Amazon space like people use different providers to help send Google traffic to their Amazon listing To build rank, that's essentially what this product is. It's you could run Google ads from within though your Walmart account. So number one, your attribution is gonna be, you know, much more legitimate, obviously because it's first-party data, so they know what converts. So like that's really helpful. You know, I'm trying. I was trying to kind of see if there's a difference in cost running gets through Walmart versus. So I'm trying to see a little bit about that. But yeah, so we long story short. In a lot of cases we haven't seen success that. There's been some cases where we've seen some good success with it. I wouldn't say like any crazy results, but if we're helping boost items that also have like lower ad relevancies and are having a little bit of hard time getting traction, like we've seen some decent success there. I would say, just because they're giving away a lot of promos with that, like check your email, you probably got either like spend a thousand, get a thousand, spend 500, get 500, or even now yesterday I think I saw some clients got like spend 500, get 250 or something along those lines. So there's a lot of you know I'm opportunities, or even you could see from there, like how you know how effective it is and then from there you could decide if you want further in it. I think it's definitely worth what. It depends on the category. So, like I would say, you know, search on Google for, let's say, you sell bikes, or turn Google for bikes and see, like what Google Shopping ads are coming up and if you feel like you're right, fit well there and convert well there, based on your pricing and Based on your product type, like then there's definitely opportunity there.   Carrie Miller: What's kind of interesting is. I remember you pointed out to me like two years ago that Walmart was actually doing this for us for free, and so we actually got a lot of traffic to our listings through those kind of Google ads and I noticed my sales picked up with the Google ads that they were doing for me for free. So I do think it's definitely something that's worthwhile to do, because it says Walmart comm under the Google shopping little ad and so people trust Walmart comm and it's just a, I think, a higher conversion rate. For that reason I'm. Coupons can you tell me a little bit about coupons? I know they're in beta and I know you have had access to coupons. What kind of success have you seen with those? And can you tell us just a little bit about the coupons that Walmart is testing out right now?   Michael: Yeah, so traditionally there's really been no coupons on Walmart.com. Besides, for some in-store items was through a third-party provider. There was a couponing program that was very expensive for in-store brands and you should spend tens and tens of thousands of dollars to be part of it. That was the only couponing available on Walmart. Walmart recently rolled out couponing through Marketplace beta and it's been in beta I think it's already been a couple months and we've been having a lot of testing with it. I've started to become a really big fan of it. We've started seeing some really strong success there. Now, in some ways, obviously when you have a price cross-off it works better, but obviously with coupons, not everybody redeems, so you save a little bit there. But more importantly, the reason why we've been leveraging coupons is Walmart has these deal shelves that do a lot of volume, and very significant volume, In order to be able to be eligible for those deal shops deal pages that a lot of times want really good pricing, sometimes even better than Amazon. So if you're going to provide pricing that's better than Amazon, or even if it's going to be good pricing but you just don't want to bring down your Amazon, you're okay, get bringing down your Walmart. You just don't want to bring down your Amazon because your Amazon is doing a lot of volume. Whatever the case might be, you don't want to lose your buy box on Amazon. One of the good ways to do that is through couponing, because it depends on who your account manager is and how well your relationship is with Walmart, but they do sometimes accept your items for that. So that's been a one really cool way to leverage coupons and we've been seeing some success there.   Carrie Miller: Okay, another one that's in beta is subscribe, not subscribe and save. You said subscribe. So have you had some clients utilizing subscribe on Walmart? Has it been getting good traction? What do you think about subscribe?   Michael: I think it's got ways to go. I think it's really cool that there's that functionality there now. I think in the beginning that we're testing out subscribe and save and now it's just unsubscribe. But there's really, if you're selling obviously consumables, anything consumables, but anything people repurchase often, it definitely makes a lot of sense. I think just the Walmart, it's pretty prominent now and a lot of times it's auto selected, so it's like pretty prominent and I'll talk to buy a lot of items. So we have been seeing some traction there. The issue is, I think the Walmart customer isn't used to subscribing yet. So on Amazon they're very used to subscribing. So I think it's going to take some time till the Walmart customer really picks up on that. It doesn't hurt to have it on there, obviously, but I think it's going to take some time till the Walmart customer really picks up on the habit of subscribing and the convenience of it. So I think we got a little bit of time to go there, but it's cool that it's already built out.   Carrie Miller: Yeah, sounds like coupons is giving better traction. Okay, so I have had a lot of questions from people recently about, you know, they're starting up on Walmart and they're kind of, you know, getting everything set up but they want to really, you know, be successful on the Walmart marketplace and they want to get sales going. So what are some strategies and what are some things that you would give advice to somebody who's you know maybe just starting out on Walmart, or maybe they're on Walmart and they haven't had enough traction yet? Like, what are some sales strategies that you would recommend to them to boost their visibility and sales on Walmart?   Michael: Yeah, so I think there's a few things and obviously it depends a lot on the type of items you sell and a whole bunch of other things, but some things that generally keep in mind is Walmart recently started releasing some data, which is extremely helpful. If you have Pacvue, you could actually see it on search insights on Pacvue. But there's basically Walmart started releasing data through API on the Kinect side where it basically shows you every keyword on Walmart, from 1,000 to 300,000, what the keyword is, how high it ranks, right. So they're not giving you search volume data, they're giving you, if it's one, it's the most searched keyword, right, for example. And then what are the three top items converting getting the click share and the conversion share for those keywords and the way we you know, I think, when you're coming to the platform and you're in a new or seller coming to the platform, I think it's really important to understand the shelves that have volume and the key word is the shelf. But like the shelves that have volume, and then what's converting for those shelves and make sure like your product fits the characteristics of what's currently converting there, because if not, like you're right, you might be successful, but it's hard to know. But if your product has the right features, as at the similar price points and maybe even more competitive, then you know there's good opportunities there and I think you really have to tailor your approach a lot more to understand the shelves and their standards going on. That's number one. Number two is, like, lean into the Walmart programs as fast, as quickly as possible, whether it's WFS, whether it's Walmart Connect, whether it's work incentives working with Walmart, whether it's, you know, flash deals, promotions. Like, really lean into those programs. They drive so much significant volume and it's something that you know is. It's one of the advantages of being a marketplace seller versus selling DSV on you know one P to Walmart. So, like you have a lot of those advantages, you might as well use them to your leverage.   Michael: And people always complain about and I hear this all the time the one P seller is in the store items. They're on the top, ranked on the top and they get preference. The reality is that marketplace sellers have a lot of advantages that the one P sellers don't. So if the marketplace sellers really tap into the advantages and I've seen the ones that do it but if they tap into Flash Deals, promotions, a lot more of those placements are marketplace right now. They're not. Flash Deals is basically all marketplace, I think if not I'm not mistaken, it's all marketplace. Mosaic's are, especially during key times and events. It's very heavily marketplace driven. A lot of the data and things you get is a lot more on the marketplace side than on the one-piece side. So there's really a lot of programs that you could really lean into, especially with WFS. There's so many things that if you do them, you put yourself at a better advantage. So yeah, I would just kind of strongly emphasize that.   Carrie Miller: So you're saying Walmart Connect is advertising and the Flash Deals not everybody has access to those. Can you maybe give some strategies to get those or what is needed in order to get access to Flash Deals?   Michael: So if you're doing volume any decent significant volume it's usually going to be added to your account. If it's not and you're doing a lot of volume, you can reach out to me and I can get it added to your account. But yeah, most cases if your account's doing volume it'll get added to your account. If not, you can open up a case and request that. I'm not sure if that works, but you can email me and I can try to get it added to your account.   Carrie Miller: Is there a number of certain amount of volume, a year or a month, or what are they looking for?   Michael: So I'm not sure they don't say it. I know there's a number for that specific item to be eligible for Flash Picks. To actually do that it's in the thousands. It's not that much that it has to be doing in sales. It's in the low thousands for it to be eligible for Flash Deals. But for the account itself, I'm not sure Because I have very small accounts that have it and I have sometimes bigger ones that don't have it, that just have to request it. So yeah, I'm not sure exactly what the criteria is.   Carrie Miller: All right, yeah, those are some good suggestions. Anything maybe on the optimization side, or like do you think? That the pro seller badge is really needed, like what are some other things people can do and focus on that they can control to get more sales.   Michael: Yeah. So I think items if you're already an existing seller or if you're coming on, like I think it's important to pay attention to item spec 5.0. There's been new updates in the Walmart guidelines for how items are listed. I was actually in the Walmart offices in Hoboken a few weeks ago and we were actually looking through listings that we managed and seeing how, like, once item spec 5.0 got implemented for listings that didn't implement the changes, how, like slow performance kind of dropped off in some areas. So definitely learn those, pay attention to some of those, adjust your listings. You know, in Venezuela there's no reason to wait until, like, you're not just starting to not rank to make those changes. So I would definitely suggest that is one thing that you could control. I really pay attention to.   Carrie Miller: All right. So what about keywords? So you said you know they're basically ranked on there, but I know you know with Helium 10, we have kind of a search volume. You know, what kind of keywords do you recommend going after, like if something has you know 30,000 search volume or it's like a high ranked volume, do you think people should go after those? Or should they go over after low hanging fruit keywords in their advertising, in their listing? Like, what's your keyword strategy for marketplace sellers?   Michael: It's a great question. So start off with getting as really figuring out your really high converting keywords and building campaigns around those. Because even though the volumes of those are so low, you really need to build ad relevancy on Walmart and you could try bidding on the main keywords. But it's just so. Even if your item in a situation where your item would convert really well for a high volume keyword, you eventually want to target those because that's where you'll make sales. It's too hard to make sales by the smaller keywords. If it's a situation where the really large keyword, your item, doesn't fit in well there, like then you know that shouldn't be an item you're focusing on. But in order to be able to bid effectively on those keywords, you need to start building some ad relevancy. So what you'd seen work best is like building some campaigns around a lot more targeted keywords and build some relevancy there and then from there, like when you start bidding on the main keywords, you'll start being able to win them much easier and much better.   Carrie Miller: Do you mean like long tail keywords, like, for example, like bookshelf, like you would say large green bookshelf and you would target that instead of just bookshelf?   Michael: Exactly, yeah, and with Walmart, like you don't have to go even that long tail, like sometimes it's even two words, right. So like a white bookshelf, a bookcase, a green bookcase, but things like that, and you'll already have, you know, some volume there. That already allowed you to start converting.   Carrie Miller: Another question for you about ads. Then I noticed whenever I'm shopping on Walmart I haven't seen many people utilizing video ads. Do you know why that would be? You know? Do you think they're really good converting tool for you know? Because I think they're only a dollar and I think that's pretty cheap for a lot of people who are moving over from Amazon, or like just a dollar or something. They're not that expensive comparatively to Amazon. So I'm just curious why you think maybe there's not as many video ads and what you think? You know how well you think they're doing?   Michael: Yeah, so we've been having good success with video ads. It's really great if you have good content about your product and there is good video, so to say, do about your product. You're getting so much brand visibility and just for low costs. Like you said, the reason why it's not in a lot of categories is, for the most part, it's usually people not bidding on it. Like you have to accept the video ads and most people are just not doing it. So a lot of times, like we'll see really good success there, then some competitors start the video ads because we're doing it and then it starts becoming not as economical. But in the beginning you could get some good boost out of it.   Carrie Miller: Any other strategies or anything that maybe I haven't covered, that you wanted to talk about in this?   Michael: I think that's good. I think just pay really close attention to the updates and things that are coming out from Walmart, like if you're pretty quick to jump on those, you know some of those programs could help move the needle. So and just plan a lot around promotions. Like there's a lot of leverage with promotions. Like try to plan properly around how to position your promotions. It's a longer conversation but there's a lot to unpack there. So definitely try to have a better eye for the promotional angle.   Carrie Miller: I did see like Black Friday it came up pretty quickly. Is that kind of how Walmart works? Is like the deals come out pretty quickly, you have to move fast and say you want to do them, or is there a planning process for them?   Michael: There's a planning process. If you have an account manager, like holiday deals get planned way in advance, but there's also like the prime equivalent event that they do around prime things. So like definitely want to plan ahead with your account manager and ask them if there's any opportunities for your items to fit into any of their promotions and see if there's any opportunities there.   Carrie Miller: Okay, all right. So we've got a question from Lady and the Storm. How long is the process to get approved?   Michael: To sell on Walmart. It could either happen right away, it could either take a few days, it could either be a denial. So you know it really depends on. But if you really, if you fill out your information properly and you double check it all and you fill out your information properly and all the paperwork and everything matches up and you're, you know it looks like you have a decent Amazon store, like you know, you shouldn't have a problem getting accepted unless you have, like another application before. And most people, by the way, that come to us with like a non accept, like denied accounts, it's usually like they have another, they have another, they have another account they tried opening. It's linked on the email, there's that to like all these bunch of things. But just, I think it's very important to make sure you really think through your application, make sure that you know you have everything filled out and if you already tried applying in the past, like reach out about it rather than opening up another application, it'll just get both your applications, yeah you can reach out to sell cord.   Carrie Miller: Michael does has helped some people that have gotten rejected. That I've sent over to him. So reach out to them if you do have some issues with that. And also have they kind of loosened the guidelines on? You know, do you have to be an established seller still? Or I've seen some people who, like maybe started a new brand and then they applied and they got accepted. Is that the kind of the norm or is that just kind of like? They got kind of passed through and they got lucky.   Michael: No, so they're starting to accept like newer, smaller sellers. It depends a lot on the products you sell and you know it goes there. It goes under different teams based on the main category that you're under. So you know there's definitely there is there. There changes a little bit but for the most part we started seeing new small applications get approved.   Carrie Miller: So it is dependent on the category. So that's a good thing to note. Okay, next one from Lynn how to manage Amazon PPC. Okay, so we're not doing Amazon. See, for example, how to add negative keywords in Walmart. So okay, so I'm going to try to sit rephrase this, maybe in Walmart terms, because this we're not talking about Amazon in this one, but how to manage Amazon or Walmart PPC. The platform is different from Amazon. For example, how to add negative keyword in Walmart Seller Center.   Michael: Yeah, so Walmart Seller Center doesn't have negative targeting yet they're adding it so that they're adding that there's new things that came like conquesting ads and stuff like that, so there is newer things for targeting. But, yeah, negative is gonna come soon.   Carrie Miller: Yeah they said it was on the road map. So yeah. Alright. Next lady in a storm asks how long do you have to ship your items?   Michael: So it depends on how you fill out your shipping template. So you just have to whatever you fill out in your shipping templates, like that's what you have to when you have to meet. So if you fill out two days, you're gonna have to make sure it's two days. It's a fill out one day. So it depends how you manage your shipping templates. I think there's a minimum. There's like a maximum, though I'm not exactly sure what that is.   Carrie Miller: But I think it's seven days. This is the max. Can you analyze wholesale for sales data in competition with helium 10? You can with x-ray. So you can, you know, find the products that you want to sell and you can actually Utilize x-ray to look at sales. So that's a great way to do it, mostly. And then also, you know, you can also look at the sales rank as well in the back end of seller center. You can utilize that information and then any information that you get, like if you have Pacvue or using kind of a software To help you to run your ads. You can see some more data in there that way, but I would say mostly x-ray for helium 10, go ahead and go to the, the main page for the price that you're selling, and then pull, pull our Chrome extension and it'll show you the sales data there. Um, okay, is tied? Janak Ranchod said is title density as relevant to Walmart listings compared to Amazon listings?   Michael: Yeah, so I'm not sure exactly what it's meant by that, but Title Density on Helium 10 is basically Keyword phrases on Amazon.   Carrie Miller: So if you, for example, green bookshelf and you wanted to target green bookshelf but if, like 50 competitors on page one have green bookshelf in their title, it's gonna be really competitive. However, if that phrase you see that maybe only one or two have just that same exact phrase, then you can actually rank for it a lot easier on Amazon. So it's basically like the exact phrase form and how many competitors have that exact phrase in their title.   Michael: Yeah. So I have a different approach when it comes to ranking on Walmart and you know everybody's got their own opinions. But my approach for ranking on Walmart is more about you have to find the keywords that have the most volume and then, based on the most volume, you have to then analyze who's taking the conversion share of those keywords and then understand their product, their price points and, if you're on the features around their product, if your product Matches up well enough to their product, meaning you're just as you have just as much features, your item is just as good, if not better, and your price points competitive enough. That's what you want to target because you know if you get there you'll convert and you're gonna have to check their PDP and make sure like your PDP is better and all that kind of stuff. But the problem is, if you're focusing on, if you do all that research, but you're focusing on key on items, on keywords, that the items that converting in the shelf, you're not gonna, you're not gonna match on, you're not gonna match one next to it, doesn't matter if you rank, you're just gonna start de-ranking because Walmart's so heavily based on conversion rates. So I that's kind of our approach to it, and also because the Significant keywords are the only ones that drive legitimate volume, like there is some volume done from other keywords but it's usually not significant enough loose is asking Do you recommend to start Walmart even when just started on Amazon? I would say it depends on their products, your storemen and a little bit of more about your company. But as a whole, usually not usually, I would say like build your brand, build a little bit of your capabilities off of Amazon. It's gonna be hard to tackle both at the same time and then start with that.   Carrie Miller: So you think starting on Amazon first is a good idea, and then yeah. Okay, the next one. Jenak asked. I hope I'm saying your name right, Jenak. Jenak, can you simply copy your Amazon listings to create your Walmart listings?   Michael: You shouldn't. That's a big no-no. You should Rewrite your listings like you can use the same core of information. You should rewrite your titles, descriptions, key features, to be optimized based on Walmart style guide. So number one, the keywords that you care about, are going to be different. Walmart wants shorter titles, they want different style, descriptions, key features. So for the most part, all that's different. So you really that's kind of the biggest Task is to just make sure you're optimized specifically for Walmart.   Carrie Miller: Yeah, I think it actually kind of hinders you on your listing quality score when you do that. So yeah, Lynn asks are you going to host a Walmart PPC management session? We really need it. I think we can arrange that in the in the near future. So we'll definitely work on that and if you haven't joined our one winning with Walmart group, that's probably where we'll do it. So make sure you're in our helium 10 winning with Walmart group if you want to do that. Alright, it looks like we've come to an end of the questions. I think that we had a lot of great information. Oh, we got another question. I will put this one up here. Let's see here. Mr. Kamal says how much revenue Should you have on Amazon to consider yourself to move to Walmart?   Michael: So I mean, the revenue number is a hard thing because it depends on your Category and the type of items you sell and how competitive is on Walmart versus how well you're doing on Amazon. A lot of times, if you really started tapping on your Amazon and then definitely make sense to spend one by once, you already have some traction and you have a good hold. You have good products, like you know, I would I mean, we're a big fan of Walmart's a lot of times will tell people to start pretty early on. So it's just, I think, less about revenue numbers because it's so dependable based on different brands. I think what what's important to understand is like do you have good enough products that are? You know? You feel like you know you could move properly on Walmart. Is enough volume for them on Walmart? And what is that? What is what type of a volume are you looking for it to be worthwhile for you to kind of take on the endeavor? And then you know, yeah, and, and based on that you could really analyze, okay, are you ready to move, and what that would look like and just expand not move, but expand.   Carrie Miller: All right, it looks like we've come to an end of the questions. Thank you everyone for joining and for just, you know, interacting and asking all these great questions throughout. And thanks again, Michael, for joining us. I know it's been a while since you've been on and I'm really happy that you were able to answer a lot of these questions for us. So thanks again and we will see you all again next month. We'll have another guest for Winning with Walmart Wednesday, and we'll see you then. Bye, everyone.

31m

Feb 20, 2024

Cara Sayer's entrepreneurial spirit shines brighter than ever as she recounts her nail-biting journey from the brink of closure to soaring profits. Her candid discussion with us offers a lot of wisdom on the critical importance of keeping a keen eye on business metrics. As an e-commerce maven, she underpins the conversation with her own blunders and breakthroughs, ensuring that our listeners can sidestep the pitfalls and replicate her success. And for those with a penchant for cultural quirks, our banter in British slang adds a hearty dash of charm to the mix. Our talk takes an exciting turn when we unlock the secrets to mastering keyword research and making data-led decisions that skyrocket sales. Cara and Bradley dissect how tools like Helium 10 can revolutionize product listings and why a stale strategy could be your downfall. We also unravel the complex web of inventory management and the savvy approach to just-in-time shipping, a must-know for Amazon sellers looking to conquer international markets. Plus, don't miss our exploration of the monumental impact that solid branding has on weathering the competitive storm and securing consumer trust. Wrapping things up, we navigate the art of standing out in Amazon's vast marketplace. Cara shares her playbook on crafting a unique narrative and engaging brand backstory that can mean the difference between blending in and breaking through. We spotlight the strategic edge of maintaining your website for direct consumer rapport and a sneak peek at new products. With a nod to the upcoming changes in EU regulations and the significance of a diversified sales approach, this episode is jam-packed with actionable insights. And as we close, Cara and Bradley reflected on the delicate dance of work-life balance, ensuring our listeners remember the heartbeat behind the hustle. In episode 536 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Cara discuss: __ __ ► 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 listener favorite guest car back to tell us how she came close to having to shut down her business since she wasn't looking at the right metrics, but she's going to show us how she was not only able to save her company but grow it. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Are you a 6, 7, or 8 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.   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 to continue in my series of me being on the other side of the world here in Germany, the next guest that we recorded here in Frankfurt is none other than the amazing Cara. Welcome back to the show.   Cara: Thank you, gorgeous one, thank you for having me.   Bradley Sutton: This is actually the fourth time, believe it or not on the podcast.   Cara: Am I approaching a world record for the most interviewed person?   Bradley Sutton: You're in the select top 5% of people who have made it to four episodes.   Cara: There you go I love it.   Bradley Sutton: So we're not going to go too much into her backstory. Mhel here prepared some of the numbers where she's on, so if you want to find out her origin story, that's episode 117. She came back on episode 246 and we were talking pandemic stuff and then most recently back in 2022, she was on episode 378. And that was interesting, talking about some of her struggles that she started seeing with her business, and we're going to talk a little bit about that today. Hey, we keep it real on the podcast, but before we get into the stuff we. Every time Cara is on the episode, she teaches me a little bit more of British English, all right, and I'm sure it's going to come out like, like she, the way she talks. She always says stuff that I'm like what, what did you say? So we're all going to learn some more British slang here? My first question is wait, what is this one phrase? That was something.   Cara: Yeah, so we were talking about something. I said oh, that's just piffling, and piffling is when something's really inconsequential, so it's just like so little, it's like a piffling thing, okay. And then the other one was put some Wellie into it.   Bradley Sutton: Put some Wellie into it.   Cara: So, which is, I suppose, a translation, would be put some oomph into it.   Bradley Sutton: Okay, put some oomph in it. All right, so I'm wearing my office the office t-shirt Dunder Mifflin here, because you know that's one of our exports that we got from, from Britain, is the office. You know, one of our most popular shows. I know how it's used, but when people say Bob's your uncle, like, like, where does that come from? Though that's the most ridiculous phrase I've ever heard Bob's your uncle, how does that?   Cara: I actually have no clue. This is half the problem. So when I talk, a lot of the time I'll use these phrases and I have no clue. I haven't got a Scoobies where it came from. That was one, and I thought maybe that had something to do with Scooby-Doo, but apparently it doesn't, because I Googled it last night and it's got something to do with the Scottish word that's got to do with Scooby or something. So that's the thing is a lot of these things I have, and in fact, what's the other one? There's one oh, I'll have it, it'll come back to me. But there's one that I use quite a lot and I actually had to Google it because and it turned out was something to do an Australian runner or something. Oh, Gordon Bennett, that's right, Gordon Bennett, have you ever heard of that one?   Bradley Sutton: I have not.   0:03:49 - Cara: Okay. So you know, instead of being really rude and throwing out an F word, you go oh, Gordon Bennett. And I was like who is Gordon Bennett? Why do we say him? And I'm quite interested in these things and I think he's. Either he was either an Australian pilot or an Australian runner or something like that. I have no clue why we use it, but we do and I say it quite a lot.   Bradley Sutton: Now the first. You know like you know how I roll here. I usually don't like trying to get our topics before I don't really think about it. But you know, we went out to dinner last night and you were talking a little bit about some of your struggles and how you were taking one aspect of your total business and we're kind of like not giving it the attention it needed. And then when you actually did, you were just like, wow, this is I'm in such bad shape, why have to close? You know, shut the business. So talk about what you were neglecting, how you put a stop to that neglect and then the steps that you took to rectify this situation.   Cara: So I think a lot of it comes from the fact that when I started my business I had no clue what I was doing, and I suppose a lot of Amazon sellers are like that, in that you just sort of go yeah, this sounds like a good idea. So I'm going to start running a business and I used to work in a corporate environment and had budgets and all various other things, but in my own business I didn't. I just kind of ran a lot like the seat of my pants and I think maybe that's just because, also, my I'm more of an intuitive person versus a data driven person, because I know a lot of Amazon sellers are very data driven and maybe less, you know, intuitive. You know, as in like everyone has different skill sets. And I think what happened was the business grew and grew and grew and I basically broke my own golden rule, which is that at the end of the day, the whole thing about turnover is vanity and profit is sanity. So what I was doing is I was just looking at the big numbers and not really focusing on small numbers, and I sort of came to a point in July where I realized that basically what happened was I used to use the software Sage for my accounts and I knew Sage inside and out. And then I changed accountants and they started to use zero and I didn't know it as well. So, if I'm honest, I should have been more involved, but I just kind of let them like run it. And so when I went to look at my accounts I was like, oh God, I don't seem to have made very much money. I've got really quite a good turnover, but I haven't actually made much profit. I'm thinking like, what am I gonna do? So I started looking into it in much more depth.   Cara: So, first of all, what I did and I would suggest every Amazon seller does this. But, to be honest, as you know, I don't really talk about Amazon sellers, I talk about businesses and brands. But every company that is selling products, you 100% need to really make sure that your profit and loss, your PnL, reflects what you're doing. So mine was literally sales, pretty much as a big picture. Well, I sell in four countries. I've got four websites, four marketplaces. I've also got retailers and distributors and various other things. So to have all of my sales information in one place was a bit stupid, frankly, because how am I gonna get any clarity on what's doing well, what's not doing so well, and pretty much all my costs, like all my Amazon costs, were all bunched in one place. And yes, I could have separated them out if I'd done it by area. But actually I then had an issue with my bookkeeping and so actually it turned out that hadn't been done properly, so I wouldn't have been able to do that, so I then separated my costs out. So again I had like eight different cost centers for well, not eight different cost centers, sorry, I did four different cost centers, but by country, so I could at least see what I was making in terms of turnover and then see what the costs were for those countries, looking at a lot of detail. And then I started looking like then I went into and this is a really really super useful and I don't think I certainly haven't used it before the SKU economics level of reporting, where I mean, obviously it's easy for me because I've got only 13 SKUs and I know I've spone people today and they'd like two and a half thousand. But you can actually see although it would be really good if Amazon could do or actually I don't think Helium 10 does it do they Like, an ability to export SKU economics reports?   Bradley Sutton: Oh, I don't know what SKU economics means. I mean, we have-.   Cara: Oh my God, right. Well, in which case, I'm giving you a whole new thing that Helium 10, a thousand-.   Bradley Sutton: I mean, I probably do it but I just don't call it that. You know like it's called.   Cara: SKU economics.   0:07:58 - Bradley Sutton: There's no other right.   Cara: So basically I saw it for the first time on the app because I'm quite a regular app checker. So I go in and I have a look and it's in the manage inventory. You go to the SKU and then on the top it's got like pricing and this and that and then it says SKU economics and you can actually You're talking about seller central.   Bradley Sutton: This is Seller Central   Cara: Yes, sorry, do translate. So I go to SKU economics and basically you can do it like the last seven days, last 30 days, last six months, last 12 months, and it's the only place I've ever seen where you can literally see what your total sales are, what your net sales are, what your Amazon costs are, and they break it down to a level of detail where it's literally like you spent this amount on a deal coupon code, this amount on a sponsored profit by SKU.   Bradley Sutton: Okay, yes, helium 10 has that. We don't call it SKU economics, but it's just in profits. You go to your product performance and then you could look at it at the ASIN level or you could look at the SKU level. Okay, well, you need to show me how to do that then, okay, we'll do-.   Cara: But I did this myself, just went in Sure, and then I started transporting all the information over and then I broke it down by country and I started looking and I realized that actually, like in Canada, when you actually put in the cost of my product, excluding shipping in or any other costs, I had running a business in Canada I was pretty much not even breaking even. And then I started looking at the US and I was like, oh same thing, not good UK, really healthy Australia, healthy so. But at the time I was before I did all the analysis and there was a lot of work to do on it I was literally like, oh my God, I think I'm gonna just have to shut up shop because I've got an issue with the Chinese sellers who I think were impacting before, but they're really kicking off now because obviously my product was launched over 10 years ago, so they know there's no patent on that product. Therefore, they can go for it. So at the moment they're selling the product that looks like mine it is not the same but it looks as similar enough to the consumer for $5. Well, it cost me $25 to manufacture the thing. They're selling them for $25 on Amazon and I can't compete. Now I don't want to compete, but the issue is what it's done.   Cara: And again, this is where I wasn't paying attention and should have, like, pulled myself up sooner. I didn't see the huge drop in the sales and therefore my storage costs at 3PL level have gone up hugely and therefore I've got huge, big overheads on the fact that I've got all this stock and it's not selling. And if I sell it at too low a price then I'm almost not even, I'm not gonna break even at all. So anyway, I started doing a whole lot of analysis and I literally I've probably had my head in spreadsheets for close to four months, something like that. But I tell you what, once you've done that sort of work, the clarity you have and the decisions you can make. So, for example, I actually decided, normally I'm all about trying to give my customers the most range possible, the widest, and I'm like excuse, my French, fuck that.   Cara: Literally I'm just gonna give them this product, this product, this product, this product. You don't need the variations, because the variations are costumey, extra. They often get returned because they may be by the wrong one thinking they didn't realize it at a pink trim and they bought that one. So I'm like actually that one I know they'll like they either have that one or nothing, and so that's now my more my approach. And then the other thing I was doing as well is looking more into the keywords and looking more into making sure that the listing was actually really reflecting the keywords that are out there. So I was doing a lot of helium 10 research into that and actually updating the listings. So they'd probably been around like one of them particularly had been around for about two or three years and I probably hadn't really ever done that much work on it and already I only updated it like middle of December. It's not my peak season and I can see the sales coming up. And that's from literally looking at what are the terms that we should be using. Because, it changes over time.   Bradley Sutton: It can change the same product, but the how people find it are searching for it to change over time.   Cara: Exactly, and also, I mean, I do have a tendency to kind of invent keywords as well.   Bradley Sutton: So words, that I use in my speech and also in my listings.   Cara: So I find that things like there are certain keywords that I use in my listings, that because people are copying my listings, they're copying my wording and therefore then that wording is then getting picked up in like brand analytics, et cetera. So it's quite fascinating, but the thing is is at the end of the day, I think it does. You know, I'm all about the marketing, I'm all about the intuition, but also you have to be about the data as well and the numbers, and you know there's a difference between taking some risk and investing in something that your business needs in order to grow, versus just sort of sitting there and maybe not paying attention to what you shouldn't really be spending, and that's what I was doing. So bad me, bad me.   Bradley Sutton: So, you know, instead of having to shut down the whole business, you were able to, you know, maybe shut down some unprofitable skews. Well, I shut down Canada, shut down, you know, marketplaces, and that might be a scary thing. You know, some people, they go to extremes. They're like I got to, just I'm just going to quit everything, and that's not good. Or they're like no, like I have to succeed in Canada, like I know it can work despite all the numbers. Screw the numbers. You know I'm going to make this work. You know you got to be able to not easily give up by the same time, understand that you'd have battles, or if you want to win the war, you might need to like. So it doesn't always have to be permanent. That's the other thing, right?   Cara: So just because I've shut Canada down for now doesn't mean I can't come back to Canada. But right now the numbers don't work in terms of getting the product over there, the various other things that are there, the pricing structures, etc. The percentage of the particular products that will sell and the ones that won't it. I literally just was like no, okay, that doesn't make sense. And, like you say, there is a bit of ego in there in terms of like oh well, I sell on, you know, for marketplaces. Well, who cares? If you're not making money, don't sell on any, you know. So I did. And then I actually had a chat, the reason I was gonna shut the US down. So I had another a chat with another friend of mine who she'd exited a business, an eight-figure business, and she was saying the US is really tough and particularly because, like Amazon, are doing all this now Penalizing you for not having enough in as well as penalizing you for having too much, and it's like God, Gordon Bennett, like give us a break, right, seriously, give us a break.   Cara: And I was like you know what the thing is that in my home country it's a lot easier to manage that sort of thing, which obviously, you know it, the US is not my home country, so I'm gonna have to pay more for storage and 3PLs and all the rest of it, managing that constant fluctuation. So I did the numbers and it is actually cheaper for me to fly it in on a sort of just in time basis, at least for the short term, because that's the other thing. Sometimes it's not about always doing things, for I'm never gonna. I'm gonna do that forever. It's more, let's just have a breather and Monitor the costs and then see whether you've got something going on that works.   Bradley Sutton: Yeah, now, I didn't get to see your presentation right now because I was recording some podcast in here, but I know like one of the things you talk about a lot is is branding, and I imagine Actually that's one of the reasons why you don't have to shut your business down and why, you know, some people might have been listening right now and thoughts themselves wait a minute, if she has very close knockoffs who are selling for $25 and her price is $90, you know it's not a matter of oh, maybe us is just a little bit more profitable in Canada. You know, like that that's a huge gap, you know right there. But you're obviously not fighting on price and I would imagine one of the main reasons why you're able to Succeed is because of your strong brand 100% because we grew in the UK.   Cara: 30% Grew, even at that price..   Bradley Sutton: You know it's not like the Chinese sellers are not selling in the UK.   Cara: I've got loads of Chinese sellers chasing me in the UK, but the difference is that the brand is better known and is better trusted and therefore you know they, they and also I think there is an element, you know, there is an element of the fact that you know whichever country you're based in, you know People like to support a more local business, so there is an element of that. So, if you're a US seller in the US, I do think sometimes you know you need to make more of that because actually you know US citizens are gonna want to support a US business.   Bradley Sutton: Yeah, so talk, talk a little bit more about that. It's about you know the all of this can be considered part of your branding. You know where's it manufactured. You know, like, are you really targeting your, your target avatar? You know, what did you talk about in your presentation today that you can maybe share with the audience About some things that will help them to one of the one of the one of the biggest things was the fact that I do think a lot Of Amazon sellers don't really have a brand.   Cara: They just have a name for a business or a name for something that they use and they don't really have a what I'd call a true brand, and they don't always. I think sometimes also, existing only on Amazon makes you lose perspective on you know how normal businesses work, like businesses that aren't based on Amazon, and so you know a lot of businesses. I mean, I think throughout life, people buy from people and I think that's so important to remember that, even on Amazon, one of the reasons why Amazon focus is so heavily on a plus listings and now they're bringing in the premium, a plus and all the rest of it, because Amazon knows right. I, you know, you've known me quite a few years now and I've always banged on about brand. I've always banged on about having a story.   Cara: Tell your story. It doesn't have to be your story necessarily. It could be the product story, but you need to have something that differentiates you and and even then I was chatting to someone the conference earlier on and I was saying the thing is that sometimes it's not even the fact that you're you're selling different products. It's the way that you curate them, right. So it's the collection of products that you've chosen to sell it under your brand name Says something because, like, if you check, if I said right, bradley, like we're both gonna do kitchenware, I guarantee you that both of us would choose different products. If you said right, you've got to choose 10 products and you know, off you go, I would choose 10 different or we might have some crossover, but you know, we might both have a garlic crusher, for example. I used a garlic crusher as an example in my talk about how even a garlic crusher can have a story.   Bradley Sutton: We call that garlic press.   Cara: Thank you for enlightening, but you know. But the whole point is that you know, even the fact that individual people are actually running these businesses means that there will be something individual about that business. So it's finding that story effectively and finding the why. I'm always really quite fascinated by the whys of business. So, for example, you look at things like Airbnb and Uber and things like that, and the why was because people didn't want to pay the stupidly high taxi rates. The why was the two guys who did Airbnb was because, of fact, they didn't want to. They didn't have enough money to rent a hotel room and they needed somewhere to stay and they couldn't afford all the other options. So they came up with a concept of Airbnb.   Cara: Even things like Ring, you know, like the doorbell company, you know that originally came that that wasn't the story there is. It's a reinvention of something traditional, but they've used technology that's available to revolutionize an existing product. It could also just be the way in which something is communicated with or handled like with the customers, so making the customers more engaged with the product. So, for example, one of the things I'm doing this year is I'm going to be doing an app which helps baby sleep through the provision of white noise, and you know that's an add-on product, but I won't be selling on Amazon, obviously. But the thing is, is it's kind of something where, again, it can become a marketing tool. It can become like something that you can, you know, give to people. You know there's other. I'm all about added value, like where can you give added value? And hopefully try and give added value where it doesn't cost you very much.   Bradley Sutton: Yeah, yeah, for sure. One thing I think that helps you expand also to different market places. Be it, you know, like when you, you know you started in UK, then went to US I know we were talking about the potential of UAE and you were saying, oh yeah, I've got. You know, I've got some customers down there and stuff, so talk to you about that. Like how can you say something like that Is that because you know people from social media who have bought your product? Or you look at the addresses of where people buy your products. But how can you say, oh yeah, I've got customers there. When I'm ready to launch there, I can hit them up and they'll promote it. Like how can you do that?   Cara: Okay, so yes, yes and almost yes. So, fundamentally, one of the other things I always bang on about and I banged on about it in my presentation is I do believe that any real brand or product business should have a website. There's two reasons for that, so I'm going to just go off on one tangent slightly, but the main reason for it is that, for example, I've been out of stock for two of my best selling products for the last couple of months because we've had issues getting stuff in from China, blah, blah, blah, and we had delays on the line, etc. Etc. So what I'm able to do with my websites, take pre-orders. You can't do that on Amazon, because if you don't have the stock, you can't sell. Literally, that's it, you're done. So I've generated, I've lost. My sales are down for the month in comparison to last year on Amazon and they're up not as much as they would be, but they're still significant enough money coming in on people who are prepared to hand over their money on the basis that the product will come. We tell them the dates and then we ship it.   Cara: And so, therefore, the benefit of having a website, for example, is I know exactly how much traffic my website gets from the UAE. I can literally see it down to the almost like city level because, like the analytics now on things like Shopify is absolutely fascinating. So I did a breakdown of breakdown of, like, all the visitors that come from outside of the UK and you know there's some significant numbers Also. Yes, the other thing with the UAE is that you have a lot of expats. Now, the one thing that expats lack is family, because they're living outside of their home country. So when they have a baby, they're much more reliant on external sources. So they're much more reliant on things like baby sleep experts. They're much more reliant on gadgets and things that can help the baby sleep. And, yeah, we've got influencers. There's actually a few baby sleep experts starting up in the UAE and at the moment I can't, I can't. It's really frustrating.   Cara: The most frustrating thing for me is when someone says they can't buy my product at a reasonable price, because I don't want to be like charging 25, 30 quid for a courier, which I do, and people will pay it, but I don't really want to be. I want them to get it at a price that works for them and in a time span that works for them. So the reason the UAE I've been sort of thinking about it for many, many, many years and in fact, I had way back in the day like 2010. I had a distributor in the UAE and I've had retailers in the UAE before, and I think the main issue is that they don't do any marketing, whereas I'm happy to do the marketing. So we're happy to make contact with the influencers, we're happy to, you know, and the good thing is we get people contacting us because it works both ways, and then we can say, oh, actually, yes, and we're selling on Amazon, so it gives us the opportunity to say, yeah, we can help you, sure.   Bradley Sutton: Really interesting. And another thing that I found or I probably knew this, but you know my memory is so bad but that you are an unexpected expert in things that have to do with, like trademarks and stuff like that. So what is something that you think the average listener might not know or might wow them like well, I didn't know that.   Cara: Well, one of the issues I think that people in fact I was chatting to someone at dinner last night about it is that quite often people worry about the fact that a particular brand name may have been registered already. Now, that's not necessarily a problem because, for example, McDonald’s farms now this is a slightly like random, not realistic example, but the principles are the same. So you've got McDonald's restaurants and then you've got McDonald's farm. Now we know, obviously McDonald's restaurants probably have got their own farm. But if they didn't, then there's absolutely no reason why you can't trademark McDonald's as a farm, because it's a different category and those categories are actually quite important. So, for example, if you've got a rubber duck company and you wanted to call it, you can't call it rubber ducks, it's too generic. But say, you wanted to call it sort of yellow ducky or something like that, right, and then somebody else was doing you know you're making toys and they're called yellow ducky, and then someone wanted to do a swimwear brand called yellow ducky. Well, actually you could have the two existing, like you wouldn't necessarily want to. This is the other thing. Sometimes it's not advantageous to actually have a similar brand name to somebody who's already established. But if they're in a completely different like industry. So if you had a yellow ducky, that was a truck company, right, and you're doing yellow ducky toys, no one's going to confuse the two, like you know. It's really not going to be like a case of someone's going to go to the yellow ducky truck company and think, oh, my goodness, where are my ducks, you know, or toys, or whatever. So there is that and there's also.   Cara: The other thing is, I think, is that you know, people don't really know how to search for that sort of thing and it's not that hard. The USPTO, the US Patent Trademark Office, has actually got some really good search functionality. There's also the WEPO, which is World Internet, because I'm always suggesting the other thing you need to do is you need to make sure that your trademark isn't taken in another country. So we have it quite a lot. I tend to talk about it in reverse, which is you might have a brand in the UK and then actually someone may have already filed for that trademark in the US. So there's no point really building up a brand in the US, in the UK sorry if you're then hoping to go to the US, because it's going to be too difficult, especially if they're in a similar sort of environment.   Cara: So it is really, and that works both ways. So I would say, even in the US, if you're thinking of expanding to Europe or to the UK or Australia or whatever, do a bit of due diligence, search online, because you will be able to find it, and make sure you use a VPN to go looking through on Google in local countries, because the other thing also you don't necessarily know is there was one brand that I know of in the baby industry and if you Google it, it actually means it's in Dutch, it actually means the bits of that hang off the back of a sheep's bottom.   Bradley Sutton: Okay.   Cara: Okay, so I'm not being funny, but I don't want that as a brand name they have and I don't seem to impact on them at all. But the thing is, you do want to see whether there's any weird colloquialisms or weird slang and things like that. Plus, the other thing is people get very like oh my goodness, what am I going to do? What am I going to do about like, trademarking internationally? And there is something called the Madrid Protocol and the Madrid Protocol. Once you've actually trademarked in a country that follows the Madrid Protocol which, by the way, includes America and China, EU, Australia, all the big players, all the most of the places you would want to trademark and once your trademark has been accepted and obviously this is why the due diligence is really important, to make sure that you haven't got like McDonald's restaurants anywhere else is you can use the Madrid Protocol to register in those other countries within a six month period of your trademark being approved in your home country. And it's a lot less and you don't need to use lawyers because otherwise you'd have to literally go out to each country and then trademark it. So I always say to people sort of think big in terms of and think safe. So, for example, it's super important to have a trademark in China, because trade in China. It is a first. I think it's a first to file. It is it's first to file, whereas in other countries it's first to use. I think the US is first to use.   Cara: So the problem is that you could have been using a trademark in, for example, I think in the UK we're first to file, I think in the US it's first to use. So somebody would not be able to probably register my trademark unless you know, because I would probably know about it and therefore it would come up and I'd say well, hang on a minute, I've been trading in the US for this amount of time and I also think I had to also do the same in Canada. I had to actually show how long I've been trading for. But in the UK you don't have to have been trading at all. So if I wanted to, I could literally take Helium 10, and I could trademark that in the UK. If you haven't done, you know, because no one else is using it. There's no reason why it wouldn't be, and you know so by thinking with using the Madrid protocol, especially in the early days of like, when you're just doing your trademark. It's expensive, but the thing is, if you think you're going to go. Well, if you're producing in China, you should definitely do it, and if you think you're going to go into the US or into the UK or EU, it's actually quite a cost effective way of getting a trademark.   Bradley Sutton: So Edumacated me about a lot of stuff there. Now, before we get into your last strategy, a couple of questions. I've been asking guests, so you've obviously been using Helium 10 for a while and I remember from the very first time I met you. There's just a lot of stuff that you don't know how to do. But about from the stuff that you do know how to do and that you do use, what is your favorite tool in Helium 10 that you feel gives you the most value, and why does it give you value?   Cara: It's the one. It's a Cerebro where you go in and look at the keywords put the ace in it and get the keywords yes, yes. So I love that one.   Bradley Sutton: Do you know what language Cerebro is?   Cara: Oh, is it Greek.   Bradley Sutton: No, it might be, I have some Greek in it, but it's. Oh, that's so the literal translation or the literal spelling is brain yeah, for Spanish yeah okay, cool, so yeah, so that's definitely one of my favorites.   Cara: and then I also use I get the marketplace alerts and things like that, and I particularly like every time I change my own or if a price changes. I love that coming in, because Amazon quite often starts selling my products in other places and it's useful to know what they're charging when they're doing it. And also it's a sanity check for me, like when I, for example, I messed up the other day big time. I'm launching a new product and I'm making a variation of another product and I accidentally put on the old product the new title. So I was accidentally selling the new product before it had launched because the old product was still live. So it was only when I got an email from Helium 10 saying my title had changed and I was like. So I ran into the back of, like Seller Central oh my god, I think it was only about 20 orders and then I'm like, trying to change the title, trying to change the title, trying to change the title, got it changed finally and that was yeah, that was a bit of a lifesaver as well.   Bradley Sutton: All right. So alerts is and Cerebro Wishlist for something that maybe we do it and you just don't realize it, or something that you think that we don't have. That would really make your life easier.   Cara: Well, the SKU economics. I'm gonna be looking for that, okay, so I don't know. We have to have a chat afterwards and we'll have a look, because the problem is with the Amazon seller central version is that it's not exportable. So I literally had to sit there and I was doing screenshots and then moving and copying, like a picture, into an Excel spreadsheet.   Bradley Sutton: For you with 13 SKUs. Maybe not so bad, but imagine somebody else.   Cara: I'm thinking, feeling the pain, but also if I wanted to do regular updates like where am I now? I don't want to have to go through that every single time. So I will be very interested to see. Because SKU economics honestly, I'm a bit obsessed with it at the moment because it's so useful in being really granular, Like literally, like that SKU has spent X amount of money on sponsored ads, that bit has generated that amount of profit and it tells you all the returns, like everything, and so it really gave me some, like I was saying, some really good knowledge into what the business was actually doing versus what I thought it was doing.   Bradley Sutton: Okay, your last 30, 60, I know for you might be hard. So maybe 90 second tip of the day. It could be about trademarks, it could be about branding, it could be about the best pubs to go to in Britain. I mean any possible subject that you are an expert on.   Cara: Okay, I'm not going to go down the pubs route.   Bradley Sutton: Okay, okay.   Cara: But no, I think my top tip is have a website outside of Amazon. Have some way where you can sell, because we are all at the mercy of Amazon and all that needs to happen is we've got some new regulations going into the EU that's going to impact on all the US sellers, which is new labeling laws, and if your product is not compliant, amazon will shut your listing down on December the 13th 2024. Literally, so it's absolutely vital that you have another way to sell. That's obviously in the EU, but like this, that could happen in any market. We just don't know what's going to happen. And the thing is, you know, if you have all your eggs in Amazon's basket, then you're not really giving yourself an opportunity to do anything other than be at the mercy of Amazon. And you know, whilst I do love Amazon, obviously, at the same time I don't think it's healthy to be that involved with any one person at all. So it is really good to be able to sort of spread the risk a little bit and, as I say, then that gives you the opportunity to do more things off Amazon, which then actually tend to drive more traffic. So my website increased by 30% last year. Amazon increased by 30% because I do encourage my customers to go to Amazon if that's what they want to do.   Cara: But and then there's also a customer who doesn't want to buy on Amazon because they don't like the concept, they don't believe in it. And there is, there is a there's a definite movement. A lot of people. Unfortunately, they don't understand how Amazon works and they think everything that's being sold on Amazon is being sold by Amazon. And I often have to explain to them like hang on a minute, I'm selling on Amazon. So by you not shopping on Amazon, you're actually not helping me.   Bradley Sutton: Yeah, yeah.   Cara: You know, and they don't get it. So, anyway, have a website and make sure you've got a really good, strong, like about us like page which sort of tells people why you're doing this.   Bradley Sutton: Awesome, awesome, Well, Cara, thank you so much. I have no doubt that you're gonna be make it to five episodes next year. You'll have some good stories and teach us some new vocabulary words as well. You know, one of the things I like about you is that you're not here to sell something and then not the people who Nothing bad about it, yeah nothing bad. You know, I have influencers and people who have service providers and they push their website Great. You know, that's why part of the reason why we're all here, but you know, you're just like helping people.   Cara: I love it.   Bradley Sutton: You speak and you have no agenda, so we're not gonna say, hey, go to carasayer.com but I have nothing on there. But I'm sure people like to hear from you. So like do you know where the next speaking? Are you speaking at a Billion Dollar Seller? Somebody are going there or anything.   Cara: No, I'm not allowed to, because my daughter's doing her big exams this year.   Bradley Sutton: So I've had it. This is the one year so no international travel until after July.   Cara: But I'm going to the European Seller Conference in Prague Because I'm allowed to stay with it.   Bradley Sutton: That's in March, I believe.   Cara: Yeah, march 13th to the 16th, I think it is, and I'm not speaking, but I'm just gonna go along as a participant and I'm really looking forward to it, actually, because I've never been before.   Bradley Sutton: So I love that conference. I spoke at it last year. Shivali is going this year. I won't be going this year, but make sure to go there If you guys want to go to Prague.   Cara: It's in March, it's a beautiful city as well.   Bradley Sutton: Yes, oh, and there's really great, amazing pizza place called Johnny's Pizza. I'll let you know where it works at.   Cara: I'll make sure I go out and make sure you're Really great, me and Shivali can go out and eat some pizza.   0:33:57 - Bradley Sutton: All right. Well, Cara. Thank you so much for joining us and coming out here from across the pond.   Cara: Indeed, a bit of a bumpy landing. It was yesterday, but yes.   Bradley Sutton: That was a little rough here in Frankfurt. I kept me a little awake there, but anyways, thank you so much for coming and I can't wait next year to see what you've been up to All right, take care.   Cara: All right, take care. I'll see you next time. Bye, bye, bye.

34m

Feb 17, 2024

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, interview someone you need to hear from and provide a training tip for the week. California man receives dozens of Amazon packages he never ordered https://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2024/02/15/mysterious-Amazon-packages-Woodside-California/6441708019084/ https://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2024/02/15/mysterious-Amazon-packages-Woodside-California/6441708019084/The Amazing Ways Walmart Is Using Generative AI https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2024/02/15/the-amazing-ways-walmart-is-using-generative-ai/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2024/02/15/the-amazing-ways-walmart-is-using-generative-ai/Sponsored Brands video introduces vertical video creatives on the advertising console and Amazon Ads API https://advertising.amazon.com/en-us/resources/whats-new/sponsored-brands-video-introduces-vertical-video-creatives/ https://advertising.amazon.com/en-us/resources/whats-new/sponsored-brands-video-introduces-vertical-video-creatives/The final leg of our journey takes us to the launch pad of Helium 10's latest tool, akin to Surfer SEO, but built for conquering the Amazon listing optimization battlefield. Bradley shares his journey from four months in the trenches, crafting over 150 listings to decode the Amazon algorithm for ranking. And for those hungry for knowledge, we spotlight an array of events and webinars, including a keyword research masterclass with Jason from Vitacup. Tune in for these insights and more, as we provide serious strategies for serious sellers looking to make their mark. In this episode of the Weekly Buzz by Helium 10, Bradley covers: __ __ ► 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's new FBA inbound placement service fees are going live in a couple of weeks. Walmart's integrating generative AI Vertical video PPC ads are now live. Helium 10 releases its most requested tool of 2023 for sellers. These and many more stories on today's weekly buzz. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I'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 goings on and news articles in the e-commerce world and we let you know what new Helium 10 features there are and we give you training tips of the week that will give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Let's see what's buzzing. Got a few articles today, but a little later on I'm going to give you guys a complete breakdown of that new FBA inbound inventory fee service that is coming out soon. Some sellers are saying they might have to pay double what they used to. Is that really true? I'm going to break down some things inside of Project X to show you what the fees are going to be, and make sure to stay to the end, because we also have exciting, exciting new tool announcement that's in beta for Helium 10 members.   Bradley Sutton: All right, let's go ahead and hop into the news. The first article today is from upi.com and it's entitled California man Receives Dozens of Amazon Packages he Never Ordered. Does that sound familiar to you? This sounds like things that were happening years ago that maybe some of us thought you know went away. But basically, this guy in California yesterday he says he received dozens of mysterious Amazon packages at his home over the course of six months. Now, first he just started with a couple of envelopes, he said, but then a lot more products were coming. All right, the name on the label wasn't his name, it was somebody else's name, and he at first thought that, you know, just maybe there was a mistake that happened. But more and more packages sooner arriving, everything from, says, solar panel cables, video game consoles, digital picture frames, portable spas. And then he said he eventually just stopped opening them and just simply sent them back. All right, somehow his card actually started getting charged.   Bradley Sutton: Now, that's separate than what I'm talking about or what this guy I think is talking about here, but basically this is the Black Hat method of brushing. Even this article talks about brushing. Like I said, this is like circa 2020, when this thing happened. And then this article says hey, brushing involves Amazon sellers sending packages to random addresses so they can artificially inflate their number of positive reviews. So the way that brushing works is kind of like these sellers they get somebody's real address and then they just use all these different Amazon accounts and send products to that address and then that allows them to do like a verified review. For me I wouldn't be sending it back. You know me as an Amazon seller. I'm gonna think like an Amazon seller. If one of those companies is gets my address and they're gonna use me for brushing, give me all those products, I'm gonna put it right back on Amazon and make some money off of it. But that's interesting. I wonder if this is just an isolated case or is brushing making a comeback. Hopefully Amazon cracks down on that, because you know shouldn't be doing any of these shady shady behaviors, in my opinion.   Bradley Sutton: Next article is from Amazon Seller Central, and it was a news article that came out and says increase sales with new metrics available on the build your brand page, all right. So this is something that a lot of us might not even know is in Seller Central. All right, you have to like if you're using a sub account, you actually can't see it off the bat. You have to go and to the admin account and give yourself the rights to this. But basically, this what Amazon announces hey, there's gonna be four new key metrics that allow you to measure your brand's performance branded search ratio, star rating, brand conversion rate and repeat customer ratio. All right, so there's gonna be actionable things that you can do. Go to the build your brand section of Seller Central, scroll down and then if, for the brands that you have brand registry, you are going to be able to see, for the different countries, these new metrics. Again, branded search ratio here's one about the star rating. It's gonna give you a whole bunch of insights on things that it wants you to do how to increase your conversion rate, et cetera.   Bradley Sutton: Next article is going to Forbes now and this one is entitled the amazing ways Walmart is using generative AI. Now, a lot of this didn't have to do with Walmart sellers, but if you scroll down in this article, there's an interesting tidbit here where it says here under the section, where it says under the section improving the shopping experience, it says there's also a new text to shop feature that lets customers ask for what they want by texting Walmart. All right, so there's a simple text chat powered by AI technology. Customers can search for items, add or remove products from their cart, reorder products and schedule delivery or pickup. Like, Walmart seems to be beating Amazon on this one at least, but if this is only in beta, well, you can't really say that it's beating Amazon if it's not widespread. But that's interesting, like, will that increase sales for third party sellers using the Walmart app If people can just start texting and ask questions? Will Amazon roll out their version of this, which has also been rumored?   Bradley Sutton: Another thing that Walmart says they're launching is they're introducing a new online AI shopping assistant designed to help shoppers find the best product for their needs. So this AI is going to recommend relevant and related products based on, like, you're throwing a certain party or you have a certain age kid who has a need and you just, instead of like searching for keywords, you kind of like explain the situation and they'll give suggestions. Now, you know, part of me the skeptic is like I can't imagine how this is going to work because, like you know, like what I'm going to say hey, I've got a 19 year old kid who got his first new car, what products would he like, you know? Like, is it really going to know exactly what? But then again, guys think about it. How many times is this happening? You, where I don't know, you type in a search, or sometimes even you just are having a conversation with somebody. You go back to your phone and you're getting hit with ads, like about that very thing that you were just asking. You know it's got to be AI doing that. I don't know. But so, who knows, maybe AI is a lot more advanced than I give it credit for.   Bradley Sutton: Next article is from Amazon Advertising and it's entitled Sponsored Brand Video introduces vertical video creatives on the advertising console and Amazon API. So now when you're creating sponsored brand video ads, you are going to have an option to choose from creative assets. It says upload video, horizontal or vertical, alright. So a lot of people have had access to this for a few months now, I guess in beta, but now this is the official announcement. It looks like it's rolling out to everybody else. I've heard a lot of good feedback on how the vertical video looks, especially obviously in mobile browsers, which is what, or the mobile app, which is what it's designed for. So take a look at your advertising console. Do you have that available? It says it should be available united across North America, south America, Europe, middle East and Asia Pacific for sellers for that Next article, going back to Seller Central again, and it's entitled instant replacements are available for seller fulfilled returns.   Bradley Sutton: Starting on this week, buyers will be able to request instant replacement for items sent using the prepaid return label program. You see me shaking my head. Those of you watching on YouTube. They were on this Seller Central article, 468 down votes and only 55 up votes. Up votes. So this is something that if you're doing fbm, you know, like myself, it's like might be a little scared. What now? Just a customer can just instantly get a replacement and I have to ship it to them and they have like 30 days to return it. They might not return. I got to start keeping track of if they return it, if they return the right product. But we know, you know that Amazon is very customer centric and so I guess you know this really shouldn't surprise us all. Right now.   Bradley Sutton: Let's do a deep dive, guys, into the 2024 FBA inbound placement service fee. That's. This is just one of the couple things that amazon, or a lot of amazon sellers are very scared about this new in inbound placement service fee, and then the low inventory fee. That's going to come a little bit later, guys. This is coming now, march first. All right, so you look up, if you, if you want to get some detail on this, just go into your Seller Central and type in FBA inbound placement service and you you'll get this article. But let's do a deep dive into some of these things that that it says. Now, basically, what's going to happen is that you are going to start getting charged if you are only sending to one location, for example. All right, you're going to get a per unit charge based on the size of your product and based on where it's going uh, west coast, middle or, or uh, Midwest, I don't know, central area or east coast. Now, this is going to be interesting because, according to this article, this service fee is going to hit you 45 days after your shipment is received. So you've got a little leeway in there. So the first charges are not actually going to happen until mid-April, but it's going to be in effect starting in March.   Bradley Sutton: Now, the only way to completely skip this fee is if you accept Amazon's suggestion to ship to four different locations. I mean, that's only if Amazon tells you to ship to four different locations. You know, for me in the past a lot of times it's sometimes two locations, sometimes three, sometimes it tells me to only ship to one. So like I'm wondering how that's going to be. Is Amazon going to like force me to send it to one and I still have to pay, no matter what? But if you send to four or more locations, amazon is going to waive this fee. If you ship to two or three locations only, you are going to get a surcharge per unit that you were sending to Amazon and if you only send to one location, it is going to actually be the highest fee.   Bradley Sutton: Now, how does this affect sellers? Well, everybody has different preferences. I'm here in Southern California. What do I want to do? I want to send to one location and I want it to be in Southern California. It's going to get there super fast, right, and the shipping is very like sometimes half what it is if I ship it, like all the way to an FBA DC in New York or Florida or something like that. But now I've got to start thinking what do I choose? Do I choose to send it to multiple locations? Is it going to be expensive? Am I going to get a surcharge? Or should I just send it to one location and I save on the shipping fee because it's so close, but I just pay this extra fee?   Bradley Sutton: Let's start breaking down what some of these fees are. I'm not going to go into detail on this table here. You guys looking at YouTube, you can take a look at the screen here or just go into your Seller Central. But, for example, like if you have a small size box size 15 by 12, by 0.75, less than one pound you're trying to send everything to one location, you are going to get a 21 cent to 30 cent charge per unit. If you're sending to two or more that same package, you're going to get 12 cents to 21 cents per unit and, like I said, if you send to four locations or more, it is no fee. All right, so let's go ahead.   Bradley Sutton: What I did was I actually went to my. This is what I suggest you guys do to go into your Seller Central and go into your shipments and look at your old shipments to see what's going on. For example, here is one of my shipments that I did late last year. This was for, I believe, the large coffin shelf, so this is an oversized box, and they had me send I only sent 20 units, for whatever reason I think it was right before I ran out and it had me sent to two locations. All right, so two locations, and one of these was in Washington. Okay, so, as you can see right here, for these 10 units, because this is a huge oversized box, I got charged $25. All right, so about $2.50 per unit, all right, the other 10, it had me send all the way to Delaware, all the way across the country, and it actually cost me $35 for those same amount, 10 units. All right, so you can see how much more it was by sending it to the opposite coast, and the one in Washington wasn't even that's not even close to me. Like I said, I'm in Southern California, so if I were to send it to California, it would have been cheaper, right, it might have been like what less than $20, right Now, what you do to calculate this out?   Bradley Sutton: You go type into your search in Seller Central revenue calculator. All right, type in revenue calculator. We're going to have this in Helium 10 eventually too, but for now, go ahead and use a Seller Central. It's a little bit more difficult to use but it has the details you need for this new fees. Go into Seller Central, find your product this one that I just did and put how many units you're going to you're going to send. So I'm going to say, hey, I'm going to go ahead and inbound 20 units of this product.   Bradley Sutton: And now if I were to ship it to one location only let's say it has me ship everything to Spokane, Washington I'm going to pay $2.70 per unit to ship this to Amazon. That's do you remember what it was? In Washington, it was $2.50. That's more than double just for shipping to one location. Now, in this shipment I shipped it to two locations, you remember. So if I ship it to two locations, I just hit this partial shipment splits and it brings down the price to $1.57. But still, that's now $31 more I'm paying for shipping. Do you remember total? On those two shipments I only paid $55. Well, now that $55 shipment just became $80 a shipment, all right, and that's only 20 units, that means I'm paying $4 just to get it from my warehouse to Amazon. So you can see that there's a decision you have to make. Like what if I could send everything to San Bernardino? Right, if I send everything to San Bernardino and I pay $2.70, but I save a whole bunch of money on my shipping, the shipping price would have to be $2.70 cheaper than what it would cost to send to multiple locations into the East Coast in order for it to be worth it. But again, it's not just the price. Now you got to think well, if I send it to Delaware, it might take like six days to get there, another few days to check in. If I send it to California, it'll get there the next day, maybe just a couple days to check in. So there's all these things you are going to have to start kind of like calculating out.   Bradley Sutton: Let me show you another example. Another shipment I did this was actually from this year was the smaller coffin shelves and I sent like 80 units total. All right. Now take a look. I sent one shipment to California. 30 units cost $25. All right. So like what? 80 cents per unit? At the same time, it had me send some more to a different warehouse in California. It was only 10 units for $8.57. So 85 cents. And then, lastly, it still was in the West, but it had me send another 40 units to Henderson, Nevada, and it cost me 37 bucks, so a little over 90 cents. All right, so the average for this 80 units I was paying. What about? I paid about 80 cents per unit to ship and I didn't pay any fees. Right, if I do the same exact shipment after March 1st? Conversely, here is one more shipment I did separately and I sent 100 units all together and it went to Southern California and it only cost me $70. All right, so that's 70 cents, about 15 cents cheaper per unit than those other ones I sent all over the place. All right, so again, these were two separate shipments, very similar in scope. One had me send to three, one had me send to one.   Bradley Sutton: What's going to happen if I have this same scenario in a couple of weeks, starting in March? Let's go back to that revenue calculator. I go ahead and put the coffin shelf in here and I say, hey, 100 units, the same exact shipment to California, to the West, 68 cents per unit. Do you remember what it cost me Originally? 70 cents. This is doubling the cost of what I have to send, or how much it cost me to send it in the old days, literally doubling my cost. Now, what about that other one where it had me send to three different locations? All right, it's still not four. It didn't have me send it to four, so I have to hit the partial shipment splits. I select three locations and now I see that it's going to cost 33 cents extra. It's not double, but now my price goes from 80 cents to $1.20, which is almost the same as the 70 cents plus 70 cents that I pay if I send it to one.   Bradley Sutton: Is your mind kind of like spinning in circles with all these things you guys have to calculate? Now? I'm sure there's gonna be hopefully easier ways that Helium 10 can help you decide which one is going to be better to use. But again, you can't just blindly do your shipments anymore. You have got to really think about what's going on. All right, let me know in the comments below what are you seeing. Go ahead and put in some of your old shipments in there and let me know what you're seeing in your account. All right, last article of the day. It's actually just a post from LinkedIn.   Bradley Sutton: I wanted to give a shout out to Jason from Vitacup and he talked about the release of Amazon's 3D photos. This was something that we talked about like about four or five months ago, when they announced that Amazon Accelerate, and now he is reporting that he's seeing it out there in the wild. Now we actually saw this a couple of days ago because when I was setting up that brand rights that I talked about earlier how I had to give rights to do that to my sub-accounts this was one of those new ones that you have to give rights to.   Bradley Sutton: So if you guys are giving rights to see the brand, go ahead and click this 3D models thing. You have to have the seller app and then it's gonna allow you to take pictures from all sides using your mobile phone and then it's going to allow you to be enrolled in this 3D beta that Amazon has going right now. So take a look to see if you guys have access to that. Now, the reason why I wanted to give Jason a shout out here was he's actually gonna be a special guest next week in a keyword research webinar. He's an eight-figure seller and he's gonna give us his best keyword research strategy. So that's just one of the many online and offline events coming up for myself and the evangelist here at Helium 10 over the next few weeks. Shivali now is going to let you guys know of all the other events that's going on.   Shivali Patel: Hi there. We have tons of online and in-person events over the next couple of months, so let's just quickly run through them so you're in the know and can potentially even plan ahead. First up, we have the virtual Billion Dollar Seller Summit from February 20th to the 22nd. Bradley is a speaker and if you plan to attend his session, you can take $150 off the price by using the coupon code BDSS2024. Again, that's just BDSS2024. At h10.me/bdss https://h10.me/bdss, you can also sit down with Bradley at the Sellers Edge training this upcoming week where he's gonna start a conversation with a guest eight figure seller and they're going to talk shop on keyword research strategies for Helium 10, amazon Product Opportunity Explorer, Search Query Performance and so much more. Get registered at h10.me/edge2 https://h10.me/edge2. The two is just the number and it's not spelled out. On March 1st to 2nd, if you're interested in remotely anything Walmart and you're located on the other side of the world from me, perhaps you'll be able to make it out to Ecom Seller Summit and say hello to Carrie, who will be speaking. Visit h10.me/australia https://h10.me/australia to grab a ticket. You can use the name, Carrie, as a code to save $50 and catch her session in person.   Shivali Patel: The week right after Australia, we have the Prosper show in Las Vegas, where Bradley and Carrie are speaking, but all three of us will be there. Go to h10.me/prosper to reserve a spot and come swing by the Pack View and Helium 10 booth so we can get acquainted. Don't be shy, even if you see us just walking around. Now. If Vegas is too far for you, as is Australia, then I have the perfect in between event for you, and that is going to be held from March 13th to 16th in Prague, Czech Republic. I'm opening up the conversation for strategic innovation that leads to increased profits and so much more. The link for this event is h10.me/prague https://h10.me/prague. You can use my code Shivali50 for a 50 euro discount. If you don't know how to spell my name, that's S-H-I-V-A-L-I 50 for a 50 euro discount.   Shivali Patel: There will be an Amazon sponsored seller meetup in Manila, Philippines, so save or mark the date for March 21st. Bradley will be attending, but we don't have a sign up page yet. We'll keep you posted, though, and I will also be speaking at amazing day summit and attending the Amazing Days Summit in Sofia, Bulgaria. That's going to take place on April 3rd, 4th and 5th. These two events are just days apart, so perhaps it's the perfect excuse. You need to come out and spend a week in Bulgaria. If you'd like a ticket, go to h10.me/bulgaria https://h10.me/bulgaria and use the code Helium10 for a 10% discount.   Shivali Patel: The last couple of events you can anticipate some more in-person Bradley time are going to be the seven figure seller Japan mastermind in Okinawa. I might make it out to Japan, but it's still up in the air, so I guess you'll just have to come out to find out. The link to learn more about the Japan event is h10.me/japan https://h10.me/japan. However, Bradley will definitely be speaking at Seller Velocity, as you can see here. So naturally I've got a code for you and that's going to be BRADLEYFIRST in all caps. You can put that into motion at h10.me/velocity https://h10.me/velocity. Look, guys, at the end of the day, each of these events are packed with incredible sessions, knowledgeable, expert speakers and the invaluable opportunity to network and honestly, I couldn't tell you just how many connections I've made by attending these events and the strategies I've learned to implement into my own business so I can take it to the level I'm hoping towards. So, really, if you can come, come, we'd love to meet you in real life and we'll see you there.   Bradley Sutton: All right, thank you, Shivali, for those events. I hope to see you guys at some of them. One quick thing, guys if you didn't get our notice we have a new message board or forum. That is on our website. So sign into your Helium 10 account and then go to forum.helium10.com https://forum.helium10.com/ and you'll be able to post messages there, interact with other Helium 10 users and see some announcements and strategies that myself and Carrie and Shivali are doing. So, again, forum.helium10.com https://forum.helium10.com/. All right, let's get into our Helium 10 new feature alerts.   Bradley Sutton: The new tool that Helium 10 is coming out with right now is probably the most asked for tool last year 2023, of what, when I was on the road, people asking about this and something even beforehand I had in mind. Now, before I get into how to use a tool, it's kind of important to understand the background of how we even came up with this. This wasn't like my idea or something, but it's something that's been on my mind for a while Now. As you guys may or may not know, I used to run the content team here at Helium 10. And now I still write blogs to help out the content team, and something we've always used is this software. The one that we're using right now is called Surfer SEO and it's really cool Like we have blogs for SEO, right, and it gives me all of my kind of like titles that I need to have and then all of the main keywords that I need to put in blogs and it tells me how many times I need to use it, where I have to put it and, as I'm writing my blog, it gives me the score of how I'm going to be ranking for Google SEO and it tells me also how I'm doing compared to other blogs about the same subject. And so I've always thought, well, you know, like that would be kind of cool thing to have for Amazon sellers.   Bradley Sutton: And Amazon sellers thought the same way. One of the you know, as I was touring everyone said, hey, we like a tool that allows us to kind of like take, hey, the best keywords from Helium 10, but then helps us to understand where we need to put it in the listing and how it kind of stacks up for the Amazon algorithm and then how my competitors are doing it. All right. So I'm going to show you guys how to use this new tool. It's in listing builder, but let me just tell you right off the bat like. I actually spent, you know, like four months on a case study, making like more than 150 listings in different accounts and trying all these different things that kind of like the best they can decode the Amazon algorithm to see, hey, what forms of words work best for the Amazon algorithm, what helps the ranking, what kind of frequency, what does it matter where the keywords are, et cetera. So I did a lot of work on this, but let me just say there is no buddy out there myself included who can tell you exactly how the Amazon algorithm works. It doesn't work that way. All right, it's not like I can just give you an exact formula, but what we, what I've been able to do here is get it to a formula here that will give you the best chance at having good SEO for your Amazon listing. All right, so where you find this tool is now in listing builder, all right.   Bradley Sutton: Now you're gonna see a little bit of different things here. There's some things that, based on when you're seeing this video, it might be different Later on, like these colors might be gone. You're gonna have the number here of how many times the keywords came up. We'll update this video later, once this tool is fully finished. Like I said, it's in beta. But the first thing you do is just like you normally do with your keyword research. You're first gonna get all your best keywords from Cerebro, whatever other tools you have, stick them all now into listing builder. Before I didn't have you do that, remember, I said, hey, only get your 20 best keywords, right, and then the rest of the keywords just find the individual words. That's no longer.   Bradley Sutton: With this new tool. You can go ahead and throw all of your keywords into listing builder at once. You don't have to separate the best and the worst. One of the reasons why is because now we have the Cerebro competitor performance score. Again, this is from Cerebro and it tells you what are the most important keywords for this niche, based on what the listings are all ranking for. Very highly, all right. So I put all 116 phrases right here. I also see the search volume and it breaks it down here on the top to all the one and two and three word parts of these phrases, so that I can see hey, what are all of the individual keywords that are showing up here, what are the two and three word phrases that show up in multiple phrases? Now, after you get your keywords in here. You scroll down, you're going to see your original listing quality score if I already made my listing here on the right-hand side, and that's just based on Amazon best practices, like you know how many characters in your title, things like that. But the new part here click on Keyword Performance Rank and what you're going to want to do is add your competitors. Okay, so this is something new. So this here is a bat-shaped bath mat that I was doing. So I went to Amazon and I wanted to put in all of the top bat mats here and I just pasted all of the ASINs or I could have just selected it right here in this Add Competitors section and now, instantly, based on these keywords that I already got from Cerebro, it is going to give me a score for every single one of these competitor listings that we see right up here, and actually the number one listing just happens to be the product that is selling the most, all right, so it kind of shows that, hey, this formula is a pretty decent indication on how you might be doing in the niche, potentially, all right. So that's what you're going to see right here when you click on Keyword Performance Rank, and then once I make my listing now it's going to give me a score. So right now I'm not first, all right, I might need to tweak my listing a little bit. This is only version one of my listing. It says I'm second out of 10 competitors. All right.   Bradley Sutton: Now, if you want more detail on what is going into this Keyword Performance Score, well, it is based on a lot of these kind of like match types. There's five of them that I kind of pinpointed with all of my tests that I was doing, and it also has to do with where in the listing it is. You know title is the absolute most important. Search volume is something that is factored into the score as well. The points is the next, and then description right, and then you get different points based on the search volume and then based the highest points for a keyword is exact match, like if the word is coffin shelf, you put coffin shelf and then that's an exact match. The next one that you also get points is plural or singular match, so like it's coffin shelf or coffin shelves, right. Next is a phrase match, but a partial phrase match, all right. So it gets really down and dirty. Guys Like I did a lot of work trying to come up with this formula. So when you get into this tool, put your mouse over the little eye, the little information, and you will see, kind of like, what all of these different match types mean. And then, as you are making your listing, you will literally see this score change based on these factors, right here.   Bradley Sutton: Now, remember, keyword stuffing is not suggested. You, I did see that some kind of like duplication of keywords is good in some circumstances, but you're not going to get points, extra points, by putting the same keyword five times in a listing. The first time you put it, and if it's in phrase form, that can get you the most points. If you have it again, that actually can kind of like let Amazon know you're especially relevant for it. So you are going to get some credit. But as you play around the score you'll see that it's not the full credit as if you like the same one that you put in the title.   Bradley Sutton: Now again, I'm not going to sit here and say hey for a fact. If you get the top keyword performance rank out of your competitors, that's going to guarantee that you're going to get the most sales. Obviously, a lot more things have to be considered when you're talking about getting sales on Amazon. But this is what I came up with and our data scientists. I'm not smart enough to make like full formulas here. I had to get the data scientists help, but this is what we found will give you the best chance to really make sure that Amazon knows that you're relevant. I'm going to have a few workshops coming up on just general listing optimization techniques, but once you have all that down, this is what is going to help you really bring your keyword research and your listing optimization to get the best bang for your buck.   Bradley Sutton: So I want you guys to try out this tool. Like I said, it's in beta right now. New things are being added to it every day. If you have a diamond counter hire. Elite members have been playing with this for weeks, but now it's to a point where, like, hey, if your diamond are higher, for now, we want to get your feedback too. So please give this a spin and then, if you have any questions or comments on it, reach out to customer support and let them know about it, and we'd love to hear from you to see what you think about this tool that everybody was asking so much for the last year or two. All right, guys, thank you very much for joining us on this edition of the weekly buzz. We'll see you next week to see what's buzzing.

31m

Feb 16, 2024

Ever felt like you're just one PPC secret away from skyrocketing your Amazon or Walmart sales? Madalina from eComcy joins us on this month’s TACoS Tuesday program to lift the veil on advanced advertising tactics that could very well be your game-changer. From initiating precise exact-match campaigns to harnessing the untapped potential of broad match types, we cover the A-Z of creating a strategy that not only speaks to your product’s strengths but also steals the spotlight from your competitors. Using Helium 10 tools like Cerebro and Magnet, Madalina walks us through the art of strategic competitive analysis, ensuring your keyword lists are as refined as they are effective. Bid management can often feel like walking a tightrope, but with insights from our guest expert and the aid of Adtomic, we transform this balancing act into a calculated dance of numbers and intuition. Discover how the blend of automated suggestions and manual adjustments can refine your campaigns to an unparalleled level of precision. Madalina doesn't stop there—she dissects the significance of match types, niche-specific benchmarks, and the pivotal role they play in the fluctuating realm of click-through and conversion rates. Wrapping up, we look into the crystal ball of keyword volumes and campaign management, offering a blueprint for structuring your campaigns so that they work smarter, not harder. Whether you're dealing with keywords that command their own stage or those that perform better in an ensemble, Madalina's methodical approach to campaign structure ensures you'll stay in control while maximizing efficiency. As an added bonus, we touch on the experiences of Walmart sellers, inviting a broader discussion on the adaptability of these strategies across platforms. Tune in for a wealth of knowledge that's sure to give your Amazon PPC efforts that extra edge.   Episode 535 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Shivali and Madalina discuss: __ __ ► 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: Today, on TACoS Tuesday, we sit down with Madalina from Ecomcy to talk about a variety of different things related to PPC, for example, how to do keyword research, how to set up your campaigns, recommendations for launching and what kind of key metrics to look out for.   Bradley Sutton: How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. I want to check estimated sales for products you see on Amazon. Or maybe you want to instantly see how many listings on page one of a search term result have the actual searched keyword in the title. You can find all of these things out and more with the Helium 10 Chrome extension tool X -Ray. More than one million people have used this tool. Find out what it can do for you by downloading it for free at h10.me/xray.   Shivali Patel: Hello and welcome to another episode of the series sellers podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Shivali Patel, and this is the show that is our monthly TACoS Tuesday episode, where we talk anything and everything PPC. Today, our guest is from Ecomcy, which is an Amazon and Walmart ads agency, and our guest is Madalina. Welcome in. How are you? I'm great, thank you, how are you? I'm good. I'm good. I'm glad to have you on. I know that we're talking all things PPC. We're going to have some questions kind of filing in and it's going to be AMA style. But in the meantime, how about we talk a little bit about you, so what you do at Ecomcy, how you got started in this field and what have you?   Madalina: First of all, thanks for having me. I'm super excited and I'm really nice to see everyone just joining from different parts of the world. So I'm Madelina. I've been in the industry for the past six years yeah, doing everything Amazon and then specializing in PPC, because I'm more like a data lover, you know.   Shivali Patel: So I've started doing PPC at Ecomcy and now I'm the PPC lead and do you offer such an important service to F that PPC is so monumental for any business? So I'm excited to talk a little bit about how you guys kind of approach your PPC campaigns, how you audit, how you optimize, and so let's kind of just dig right, deep right. How does Ecomcy navigate its PPC campaigns? Like, when somebody comes to you with their campaigns, what is sort of the first way that you really look at it and audit?   Madalina: First of all, we would be looking not only at the advertising campaigns but we would be looking at the products overall and kind of reverse engineer performance, this against to the client's target. So if we have issues with sales or if we have issues with profitability, we would be basically reverse engineer from there and kind of see like do we have a PPC order percentage that's too high? Is our organics doing okay? Obviously, we would be using Cerebro and all the 10 tools to kind of like reverse engineer performance, see how we're being compared to the markets and things like this when it comes to PPC. So of course, ppc plays like a very, very important role but like my point is that it's not only PPC that goes in here, because we kind of like look at performance overall. So at an advertising level, we would be basically assessing main metrics like collect rate. Is everything that we put in our ads kind of relevant to our audience? We would be looking at conversion rates, see, like if there's anything we can do at a very detailed level when it comes to like placements or things like this Are we doing migrations? Are we doing like all the different kind of placements? Are we doing all the match types? So kind of like going through a very detailed audit to see is if, basically, the client objectives are being reached or not. And if not, what else are we doing in order to reach the objectives?   Shivali Patel: Yeah, I know, I kind of threw you into the deep end there, because there are so many different things that are part of the PPC campaigns. Right, you have your ad structure. Maybe it's something that's an underlying factor. I do see we have questions starting to roll in, so let's go ahead and start with how to start PPC. So I guess, for this question, if somebody is just starting I know we just talked very briefly about auditing what about if you're just getting started? Is there a specific campaign structure or, like match type, specific kind of ads that you recommend?   Madalina: Yes, so we usually start with the bare minimum and that would be exact campaigns for your very relevant keywords, right? So we would be using the cerebral tool in order to find what are your competitors are ranking for and then, with kind of like, find your most relevant keyword and start exact campaigns from there. So I think that would be a good start. What I usually like from there to the from there as well is not to limit only on exact. Also do like a broad plus to, so a broad modifier to ensure, like you kind of find the long pills from your highly relevant keywords as well. So that would kind of like ensure you're using the, the budget, in the most efficient way. So that would be the like the match types I would use. Then, at the structure level, like there's a whole debate like how to organize your campaigns and things like this. It's up to you and the tools you'll be using to optimize campaigns. We would prefer to kind of like put all the highly searched keywords in one campaign because we can monitor them more closely and we can better understand performance. We can change the placements, do they partying, change budgets more easily, and things like this. And then for the maybe lower volume keywords, maybe like add maximum if they're super low volume. I would say maybe like 15 keywords max per campaign and then try to put them, to group them based on intent. So then when you look at the very high level in your advertising console, you understand exactly what performs well, what kind of targets you might want to dial down on and things like this. There's a lot, yeah, there's a lot to start with, but don't get overwhelmed. I bet that's also an advice. Don't get overwhelmed because, yeah, it's, even if you start with the exact and doing like a broad modifier, you should see some performance. If you don't see performance, then getting that through us, we can trouble you.   Shivali Patel: Right, right, I think the most important thing is definitely what you said is just getting started and then modifying from there. Something that you did mention is budget. I've heard sort of a debate even on that aspect, right, because some people say you should start with a really large budget per day and then just bid a little bit lower. Some people say, just go based off of what you can really work with. So what is your take on that specifically?   Madalina: So it really depends on your product price and your estimated conversion. Because let's say you have a product price that's $20 and your target A cost, let's say, might be 100% to start with, your budget could for that particular company let's say might be $20, right, so you can work it out this way If you have a higher price product, then of course you can work on your budget as well. But I would reverse engineer it from the price of your product and based on your estimated conversion rate.   Patel: Good advice, good advice. I feel like my broad match campaign is always burn money, so it's always a tricky game getting the right sweet spot. I see we have some more questions, so let's go ahead and pop those onto the page. We have Yizak. He says I'm about to launch two new listings Congratulations. Any new strategies? Do you have any PPC recommendations for launching? Which keywords do long tail, low search or high search volume?   Madalina: For the long tails. I would definitely add your long tails. It's all based on relevancy. So if your long tails are relevant, definitely add them in your campaign. If they are high in search volume, just make sure you start with low bids in order to make sure you can't control the spend. You can always go back and increase bids, but if you wake up with a very high spend that's you can't go back on that. So make sure you set up low bids initially. I would say start with the classic approach Go and research your competitors, see what they're ranking on, see if there's any sales you can sell from them With the highly relevant keywords you'll be targeting and, of course, add those keywords in exact campaigns. Then start with the broad modifier to do the long tails. You have a limited budget.   Shivali Patel: All right, we have. What are the key metrics?   Madalina: you are following we love conversion rate, we love orders, so that is a key metric we are looking at. Other than that, to define relevancy, we look at click through rate as well and down the profitability road we would look at clicks, impressions, spend a-cost, total advertising cost of sales tax cost and things like this. So basically a lot of metrics, but the key ones would be basically conversion. So it's like how your campaign is going and then how much traffic you're putting into or you're receiving from us on impressions and clicks, Amazing.   Shivali Patel: We also have Ismall who said how to research keywords. Now, of course, as somebody from Helium 10 can also say, you can check out the Sears Sellers podcast. We have a few episodes that Bradley has done for keyword research, like master classes that you can go in and check out how to do keyword research using Serebro Magnet, some other ways. But, Maddalena, I also want to hear from you sort of how you guys approach keyword research.   Madalina: Yeah, so we are actually in line with the Hewley Newton approach. So we would be, with this, very important to look at your market, study your competitors. So find your competitors first and you can do that by looking at your product features. So the price would be very important, the number of ratings, how many, how established they are in the market and things like this. So first find your competitors, then find your keyword based on the competitors and this is where the Cerebro will come in and you'd reverse engineer based on the keyword competitors would be ranking on and you'd try to go for those particular keywords. Now the Cerebro also have that relevancy column which you can look at. So basically, try to go for. You basically assess relevancy based on how many competitors would be ranking for your product. So try to look at the keywords that are the most relevant ones in order to prioritize those in your advertising campaigns and then be higher on them and try to base your launch strategy on them.   Shivali Patel: Basically, I think what Madalina said is really important. You guys can go in check out relative rank filters inside of Cerebro or Magnet. But in doing so, in running a multi-ASIN search, you can then go in check out where you're positioned in accordance with your competitors and then adjust your strategy. So let's say you have a really great competitor who is killing it and you see that they're ranking higher than you want a specific keyword. You can use that keyword, adjust your strategy and incorporate into your listing or into your PPC campaigns and then vice versa, if you have some of these other filters, you have Amazon recommended rank, you have your sponsored type. You can go in reverse engineer somebody's PPC strategy If you're doing a single-ASIN search. There's so many cool things to do. So, again, make sure you guys go and check out the Ceresellers podcast I'm talking about with the masterclasses. If you type in masterclass, you should be able to find it. We also have Tassine from Germany Any Amazon report to check day parting performance and your rank on Amazon.   Madalina: Yes, so there would be. So we have that in Adtomic and I love the Adtomic performance graph on it. But if you're using Amazon, there is a sponsored product report. You can download it. If you go in the sponsored product, then it's the campaign one and then you have the hourly. You just have to choose it hourly and then we'll go for the last 14 days. I don't like the fact that it's for 14 days Only. Helium 10 has for 60 days, so I do love that.   Shivali Patel: All right. We also have Abe, who's responding to something I said about the Broad Match campaign. He said Nake Shivali negate frequently in broad. I do negate frequently and I use Adtomic. So Adtomic lets you set up rules and suggestions. I suppose I probably need to go in there even more frequently. However, speaking of Adtomic, I hear that Ecomcy uses Adtomic, so I would love to know a little bit about how you guys use the tool itself for all of your clients.   Madalina: It depends on the client, on the brand, on the product, so we don't do an overall approach. So we would be basically going with some benchmarks and we would be setting up some rules in atomic based on them. So we would be looking at the main metrics we talked about, in fact, like the conversion rate, the clicks, the impressions, overall spend for that particular target, and we would go with those kind of metrics and set up rules and kind of like if performance is not good, based on the category or the product, decrease speed. If performance is good, increase speed and things like this. We do want a very, because we put a lot of time into knowing the product and understanding the category and things like this. And we would be manually going and approving the bid suggestions, Because if the audience doesn't know, basically what the atomic would do is to give you some suggestions, bid suggestions or budget suggestions or negative keyword suggestions and things like this. So then we would be manually applying those to make sure our knowledge is combined with the knowledge we put in atomic and make sure that we understand what kind of actions we took and then how the results were affected by those particular actions. So kind of like track and measure this way. Yes, and again, it would be like it would depend on the product market category and things like this, and then on your goals as well, If you want to be more profitable, even to increase sales, and things like this.   Shivali Patel: We also have another question on the thresholds, since we were talking about the key metrics before. So what are the general thresholds for click-through rate and conversion?   Madalina: Yeah, I love that question, but it's a yeah, it will really depend on your category and on your product. Because, yeah, if you can see very big variations from one product to another, I would really throw you off if I were to give you some benchmarks. I don't know, at some point it used to be like 0.3, let's say, in click-through rate. Now, let's say, we are seeing a little bit of an improvement when it comes to click-through rate and conversion rate. Again, it really depends on your product. So, yeah, now you can actually see that in the product. You can see some ideas of your category conversion rate in the product that Opportunity Explorer, as well. If you search for the niche, you can basically see the conversion rate for that particular niche.   Shivali Patel: What is the best metric to use, in Surabro or Magnet, to find the most relevant keywords for the product that you are selling?   Madalina: So what we usually do internally I know there's now the column that shows you how many computers are waiting for that product we are doing the report to make sure there's nothing we're seeing in the filter things down and things like this, and we would basically just apply a relevancy for a new lot to better understand, based on the keyword relevancy as well. So Sorry, let me take that from the beginning. Basically we would be taking like the, what sounds relevant. We would be clustering that and then apply a relevancy column from formula from there in with the data we downloaded from Cerebro.   Shivali Patel: I think that answers that. We have explained what is the best match type for PPC broad phrase and exact.   Madalina: I wouldn't say there's something like the best match type because, again, like, it will depend on your product and your target. Exact is the most controlled one. So from a profitability point of view that's your best, let's say, because you can really like the search terms you would have would be essentially like the search terms you wanted to put in that campaign. Then phrase is good, like for a mean between discovery and then broad is best for discovery. Broad now is super broad on some accounts actually and on some products. But yes, I would say if you're launching, exact is your best friend. If you're, like in a discovery phase and trying to find new keywords, then broad and phrase would also be good friends.   Shivali Patel: Okay, now we have. Ysak has asked. I found around 80 keywords or phrases relevant to my product. How many exact campaigns would you do or should do, and do you use auto campaign for launch?   Madalina: Yes, auto campaigns could be good for launch. Again, like, depends on your budget, depends on your product and how much you want to invest in discovery. You, it would be good to set up auto as well, but usually, like, if your budget is limited, go with a lower budget and lower bid on auto, just to ensure your budget is distributed nicely in those exact you put a lot of work discovering already. So about the 80 keyword phrases relevant to your product. So depends on your search volume, depends, like how popular those keywords would be on Amazon. You can I that does sound like a lot of keywords. I would say that will be like. If you imagine if you, if all your keywords would have one click you already have and you have like a dollar cost per click, you'd already have 80 in spend only from those particular keywords only with one click. Depending on your conversion rate, that will obviously be higher. So I would maybe try to filter down a little bit more. But again, depends on your, on your budget and your launch strategy, your product. I would do for the very, very low volume keywords I would do 10 keywords per campaign and then for the high volume keywords I or medium volume keywords, I would do five keywords per campaign. Then for the very high volume keywords and the ones that you're really trying to to go with for the launch, I would do only one keyword per campaign. You can control the placement that you can do. Sorry, you can play with the day parting and things like this, because, yeah, you might have if they are very high in volume, you might be surprised with how much they could be spending.   Shivali Patel: So, if I sum that up, just for those of you that are listening, maybe four or five that are very high search volume, very highly relevant, that you do want to rank for just one each and exact match campaigns, and then the medium style ones, maybe five keywords per and then the low would be 10 to 15. I believe is what you said at the beginning, right? Yes, exactly Okay. On the note of exact, this person's asked the number of keywords in campaign structure. I can see that you avoid making too many single word campaigns. Is there a specific reason for that, like difficulty to manage it or something else?   Madalina: Yes, so when you start especially, it is quite hard to manage it. If you don't have like a tool like atomic, I would say, yeah, it would be. It would be quite difficult to look manually in each campaign, you know, and kind of apply your bit. So that that is the main reason why you wouldn't do too many single word, too many single search term campaigns. Yeah, just to clarify. Actually, you don't mean single words, right, you mean single search terms.   Shivali Patel: I think it's yeah, single search term inside of campaigns. But for any of you guys who don't use atomic at the moment and you want a free demo, you can go to h10.me forward slash atomic. So that's h10.me forward slash atomic. If you want to get a free demo of atomic to learn how to use it. Hey guys, been working with brand related terms, tried branching out to general category terms. Currently running campaigns with limited sales. What should be the strategy here?   Madalina: So I guess that's where you're taking most of your traffic from. But you're also doing a general category search term, like a product I would imagine, a sponsor product category target. So I would do, I would ensure, like, apart from the branded search terms, you also have those kind of product descriptors in your exact and broad plus or phrase. So back to the, the garlic press example, like if it was Nike garlic press, let's say, yeah, you, you are everything on all the the branded search terms, but also make sure you're advertising on garlic press. So your product descriptor and then go, go from there again like, check your competitors, see where they're getting their sales from, do some some keywords, research and ensure, like you, you also like, do all the the exacts that are not related necessarily to your, your brand. And then, apart from, like the, if you're already running only sponsor products, I would also ensure you're doing like sponsor brands, sponsor brand videos for your branded search terms. Sponsor display you're targeting your own asians and then you're doing sponsor display targeting, free targeting, the kind of thing. So ensure, like all the different advertising types are also being ticked for your branded search terms, if that's where your, your, you have seen performance.   Shivali Patel: We do also have whether or not you should run campaigns for competition brand names when you are just getting started, when you're just launching.   Madalina: Yes, I would. Well, those would be relevant targets, I guess, again, it depends on your budget. It depends how closely related your competitors would be as well from a price perspective and from a reviews perspective. If they are very popular in Amazon as well, like how much visibility would they get out of it? What's your plan with the launch? Are you planning to seal sales from there, from them, or are you planning to rank on other keywords? So if you're planning to rank on other keywords organically and those are more like extras you might want to steal some sales from them, but that's not what your strategy is focused on. I would just run them with very low bid see how they're working, see how they could convert. If that's your strategy, if you're stealing sales from them, definitely run campaigns on them. But yes, again, it depends on the different factors regarding search volume and the metrics I've mentioned.   Shivali Patel: We have a question here that says we all sell better in some states and worse than others. So is this something that you consider in your strategy and, if yes, how?   Madalina: To prioritize the market. Sorry, I'm not sure I'm understanding the.   Shivali Patel: Really, this is just more widespread. Let's say you're selling in the US marketplace and you know that your consumers are purchasing more in a given state, then is that something that you consider?   Madalina: I guess, yes, you can definitely tailor your strategy based on the different states as well. You won't be able to advertise differently in different states, unfortunately. We hope that will be a feature that will be released soon. But, yes, you can definitely target keywords that are for the different states and you can potentially use day parting as well if there is quite different. I guess the states are super differently from a geographical point of view. It's super different from a geographical point of view and then you might see some performance differences. You could potentially use day parting to tailor that strategy.   Shivali Patel: So time zones if you know that certain time zones are selling better than others, then definitely day parting. But outside of that, I think your best bet, if you were going to go that route, is really just external traffic. Right, it's going to be Facebook, I think, is where you can actually segment stuff like that out when you're going geographically speaking if you want to do certain states. But that's completely off Amazon. We have a defensive PPC question. What tactics do you recommend to cover more real estate from your own page? What is your advice to sellers when they have competitors that push very hard PPC on your listing or your product detail page?   Madalina: We would make sure we are targeting ourselves. So basically target your own AC limit when it comes to a sponsor product, because you'd be basically following the customer throughout the journey, and then it's not only on your product page but also target those customers that were interested in your product and also target your product in your whole catalog. So make sure you have a defensive campaign for all the products in your catalog, and that covers sponsor products, sponsor brands, sponsor brand videos and sponsor display. It depends how popular your brand is as well, because sometimes you might want to, as you say, have a defensive strategy. Other times you might just want to ensure you're getting sales from it, because the page could be already super cluttered by other search results and also depends on your product performance. So, let's say you have some product that you're launching right now and you might not have a great visibility on them. There is a chance you might not even index on those products for your brand names. So definitely, I would definitely target the new products to ensure they are at the top of the search results. You also want to make sure the customers are not too distracted when they go on your page, so make sure that you keep them there and show them what other options they can have from you. Also, make use of the free retail space when it comes to stores sorry, the costs and publish a lot of costs, so those will appear on your product page. Yeah, basically, use all the different types of placements on your own ASIN.   Shivali Patel: So I know we're kind of coming up on time here, but I just wanted to leave a little bit of room to give you some space to talk a little bit about how people can contact you if they want to reach out to you or talk to Ecomcy.   Madalina: business@ecomcy.com and we also offer a free audit. We're happy to look at clients' performance, see how we can help increase their sales with PPC and also with product optimization. We also do Walmart, so in case I didn't mention it. So we are happy to help on that side as well. And actually for the audience here, we are happy to offer a 25% discount for the first three months as well. So just let us know if you need any help and you can get the freebie as well on your first three months Amazing.   Shivali Patel: So I know you mentioned Walmart really briefly. I know we said we were closing out, but just really quickly, do we have any Walmart sellers here that are watching and do any of you actually sell on the platform? I'd love to know because I know a lot of our questions were kind of geared in general or like mostly Amazon based. Thank you so much, Madalina, by the way, for being here, and it seems like people got a lot of value out of it and I'm excited for this episode to go out. All right, take care.

31m

Feb 13, 2024

Stepping away from the comfort of a well-established brand like Lego, Silas has steered his career ship through the tumultuous waters of entrepreneurship and surfaced with a lot of insights. From launching a private label brand on Amazon to the helm of his own agency, his narrative is rich with the lessons of building businesses from scratch, the significance of co-founder synergy, and the hard truths of partnership pitfalls. Silas' story is a testament to the resilience and adaptability required in today's e-commerce oceans, and he doesn't shy away from sharing the gritty details. Tuning into the finer points of Amazon PPC, we navigate the complexities of keyword strategies with the precision of a Lego master builder. The conversation traverses from Lego's expansive strategies to the necessity of adaptability in the private label and agency landscapes, where budget constraints demand a more tactical approach. Silas introduces us to his innovative keyword categorization, a strategy that has revolutionized advertising efficiency for businesses big and small. He even lets us peek into his toolbox, showcasing how tools like Helium 10 are not just for the giants but are instrumental for anyone looking to make a mark on Amazon and Walmart.   But it's not all about keywords and conversion rates; there's a heartbeat to Silas’ story that underscores the importance of mental health and personal fulfillment. He shares a candid account of his own struggles and triumphs, reminding us that well-being is inextricably linked to professional success. The birth of Copenhagen Commerce and the value of connections made through podcasting and networking events narrate a journey of rediscovery. It's a compelling reminder of the power that lies in human connections and prioritizing what truly matters – a lesson that resonates with all of us, whether we're building block by block or keyword by keyword.   In episode 534 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Silas discuss: __ 18:48 - Negative View on Mental Health  19:48 - Starting a New Agency, Finding Fulfillment 27:20 - Amazon Keyword Research Strategies and Tools 28:39 - Building a Consistent Ranking System 30:55 - Favorite Helium 10 Tool 32:25 - The Power of Networking at Events __

33m

Feb 10, 2024

We’re back with another episode of the Weekly Buzz with Helium 10’s Brand Evangelist, Shivali Patel. Every week, we cover the latest breaking news in the Amazon, Walmart, and E-commerce space and provide a training tip for the week. Target considering paid membership program to compete with Amazon, Walmart: report https://nypost.com/2024/02/07/business/target-considering-paid-membership-program-to-compete-with-amazon-walmart-report/ https://nypost.com/2024/02/07/business/target-considering-paid-membership-program-to-compete-with-amazon-walmart-report/Sponsored Display | Geotargeting https://www.linkedin.com/posts/destaney-wishon_sponsored-display-geotargeting-activity-7160694127251062785-gtD3/ https://www.linkedin.com/posts/destaney-wishon_sponsored-display-geotargeting-activity-7160694127251062785-gtD3/Amazon announces Rufus, a new generative AI-powered conversational shopping experience https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/retail/amazon-rufus https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/retail/amazon-rufusThe latest actions against fake review brokers: Amazon continues to see success in global efforts to stop fake reviews https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/policy-news-views/amazons-latest-actions-against-fake-review-brokers For sellers seeking to harness data with precision, Helium 10's latest features provide sellers with immediate sales data and a two-year historical view right from search results and product pages. And for sellers eyeing the Brazilian market, our Listing Builder AI now crafts listings in Portuguese, simplifying your international expansion efforts. Tune in for these insightful updates and more, tailor-made for serious sellers eager to stay ahead in the ever-evolving Amazon FBA landscape.   In this episode of the Weekly Buzz by Helium 10, Bradley covers: __ __ ► 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: An interesting Amazon coupon update lower fulfillment FBA fees with the Ship in Product Packaging program and geographically targeted sponsored display ads. This and more on this week's episode of the Weekly Buzz.   Bradley Sutton: How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.   Shivali Patel: Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Shivali Patel, and this is the show that is our Helium 10 Weekly Buzz, where we give you all the latest news in the Amazon, Walmart and e-commerce space, and we also provide you with a training tip of the week that will give you insight into serious strategies for Serious Sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Let's see what's buzzing this week. First up, we have a big Amazon coupon update this week. Bradley was setting up a new launch for a test coffin shelf and he saw this when setting up coupons. Basically, now you can create coupons for specific audiences, similar to what you see in brand tailored promotions, for example, having them show up only for customers who might have abandoned your product in their cart. Other alternatives, as you can see here, include things like people who have not purchased recently nor frequently, with varied spend, who are considered at risk, Brand followers who have clicked to follow the brand on Amazon, and so much more. If you just keep scrolling, note that you do need to be brand registered for this, and since they're in the process of rolling it out, you may or may not see it, but it's cool to play around with, especially since this lets you set it up at the ace in level compared to what you can do inside of brand tailored promotions, where promotions are for all the products in your brand.   Shivali Patel: Next up, let's talk about the lower FBA fulfillment fees with Ships in Product Packaging. Amazon recently launched the Ships in Product Packaging program, otherwise known as SIPP, and this used to be known as SIPP in Own Container. The gist of it is it allows FBA sellers on Amazon to ship their products using their custom brand packaging without any additional materials added by Amazon. This initiative presents several advantages for FBA sellers, such as lower FBA fulfillment fees for products, an increased ability to connect with customers and the honorable contribution of environmental sustainability by reducing packaging, the latter being something that decreases the space needed on trucks and ultimately leads to a reduction in the number of trucks required, as well as carbon emissions. It's worth noting that products that are certified under SIPP prior to February 5th 2024, will automatically qualify for discounted FBA fulfillment fees starting from that date, and the program is currently available in seven stores the Canadian, American, Italian, Spanish, German, French and UK markets. There are no fees to enroll, but there may be costs associated with updating your packaging to be compliant with Ships in Product Packaging requirements, or if the product that you wish to enroll is fragile or contains sharp items, contains liquids, etc. Then it might have to be tested at a lab. The only time a product may be shipped with Amazon-added packaging is if a customer is shipping multiple items in the same order or if they've selected to have the Amazon-added packaging. Shipping requirements will remain the same and some products may have already actually began shipping without the Amazon-added packaging, because they're actually using machine learning to identify, test and then certify SIPP compliant products without needing you to take any action. Frustration fee packaging indicates that the package is compliant with SIPP guidelines and it has a series of other parameters, for example, 100% curbside, recyclable materials per applicable laws in the region of sale. It's easy to open and all content removable by the customer within 120 seconds with minimal use of scissors or box cutters, plus some other things.   Shivali Patel: While there is no separate certification and it won't grant additional discounts, you can enroll those into the SIPP program. You can also enroll variations without having to enroll all of the variations. As for your first arrival date, that's going to be the date where all your units being shipped to the Amazon facilities are SIPP compliant. Meaning if your enrollment date is complete on March 1st but the SIPP compliant packaging is April 1st, then you should input April 1st. If after that date your packaging is not compliant, then you're going to risk decertification. However, your shipments don't need to be compliant when they're waiting for the enrollment approval. There are dimension regulations and discount rate depends on the size and weight of your product and you can always request to decertify later. If something changes. Customers are going to be notified. I think I mentioned this a little bit earlier, but they're going to have the option to add Amazon packaging at no additional cost. Now, I wouldn't want to do this for my own products. Putting a shipping label would take away from them as a gift item and just not protect the product that well. But let me know in the comments would you do this for your products and for more info? If you're interested in this, then you can visit the SIPP enrollment portal from your news page inside of Seller Central.   Shivali Patel: In other news, have you guys heard about Project Trident? And no, I don't mean the gum brand. Target is actually coming out with a brand new paid membership program as soon as this year. Speaking at a personal level, there are barely any third party sellers that I know who sell on Target, as it's quite hard to sign up. But hey, maybe if this goes through that might change. Target might open up its platform and pave the way for more sellers. So what about you? Will you be keeping an eye out? I'm curious what do you think about the opportunity potential here, and will you get on it right away, or are you going to wait until it's a little bit more established? Switching gears? Sponsored display locations. We know that sponsored display ads give sellers the most customized ability for targeting and audiences in sponsored ads that regular sellers have access to outside of DSP. Amazon now has something new in beta that again brings DSP level functionality to any brand registered seller using sponsored display ads. Destiny from BTR Media started a conversation on this post of how some sellers who have access to the functionality in beta have the ability to target locations with their sponsored display ads. This should be cool because, say, you have a product specifically for the Alaskan market, you obviously wouldn't want that to show up in sunny Florida. You will now be able to geographically target those display ads Again. For now this is only sponsored display ads, so it's not something that's going to allow you to target certain keywords or regular sponsored product campaigns just yet, but it's still a pretty cool addition by Amazon. So do any of you guys see this inside of your account? Let me know when we have Amazon reporting.   Shivali Patel: They've redesigned navigation carousel module so brands can access it within the A plus content manager and help you enhance your listings. Modules have been updated to include clickable tabs that are highlighted in a translucent overlay on the image. This is going to help you navigate elements in the carousel. Now, I'm not sure if this is it, but check out this listing from Uncar. There are actually a couple links in their content and, if I can just scroll down here and show it to you guys, this right here, check this out. When I click these three dots, it automatically changes over the tabs, so I go from business trips into Commute and back into outdoor cafe.   Shivali Patel: Alright, just a couple more things. Here we have Amazon Rufus. Has anyone already heard about this? If you didn't know, rufus great name, by the way is a new expert shopping assistant powered by generative AI that is trained on Amazon's vast product catalog, customer reviews, community Q&As and web information to assist customers which shopping needs, product comparisons and recommendations. Rufus is presently launched in beta to a limited number of US customers via Amazon's mobile app, with a gradual rollout planned in the coming weeks. It aims to enhance the shopping experience by providing tailored assistance, from general product research to more specific inquiries about products or comparisons between categories. The assistant will enable customers to shop by occasion, by purpose, by specific needs, offering personalized suggestions and insights seamlessly integrated into the Amazon shopping experience, customers can interact with it by typing or speaking queries into the Amazon search bar, and then feedback mechanisms are already in place to continuously improve that performance. As Amazon continues to invest in generative AI technology, rufus represents a significant step towards enhancing customer engagement and satisfaction within that Amazon ecosystem.   Shivali Patel: I want to know do you guys already have access to this as well? I don't yet. Then, finally, we have Amazon emphasizing the significance of the Amazon shopping experience in its shopping experience, but acknowledging the rise of a fraudulent fake review broker industry that exploits the value of reviews. I think we all know fake reviews are against TOS and Amazon has been quite proactive about stopping them globally, investing resources in combating those fake reviews, utilizing really sophisticated tools and legal action as well In 2023, legal actions targeted bad actors in US, in China, in Europe for instance, this case against Tao Hau-Vai in the US. Despite progress, amazon recognizes the ongoing threat and vows to continue its efforts to maintain the integrity of customer reviews and hold fraudsters accountable in 2024.   Shivali Patel: If you want to dig deeper, Chris of e-commerce. Chris touched on this more recently, I believe it was in the AM/PM Podcast episode 379. All to say, look, we know there's a lot more bad players out there, but it's good to see Amazon taking steps to police this kind of thing. Remember, it's never worth it to try to take those illegal shortcuts, as much as you want to do them. So with that, that is it for this week's Weekly Buzz. Let me take this opportunity to encourage you to follow our new TikTok page for some cool, fun, educational content regularly. It's helium10_software. So just go to TikTok, open up the app, go to helium10_software in that search bar and click follow. Now for our new feature alerts. Carrie is going to be sharing with us what new tools Helium 10 has launched this week.   Carrie Miller: Today I'm going to be talking with you about some new Helium 10 features updates. So I'll go ahead and get into it and share my screen. The first thing that we have here is when you actually go to a search. So, for example, in this search we searched coffin shelf and we have all of these great results. What we can do now is we can actually look here and where it says load a 30 day sales data on all of these, we can just click on those buttons and we can see the 30 day revenue and the 30 day unit sales for all of our competitors. So this means we don't have to open up the extension and look for all this information. It's actually just a pull down right there. So if you wanted to just quickly look at the revenue while you're browsing a page, you can see quickly what it is. And I think this is kind of cool because then you know, for certain searches where there's a lot of different types of products that are kind of different designs, it's really helpful to just be able to look at which one is selling the best, how much they're selling. So that is one feature update. I think it's really great. And then the next thing is on the detail pages themselves. We have this new data up at the top of the page. Now you can expand this and you can show more details. And we've got not only we have the revenue for this listing, but we have the ratings and reviews. We also can go down here. We can see, you know, the fulfillment dimensions, the, the stamp you know sized here, and all this information, that BA fee on the side. Here you can also go back and look at sales on different days of the year and you can change the timeframe to all the way back to two years so you can see kind of, the growth of each product. You can see, you know, the price and the best seller rank. You can see ratings and reviews right here. So this is some golden information that you can just see right there, especially if you find you know a big competitor and you want to just see what's going on with their product and how long they've been in the game. This is a great tool to be able to see all of that.   Carrie Miller: The next thing now I know Bradley mentioned that we have some great tools for the Brazil market. We've got, you know, Cerebro, Magnet, lots of great stuff that he talked about last week in regards to starting to sell on Brazil, the Brazil marketplace on Amazon, and so now we also have our listing builder AI that can help you to create listings in Portuguese, especially if you do not know how to speak Portuguese. So the first thing you need to do is you're going to go under tools and then you're going to click on listing builder AI, and then what you're going to do is you're going to go up to the top right and click on add listing. Now I'm going to just go ahead and say get started from scratch, and then the most important thing is you need to choose the market of Brazil, which is at the very bottom. So I'm clicking on Brazil here and then I'll click on start building, and then I've actually already created some keywords from Cerebro in Portuguese for our Brazil garlic press, and I chose. I found those by just going to Amazon Brazil and doing a reverse asin search, and so I'm just going to add those to my bank, so they're going to show up here in the bank, and then the next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to click next, and on this part, this is really cool because you can input information in English and it's going to create the listing in Portuguese.   Carrie Miller: For the, for example, we're going to put garlic product characteristics garlic press stainless steel, durable, high quality, perfect for home cooks, okay. So then the next thing is the brand name, which is optional. Okay, so I'm actually going to just put create my own brand name here and make it up Manny's garlic press, and then I'm going to have that at the end of the title. The product name is garlic press and you can choose the tone, whatever tone you want. I'm just going to put casual here. Target audience home cooks, chefs, the home cook chefs, anyone who wants to easily mince garlic, okay. So I'm just going to kind of put it like that. The more input that you put in here, the better. You want to put all your sales, your sales points, in the in the product characteristics, but you can put them all in English, which is really cool. If there's anything that you want to avoid in the listing, you can put that there, so you can have it avoid certain things. And all you have to do here for the title is click, write it for me, and it's going to use the keywords that I have in here plus the input that I gave it here to create an optimized title, which is really cool because you don't even have to know Portuguese. Now, obviously, you can check this and go to Google translate, translate it, make sure it works right. Or, if you know, you want to pay somebody to just kind of review your listings after you've created them to make sure that they're they make sense. That's probably a good idea, but I think this is pretty amazing to get your listings started. So I'm going to click on use suggestion and so, because that looks pretty good, and, again, just go to Google translate and have them translated. You can check it that way.   Carrie Miller: The next thing is bullet points. You can click write it for me. It's going to write all those bullet points in Portuguese and you'll have an optimized listing with those keywords that you put, as well as the input. So we'll let that pop up here. And then at the bottom here you can also do this for a description and click on write it for me. So this all can be written in Portuguese at the click of a button by just putting in these simple inputs in English and it's going to spit out a an optimized listing in Portuguese. All right, so we have these little suggestions. You can click on use suggestions. You can discard it and have it rewrite it, but I'll just go ahead and hit use suggestions and you can see that it's crossing out the keywords that they've used in the bullet points here, and that is pretty amazing that we've been able to use all these keywords with just the click of a button. It's still writing the description here, and once the description is done, I'm sure all of these keywords will be all crossed out. So most of them are, and so we've got an optimized description there.   Carrie Miller: You can again click use suggestion or you can discard it, and so that is the simple and easy way that you can optimize your listings on the Brazil marketplace. I know a lot of people are excited about the opportunity to sell it in Brazil, so go ahead and try this out. I think it's a great tool to help you to get started on other marketplaces in other languages. Really really helpful to use AI to get these all written with a click of a button. It's absolutely incredible. So if you haven't checked this out, go ahead and check it out and we'll see you again next week. Bye.   Shivali Patel: Thank you for sharing, Carrie. That's a wrap. Hope you enjoy this week's episode. We will see you next week to see what's buzzing.

17m

Feb 08, 2024

Ever wonder how an Amazon seller jumps from zero to hero with a product that defies the odds? In our first-ever Seller’s Edge Series episode, let’s explore success stories, product journeys, and every tactic that will help you find your first or next E-commerce product. Special guest Shivali Patel, brand evangelist at Helium 10,  joins us bringing the heat with a story of how a $45,000 revenue bomb was dropped in just two weeks after launching in Q4, proving that with the right strategies, such as leveraging BlackBox for product research and adding unique value, anyone can stand out in the crowded Amazon marketplace. Finally, for those ready to expand their horizons, our brand, Manny’s Mysterious Oddities, is branching out into the bat niche, where opportunities lurk in the shadows. Using Amazon’s Product Opportunity Explorer and Helium 10’s BlackBox, we dissect how to scout and validate new product extensions for your Amazon brand. This episode isn’t just about telling you what worked; it's about showing you how to pivot and roll with the punches, finding those hidden gems in the market, such as bat-shaped bath mats, that could become your next big win. And for the cherry on top, resources and podcast episodes are flagged to help you turn these insights into action. Join us to learn about these actionable strategies, and let's raise the stakes in your Amazon selling game.   In episode 533 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Shivali discuss: __ __ Transcript Bradley Sutton: Today is our first ever Sellers Edge Monthly Training. In this episode we're going to go over how I found a brand new product that I can come in at a price point twice as much as the competition, and how Shivali was able to sell $45,000 on her brand new product in only two weeks. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. One, two, three, four. 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, as mentioned, this is the first in a new series that we're going to do monthly where we go over a different topic in our sellers edge training webinar. I actually recorded this in front of a live audience, so this episode might have a little bit different sound than normally and there's definitely some interactions there, but we have here cut up the highlights from that training and basically I'm going to show you how Shivali took some steps to have a product that nobody can compete with her in and it was over $100 and she was able to get 40% profit and sell $45,000, even though she launched right after Black Friday Kind of crazy. And then how I am launching a product like in the next couple of weeks and I'm going through all the steps on exactly how I found it and how I can have a higher price point as well, and we go over some other product research strategies that I think will definitely be able to help you guys. So this is a new series. Hope you enjoy it. Bradley Sutton: This is 100% based on value that can help you find your first or next product to sell on Amazon. Here we go, welcome to our new monthly workshop. We call it Sellers Edge Monthly Series, and this one is entitled how to Find your First or Next Product to Sell in 2024. So we are going to start off with a real life experience. I'm going to interview somebody right now who launched a product and had a lot of success on Amazon, especially in Q4, which is kind of like when people say, oh, you should never launch a product during that time. So we're going to ask Shivali to come on the show right now. Shivali, you there? Shivali Patel: Yes, I am Awesome. Bradley Sutton: I want to talk to you about your product launch. We had you on the podcast a few months ago and you were talking about this long journey of getting it ready, but then you actually launched in December. But for those who maybe didn't hear that podcast, let's start on this. You were selling on Amazon years ago and then you've always been selling for years, like books, but you really wanted to have a physical product to sell. A lot of people here they're looking for their first product, so they might have been kind of like in a it wasn't your first product but you were restarting it, so there might be a similar situation to you. So how do you tackle it? First, like, were you like hey, I want to try to find a product that just there's a lot of demand for it. Or you like hey, I want to find a lot of demand, but it's got to be something that maybe I'm passionate about. What was your thought process when you first started? Shivali Patel: I was quite open to whatever opportunity I was finding. I was using Blackbox, which I love because I come my first brand I launched years ago. I did manually. I was inside of Amazon, going through best sellers list, looking at BSRs, trying to understand the reviews, figure out what I could do better, and that's great, it works. But it takes a long time, and so that's where software like Blackbox is really, really helpful, because the process is over 2 billion data points daily right, Something that you can't actually do. So going in I was pretty open. I did many, many searches inside of Blackbox and then from there, started narrowing things down based off of different parameters. So whether that was profitability I mean all these things are important but profitability, what I can add? Value creation, the price point, checking out the market, the competition, what sort of reviews there are yeah, and I also did go to trade shows as well, so I went. I actually flew out. At the time I was considering a cocktail smoker kit. Bradley Sutton: What is a cocktail smoker kit. Shivali Patel: It's those for anybody who drinks. I mean you don't have to necessarily have it be a cocktail but a mocktail or even smoking. Your food comes with a little blow torch and then a different oak piece. Bradley Sutton: Yeah, I see that. Shivali Patel: Yeah, it's really nice. But I was considering that and a supplier ended up saying, hey, I'm actually in the US, and so I flew out to meet that supplier in person, which is a really, really cool experience. There was many vendors there, people that have flown in from Indonesia, from China. I got to see actual products, field them, try to negotiate a price point, get a basic understanding. Cool Enough is I ended up meeting somebody who helped me design a brand new product which I'm hoping to launch eventually as well. Bradley Sutton: This was at the trade show that you went to. Shivali Patel: At the trade show. Yeah, so they designed in a completely new style of a product for me. Bradley Sutton: Okay, so that's the first thing that's probably interesting to. Maybe some of you guys haven't thought about that, but you know, maybe you think that, oh, the only place you can go to trade shows which is 100% accurate, like it's a great place to go, is like in China. But what she's always talking about, I believe, was in Chicago or somewhere in the United States. So sometimes you know a lot of Chinese factories, indian factories and other factories. They'll come to US based trade shows and it's also a place where you can go and meet a supplier. Maybe you've been talking to online, like she was doing, but also you might meet somebody else. That is completely not even why you went there. So in her situation, she met somebody who's helping her design another product. So then that original product, the Smoker Kit you went to that trade show. You kind of like I'm probably not going to do this. How did you land on this makeup bag that you ended up going with? Shivali Patel: I found it inside a black box and I saw many different keywords. Actually, I was using the keywords tab. I went through and I did a few other things. I did the regular products tab, I did the keywords tab, I went into product opportunity explorer inside of Amazon. I was looking at Etsy and Pinterest trends as well. Anytime I was scrolling on social media. I mean the list was massive. And then eventually I found, I think, five to six different keywords inside of the keywords tab that were all related to the bag, so obviously there was a growing demand for it. And then from there went into the product validation and I felt like I could actually contribute something to that space, because I grew up in fashion and in the beauty personal care sector. I guess is something that I've taken time to educate myself on and spent many hours with, and so when I started having conversations after that with you, I think we also had a very unique pitching point that I felt I could go onto the market with a premium price point, because anytime I'm selling something, the value of creation is important, but you also want to make it worth the person's while. So if I'm going in with a premium price, I want to over, deliver on it, and I think this bag really hit all those spots. Bradley Sutton: And this was a high. The current the market was kind of high, aren't most products there like 80, 100 bucks or so? Shivali Patel: Now. So when I was looking at this product, everything was 30 bucks and I wanted to sell it for 120. And I knew I wanted to sell it for somewhere between 120 and like 140. But by the time that I actually launched, there was a couple bags on the market that were selling for 160 with a lot less value. In my opinion, they're nice, but also, if you think about anything else in the world you have your cars, you have your coach bags there's always a market for something. So I suppose at that point it's just what you're planning to or who you're really getting. Bradley Sutton: So then you know a lot of people here in this room. You know they might not be able to afford a product that requires an investment, you know pretty high, because you know if you're having a 100, $120 product, you know your costs might be like 30 bucks or 40 bucks a unit. And then, if you're, what was your MOQ, by the way? Shivali Patel: My MOQ was 500. Bradley Sutton: 500, all right. So, like, you guys can do the math, if you're buying a product that costs $30 and you have to order 500 or 1000, you know you're already talking about 15, $20, $30,000 before you even consider shipping. However, on the flip side is if you can afford that. This is just by itself a way that you can differentiate yourself from from these saturated niches, because not that many people can afford to go into a niche like that. So you're immediately kind of like disqualifying a lot of the potential people that you might that you might, you know, be going up again. So let's fast forward. You know, you took a few months. You started designing the product. You're looking at different, different needs and you actually built in like your own program. Since you're kind of like your own influencer, you're like, hey, I'm going to sell this product with also like this course, and so just, you know, briefly, like in a minute or so, can you talk about how that idea came? And then what's the deliverable? Like, like, are people getting this, this card inside the thing that says, hey, sign up for my beauty course, or how did that work? Shivali Patel: I have always sold physical and digital products separately, and I thought it would be interesting to combine the two, especially because a lot of the competitors inside of the makeup bag market were selling, essentially as the add-on, a 10x magnifier. It was like a bonus piece that people throw in for bundling options. And I know for me, while a magnifying mirror is helpful, I don't actually use one on a day-to-day basis, so it has no real value for me as a consumer, not to say that it doesn't for somebody else, but for me. Outside of that, they also had these little travel jewelry compartments, which is great, but again, what's something that would be more of an experience, right, that would justify $120 price point. And so I started looking at the intersection of a digital course or a live coaching element, which one increases your touch points with the customer you get to hopefully get with, of course, in like, I'm not saying anything, black hat, I'm just saying that you can get to know, maybe, your customer a little bit better and then you'll know their order number so you can ask them to request a review a little bit later on. But yeah, the delivery aspect of it for the actual course is the product insert, which I created a QR code using Helium 10s portals and then just put that in so they get access to exclusive course that pretty much no other competitors can replicate, right? Because it takes a significant amount of time to go through and film a bunch of videos and then also end up taking time to do live coaching as well. Bradley Sutton: Yeah, hold on. I want to pause you right there because this is important. I want to make sure people understood the main point here. We hear so much and maybe you who haven't started on Amazon yet you've probably heard oh my goodness, it's too late to sell on Amazon, or there's just too much competition, or no matter what I sell, everybody's going to copy me. And then everybody's going to do it and have a low price. And, guys, let me tell you that's, first of all, that's not true. Like in some, you know, like categories, maybe, okay, maybe that's true. Like, if you just have a generic product, could everybody copy you? There's not much room for differentiation? Sure, but there are so many opportunities out there where you as, like you know, if you're selling in Europe, you're Europe based. You're selling in America, you're US based. There's things that you can do, there's skills that you have, or maybe, utilizing the network you have, that you can kind of like competition proof what you're trying to make. So, Shivali, she was like what can I do that? You know, probably the bakeries that are trying to sell direct on Amazon can't do All right. And one of them was like, hey, she's like let me make an actual course that nobody you know no Chinese factory or Indian factory or any other country that makes this are going to take the time to find an American based influencer and film this whole course and have that be a threat. Bradley Sutton: Like literally nobody is going to do that. So this is something that she has like a 100% exclusivity on that she never has to worry about competing with other people and it's going to allow her to keep a higher price point as well, because there's this added bonus. So don't let people tell you, oh it's, it's impossible to compete on Amazon because of the competition. No, you, absolutely, you know, can do that. Now let's just fast forward. Now you launched on what doesn't have to be the exact date, but when did you actually launch your product? November 30th or right, wait, November 30th. Was that during Black Friday weekend or? Shivali Patel: Okay, I was trying to get ahead of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but the issue was it's an electronics item and I had some sort of request that they asked for like an MSDS safety sheet, and then it got classified as a dangerous good. So all my inventory was at the facilities but it was in reserve. I couldn't access it, I couldn't sell it. And then eventually, when it finally happened, I pretty much didn't know when it like went live. I was checking but I couldn't tell because it was like some of the products looked okay and then I made the stupid blunder of trying to check if it was available by buying, but then it wouldn't let me buy because I'm a seller. I didn't process that. But finally, November 30th, I had my first sale. It went live and I had my first sale and then I actually discounted that product for I think it was like 20 bucks or not 20 bucks, 20%, and then I had like that nice strike through price so I dropped from 120 to $90 and then went back up because my end of the November. Bradley Sutton: You're doing all this which, by the way, guys, she's talking about like what we call the Maldives honeymoon strategy. I'll give you, guys, links to how to launch your product. You know, based on the Maldives honeymoon strategy. It has to do with PPC and putting a heavy discount on your product. Now some people in the chat are asking about if they can see the product. I can throw it up here. Is it out of stock right now? Like, did you sell out or is it actually live still? Shivali Patel: No, it's still live. radley Sutton: Fast forward guys. She kind of like was doing stuff that some people say, oh, you should never do, like never launch a product in Q4., don't launch a product during Black Friday weekend. But she did that and then, right away, what did you get your kind of like daily sales up to? 70 units a day 70 units a day at $100 price point. But, guys, this is the product that we're talking about. It's a live, real live product that was just launched on Amazon a couple months ago. Here we go, brand new. She doesn't even have the video on here yet, like she even didn't even do the brand registry at first, I remember, because she just like got this, got this up, but where does it? Man, these are some nice images. So here's the image that talked about her makeup lessons. Okay, there she is. She's her own influencer. Totally fine, you're not going to see me put my picture on a coffin shelf, which is the product. Shivali Patel: I sell. I don't know. I think a lot of people right now that are watching would buy things if you were the influencer. Bradley Sutton: I don't know, I don't know. That's not the way I roll, but you can see, like if you go back in her BSR like when she launched the product and look at these crazy BSRs that she was having. Now obviously the sales have gone down after Christmas. This was a heavy, heavy item in Christmas. But long story short, like how much money did you sell in December of this product? What was your gross sales at? Shivali Patel: $46,000. Bradley Sutton: $46,000. Shivali Patel: And what kind of profit margins? Bradley Sutton: did you have? Shivali Patel: So after all the time, I originally thought I had like a 57% profit margin, but after all the calculations I think it was closer to 45% profit margin 45. Bradley Sutton: Now, guys, we're not going to be here and say that, oh, everybody who sells on Amazon using her strategies and using Helium 10, it's going to be able to sell $45,000 in three weeks and 40% profit margins. She obviously worked really hard to do this, but it shows that what is possible. Because she didn't use any special hack because she's a Helium 10 employee or some backdoor into Amazon. She just used the same exact strategies that you could have it. And somebody asked hey, after ad spend, what was the margin? No, that is after everything, after her cost, after PPC, after everything, 40%. Yeah, Ron says she doesn't even have A plus content. Yeah, she didn't have brand registry. She got this out so fast. She didn't even have brand registry yet and she just sold out almost completely. All right, well, that's a cool story. I'm going to give one of mine. So let me give you guys one more story about something that hasn't even launched yet. But let me walk you through the process, and this has a. She talked about how she found her opportunity in helium 10. Bradley Sutton: Let me show you something where I found an opportunity, and originally it came not from black box, but another tool that's not even designed for product research? All right. So does anybody in here use the regular market tracker? All right, this is not market tracker. You know 360 regular market tracker. Let me show you guys, let me retrace, what I did a few months ago. This is the regular market tracker and, as you guys may or may not know, so if you're new to, if you're new to helium 10, you probably haven't seen Project X, but we launched this product called a, a coffin shelf. All right, and so I've been. I've sold hundreds of thousands of dollars of these coffin related items, and so I have this coffin shelf market and basically what it does is I'm tracking my market share, I'm tracking like where my market compared to the others, and actually I did so well in Q4. I sold out, until just like a week ago, of of coffin shelves. Bradley Sutton: Okay, now let me show you here what I was looking at, what the purpose of this tool is. It allows me to track what is going on with my direct coffin shelf competitors, right, but then it also suggests to me like, hey, there's a new coffin shelf or a new potential player that might be like coming into your niche, right, and so you can see here those of you watching this and if you're listening to this later, you might not see this visual here, but there's a button that says track or ignore. So it's saying like hey, here's a new player in this niche. Do you want to start tracking him to, to, to track how, how your market share is going, all right. And so I was scrolling on here and then look, do you guys see what this is? Let me know in the chat, do you guys? If you can see it, it's kind of hard. These two things that are not coffin shelves, what does it look like to you guys? Bats yes, exactly, these are bat shelves. Bradley Sutton: Okay, so now, all of a sudden, let me just explain how my thought process went. I'm like, wait a minute, this is kind of interesting. All right, like these people are not my direct competitors, but they must be ranking for similar keywords, and I'm like that makes sense. Like in in, coffin decor is like a bat shelf might be kind of like a kind of spooky thing, right? So I went into a, an Amazon tool. All right, that is the product opportunity explorer. Okay, this is another thing that anybody on this call should have access to. Whether or not you, whether or not you guys, have brand registry you should have product opportunity explorer. So I typed in the keyword coffin shelf because, again, that's what I was selling and I'm like all right, let's take a look at what are the top clicked products after coffin shelf. So after people search coffin shelf and the related search terms, what are people clicking on? Okay, now, this is. This is not helium 10. This is directly from Amazon. All right, I like to kind of validate to see a little bit deeper what's going on. Bradley Sutton: Once I saw that, initially inside of helium 10, and then, sure enough, look here in the top 10 products after my products. A lot of these are my products that I'm selling. I saw I start seeing these bat related products and so I'm like, okay, that's interesting, but I want to. I want to take it a step further, like I could launch a bat shelf and I still might do a bat shelf, but are there any other bat related items? Maybe I could start a line of bat related items. Bradley Sutton: So here's what I did, all right. So Shivali situation was kind of like hey, she was looking for her first product on a new brand. A lot of you guys haven't found your first product yet. You follow that technique, right? I'm talking about what, if you're ready, are selling a brand, how can you expand it out? And this is the kind of process for you guys. Bradley Sutton: All right, so I went back into helium 10 black box. Okay, let's go ahead and go into that tool. So now this is what I want you guys to do. We're literally retracing my steps. I'm going to try and remember what I did. I'm selling, you know, there's probably a lot of bat related products that maybe you might be in the pet niche, like people making bat houses and stuff like that. There's probably a lot of Batman stuff in the memorabilia, right. But I wanted to do stuff in my niche. So hit the category and subcategory, drop down in black box and select home and kitchen All right. Bradley Sutton: So I wanted to find products in the home and kitchen niche, all right, okay. The next thing I wanted to do was I wanted to make sure that you know we weren't going to have some like $5 products or, at the same time, products that cost, like you know, $60 or more. So I put in the sales price field minimum 10, maximum 60. I wanted to find products that we're selling already, like is there a product in this bat niche that is selling pretty decently already. So under monthly sales okay, under monthly sales I put minimum 100 per month. All right, that means, hey, here's a bat related product that is in the home and kitchen that's priced between 10 and $60. And it is 100, selling at least 100 units per month. I didn't want to have a bunch of variations, like a product that had a whole bunch of sizes. So what I put, I think again, I'm trying to retrace this, I'm doing this live here, guys, I think I put a maximum one under variation count. Bradley Sutton: Okay, now what else do I do? Okay, you might be wondering well, how in the world am I looking for bat related products? All right, well, what I did was, like, I figured if it's a bat related product, it's probably got bat in the title. Okay, and Nicole says variation yes, max should be in the max right here under one. This is the minimum. I don't put anything, max, I put one. Okay, that's why, that's why the, the, the min is blank, all right. So under title keywords I put bat. So like, that means that I'm trying to find a product that had the word bat in it. Because I like again, couple steps back, I saw in market tracker, there's bat related products showing up in my market. I looked and validated that in Amazon opportunity explore. There's bat related products and I'm just wondering is the only bat related products shelves, or are there other bat related products? Okay, I'm not sure if I, if I entered more things, I'll know by the number. Go ahead and hit search now, guys, and let's see how many, how many things come up. Let's see 14 items. Okay, this is probably it. Bradley Sutton: And then I started seeing some super interesting things. Now, of course, some things were completely unrelated, because obviously a baseball bat, you know, might, might show up. But take a look at this, guys, a bat, I don't know what. This is like a remote control holder or a decor box. Look at this one a bat shaped wine and beer opener. Now, all of a sudden, my like creative juices were flowing. Here is a bat shelf. And then, as I was scrolling down, boom, I was like, wow, look at this, a bat Bath mat or bath rug. I was like that is such a novel idea. And so I started looking at this. I'm like, hey, there is some opportunity here to make a bat bath mat. But here's the problem. When I looked on Amazon, I was like the price is a little bit low, all right, compared to my cost. So I was like, is there any way I can differentiate this? So let me just show you what I was looking at. Um, let's just go here to Amazon and let's type in bat bath mat. Bradley Sutton: Now, at the time the prices were actually higher. But let me just walk you through, kind of like my thought process here. Okay, so take a look here. I started seeing this and, by the way, when I was looking at this, I think it was kind of like around the Halloween time and there were like hundreds and hundreds of these being sold, like now there's only a couple, that there's like a hundred or so being sold, but I'm like this is a super cool product. What I like to see is like the number one product, like the one who, who is selling the most. Bradley Sutton: What can somebody in the chat tell me about? What is wrong with this? Like, what are they doing wrong that could get them literally suspended they're listening, suspended at any time. Yes, alexander says no white background. Everybody, a lot of you professional stuff. I was like I love to see this. We're the number one seller in the niche Probably doesn't even know how to sell on Amazon because they've got this ugly image of a tile floor and it. This literally could get suspended by Amazon at any time because it's not white background. Bradley Sutton: And then, as I scroll down here, this is what I love to see. I'm already like, not even halfway down the page. All right, these, these are organic results. What do you guys notice here about these organic results? Is this one a bath, a bat bath mat? No, it's unrelated results. Who said that? Jonathan says that unreal. I'm not even halfway down page one and I have completely different results, like, like, here is somebody who's advertising here with a stone bath mat has nothing to do with this. Here's some spider web bath mats. This is what I love to see. Now, guys, this is now four months later. Bradley Sutton: It was even more drastic when I was looking at this, where I like nobody had bath bath mats but at that time that all of these were like around 20 bucks and I'm like, ah, man, this is like this is. You know, I want to have some higher Profit margins. I'm like, look at, some of these guys are just blowing stuff out because, because you know, they probably had overstock. But I'm like, how am I gonna have a product that's gonna go for like 20 to 30 dollars when people have, at the time, like 16 17 dollars? So this is what I what I looked at. I was like, let me just look at regular bath mats. All right, bath mat. Okay, this is has nothing to do with bat shaped or coffin shaped or anything. And then this is what I saw, like a lot of people had it for cheap prices. I'm like, okay, fine, but you know, since I have a bat one, I I don't have that much competition. Bradley Sutton: But look at this, I didn't know much of Beth Matz at the time, but look at this. Do you guys anybody see the difference between these and those ones that were the bat, the bat ones? Anybody know about bath mats and like could see instantly I know I'm zooming in here the difference. So what the difference is is the material. Do you guys see how thick this is? This is what's called and I don't know if I'm pronouncing this right this is what's called chenille, if I, if I'm mispronouncing that, I apologize. I literally know nothing about this. This niche Chenille. This is a lot more expensive material than I thought it would be. This, this niche Chenille. This is a lot more expensive material and it is like it's kind of cool, like your foot sinks into it and your foot almost disappears into this material and it's much more absorbent and I'm like, okay, all right. So here's the thing I want to make some bat bath mats and that could launch some other products, like maybe some coffin bath mats and everything, but everybody's selling for this cheap price. So what I want to do is sell a bat shaped bath mat, and I'm going to be the only one that's going to make it Chenille. So let me show you. Bradley Sutton: I went to, I got the product made and then I went to AMZ One Step and paid them to go ahead and have a photo shoot done at their factory, and my product is not yet launched. Guys. I just got this. I'm gonna open up a Google Drive, guys. This is like real stuff. This is just a Google Drive that was sent to me two days ago. I got the images ready and take a look at the products that I was able to develop based on all of these steps that I went. Here's a same thing Chenille bat shaped Bath mat. Let me show some more images here. I did some research and I'm like all right, some of these are not machine washable. I'm going to make sure to have an image where people can clearly see that this is machine washable. That's another way that I can differentiate my myself with the other competitors. Bradley Sutton: What else did I put here? I made some detail about how the non-slip you know backing right. What else did I have in the images? I did like a really expensive photo shoot, guys. I really wanted to go out. Look at this, this is not 3D, this is like a real. This is a real Airbnb, not Airbnb. I don't know if it was Airbnb, but it might have been Airbnb. But they literally rented a house to have this that had like these kind of like minimalistic, gothic vibes and we did a photo shoot to really kind of like differentiate. Now take a look at some of these images and compare it to the images that we saw on the bath you know, bath mat over there. All right, completely different. Right, very high quality. So basically, guys, this is a product that I am going to launch either maybe this week or next week, and I'm going to launch at over $20, when everybody else was selling it for um for a lot cheaper. All right, so there's two different cases. Shivali will open up a brand new brand. Bradley Sutton: Here's me. I was selling coffin shelves and I wanted to open up a kind of new line of products that aren't coffin related but are from the same kind of like um customer profile. I guess you could say you know somebody who's weird enough to buy a coffin shaped thing, probably weird enough to buy a bat shaped thing. So those are a couple of techniques. Let me give you guys a couple more techniques that those are real life examples. Let's go back into black box, guys. All right, let's go back into black I can't even say that right back into black box. And then everybody, let me know in the chat if you're with me. We're going to do something together. We're going to pick a imaginary product research situation right now and somebody said will the US consumer buy this all year long? Absolutely, believe it or not, people buy coffin shelves all year round. They would absolutely buy this. The people who are into Gothic decor, they just love this kind of stuff. All right, everybody's ready. Bradley Sutton: Now I want you guys to click into keywords. This is the keywords tab. All right, now, everybody, give me some sample ideas of categories to choose. I'm going to give you kind of like an advanced technique and I'm going to do one more advanced technique and then we're going to open up to Q&A for about five minutes here. Somebody says kitchen, somebody says pet, a bunch of people saying pets. Okay, let's go with those. So everybody. Go ahead in your black box keywords select kitchen, kitchen and dining, home and kitchen just for kicks and giggles. And then what was the other thing that people started? Yeah, pet supplies. All right, select pet supplies. Now I'm on a tool that looks at keywords. So who can tell me in the chat what signifies demand for a keyword? Is it sales? What is the metric that signifies demand for keywords? All right, it is search volume, exactly. So I'm going to say, hey, let me see a keyword that has at least 2000 search volume, maybe a maximum of 10,000. And I might have to like, lessen these because I might be doing something a little bit too narrow here. All right, and let's go into a price range where the average product on the search results, on average of the top products, are between, let's say, 20 and 50 dollars. All right. Bradley Sutton: Now here's what I like to do. I'd like to go to the very bottom of black box keywords and, under competitor revenue, I'm going to do something that's opposite from logic. All right, this is opposite from the way that you might have learned how to do this tool. I'm going to say competitor revenue more than $5,000, a maximum of four and a minimum of one. Traditionally you might. And, by the way, guys, there's not a right way and a wrong way here. I'm just trying to show you that you can have an opposite technique and you could still get a good result. The traditional teaching here is you want to find a keyword where most of the products are selling at least $5,000. I'm trying to do something different, where maybe only a couple products are really doing well and the rest are just kind of like throwaways. Why do you think, guys, why do you think this could give me something that might be opportunity? Let me know what you think in the chat. Why would I want to see when a keyword where not that many products in the top 10 are making good sales? Bradley Sutton: Ritu says improvement opportunity. Max says bad listings yes. Kl says try to be in the top yes, very good. Louis says low PPC. Guess what, guys? Everybody's correct. These are all reasons on why I'm doing this. Now, it doesn't mean that the opposite way is not going to get me good results too, but this is what I'm doing for this one. Now, competitor reviews out of the top 10, what I'm going to say is hey, I want to see a minimum of, let's just say, six products have less than 150 reviews. So that's what I'm doing in black box keywords Again competitor reviews at less than 150, minimum six. Now there might be either a whole bunch or not enough. Bradley Sutton: I'm not sure what's going to come up here. Yeah, I have too much hair. Oh, my goodness gracious, I found a pretty cool product right away, guys. I've never looked at, I've never seen this keyword in my life Goat blankets for winter Search for 3,000 times a month. Like there are 3,000 people out there trying to find blankets for their goats. Or is it blankets made from goat fur? I don't know. We can take a look at that. What else do we see here? Oyster shells, cat collar, camera, wedding table numbers, tree wall art guys, these are all Good opportunity stuff. Pottery apron like I guess a pottery apron would be different than a regular apron. Like it maybe needs to be more thick. Alright, to Taylor Swift Betty, I'm not gonna do that one, because that's probably Branded there, trademarked, I should say. Bulldog storage decoration what the heck like storage that? Is that a brand name or is that, like people want storage with pictures of bulldogs on it? Table numbers for wedding reception here's a Vietnamese keyword that I don't know. A Heart-shaped charcuterie board. Bradley Sutton: Guys, I literally just came up with one search. I came up with about 15 product opportunity ideas that all of these are pretty good. Jonathan says these are blankets for goats. I used to have goats myself, believe it or not, like here in San Diego County. I have one acre here property. I used to raise goats. I I never bought them blankets. You know, I'm sorry, sorry to say, but I guess I was, you know. But but I'm in Southern California so it doesn't get too cold so I think my goats were doing fine. But anyways, guys, that was just one search I just did with you guys right here and we found 10 Opportunities that could be worth looking at. Bradley Sutton: One last quick one I wanted to do before we get five minutes of of Q&A. Another new tool here in black box. Now, those of you who have the diamond plan, you'll be able to see this. It's a BA top search terms. All right, this is combining Helium 10 data with what's we're called Amazon brand analytics. Okay, amazon brand analytics is something directly from Amazon and we could see in here what are the top three clicked items by any keyword. This is directly from Amazon. This is not a helium 10 metric. I mean you're looking at it in helium, but that's what this is. So, right here, guys. Bradley Sutton: Um, this is Gold because, like, for example, I could say, hey, show me something, let's say a keyword that has the word bat in it. Going back to my original example, but where? If I take a look at the top three clicked ASINs, okay, I want to see their total click share, maybe at least 50%, meaning that let's just let's just see if anything comes up. That might be nothing, might come up here, let's just take a look. But what that means is, if I take the three products that have the most clicks after this keyword, it makes up more than 50% of the clicks overall. Okay, so that's what I would want to do phrases containing bats and look at that. I might do the top three conversion share. That's another thing that I could look at as as well, but these are unique data points that somebody could use, where you combine Amazon data with helium 10 data to find something completely new and different. Bradley Sutton: Alright, I've got five minutes now, maybe less, for question and answer. Let me take a look in the Documents here in the chat, what you guys have sent in. Alright, here we go. This is from Frank what is better to use a coupon or discounted price? Great question, frank. So he's talking about when you launch a product, like she volley did, either. Or yeah, I personally use discounted price. I try and get a strike through and have a big discount and then sometimes it's like it'll put a little red symbol that says, like you know, 50% off. But then other times, if that doesn't happen, using a coupon might be better because it gives you that green bar in the search results. Bradley Sutton: Alexandra says what was the product photography company? Oh, the one that did the batch of that was AMZ One Step. So you can see them at. Go to hub.helium10.com, Alexandra. hub.helium10.com and you can contact them right inside helium 10. Just type in AMZ and then one step. And then Make sure that. Make sure that you say that helium. You know you learned or heard from a helium 10 or from Bradley on this workshop. Shivali, who can you let us know? Who made your images? Alright, so I think you. One step, Shivali. So James is wondering who? Who did you use? I? Shivali Patel: Used myself. Bradley Sutton: You actually took yourself for like your phone. Shivali Patel: I did my own images. I also made my own infographics. Wow, I did the only. I did the course on my own. Bradley Sutton: I you had to have outsourced something, though, like anything. I've outsourced nothing wait, you know how to do Photoshop and stuff like that. Yeah. Shivali Patel: I didn't even Know. I make all my own videos for TikTok, for Instagram. Anything I post, I do. I did my own product photography with a camera I have at home. Although I For social, I typically just I phone it and then use Canva for Infographics. So that's free, which contributes to the very high profit margins. Bradley Sutton: Yeah Well, yeah, that definitely helps. Like me, me, I have no Photoshop skills. Maybe a lot of you don't have Photoshop skills, so you've got an outsource. Shivali Patel: I Didn't use that much Photoshop, all I did like. If you wanted to do this yourself, they actually the same thing that you pay $1,000 for you can do on your own. All I did is take a white sheet, put it up on Like a wall at home, got a phone I ordered like a 20 or $30 circular thing, but that was for video, it wasn't even for just photography and then I put it on to like a white table and then threw it into a free app free iPhone app for background remover and then put everything into Canva. Okay, so canva Able to do a pretty, pretty impressive if you guys want to do this on your own, you can also. I believe we have a module in Freedom Ticket For making your own product images, so you guys can watch that too. I filmed that one. Bradley Sutton: If you are at all artistically inclined, it doesn't even take Photoshop to do this. But you could be like me and be completely Illiterate from artistic sense, and that's why I outsource my stuff to different companies who are the Professional. So there's not a right or a wrong way to go about it. Hosam asked how does brand analytics help you? Could you please explain with an example? So, brand analytics that the number one benefit of brand analytics is that Amazon is telling you, after the search of a keyword, which three products are click the most and of those three products, what kind of sales share do they have of the people who end up buying a product after that, after searching that keyword. Super, super valuable information that you can see inside of helium 10. That comes directly from brand analytics. Um Frank says I would like to some launch help, for example, vying coupons, giveaways what would you recommend these days? So if you're talking about, like the old school Giveaways, you know that that's against terms of service. Now, on Amazon, what Shivali did, what I'm gonna do is Fully within terms of service is mainly just using PPC, all right. So if you guys want to know the three episodes, you guys have some homework. You guys want to know how to launch a product in the same exact way that Shivali and I launch our product. This is what I'm gonna leave you guys with. Bradley Sutton: Right this time, everybody have a pen and paper ready. All right, right down these three episodes h10.me/466, all right. Or it's Serious Sellers Podcast, episode 466. You can look it up on your. I want everybody actually typing it in right now go into your Apple iPhone and go to Apple podcast and go into Serious sellers podcast and hit subscribe the three episodes you want to look at for how to launch your product, to get ready for it is 466 and 467, so you can go on your podcast. Or you can just type in h10.me forward, slash 466 or 467. The one to actually launch, it is 500, all right. So there's three episodes that you want you guys to listen to 466, 467 and 500. Thank you guys for joining and we'll see you later. Bye, now you.

44m

Feb 06, 2024

Join us in this episode as we unfold the remarkable e-commerce tale of Josh and Jenna Coleman, a powerhouse couple who turned their online sales venture into a resounding success. They take us on a journey from their beginnings in marketing and finance to dominating Amazon and TikTok Shop, sharing the strategic decisions and personal pivots that propelled them into the limelight. Their story is a masterclass in leveraging life's twists – from raising kids to career transitions – to build a thriving business that resonates with the potential of passive income. Listen in as the conversation turns to the nitty-gritty of starting with side gigs and progressing to Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) and Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA). Josh and Jenna provide valuable insights into using platforms like Helium 10 for market research and how they used their design acumen to create products that captivate both digital and physical markets. Discover how they utilized KDP as a testing ground for market interest, leading to a booming workbook series that soared in popularity, thanks to smart social media strategies. Finally, our chat takes a deeper look at the couple's viral breakthroughs and how they utilized TikTok Shop and Shopify to amplify their business. They share the behind-the-scenes of managing a small business through the highs of viral sales spikes and the challenges of inventory and listing protection. The duo also reflects on the profound impact that Amazon and TikTok Shop have had on their lives and the lives of influencers who have joined them on this journey. Tune in for a dose of inspiration and practical advice that could set you on your own path to e-commerce success.   In episode 532 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley, Josh, and Jenna discuss: __ __ ► 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 married couple with an incredible story. In not even their first full year on Amazon, they've grossed over half a million dollars. And in not even their first full month on TikTok Shop, they've grossed over a quarter of a million dollars. And they're going to share how it's possible to set up a TikTok Shop account in only 10 minutes. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Are you browsing a Shopify, Walmart, Esty, Alibaba or Pinterest page and maybe you see a cool product that you want to get some more data on? Well, while you're on those pages, you can actually use the Helium 10 Chrome extension Demand Analyzer to get instant data about what's happening on Amazon for those keywords on these other websites. Or maybe you want to then follow up and get an actual supplier quote from a company on Alibaba.com in order to see if you can get this product produced. You can do that also with the Helium 10 Demand Analyzer. Both of these are part of the Helium 10 Chrome extension, which you can download for free at h10.me/extension. Bradley Sutton: Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Series Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show. It's a completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. We've got a husband and wife dynamic, serious seller duo here for the first time on the show the double J crew, josh and Jenna. How's it going, guys? Josh: Good. Jenna: Pretty well Thanks for having us.  Bradley Sutton: Yeah, Awesome. Now where are you guys located? Jenna: We are right outside Philly. 0:01:45 - Bradley Sutton: Okay, so you're on the East Coast, all right. So you guys were born and raised, or are you transplants from somewhere else? Jenna: So well, I'm a transplant. He is born and raised out here. I'm originally from the Midwest, the suburbs of Chicago. Bradley Sutton: In West Philadelphia born and raised. Oh sorry, probably back. Josh: Yes, yeah, oh she could sing it with you the whole thing. Jenna: Oh, yes, I could, yeah. We met in college out here and I kind of fell in love with the East Coast so we knew we wanted to raise our kids out here. So yeah, then we ended up out here. Bradley Sutton: You're supposed to say you fell in love with him and then you fell in love with the East Coast. Jenna: Right, yes. Bradley Sutton: Okay, in that order there. Exactly what college did you guys meet? Jenna: We went to Nova Villanova. Bradley Sutton: Villanova Okay, yes, I knew one of my favorite Clippers was Kerry Kittles way back in the 90s. Jenna: Yeah, 85 here they won yeah. Bradley Sutton: Yeah, so the reason I know him is funny. Here's just a really crazy story. You guys may or may not know. I used to be a Zumba fitness influencer and in my channel that I created on Zumba that had 30 million views. It was called CrazySockTV and I created that. It's kind of like a branding kind of thing. I wanted to be memorable so that people in memory is my brand, and just not to be some random person dancing Zumba, which was a million people. So what I would do is I would have a crazy like one sock on one leg and then one sock on an arm, and that was what I came up with. It was always a crazy sock, but where I originally got that idea was Kerry Kittles. He would just have one sock when he played with the Clippers, which is which is my team, and I'm like that is the most weirdest thing I've ever seen. I'm going to roll with that idea. And that went to tens of millions of Zumba video views and so, yeah, that's my Villanova tie right there. Anyways, all right. So you guys, what did each of you major in there? Jenna: My bachelor's was in marketing and he was finance. Math and finance yeah, I mean he took everything for fun math, he loves math. So like that, my fine classes were like astronomy and his were, I don't know, derivatives and anything he could with math. Bradley Sutton: What did you guys do after graduation then? Did you, either of you, enter into that world that you guys were studying? Jenna: We did. We did a little bit. So I did marketing for my dad's financial planning firm and then I decided I wanted to be a teacher. I got my master's of education, went down that route and then we were actually living in Chicago for the beginning of our first quarters. And then we had our twins and moved back out to the East coast and I definitely took a good break there for like the better part of a decade and didn't really jump back into anything until like until this. I mean not really fully into anything, until this. Bradley Sutton: And then, Josh, what were you doing all this, all this time? I'm assuming you were the income, then if she was taking a break, so what were you doing? Josh: Yep. All sorts of things in finance Consulting. Jenna: Yeah, so working too many hours a week Josh: Flying a hundred thousand miles a year, like domestically only, which you. You probably fly that in four trips, but around the world domestically, that's a harder target to hit. Bradley Sutton: So, yeah, this doesn't sound like an exciting job. So what? What was the thought process on, like how you guys ended up with e-commerce? Was it just like all right, I don't want to do this always? Or were you looking for a side hustle? Or how do you go from the finance and marketing world to and the stay at home you know world, to switch to e-commerce? Jenna: So I mean that was definitely part of it. The time constraints and I think the idea that there could be some passive component to e-commerce was interesting. But I really was. I mean, josh knows I would. I was admiring e-commerce for like the better part of a decade. I was that person that everything I looked at I was like, oh, I could create this, I can make it better, even with educational stuff and tools and resources. I was making my own and kind of like just admiring it from afar and saying, you know, when it's the right time, then then I'll go into it, cause we are not like the dip your toe in type of people. We are like the 50 foot cannonball jump ball in. It's not like we're just going to try, you know, like a product and see how it goes. When we I knew when we were going to go in it was going to be all in. So I was waiting for life to slow down and it was really like actually the craziest, the easiest time of our life and I kind of just had this like epiphany that life doesn't really slow down, no matter how old your kids get. So if I don't do it now, it's probably now or never. Jenna: I can remember I think it was like a month after we got out of the hospital with my son. So our oldest son has epilepsy and he had about a year of failed anti seizure meds and treatments and it was just in and out of the hospital and they eventually came up. So they have this all over the country but it's the medical ketogenic diet for epilepsy. So they put him on that and we had to go to the hospital and we had to learn all about it and I kind of had this moment of I was like this is more intense and exhausting than twins. This has been my dream forever. I'm like if I don't jump in now, I'm never going to do it. Bradley Sutton: Well, was there something that made you that's still not a natural thing to just like jump into, like, like? Did you get hit with an ad somewhere, or where you're searching how to make money at home? Or how did you land on Ecom? Jenna: So I definitely found a couple ads there, because there were. I did take a couple courses that were teaching you how you can sell on Amazon and I had already had ideas and I kind of thought selling an Amazon? I didn't understand the process of it. So I was like, all right, so I think I can figure this out. There's courses to do it. So I took the courses, I downloaded like a ton of podcasts and he knew I kind of like dug into this whole of like just learning and education and I didn't want to bring it to him until I was like I can do great. Yeah, you're like you're doing great, you're doing your own thing. Like I said, we're not like a dip your toe in type of person. I didn't want to bring it to him until I thought this is something he would like to. So I really just kind of like dug in on the courses and I already knew the things I wanted to create, but I didn't understand like the science, the research behind it and it's funny we were talking about this. I was like, okay, so I listened to your Serious Sellers Podcast before I could understand 10% of what you said and I remember like listening to one of your podcasts and a few others like it and I was like this is amazing, this part I don't understand creating design innovation. I understand the numbers. Bradley Sutton: We're here talking, by the way, about more or less 2019, 2020, 2021. Last year, fall of  2022. Jenna: Yeah, yeah. So I listened to one of your episodes and a couple others and I was like, oh, my goodness, josh would love this. There's software, there's research, there's numbers that can go into this. So basically I hooked him by showing him that kind of stuff. I was like, look, if you can do the product research and you can tell me the numbers and you can do this, I will design and create their products. And look, they have software like Helium 10, he was like lit up. He's like this is fantastic, I can play. I mean, he was playing around in it before we even had our first product like that. Yeah, like before we even really knew if we were going to do a product yet. Josh: And now I'm like now we're here. What happened yeah? Jenna: So I hooked him with that kind of stuff. We're very different, very different in terms of like, our interest and what we like, and I think it actually helps in this industry. So yeah, that's it. I knew I wanted to for a long time. I don't think he knew we wanted to until he saw that aspect of the business that I could kind of hook him in. Bradley Sutton: So at this time you still weren't working yourself. Only Josh was. Jenna: I've done a lot of things on the side, like I would just say side jobs and stuff. Like you know, I've done network marketing and coaching and stuff like that. Josh: Coaching sports yes. Jenna: Yeah. Bradley Sutton: What sport did you coach? Jenna: I coached volleyball. I played volleyball in college, so I just here whenever. I could camps and helped at schools and stuff. Bradley Sutton: But you had, you had the kind of bandwidth, but. But, but, josh, you know, you know traveling everything. If it was up to him it probably might not have gotten done because he was pretty busy then. So that's an important thing to know. Like, hey, maybe it's the husband, maybe it's a wife, but but you know you got to have somebody who's able to dedicate some time to this, or else you might never get started. So then you guys, you know, started dipping yourselves into Two courses and now the very first product that you launched, uh, are you still selling that product now? Jenna: Yeah, but well, I mean it's of our FBA product we have, yeah, we have. We launched our first ones for KDP books and then our first product we launched last summer. Bradley Sutton: Talk about that for a second. What made you go that route? Jenna: So KDP, I mean, well, it's inexpensive. And I already was creating designs and things like that and I knew that was something that we could do while we're learning, because we wanted to. When we wanted to launch products, we knew that we wanted to launch more than one at a time and we wanted to make sure we had the research into it and we knew they were going to take a while, especially, coming up to you know, the timing of the year that we were looking at sourcing products was a little tricky. Josh: It was January, right, yeah, it was a year ago, yeah a year ago was when we launched our first KDP book in February of last year and it was Really based on. She knew the audience that she wanted to serve, but we had to test the content and we felt like KDP was a good place to test the content of like a meal planner and fitness type Trackers and budget planner, and then on the education side, cursive workbooks and you know things of that nature. Because when you look at the you know audience that she wanted to serve, my Research coming out of it was trying to find you know products that interested or that, um, that Audience wanted at the time. And so that's why we used KDP is we got to kind of test content and then we also got to test PPC, play with it and learn it and in a in a real experimental way, instead of With an FBA product that was going to require a you know a large Upfront investment and inventory and all that kind of stuff and we had started that process. But it takes a while. Bradley Sutton: So, but basically you use a lot of the similar strategies, like using Helium 10 to see demand and, and that's how you like landed on what KDP thing you were going to uh, launch and how to optimize your listing things like that. at what point then Were you like hey, not a lot, I want to do physical products. Jenna: So some of our designs that went into the KDP books are actually used in our physical products. Um, we edited them, made them a little bit better. We were able to use some reviews. So, for example, we have a meal planner, fitness tracker, or I think we call that the advanced meal planner and fitness tracker in KDP, um, and then we were able to make some improvements on that to make it into one of our vegan leather planners, um, but yeah, so, like we, those designs took me A lot of time to focus on and creating those. So we just had to make some adjustments to make those doable and we were able to get samples and stuff as we put out that KDP book. We were getting samples because we knew we wanted to eventually make it in FBA. We knew that there was more money obviously in FBA than KDP. Bradley Sutton: Were you able to do things by going, you know, directly to somebody who actually physically produced this? That was not an option with KDP, like a certain kind of Cover or something like that that you just literally could not even do KDP Uh, what are some of those things? Jenna: the KDP books. You can only do paperback or hardcover. You can have limited size Um and, as you know, with FBA you can do anything you want, really. I mean, you can create any material, cover, um things in our meal planner, fitness tracker. One of the things that I wanted was that they could tear off their grocery list and take it with them. You can't have perforated pages in a KDP book, um, and that's also, I think, where you can get seen on KDP versus you're. You're shown everywhere on amazon right and isn't KDP, I believe it's just the books that you're shown in yeah, you, you're shown in. Josh: You're shown in search To an extent, but it's an ISPN Then identified a product, not an ASIN, not a traditional like ASIN Uh product. So, yeah, you're definitely Limited as to where you show up. 0:13:50 - Bradley Sutton: Do you use it kind of like as a like an incubator almost for some of your FBA, like if it really takes off with KDP, then that's what you maybe double down on and make a physical uh copy. Josh: I will. I will say yes, and our most successful product, which we launched in December, that that most recently, um, fortunately exploded on like TikTok and such, is really a culmination of like a case study in that it's a handwriting set of handwriting workbooks that have disappearing ink and such and Most of that content you know. She built over time and we released in A variety of different like KDP workbooks while she was. You know, we kind of in always in mind had man, it would be great to do this one thing. The keyword always looked great, there were so many things about it that we felt like we could improve and we were so excited about it. But we knew it would take a lot of time and KDP's content kind of feeling and seeing how things worked was really a huge part of the design over like a nine month period before we released those in December. Jenna: And we're still using our KDP designs into new things. We have our newest product coming out, the bible verse mapping that. We're working on getting those out by spring and they were in KDP and now we're able to get those and a linen cover. A different thing for spring, for FBA products. Bradley Sutton: What's your, what's your average Retail price on the KDP side? And then, of those, how much do you take home? Josh: well, our average, every one of our products on KDP is 999, except for the homeschool planner, which is 1499, and on the, the Products that are nine, that call it ten dollars. On the products that are ten dollars, we take home about $2 and 60 cents A sale, and then on the homeschool planner, we take home about $3 and 80 cents, 90 cents give or take. Bradley Sutton: And then are you doing PBC for this at all, or it's just all organic? Josh: Yeah, we do. I think our total PBC spend on KDP is about $15 a day maybe. So it's small. Obviously it's all relative, but um, but that 1500 a month is net of you know PBC charges specifically. So it's a pretty low a cost Process. As long as you don't get sucked into chasing physical products, you stay in your lane, recognize that you're a KDP product and not try to go after FBA products not that I ever tried that then you can. You can do fine. Bradley Sutton: It's separate log on for KDP and you're a seller central, because that that's kind of like a different. It's not seller central, I know, but how different is the interface for advertising? I know Shavali you know probably knows this but I've never done Advertising for KDP Is it very similar, like you know, you can do, you know, phrase match and Sponsored and campaigns. Josh: Almost an hour, Bradley Sutton: Okay. Okay, cool. Were you selling the entirety of 2023, or did you start later, not January? Josh: KDP. Our first one was February, and then our second one was like April, and then our first FBA product was July 1. Bradley Sutton: Okay, so not a full year of KDP, not a full year, obviously, of FBA. What would you say if you were to combine the gross sales of both on Amazon, only For your planners and things? What? What would you say? It was total at the end of the end of the year in the past year, Since well we haven't been out of here, but yeah okay, yeah, so total 2023? Josh: About 400,000. Bradley Sutton: Are you still doing your day job or did you at some point last year that go all in on the Ecom? Josh: It took about like eight days to realize that there's no chance I was gonna not be able to To like go all in into this. Jenna: it was too much fun. Yeah, you and, and the hours you worked, and the time you worked, I mean, I mean not to say that you don't right now, where it has, we're starting everything up, but uh, yeah, I mean we're trying to launch a good amount of stuff. Josh: It's a lot different being on a plane a hundred thousand Miles a year than it is being, you know, up late at night talking with manufacturers or something, but still in your own house. It's a little different. Bradley Sutton: Was this your first year? In a few years that you're, you didn't make your high status on your travel? Josh: I absolutely it was a second year, but it was the first year I haven't been on an airplane in like my entire life. Jenna: Really amazing yeah, when was.  I mean I guess, so yeah, no, we've really. Josh: Because after COVID we actually started driving Everyone like if we went somewhere, love it to the kids, like it and and frankly it's fun for the two of us. Jenna: And the things we like to do. I mean we love to go to the mountains and snowboard. They're all close enough here the ocean, the beach, all that stuff is driving distance from here, which, growing up in the Midwest, that's not possible. So I love that we can just get to anything within a couple hours by the way, it was great, great story. Josh: We're in the Midwest and after school and she's like, oh, we, you can snowboard here. And I was like, awesome, where? And we she's like I'll take you this place. And we're driving and the nav you know those old Tom Tom. Things right is like this is when we live in Chicago over after we got married two miles you're at your destination and I'm like Jen, I can see about 15 miles in any direction right now there is nowhere to. Actually I don't believe. I like kind of I want to believe you. Yeah, I was like this is like a sled. Jenna: We found a hill somewhere that we turn into is yeah, so yeah, we like the mountains out here. Bradley Sutton: Yeah, well, don't got much of that here exactly in my town when I live, few miles from the beach here in California. But all right now, at what point did you guys discover TikTok shop? Josh: one of your serious seller podcasts in the. In the fall you had on a create some, a creator who did a video, a viral video that went viral for, I think, one of Lizzie's products, but I forget exactly which one it was might have been the body suit One of them, but you had someone on that was explaining, kind of somehow some of the worked and it was super intriguing. And then we went to the meeting in New York where Lizzie spoke and Jenna drove home and you set it up in New York City and I set up the. I set up our TikTok shop in the car on the hot spot. Bradley Sutton: Well, what they're talking about, guys, by the way, is we have their helium-10 elite members and we have a quarterly in-person workshop for Helium 10 members and we did one in New York and we brought somebody Elizabeth, who's been on the podcast before talking about TikTok shop, and she kind of broke down exactly what she did, and I remember you guys at that it was like light bulbs were going off in your head as you guys were watching. We're like wait, wait a minute, we've got a perfect Kind of product that would do well on TikTok shop. So then you got home or he said on the way home, not even you weren't even home yet, you're already setting it up on the way home in the car, yeah, I feel like in the car, because the kids are with my great, with their, my parents. Jenna: They're great kids for a couple days, but you draw like literally on the drive. I mean, what is it? That's less than three hours from New York, oh yeah it's a couple hours. He was done by the time we got back. He's like we're set up, let's go. I was like are you kidding me? Bradley Sutton: Now, at what point there were you like oh man, we're on to something like what was your first kind of like viral day, or? Josh: Frankly, Christmas was our first viral day. On Christmas Day, you know, I had Alerts on, like sale alerts on TikTok, because we didn't get too many before that. So we had sales, but not compared to Amazon. And so our phone. I'm like it's Christmas, leave me alone, who is bothering me? And I was like not that many family and friends are trying to say Merry Christmas. And so it was sales. And we had no idea what was going on. And it was a you know video that was about 10 seconds long, that someone had posted, that had picked up and had, you know, half a million views that day and a million by the next, and the following day, sold us out of our meal planners. I was about 500 on TikTok and about 800 on Amazon so at that point. Bradley Sutton: Sold out in like two days. Josh: Yeah, it generated more Amazon Sales than TikTok shop, even though it was from TikTok shop for that first product. Bradley Sutton: Yeah, as well as our website, so you didn't have like a link. It was just like it got sold out and then people were just trying to search for it on Amazon, you know, to try and get it, and they found your product through there. Josh: Yep and our website, yeah, and we found where they found it was be banner ads, like sponsored display ads, because they recognized the Products or if they would search for something meal planner or fitness or whatever. Our banner ads had like a you know 6% a cost. I remember we're looking at them and I was like, oh, that's what. Like they didn't necessarily know what to search because I didn't really think about it at the time. We just had the title as Grace will buy design meal planner or fitness tracker or something, whereas all the conversions, PPC were happening from there. And that's when we kind of realized you know, there's something to this, to your point about your question about when did we realize like this was a thing, when we realized how well these markets could play off each other and help each other. That was when that day, Christmas in the day after, is when I was like oh yeah, oh wow, like this is, this is a thing. Jenna: I think you were pretty excited about it pretty early though, yeah. Josh: I was excited. Jenna: I'm the pessimist, I was the one that was like I don't know. I mean, we're still. We just had our second product go viral, even more so, and I'm still like I don't know if we should we get the inventory. Is it gonna repeat? Josh: Yeah, it probably won't work. Yeah. Bradley Sutton: So now the planners on Amazon. This is not, this wasn't your KDP, this is a physical one. So what's the retail price on these? On Amazon? Josh: $19.99 Bradley Sutton: $It was 19.99, and then so what? What kind of profit margin on Amazon? Josh: Actually before PPC about 50%. So they're 240 landed plus small stand. We we made sure that packaged their point seven, four inches thick so that we can fit in Small standard. So basically about a 50% or shade above 50% margin and then with PPC, with. PPC, like if you take launch and everything in the consideration. The first, you know Three, four months which was the end of last year, where you know we 20% net margins on, including launch. Bradley Sutton: So about 20%, probably more. You know if we're not considering launch in there now. I yeah. Now if, what kind of retail price did you have it on TikTok shop? Did you still keep it at 1999 or did you take advantage of how you can just add shipping and TikTok pays for it? Or at least they were before? Josh: So we did not do that where we lower the price, because so TikTok shop for Sellers who use seller shipping which is what we were doing, because we are fulfilling some of it from our Amazon inventory, for example, all of it from our Amazon inventory that if you spent $20 as a customer, they would pay for shipping, TikTok shop meaning so the the customer would get it for free for shipping and then TikTok shop would reimburse us and Basically, the $7.99 it's like for one item Quantity of one is what they would do. So we would make the product $20 and shipping $7.99 and as long as we do that, the customer doesn't pay shipping and we get the $20 and reimbursed for shipping at $7.99. So 27. Bradley Sutton: So on Amazon, let's say that you were taking home, you know, after PPC and stuff you know like, let's say, six bucks or something like that. You know maybe five, six dollars or so, which is which is pretty decent on Amazon. Not many people can say that. But then, for that same order, on TikTok shop, how much money were you taking due to TikTok, like subsidizing your, your fees and all this other stuff?  Josh: Yep. So basically, to break it down, so we would get the $20 Minus the 20% commission that went to that creator, right, so we would get $16 for the product Plus the $7.99 for the shipping reimbursement, so $23.99 that we would receive, and TikTok pays the influencer directly. We don't have to do all that accounting, thank goodness. So 2399 that we would receive, it's 240 landed and our MCF fee to like ship and deliver an item to a customer is $8 and change but eight, call it $8. So $23.99 in and Around $11 and 50 cents out, so double plus. Bradley Sutton: Yeah, double or more the profit margin for the exact same product on TikTok shop. Now what's this, Jenna? Are you doing some kind of Like? Are you the influencer for your own product to like? Are you doing like lives or videos or some? Or am I getting you guys Confused with somebody? Jenna: I mean I do it, I do it, um, it's you know, I really More so. I mean they had different promotions that they were running that you could get ad credits for doing lives. That's why I don't think I get a lot of traffic and that's really not, in my opinion, where we get a large amount of sales, the sales I mean especially with our group books. That's well, that was all because of videos and influencers. So it gave us ad credits, which was great, um, but personally I'm not. I do it for the business, but I'm not a fan of being in front of the camera any more than I need to. But I was all for, you know, starting up a small business. When they were like I think it was like $1500 in ad credits, I was like I'll do it, let's do it, you know that's what it was. Josh: No, you're right. During December, if you went live, you know a certain amount of time and Spent 1500, they would give you 1500 an ad credit. And so we basically did that, and the day the promotion ended, they deposited 15 like they were exactly as they Said it would be, and she was tortured every minute that she was live. Jenna: So I would never classify myself as an influencer. I that's what I love about take talk shop that you can use the professionals that that do that as your influencers. Bradley Sutton: Okay. So now you guys I mean technically, if you know Christmas was, was around. You know was around where you really started taking off. You know, by the time that we're recording this podcast, you know, maybe you, like you, can talk about your first full month of TikTok shop. What were the gross sales on that platform? Josh: Since, if you include Christmas in that time, there 250,000 dollars. Bradley Sutton: In one week in one, in one month, in one month in one month in one thirty 70-72 hour period. Josh: They were 180,000 dollars. Jenna: That was that group books viral video, which was crazy yeah and it's amazing to me still, because we had a few large influencers that were, like you know, half a million followers. That I'm like I was the optimist for those. I'm like this is gonna be the one, and they did great videos and the video that took off. That's what I like 9 million views, knowing I don't know, I mean she had, I think, just under 40,000 and which is still big, but it's not like the half million or, you know, near a million followers, that we had other people. So you just don't know and I mean the video was good. Bradley Sutton: So the fact that you guys did a 250 or quarter of a million, does that mean that your influencers took home like 50 grand themselves for doing videos, so that that influencers specifically. Josh: Generated, yeah, single mom she's like the nicest person and we were so happy because she sent a message. You know that the commission was like life-changing, she was ready to get to be done with this and it was 30,000 and change in commission income that she generated based on her post and that, just like that's again when further, it has furthered this point of like you don't have to be the influencer because you know Jenna can be Jenna and Talk to the influencers, which again we try to do like on it, like we write Cards to them when they make content, like all of those types of things, and then it's so much more natural and the creators love doing posts on Jenna's products because she can relate to them and she cares, like she genuinely cares, and it was so cool to see that from a couple of the moms that I've had really successful posts on our products, that you just sit there and you're like this is a great, great business model, that even though they're increasing TikTok shop, increasing their referral fees, no problem, worth every penny. Bradley Sutton: You know you guys have some hijackers on some. You must have be out of stock or something. You guys know about that. I'm just looking at your day, your story now. Josh: Yep all right, you guys need to take care of that. Bradley Sutton: do some tests we already those guys offers that, do you mind if I show people your product page here.? Josh: Yeah, all right, let me um they're the worst because the shipping is like weeks and weeks and weeks that we ordered it right. Yeah, it's killing. Bradley Sutton: I mean the fact you know that that's when you that, by the way, that that's when it's like you know, until you get it fixed, you know where you might want to like suppress your listing, where you take out the images and then nobody can sell on it. You know, so that you know your Every day that somebody has it active. You're like losing your, your keyword ranking, your conversion rate and stuff like that. So if you don't think you're gonna fix that right away, you know, try and get your listing suppressed somehow, you know taking out the image is doing something. Josh: I said that this is where you're always learning in this space because, yeah, these are problems that you didn't know would be problems. Inventory management didn't know that was a problem till all of a sudden it was a Problem. So it's been great to have resources and help from people like you know, Helium 10 folks and other folks in the space, which is Such a help because you're going through for the first time. Bradley Sutton: So then, going back to your main product, which is in stock here, this is the main one that you sell on TikTok as well, right, and the ones that that went viral before. Josh: It was the first one that went viral. It's not the largest selling of our products anymore, but it's the second, and it was the one that was here first. This product released in August yeah, august. Bradley Sutton: Did this originally start as KDP or this was a from scratch? Josh: Oh yeah, you may yep, no, we did a version of this via KDP, which, if yeah, Jenna’s author page is like amazon.com/author/jennacoleman, and that's where KDP stuff is and there's a there's a 11. It's called like the advanced meal, the advanced weekly meal planner Yep, but yeah, we reached a PSR of like two and then it all went out of stock. Bradley Sutton: All right. So then this you know, and then this is, this is what you also have on your TikTok page, and so doing some cool numbers, all right. So so you, you showed me the other day like there is a for anybody who has a, an Amazon account and a Shopify account. They can literally start TikTok shop. I Within like what? 20 minutes, would you say, or less, or? Josh: Yeah, I mean we've had some people that have taken Time to like if they have a sole prop, like where they don't have a business in some ways, like where they don't have an EIN or some things. There's been some people. That has taken some time. But TikTok's due diligence on you as a company, the Shopify system, seems to Serve as enough validation for TikTok shop that they're good to go and you get set up pretty quick with a shop and Then an ad account on the business side. Then it pulls from their Amazon inventory. Bradley Sutton: Then it pulls from their Amazon inventory. So I, you know, I, you guys, don't have a way to share your screen, but maybe you can just verbally Walk through those steps. So somebody has their Amazon account and then do they need to have the Shopify account already tied to their Amazon through, like by with Prime? Josh: Yeah, so okay. So good question, but not by with Prime. For fulfilling on TikTok shop by with Prime can be used on your actual Shopify website, like if you have your website on Shopify but you don't actually need a website to do the TikTok Shopify Amazon integration as long as you have the program Shopify. There's two sides to it. There's the TikTok side and there is a native app. In other words, TikTok shop has built an app that sits on Shopify's Interface so you can download on Shopify the TikTok app that allows you to create your shop and Create your business center and ads manager. Right. So all from Shopify to TikTok shop so it can push To TikTok and then, if you have like a personal TikTok account, it Can link that to your store and convert it to a business account basically. Bradley Sutton: In Shopify. What? Where do they go and Shopify if they have their Shopify account? They got their Amazon account. What's the? If they're not tied together, how do you do? They need to get it from the Amazon app store, the Shopify app from the Amazon app store, to tie it to the Shopify account? Josh: In the Shopify app store, there is a TikTok app and an Amazon MCF app. They need both. Bradley Sutton: Okay, so you do it through Shopify instead of Amazon. We do it in the middle. Josh: Yeah, and then the Amazon MCF app is what pulls from Amazon and all they do really there is they have to sync up to skew right to make sure that the skew and Shopify matches the one in Amazon, which the app will say you're good, and then that your shipping map. So if you say standard shipping defaults to MCF standard, if you've ever done an MCF, the person has done an MCF order. Then it will say okay, when an order comes in and you fulfill it, it's gonna fulfill via Whichever MCF option, standard option. So that way TikTok shop syncs immediately to Shopify. Shopify pulls the inventory and ships it and then Shopify gives the tracking number back to TikTok shop Bradley Sutton: And then when you, when you, you know, set up your TikTok shop From your Shopify and if your Shopify is already pulling in your Amazon, you know Images and things like that, the Shopify Site, it publishes all your images and description and stuff to TikTok shop, right? Josh: Yep. Bradley Sutton: Wow. So, guys, this is not rocket science where you have to know coding and a bunch of crazy things in order to get up and running, but, at the same time, it's not something that, hey, you just turn it on and you make a quarter of a million dollars, you know, in a month. It requires you know it's heavily on influencers. So what's your guys' best suggestions of somebody's just setting up? They do everything you just said until now. They've got their Amazon store. Now they've got their Shopify set up. Now they set up their TikTok shop. It's pulling. It's all tied to Shopify and tied to Amazon. How do I get eyeballs in front of my product? Josh: The two biggest recommendations we would say is that. So I'll let her say on our account what we should have, because there are some things that you should have on your account when an influencer looks you up, it's kind of like having a website if they go to your shop and you don't have any posts or anything. So I'll let her cover that. But on the flip side, on the affiliate side, you know, you can go into the affiliate dashboard right inside TikTok shop and you have immediate, direct access to creators and that is really where you can do 50 at a time where you can reach out to. You can create a message, select a product that you want to offer them a commission to promote, and they'll receive your DM right in their affiliate dashboard that invites them to promote that product. And so being able to get in there and send 50 of those a day to reach out to folks that are relevant to at least your audience and be careful not just going after huge creators. You're able to see how each creator does. You're able to see their sales, their engagement, all that kind of stuff, and you can go and directly reach out and just use the hard work method instead of the blast or spend money just throwing money to be there, money to build your awareness. You can do manual reach outs, but then on our page. Jenna: So I would say I think in the beginning, no matter what, it's hard to get influencers to talk to you because you haven't had any product sales right. They can see how much they can see, so I think it's really important to focus on connecting with them and I think a lot of influencers, when they're sharing a product, they don't just want to know what it is and how much it is, they want to know the story behind it. So a lot of the ones that we connected with especially some of the bigger influencers where they have plenty of options of what to share they kind of want to know the story behind your product and a lot of people love to know when there is a small business owner behind it. Why did you create it? Who are you? What went into this? And that helps in connecting in the story. So a lot of them use that I've connected with the fact that I'm a homeschool parent and a lot of them are homeschool parents in terms of some of the educational stuff or other ones I've connected with. I'm a former public school teacher too and they connected the fact that we you know that we were both educators. Some of it is mom life and connecting with you know busy meal planning and just connecting in different ways. So if you're just honest about your story, sometimes it's the things that surprised me that we had connections on that. They were like, wow, that's really cool, I also have a kid, you know one with allergies on a specific diet that you know. I saw you, you know you created a meal planner or something and so different ways to connect the making of your products and sharing in those Like. Jenna: I try to do reels a little bit on that and sometimes that will help because I think when they're considering they go through and see some of your reels that you've created not just your products they don't just go to your storefront. I will notice they'll sometimes like my reels and my reels don't have many views. A lot of them have, like you know, like a hundred, a couple hundred, but the influencers were go and check to see, you know like, and sometimes I'll talk about why I made the product the way I did or the features of it. So I really tried to push on that in the beginning because I think that helped connect with influencers. But then once you do have a product that goes viral and they see that you, you know you have a business that could help them as well then they come to you but it doesn't start that way, then they come to you, right. So now it's different, which is nice, but I would say in the beginning, the pessimist in me, I was like, oh my goodness, how are we ever going to like get them to come to us? Or like we're a small business that haven't proven that we can, but it really does, yeah. It does change. Bradley Sutton: When you go into that portal you know there's probably a hundred thousand influencers, a million influencers, whatever, in there. How are you picking and choosing those 50 that you want to reach out to first? Jenna: Really the same way that I think they're choosing us Like. I try to find people that connect with our brand. So when they're talking about educational stuff or their kids or I see that they have an interest in in recipes and cooking and things like that we try to find ways that are natural connections. So that's part of it. Josh: Because you can search by interest. Yes, so in the affiliate dashboard you can search by interest. Jenna: Right and then and then you know that's the really cool part about it To have that background view into people that that are going to be sharing your products. You can like go see what they're all about on their page. So it doesn't take long. But you know we usually spend time checking out their page before we even message someone. Bradley Sutton: All right Now, before we get into you know some, some just quick hitting strategies from you guys. If people want to reach out to you, I mean, they can obviously see your, your brand, and I just showed it. You know, graceful by design. But if people want to reach out to you guys for more questions or help with either TikTok or KDP or any of your specialties, how can they find you guys on the interwebs out there? Josh: The interwebs. I would say the best place is, you know, jenna. jenna@gracefulbydesigncom. Jenna: I do check on graceful by design for TikTok or Instagram. It's at graceful by design LLC, but either one of those. I do check the messaging in there, but yeah, it is. Bradley Sutton: Let's go ahead and get into your,  SST 60 second tip or 60 second strategy. You know, maybe, maybe one each gives us any strategy that you think will be beneficial to our listeners. 0:42:51 - Josh: I'm going to do a quick strategy on folks who are newer or who are getting into, maybe wanting to get into the space, in case someone like that is watching. Um, cause, this has been, you know, a real thing for us over the past year from, you know, building this together, and I would say that the biggest thing in the e-com is that you have to remember is that cash flow timing and the business right, the real business aspects of any business, hold true in the Ecom right. So, cash flow timing, when you're thinking about getting into a business and you see, you know again some of the courses out there that just say you know, things are easy and things are this and you can make money quickly, and all those types of things, I just would say that, uh, from a cautionary perspective, that you know, remember, this is a business that costs money and when you sell more on something like Amazon or TikTok shop, you need more reserves that they hold and you have to spend more on inventory and so and so those. That's just like a fundamental business practice. That I wanted to make sure you know we said is that it's not a, you know, fairytale industry. It's a hard work. You know business, real business, and I feel like that gets blushed over a little bit with a lot of the things that are out there. So that that's just in general, a principle and uh, and then my less way, less than 60 second tip is that you know your. Your biggest strength still is your brand, and to build a strategy today without a brand, I think is just challenging, because then you can just be you. So when you're reaching out to influencers or you're designing product, you can really actually relate to it, in addition to it being good research and all that kind of stuff, because people know whether you care about what it is that you're selling or making. Bradley Sutton: Well, it's been really great to see your journey, you know, from just learning about TikTok shop at that conference. And then you know selling out and then, and then guys, they can hire me just out there. So I don't have any website or anything, but they're now my customers for my family running 3PLs Cause I have a warehouse here and I found out that they were, they were struggling with shipping. So I'm like, hey, let me take your planners here and let me have my family help you guys ship. So they're shipping. You know 20-30 of these planners all the time. So, like it's really cool to first hand see, see your growth and uh, and now you know you're putting a food on the table of that one influencer. Well, not, not now you're. You're employing my family as well. So, but yeah, you're changing lives here left and right. I'm sure you're changing lives with people who have listened to this episode learning about the potential uh on KDP um with uh TikTok shop as well. So we'll definitely want to, you know, reach back out to you guys next, uh, next year, and see how. You know, we just got with you on your first full month of TikTok shop. Let let's see what happens after a full year of Amazon and TikTok shop. You guys will be probably have some cool stories to share. So thank you so much for joining us.

46m

Feb 03, 2024

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, interview someone you need to hear from, and provide a training tip for the week. TikTok Shop links could soon become a lot more common across the social media app. https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/30/24055388/tiktok-shoppable-videos-automatic-product-discovery Amazon continues to increase the speed with which it can get deliveries to customers. https://www.geekwire.com/2024/amazon-delivery-gets-faster-with-65-jump-in-number-of-same-day-and-overnight-items-in-u-s/ Walmart plans to build or convert more than 150 large-format stores over the next five years. https://www.cnbc.com/2024/01/31/walmart-plans-to-add-150-more-stores-across-us.html Etsy’s new Gift Mode is an interactive hub, powered by AI and human curation https://www.retailtouchpoints.com/features/news-briefs/etsy-debuts-personalized-ai-powered-gift-mode China’s Temu in US online ads blitz in challenge to Amazon https://www.ft.com/content/7717fa78-a102-405f-83d5-b8750dc5b6c0 Consult-a-Friend is the latest feature to make shopping on Amazon more social and collaborative. https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/retail/amazon-introduces-consult-a-friend-mobile-shopping-experience Walmart suppliers and Marketplace sellers can launch, manage and review performance across their Brand Shop and Shelf pages through the Walmart Ad Center using Shop Builder. https://advertisinghelp.walmart.com/s/guides?channel=ShopBuilder&article=000011167 TikTok is reportedly planning to open studios https://www.tubefilter.com/2024/01/30/tiktok-livestream-shopping-studios/ Beware of misleading discounts on Amazon products promoted in news articles with affiliate links https://people.com/fykee-cordless-stick-vacuum-deal-january-2024-8553406 Lastly, Bradley shares how you can start with Amazon Brazil with just the click of a button and not having to send any inventory there. Also, Bradley shows you how can you use some of the Helium 10 tools in the said marketplace.   In this episode of the Weekly Buzz by Helium 10, Bradley covers: __ __

24m

Feb 01, 2024

Listen in as Bradley shares the latest on Project X and how we're shaking up the game with our coffin shelf product. He tackles the challenge of fierce competition and relentless price wars not by slashing our prices, but by creatively enhancing our product's value. With the inclusion of quirky accessories like mini skulls and pumpkins, we've managed to not only raise our price by $10 but also to give our product a unique edge that customers love. Bradley also opens up about our strategy for listing optimization using Helium 10's tools, which could revolutionize the way you manage your Amazon listings. This episode also takes you behind the scenes of our coffin shelf launch, revealing the thought process behind our unique packaging solution that has both charmed and intrigued our customers. Drawing inspiration from the concept of heart-shaped gift boxes, we introduced coffin-shaped gift boxes that serve a dual purpose, adding an innovative flair to the traditional storage functionality. As we unpack the hurdles of custom packaging and marketing tactics, you'll gain insights into how these elements contribute to our premium pricing model. Plus, don't miss out on the invaluable product validation and research techniques that could be the difference between success and failure in your Amazon ventures. Join us for a blend of practical advice, personal experiences, and strategic approaches to Amazon product differentiation and market success.   In episode 531 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley talks about: __ __

26m

Jan 30, 2024

Ever wondered what it takes to get your product to the top of Walmart's search results? We've cracked the code and our host, Carrie Miller, is here to share every inside tip and strategy you need to make your Walmart listings shine. In this episode, we discuss everything from the importance of choosing the right product type to mastering the listing quality score without resorting to the pitfalls of title stuffing. Compliance with Walmart's guidelines is key, and we talk about the balance between PPC campaigns and organic search enhancements that could transform your rankings. Plus, we can't forget the tactical use of Walmart's SEM tool to harness the power of Google ads—a game-changer for driving traffic to your listings. As we dive deeper into the ecosystem of Walmart's online presence, one thing is clear: the influence of digital word-of-mouth is not to be underestimated. We explore the emerging role of the Walmart Creator program and how influencers can catapult your products into the social media spotlight. Agencies like SellCord, Blue Ryse, and Ecom Creative Crew get a nod for their expertise in navigating listing challenges, and we remind sellers of the resources available through our Walmart.com tools inside Helium 10. Wrapping up, we send out an invitation to join the Winning with Walmart group—your go-to hub for community support and answers to all your Walmart-related queries. Remember, success at Walmart may be a podcast away, so tune in, get inspired, and let's make those sales numbers soar! In episode 530 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Carrie talks about: __ __ ► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast ► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension ► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup  (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life) ► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft ► Watch The Podcasts On YouTube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos Transcript Carrie Miller: In today's episode we're going to be talking about how to rank on Walmart, some new tools that Walmart is offering to help you with your sales and ranking, and also just how Helium 10 tools can help you with your PPC and also your listing optimization. Bradley Sutton: How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Carrie Miller: Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of this Serious Sellers podcast by Helium 10. My name is Keri and I'm going to be your host. This is our winning with Walmart episode, where we go live and give you some Walmart information and answer all of your Walmart questions live, alright. Somebody asked this is a great question how do you rank organically in Walmart? Is it the same algorithm as Amazon? There's actually a few different components to ranking on Walmart. The first one is product type. Your product type is really important because the product type is connected to the keywords for your actual product. If you're in the wrong product type, it's going to make it hard for you to actually rank. The first thing you want to do is go to your growth opportunities tab and check your product type. You can click on the details for each product listing and it'll tell you a product type up at the top. If the product type is definitely wrong, then you're going to want to make sure to fix that. Sometimes, what you can do is you can A B test the product types, because some product types include a lot more keywords. That means you're going to be able to rank and show up and basically index for any of those keywords. If you aren't in the right product type though with the most keywords, then it's going to be hard to rank for this. For example, I know someone did for supplements. It was nutritional supplements and herbal supplements or something like that. They changed their product type to nutritional supplements and that encompassed a lot more keywords than herbal supplements. You want to really take a look at those product types. Make sure that you have the right product type. That's first for ranking. The second thing is you want to make sure that you have a high listing score. You want to make sure you're in the 90s at least for your listing quality score. Look on that dashboard and make sure you're doing that. Carrie Miller: Things like stuffing your title. If you use the same titles that you do on Amazon a lot of times they'll suppress you a bit, because Walmart does not like stuffing titles. You want to make sure to follow the guidelines for the titles and just the entire listing. Make sure that you write the keywords that you want to rank for into your listing. If there's a specific phrase, if there's some targeted phrases, you're going to want to write those phrases in the exact form. Maybe there's 15 to 20. You want to write those throughout. Obviously, your most important phrase should be in the title. Those are the first things that you're going to want to do. The next thing is you're going to want to get sales. It is important to get some clicks ads to carts and conversions. I know some people do some search find by. There's some people who do different coupons. Sometimes people send traffic from TikTok and people will search on Walmart. They'll just search for the actual product through the keyword. There's a few different ways to do it, but really you're going to want to click add to cart and conversion. Carrie Miller: That's how you're going to help to rank. PPC is really, really helpful. If you're doing PPC along with that, that is a great way to rank. You really get some good ranking juice with PPC. Definitely try all of those things. Those are all the best combination of things to rank because it all goes together. Make sure that you're also putting in as many attributes in the backend as possible so you can rank for those as well. Those are the basics for ranking, but it's not really the same as Amazon, because Amazon's really giving you a lot of ranking juice for outside traffic. Walmart does have some outside traffic things that they have going on, but it's not necessarily helping with rank. There is something that I wanted to talk about. It's called SEM and it's on your growth opportunities tab. It's the very last one and it's basically Google ads. They used to do this for free and now it's. Unfortunately, you have to pay for it. What they're doing is they're giving you the ability to drive Google ads directly to your Walmart listings. That is a great way to get some outside traffic. That could potentially also help your rank because of the conversions and things like that. Check out the SEM at the very end. Very easy to set up those Google shopping ads and you can start showing it for Google shopping and get more conversions that way. Carrie Miller: I think we have another question Does Walmart take care of the shipping to the client? Can I ship products from China directly to the Walmart warehouse? I've actually never shipped directly from the China warehouse. The thing about it is I don't believe they're going to be receiving large shipments for you as your first starting out. So the best thing would probably be to ship your products to a 3PL and then ship them into the Walmart warehouses. That's what I would recommend in general, and then, if you don't sell out on Walmart, you can use it for Amazon, you can use it for TikTok shop, so that way you have better control over your inventory. So I think someone else said, no, you can't. So yeah, I know you can with Amazon and or used to be able to. You know we were shipping containers directly to Amazon and it's this little harder now. But you know, it sounds like somebody else said you can't ship directly from China, so ship to a 3PL, then ship into WFS, and that is the best way to go. Carrie Miller: I think something else that I wanted to kind of point out to everyone is that we actually do have some tools with Helium 10. And I did have some. I've had some meetings recently with some sellers and they are. You know, I think we're all kind of forgetting some of these tools that Helium 10 has and I wanted to kind of bring it back to your attention. So I'm going to just show you some keyword research tools and like, for example, garlic press. Okay, so we always use the garlic press kind of example. But what we want to do is what we can do here is we can actually pull our x-ray extension. We have x-ray for Walmart here and what we can do is we can copy the product IDs and do a reverse search on Cerebro for keywords. Now I like to look for kind of the main. You know things. Actually, I was looking at decorative pillow. I want to look at decorative pillows, decorative pillows. So I'm going to search for that and we'll see if we can find some. A lot of times these are kind of interesting and diverse. So let's go ahead and pull the Helium 10 extension. So, for anyone who's listening, I'm just pulling our Chrome extension for Helium 10. This is going to show revenue for each product. It's going to show the product IDs, it's going to show reviews. It's going to show a lot of great information to help you kind of better make good decisions, for not only you know what products to start selling on here, but also how to kind of position your own products. Carrie Miller: So what I usually like to do is kind of look for things that are selling pretty well. So it looks like this snow leopard pillow is selling pretty well. So what we can do is we can just paste that into Walmart for Cerebro. Now you have to choose. You have to scroll all the way down to Walmart Marketplace in Cerebro to choose the Walmart Marketplace to do this, and it's basically this product ID. Now, if you don't have, you know, the X-ray pulled up, you can actually find it on the listing page itself in the URL. It's the last digits on the URL, so you can do that as well. So I'll go ahead and actually just do this one search. Let's look at the keywords for this decorative pillow. So we're going to hit, get keywords, and what it's doing is it's basically showing all of the keywords that that particular product is ranking for, sponsored in Organic. So if we take a look, we can see a lot of different, you know, keyword phrases. We've got snow leopard decorative pillows, their organic rank number five, if you wanted. So if there's a competitor that's doing some advertising, what you can also do is you can do this single search product ID and you can sort by sponsored rank. It doesn't look like this one is doing any advertising, but if they were, then you would be able to see all of the keywords that they're advertising for. And with Walmart, a lot of times there's, you know, kind of like a 15 to 20 keyword phrase focus, and so you might be able to see the exact keyword strategy that your competitors have. So that's something that's really cool about doing a single search ascent, but you can see all of the different kind of keywords in here. You can see the search volume and it's going to be compared to the search volume on Amazon. It's a little bit different on Amazon. Carrie Miller: Now, on Walmart, there are a lot of filters that customers do use, so they kind of filter down to find the products that they want. But this is an incredible tool for your, for your listing optimization. So you want to make sure to write all of your most important keywords into your listing. Then you also want to, you know, use this for your pay per click advertising, because I have noticed that there's a little bit different keywords and keyword phrases Then on Amazon. So I always do keyword research separately for Walmart so that I can make sure that my pay per click advertising and my actual listing is optimized for Walmart. So that is one way to do this. We can also search magnet. You can search phrases. So if I put decorative pillow in here, it'll search on Walmart. Actually, you know what? I think? I didn't change the marketplace. Let's go all the way down to the Walmart marketplace here. This is the Walmart marketplace. We're going to hit, get keywords under the Walmart marketplace on magnet and what this will do is it's going to show you similar keywords to you know decorative pillow that you could use and give you. It'll give you more ideas of you know what kinds of keywords to target so you can sort by. Carrie Miller: You know search volume amounts. You can search by search search volume there. You can see it compared to Amazon there, and there's a lot of great keywords that you can focus on. Now, even the lower search volume keywords I've still made sales on those, especially if they're very relevant. So I don't ignore those really low search volume keywords either. So if you are ignoring some of those, I would highly recommend, you know, creating some campaigns for those lower search volume keywords as well. All right, so we've got Cerebro when we've got magnet. We also have a profits tool and I know there are a lot of people who are using profits to maintain just their whole profits view of Walmart and it's been been very, very helpful for a lot of people. So if you haven't started using profits, you want to connect your Walmart token to helium 10, so it'll automatically pull in that data. You can add in your costs of goods, you can add in any other expenses that you have in there and you can get a pretty good overview of your profits on Walmart. So that is something else to think about. Now. Carrie Miller: I did notice that there was kind of an announcement recently about video ads. They're doing some different testing, maybe just on the look of video ads and sponsored brand ads on Walmart. So if you are doing those, you might see that a little bit. But something I did notice is that a lot of brands are not even doing video ads or any kind of sponsored brand ads. So if you, you know, are in a kind of competitive category, you should check on those keywords and see if you can start doing some advertising on those. You know you have to be a registered brand in order to do that, but video ads and sponsored sponsored brand ads are going to be a great way for you to, you know, really get going with some sales, especially because you'll be right at the top and it's not as expensive as it is on on Amazon at this point. So it's really good thing to do. Coupons are still in beta, so I have talked to some people who are using the beta program for coupons and they've had a really good conversion rates for coupons. So I'm really, really hoping to see those come out soon for everyone. Maybe some of you have them, so you might want to check your dashboards, your growth opportunities wherever, to see if something appears about coupons, but I have heard very good things about them. Also, subscribe and save has been in some beta programs, so that those are some things to kind of look forward to. Brand stores are available, so if you are a brand registered seller, go ahead and check it, check that out, get your brand store all registered and ready to go. Carrie Miller: Okay, it looks like we have another question in here. Are there any guides for SEO, titles, description. Is it good to have keyword stuffing in the title? No, so I did mention this at the beginning. There are guides for very, very good guides, actually on Walmart. So if you go to the help center, you can find and search different for different things, and optimization is one of them. You can look for how you should set up your title, how you should set up your description and your bullets, and it's all in there. Now keyword stuffing is going to get your listing suppressed a bit. You want to follow the guidelines that Walmart sets and then, when you actually create your title and your whole listing on your growth opportunities tab. It's going to give you a listing quality score and if your title isn't the way they want it, it'll show you what you need to do to fix it. So that's very, very helpful. So any mistakes that you make on your actual listing, you can go back and fix them on the growth opportunities tab, which is a really, really great thing to utilize. So that's a great question. So thank you for that question. Carrie Miller: Another thing is I just wanted to talk a little bit about traffic to Walmart. So where is the traffic coming from? There are some things again I wanted to reiterate. If you haven't started using the SEM tab on the very end of your growth opportunities tab where you can do those Google ads, that's going to be a great place for traffic. I think a lot of traffic can come from Google. So if you can just get that that advertising going, that would really help help you there. Another thing is I have seen a very large uptick in influencers. Now I follow a lot of kind of female, kind of clothing influencers and I know there's a lot of home decor influencers. There are a lot of influencers that are now promoting Walmart products because there's a Walmart Creator program. They get commissions. Some of them are Walmart partners, so they're finding products on Walmart and promoting them through their Instagram, through their TikToks. So what you can do is, if you wanted to kind of reach out to some of these, you can search you know, walmart partner, walmart sponsored ad, or just search hashtags to see what creators within your space are, you know, basically promoting your types of products, and a lot of times you'll find those. Or if you're just following, you know people in your space and a lot of times they are already promoting Walmart stuff. So I think that's a really good opportunity to help them to not to be successful by, you know, giving them your product and then seeing if they'll promote it on Instagram, tiktok, you know, everywhere on social media. So I highly recommend looking into that. I think it's a great way of getting more traffic there. I also have noticed that you know Walmart is still really pushing for Walmart plus memberships. A lot of credit cards you get it for free, like American Express, platinum, for sure you get. You get it for free for the year. So there's a lot of great credit card perks that you can get Walmart plus memberships for free, which you know will incentivize people to you know shop at Walmart, especially if they see something that's the same thing on Walmart, they're like, oh, I might as well just go to Walmart because I get free shipping anyway. So those are some things about Walmart traffic, all right. So another question Do you know any I think, maybe trustworthy agencies to fix my listing problem for me? Yes, I do know some agencies. There is Michael LaBar at SellCord.co. They do a great job at fixing listing issues. I think they're probably the best for kind of like solving issues. There's also Ryan King from Blue Rise and there's also McCall Chapnick from Ecom Creative Crew. So Ecom Crew so sorry, Ecom Creative Crew team and so you can reach out to all of them. I know McCall has a great Walmart group, so if you haven't joined her group, it's a Walmart Marketplace Sellers group. She's pretty active in there too, so you can you can, you know connect with her there. So there's a lot of great agencies that you could reach out to. Somebody has a very long one here, let's see here, let's see. It's a very long question here. Thank you, my G, michael Thomas, says sorry, I had to step off for a minute so I may have missed this. Carrie Miller: Concerning the application process. What is your experience or anyone that you know who has submitted an application? I've actually been talking to a new seller of business development and Matt Turner said the fiscal year starts at the end of this month, so I think Walmart will start approving applications at that time. Also, how do you get a brand page on Walmart? Okay, so you should be able to apply to Walmart anytime. So if you're, you know, ready to sell on Walmart, I would recommend that you just go ahead and apply. Make sure that you have, you know, make sure that there's a list of countries that are approved. Now, if you don't live in the US and maybe your country is not approved, usually an LLC works and I know Michael from Cell Court can help get around those kinds of issues. But you do just need to have kind of an established business. Make sure that you have all your ducks in a row, you know of all the qualifications that they have listed out for your application and you should be good to go for the application. It takes usually 48 hours. Sometimes it can take a little bit longer, but you should be able to get that application going. The next thing is going to be brand registry. So there is a brand registry portal, so it's brand portal, portalonemarkcom, and you just click on register. You need to have a you know a red, a trademark. It says it right here on this screen here you need to have registered trademark and so make sure that you have that. You know all that in a, all those ducks in a row, basically, before you apply for that, so that you have access, that'll give you access to video ads, sponsor brand ads, the brand stores. A lot of the perks that are coming are going to be basically related to to the brand portal. So hopefully that answers your question. Let's see. Carrie Miller: Another question is it seems like Walmart is looking more for brands. Do you agree? I actually don't agree. What they are looking for and I've actually talked to a lot of these kind of the managers on Walmart they're looking for products that really complement what's already on Walmartcom, so things like accessories to products that are already on Walmart, so things that are complimentary that maybe aren't already on Walmart. They're looking for a well-rounded catalog. So it doesn't necessarily mean that you have to have a big brand, they just want complimentary products. There is an assortment growth tab on the back end of your Walmart seller center and sometimes you get some good suggestions on how to kind of grow things that might not be available on Walmart, that they want you to sell. But that is a great way to just look for things that are not necessarily available on Walmart but would be good complimentary accessory products to things that they have, and that might be a great way to go. But, yeah, they are accepting third-party sellers. They're really investing a lot of money to get third-party sellers to start selling on Walmart, so they are definitely wanting third-party sellers to come. Carrie Miller: Another thing that I wanted to bring up is that there is some rich media that's available for free and that's kind of like A-plus content If you go to the help and then go to get support when you're logged in to seller center. So go help get support, then click on items and inventory, click on rich media and then you'll see instructions on how you can upload a video or a 365 image and that'll be basically for free. Otherwise you have to pay for each thing to get hosted through an agency. But those are some free modules. If you don't have a video up, that's a great thing to put up there and I highly recommend you do that if you haven't done that yet. So another thing somebody asked is where can we create a brand store? This is going to be when you are registered, a brand registered, you go to your brand portal and that should. That is the place where you're going to be able to see all of that to create your brand store. Another thing I wanted to bring up is the review accelerator program is still going on. You can go do up to 10 reviews and basically how this works is it's not like Vine on Amazon, it's basically your actual customers. So whatever sales you get within a certain amount of time, they will actually send a request to that customer for a review and they'll pay them $3. You pay $10 for the whole review, but it's a great way to get some verified reviews of customers who are actually looking for your product already, not just somebody who's reviewing products. So review accelerator program if you don't have any reviews, you can go up to 10. So once you pass 10, you're no longer eligible for the review accelerator program, but that is a great way to get some reviews going if you don't have them going as well. Carrie Miller: And let's see. Here we have another question. Bradley's asking me what was my December sales? I actually don't know the actual number. I think it was around the 12,000 to 15,000 for my one main product. And I have to go look, I have a few different brands on there, so the one that I've been really focusing on I did about 15,000 for that one product. So not bad, especially since it's only one product. You kind of multiply that by 10, you've got a million dollars a year on Walmart. So that's something to consider. That's the one that I use mostly to kind of test things out and I try to see what's going on with Walmart with that particular product. And I've had the Proseller badge. I've had that for quite a while now and they've actually been giving me refunds on my referral fees and so that's pretty cool. So a lot of great things coming with Walmart. I think the coupons are going to be a really big deal, that we're going to be able to sell a lot more on with those coupons, because people do like deals, and I think that's going to be great. So let's see here Bradley is asking how have you been getting to page one for your Walmart launches? Carrie Miller: Now, I did talk about this a little bit earlier, right at the beginning, because somebody was asking how to rank, and that is basically the first thing obviously is your product type. You have to be in the right product type. First of all, you have to make sure you're listing it has about a 90% or above, and sometimes you'll rank to the top just with that listing quality score. A lot of times we'll just help optimize listings and it goes straight to the top with just the listing quality score. Don't stuff your title, but it's really clicks, adds to carts, conversions. Those are going to help to really get your ranking up, and that includes PPC. So if you're combining doing a search, find by type strategy along with pay-per-click advertising, you're going to get some really good results from that. So I know we talked with Kostin from AZ Rank last I think it was last month that we did and they actually have a whole way to help you rank. So if you do want to use their services, they're doing a good job of helping people to rank to the top. So check them out as well, because they've got some great strategies for ranking on Walmart too. Carrie Miller: All right, another thing that I wanted to point out is WFS. Make sure you have your products in WFS. That's another thing that's going to help you with your listing quality score and your rank. So Walmart fulfillment services are even if you want to just send in like 20 to 30 products at a time just to see how much it's going to how much is going to go, and I would suggest at least trying out WFS, and it's going to help you quite a bit. So if you haven't enrolled in WFS, you should do that. But other than that, I think that is all that I have for today, unless there's any more questions. But thank you all for these questions and if you haven't joined our winning with Walmart group, make sure that you go and join our winning with Walmart group. We have a lot of great sellers in there and people answering questions, and so you can also tag me in any questions that you have. On Facebook. Some people have sent me messages and so I would love to help you with any Walmart issues. So I will see you all on the next episode Next month, we'll have a special guest, so I'm excited for that one, and so stay tuned. Every month, usually on Wednesday. We had to reschedule this week, but usually on Wednesdays we do Winning with Walmart Wednesday and I hope to see you all there again and have a great rest of the day. Bye everyone.

25m

Jan 27, 2024

Listen in as we explore the latest buzzing news shifting the landscape of e-commerce, where we talk about TikTok’s slowing usage, Amazon’s AI integrations, and more! We’re back with another episode of the Weekly Buzz with Helium 10’s Senior Brand Evangelist and Walmart Expert, Carrie Miller. Every week, we cover the latest breaking news in the Amazon, Walmart, and E-commerce space, interview someone you need to hear from and provide a training tip for the week. TikTok Shop buyers will have to pay higher order minimums to get free shipping as the company cuts back https://www.businessinsider.com/tiktok-shop-cutting-back-free-shipping-trims-costs-2024-1 https://www.businessinsider.com/tiktok-shop-cutting-back-free-shipping-trims-costs-2024-1Amazon aids seller listings with new generative AI partnership https://chainstoreage.com/amazon-aids-seller-listings-new-generative-ai-partnership https://chainstoreage.com/amazon-aids-seller-listings-new-generative-ai-partnershipEtsy targets gift shoppers with AI-based tool https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/19/tiktok-usage-is-starting-to-slow-is-tiktok-shop-to-blame/ https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/19/tiktok-usage-is-starting-to-slow-is-tiktok-shop-to-blame/TikTok usage is starting to slow — is TikTok Shop to blame? https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/19/tiktok-usage-is-starting-to-slow-is-tiktok-shop-to-blame/ Learn how to stay ahead of the curve as Carrie shows you the power of  Helium 10’s BlackBox tool together with Amazon’s Brand Analytics data. Your perspective is the missing piece so make sure to share them in the comments below or in the Helium 10 Users Facebook group as we dissect Amazon, Etsy, and TikTok shop’s evolving marketplaces and the power dynamics at play for sellers. In this episode of the Weekly Buzz by Helium 10, Carrie covers: __ 07:14 - New BlackBox Tool __ ► 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  

12m

Jan 25, 2024

Ever wondered how the savviest of e-commerce entrepreneurs keep their profit margins healthy amidst rising industry costs? Buckle up as Benjamin Webber, a true maverick in the Amazon FBA realm, rides through the podcast to share his unique tactics. He's not just playing the game; he's changing it by using his own truck as an Amazon carrier, slashing his shipping expenses, and keeping his company's financials robust. With a 10% hike in gross sales and an ever-expanding team, Ben breaks down the logistics of becoming an Amazon carrier, the operational efficiencies that keep his business ahead, and why sometimes the best move is to quite literally take the wheel of your product distribution. The chessboard of global e-commerce is complex, but Ben is a grandmaster at maneuvering his pieces. He unveils his strategies for managing inventory across continents, discusses the art of optimizing check-in speeds, and serves wisdom on tackling geographic conversion issues. His narrative takes us through the meticulous dance of manufacturing diversification—from Asia to the Americas—and the savvy logistics of East Coast shipping. As Ben's company eyes a leap into Amazon's global marketplaces, he lays out his blueprint for facing the squeeze of shrinking margins, fortifying supplier relationships, and negotiating like a pro. In a world increasingly driven by AI, Ben has mastered fusing technology with human creativity. This episode isn't just about listing optimization and tweaking ad strategies—it's a glimpse into an advertising revolution dictated by sponsored rank and AI's role in it. And when it comes to product development, Ben and his team are tapping into AI to conjure up innovative solutions to everyday problems. It's a thrilling ride through the intersection of data, technology, and human insight, where Ben exemplifies the adventurous spirit of online selling. Join us, and let your e-commerce curiosity be captured by his exceptional vision and trailblazing tactics.   In episode 529 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Ben discuss: __ __ ► 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 popular guest back on the show, Ben, who's got very unique strategies, such as he made himself an Amazon carrier so that he can deliver with his own truck his FBA replenishment orders 15 minutes away from him for free. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Sellers have lost thousands of dollars by not knowing that they were hijacked, perhaps on their Amazon listing, or maybe somebody changed their main image, or Amazon changed their shipping dimensions so they had to pay extra money every order. Helium 10 can actually send you a text message or email if any of these things or other critical events happen to your Amazon account. For more information, go to h10.me/alerts. 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 for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. You've got a serious seller back for, I believe, the second time here on the show, Ben. How's it going, man?   Ben: Good, how about yourself?   Bradley Sutton: I'm doing just delightful. So I take your North Carolina, which is why I switched hats here at the last second rock in this Charlotte hat. Here Is Charlotte where you're at, or what part North Carolina are you on?   Ben: Yeah, I'm in Charlotte.   Bradley Sutton: Okay, been out there long yeah.   Ben: I came here in 2002 and never left.   Bradley Sutton: Okay, all right. So if you guys want to get more of his backstory, guys write this down episode 379. We went a little bit more into his background there, so we're not going to go too much. You know more into. You know how his superhero origin story, want to catch up and see what cool stuff he's been he's been working on. That was a great episode, by the way. In there he talked about how he had a three million dollars in retail arbitrage sales and he has his cult following now in the Amazon world on the speaker circuit. A lot of cool stuff we talked about in that episode, including you know how to hire for your Amazon businesses and whatnot. But let's just catch up. You know now we're in 2024. You know I think the last time you're on the show was like end of 2022 around there, so it's been, you know, full year. How was your 2023?   Ben: It was good. Our big priority was expanding obviously expanding product lines, and then just figuring out the best ways to manage what we have so that we can grow and scale as efficiently as possible.   Bradley Sutton: How many employees are you guys up to now?   Ben: So we have the warehouse and then we have an international team. So collectively we're between 60 and 70.   Bradley Sutton: Excellent. Now what was you know, just from a gross sales overall, all channels, if you were to compare 2023 with 2022, how did you guys do?   Ben: We're up maybe 10%, so it didn't really push too hard this year.   Bradley Sutton: Now, something that I think a lot of sellers might have said compared in 2023 to 2022, is profit margins were down due to increased cost, whether that be inflation or cost of goods, Amazon fees, PPC how was your profit margin?   Ben: Yeah, it definitely went down a little bit, not as bad as I guess a lot of people have. That I've talked to have run into. But one of the big things that helps us and I think we talked about this before is just that because we are in Charlotte and there's a CL2, the CL22 warehouse is in Charlotte we're able to deliver a lot of our own inventory. So we're a last mile delivery driver or delivery provider for Amazon. So we don't have to pay to ship in to Amazon. We pay somebody $15 an hour to drive a truck with 12 pallets and they're 20 minutes from our warehouse. So as far as the inbound shipping costs and those expenses, those don't really hurt us too badly.   Bradley Sutton: So that whole, so you ship everything then from your manufacturing to your warehouse and then so that that quote unquote landed cost that ends up being your cost to Amazon as well. Essentially, yeah, how did you even know that that was possible to do?   Ben: Several years ago we were about to stock out of. As you know, we sell a lot of fourth quarter products and kind of joke toy products, and we're about to stock out of one that we sold between 800 to 1000 units a day, which is a fairly substantial issue. So we actually loaded up a cargo van and drove the cargo van to Amazon, talked to us our way through the front gates to deliver it and they took it and so we did that once. Then we did it again and we got through again the third time. They're like no, you can't do this and so like, okay, but somehow we have to be able to do this. So we looked into Carrier Central and figure out how we could become a last mile carotter, which is incredibly easy. It takes about 15 minutes to fill out a form and then you have to show that you can back in and out of a parking spot Incredibly easy. So in that January we bought a truck and the rest is history from there. But it was. It came about because we were about to stock out and panic and we're like well, what's the worst that can happen?   Bradley Sutton: So then theoretically you can also do this service for other people, that you would be the carrier and then other people can just store their product here at warehouse and then you would deliver. But for now you just pretty much do it for yourself. Is there like was there any kind of minimums? Like, hey, you have to have a dock high truck, you have to, it has to be this size, it has to be order, you know, like it has to be at least X number of pallets, or what kind of requirements was it.   Ben: So basically it had to be palletized and it required a dock high truck, and I forget there was. There's a code you have to send them that you get for just having a truck, so it doesn't really matter, you're going to have it anyway. But dock high and palletized products. And what we did was we looked up what the largest truck that we could buy without having to have a CDL was, which in North Carolina, is a 26 foot box truck, and so that holds 12 pallets.   Bradley Sutton: Did you have to have, like a company that's a registered trucking company or something?   Ben: Nope, I actually had a friend who was trying to do this for some of their products because they were just the same issue where they're about to stock out and Amazon wasn't checking them in fast enough. And one of the benefits of what we do is and this is I don't know how long this will stay that way, so I'm probably going to jinx myself by saying it, but our stuff gets checked in faster than anybody else's. So, like this year, we had stuff that we delivered in December that was checked in three days late.   Bradley Sutton: We were able to pick that exact DC to get the stuff into when you're creating your transfer shipments.   Ben: There are a number of softwares that you can use that let you pick and direct where you want it to go to.   Bradley Sutton: But what is that? So that's not something that you can do on your own, just in seller central.   Ben: It. Well, yes and no, it's not something that you can directly do, but typically if you're sending case packs in, they're going to try to send that to the largest distributor center nearest you or distribution center nearest to you. At least that's what we've seen Even before, like when we weren't using a software for it. We're sending about 65 to 70% of our case packs all went to Charlotte, so they're still trying to keep stuff. As far as the case packs that, they're just sending them to the nearest large distribution center. At least that's how it worked out for us.   Bradley Sutton: Now, have you looked into, or do you know yet, how this change to their shipping program is going to affect you, if any at all, with this whole thing where people now have to pay if they're only sending it to one location? I mean, even if that's the case, it's still got to be better. I'm assuming that you'd still choose that.   Ben: Yeah, it'll cost us more now, but it's still better to deliver to ourselves. The bigger issue, honestly, was the minimum stock levels. Because we're able to deliver so quickly and because we know that Amazon is checking in so quickly, we've been able to run very, very, very lean, and that's going to get.   Bradley Sutton: They're going to punish you now, right?   Ben: So now we're going to have to put. Over the last month we've been having to send way more inventory than we ever had before in because we have to meet the minimum stock requirements to not get charged, though I had the fees there, so that's honestly the bigger issue for us.   Bradley Sutton: Have you ever taken a look at in Helium 10, at our inventory heat maps to see what they do with your inventory day by day and then how long it takes them to distribute? Because sure, you can get it checked in, but if everything just sits there in Charlotte for a week and then all of a sudden somebody's in Portland and their buy box says yeah, two weeks delivery date, then that might be conversion issue for certain geographic areas. Are they getting your inventory out to the country pretty fast?   Ben: Usually within two weeks, but it is something where there's definitely some gaps, where we have been not fulfilling the West Coast, for example, is efficiently, as we probably could be.   Bradley Sutton: Now, what about the fact that you're I mean I'm assuming you manufacture your stuff in China, India or where you?   Ben: manufacture it. So we have manufacturing in China, Mexico, India, Canada, the US and I want to say Vietnam as well.   Bradley Sutton: So what about the stuff coming from Asia, the fact that you're not, that you're sending it to you in the middle, not completely in the middle, but is it coming to the East Coast port first, or is it coming to California?   Ben: We send a lot of it through Savannah Georgia.   Bradley Sutton: Yeah, okay, and so, even if it wasn't going to your warehouse, is that where you're routing it? In the old days, if you were going directly to Amazon, it would still go to the East Coast first.   Ben: We always sent directly to our warehouse just for having the flexibility. For a lot of our products there are varying pack sizes and we'll repackage as needed in the warehouse to make sure that we're filling the ones that we need to. So we've always sent it to ourselves first For that reason. Then also just from a flexibility standpoint as far as inventory management, where if you send it from China you're basically going to have to send in 90 to 120 days to make sure that you're covered or just have constant orders going. If we send it to our warehouse first, we can keep the Amazon fees lower for storage by storing it. For what amounts to about? I think last time we calculated it we're paying like $6.50 a pallet or $7 a pallet, something like that, to store it at our warehouse. So the amount of money that we're saving off of the Amazon fees by storing it to ourselves and then sending in smaller shipments versus sending in the bulk ones that a lot of people do.   Bradley Sutton: All right, makes sense. Yeah, I was worried a little bit at least. Like, wait a minute, you know like some of your savings might be gone if you're still having a bring things into the port and like California. And then you got to ship it all the way Right, stick it on trains or trucks to go all the way to North Carolina. But the fact that it's coming into already on the East Coast, that doesn't make it too bad. Okay, so that's pretty cool.   Ben: Honestly, that's one of the things that we're looking into for 2024 is seeing if we want to find a 3PL out on the West Coast so we can send some inventory there for the heat map issues that you were bringing up, where we can send stuff to the West Coast DCs from there and then keep doing everything else from Charlotte so that we can make sure that we're covering the country. And also, if there's a way to bring stuff in and have it on the West Coast already, then it just makes things easier.   Bradley Sutton: Now what other you know? We've been talking about Amazon USA. What other Amazon marketplaces are you selling on worldwide? And what about other domestic here in the USA marketplaces like Walmart, tik Tok, etc.   Ben: Honestly, we haven't pushed that hard on the non-domestic Amazon sites just because our logic has kind of been well, the US is the largest market. If we're able to successfully sell something here, we're going to be more successful than selling something in another market. So we would rather come up with a new product to sell in the US versus taking the time and energy to push externally. But that is something that started to change over the last year. We are in Canada, we're in the UK and we're going to expand through Europe over the next year as far as Amazon, and then we have our own Shopify sites for all of our brands, and then we do a good bit through Walmart as well.   Bradley Sutton: What's your strategy, like you know, going into 2024, now that margins are decreasing, I mean, are you raising? Are you planning to raise prices? Have you raised prices? Trying to cut costs in unique ways? Pull back on advertising? How does somebody you know, because it's not like you know, this is just something that you're facing, like we talked about earlier. A lot of people are facing it, and some worse. Why do you think, other than the shipping thing, you haven't been hit as hard as others. And what's the plan to you know? It's not like costs are going to go down anytime soon. So how are you going to? You know, stay above water.   Ben: Yeah Well, I mean, one of the things is, before we started the podcast, you and I were discussing how you were just in China and like going and meeting with your manufacturers and actually having those conversations, you can get better rates, you can get better terms, you can get a lot of benefits. You can also see what they can and can't do and find a lot of products that you can make with the same manufacturer. And the more things you buy from one manufacturer, the better rates you're going to get on each of those orders. So going directly to your manufacturers and talking to them is a way that you can massively improve your, your costs and also the terms you have. Like, with some of our, some of our manufacturers, we don't pay until 90 days after the products has come to our warehouse.   Bradley Sutton: How long have you been with those manufacturers?   Ben: I like to ask for some Wow yeah.   Bradley Sutton: And have you visited them there in where they're at and got out to meet and stuff like it?   Ben: And met their family, took their kids presents like or we're very close with them. But it's something that you can like you, that's something that you can build. And again, even if it's somebody that you aren't close with, the more that you can, more you buy from them, the more likely they are to give you better rates, better terms etc. So that's one thing. As far as the advertising goes, one of the things we started really pushing over the last probably six months is just kind of figuring out what are where our product deserves to be ranked based off of price, quality, everything else compared to our competition on specific keywords, and adjusting our advertising based off of that. So if we look and we say like, okay, we're really the fourth best product on this keyword, we're not going to push heavily for our with our advertising to try and get to the number one spot, because eventually we're just going to drop back down to the number four or we're going to have to keep spending a ton of money. So we've adjusted our ad spend to match where we feel like we should be on that keyword and if we drop below that then we'll raise it. But if we're there we'll leave it basically where it is, and that's actually significantly improved our profitability, because we're not spending as much to rank up on something that we won't stick. Because you're not going to stick at the top, then why are you trying to get there? It's not going to, you're just wasting money.   Bradley Sutton: So are you like you know? Obviously, like you said, you know, price is an easy, easy one to know. If you quote unquote deserve to be there. You're looking at, like conversion rates by keyword and search, career performance or things like that, or what are some other factors other than just strictly price?   Ben: Yeah. So we'll buy every single product and bring it to our warehouse and do comparison tests so we'll look and see like okay, this one, like, let's say, we're selling a paper plate we can see like, okay, if we put sauce on this for an hour, it leaks through Ours doesn't. So for the sauce we rank better than them, or the size that it takes or the amount of weight they can hold. It can hold as far as food, things like that, where you're just testing to see the quality of your product versus theirs. So it's not just the quality of the listing and conversion, it's also the quality of what you're actually offering to the customer.   Bradley Sutton: That's interesting. I've never heard of somebody doing that. Where it's like at the keyword level, how do we stack up so that we deserve you know to. You know like, like a product could do really well, like in that situation, for like a keyword like heavy duty plates, or you know big meals or some, or for you know watery foods or something like that, whereas maybe another one would be, you know, floral looking plates, where it's more aesthetic and you could rank or you could rate, I should say, differently for each keyword.   Ben: Exactly and it also helps you figure out which way you want to direct your, the copy and photos and everything that you're putting out for the listing, as you see like, because I mean, everybody is doing competitor research before to figure out, okay, how can I say that I'm better than this one? But if you don't keep doing that throughout it, you're going to get passed off. But also, if you look at it on a keyword level, like we're doing, you're able to save a lot of money on advertising by not bidding on things you shouldn't.   Bradley Sutton: Now, speaking of listing optimization, you know that was one thing that we focused on the last episode I remember. You know you talked about. You've got some listings that are 100% puns and a different, you know, and that helps with your conversion and stickiness of customers. What are you like? Are you guys using AI? That's something that's just kind of blown up, probably since the last time we talked. What other listing optimization strategies you're doing in the last year?   Ben: Yeah, and, like you said, ai is massive. I mean the ability to identify a customer avatar immediately, to put the reviews in and pull whatever, extract whatever data you need to from it with like quickly, efficiently, and to have essentially a professional copywriter write your listings for you. One of the things that I enjoy doing, which has led to some good results and some terrible results is to pick like a few famous copywriters or famous advertisers that I find interesting and then have them have a conversation about the product. So if you say, like these four people discuss paper plates and why someone would buy them, and then they go through and the AI talks like those people and has a conversation, and you can see people who are way smarter than me discussing how they would sell it, why they would sell or what they think people would be directly interested in and how they would position it, and so I like doing that. Also for coming up with brand names If you have like the top branders in the world, you can just say have these people discuss what my brand should be if I'm selling X product. So kind of expanding outside of just saying write me a bullet point with the including these keywords with 250 characters or less and yada, yada, yada. Trying to like, think outside the box a bit more, to be more unique, because at this point anybody can use AI. It's trying to figure out ways to use it in ways that other people aren't yet and especially trying to get add to what the AI is doing, add emotional language to it, because AI is okay at emotional, but not great. So if you can put something in that appeals directly to the customer while still using the the pitches from the AI, we've had really good success with that.   Bradley Sutton: Now what, if anything is, would you say, is the biggest difference when you're taking one product from Amazon and making a listing on Walmart, Like, have you seen something that definitely works and something that you always have to change because it's completely different on Walmart, or is the general structure always pretty much the same and you're just doing the little things that you know, the little requirements that Walmart has, in order to differentiate it?   0:21:40 - Yeah, I mean we are trying to obviously match what Walmart says, but it just seems like on Walmart you want to be way more direct. Like, keyword stuffing doesn't work as well there. It seems like there, at least for us. It hasn't May for other people. But just being more readable and fluent with the way that we create the listings has led to better results versus just trying to stuff too many keywords into it as we possibly can.   Bradley Sutton: What else are you doing differently Something we haven't talked about in this episode or the last one, I mean, you know to manufacturing in USA and keeping respectable profit margins. Having 70 employees, this is not something that, you know, like any Amazon seller can achieve. There's got to be some more other unique things that have helped you reach this level. What do you think those are?   Ben: Now you're putting me on the spot. I think the you know that I have three main partners that I've worked with from the start and I think one of the things that we've done really well is division of labor and creating the SOPs and the backbone for everything that we need in order to run the business, so that we don't have to be involved in the day to day as much as we used to and had to at the start. So we are able to look into things like Amazon fee changes. Look into things like okay, how can we get to China and improve our costs and fees there. Like having the flexibility by building a powerful team to and like our team is. I mean, I would say our VA's are probably smarter than me, so they're better at the job that I am at this point. So like being able to get to that point where you're able to have the flexibility to scale mentally going forward has been massive and we actually like, from the start, the way that we kind of divided it was, we had one of my partners was focused on incoming products. The other was focused on running the warehouse. My role was mostly building the products on the marketing side, and then we had one person whose role was essentially figuring out how we're going forward. His job has always been to push things forward, to figure out what we need to do and then having him he is very, very good at systems so he'll be able to come in and look at what we've done and see the systems we built and say, no, you all are idiots, change these three things. That's going to be much better.   Ben: So, like, being willing to constantly, always, constantly be improving on what you're doing Is one aspect of it, but also always looking forward. So figuring out, like, how do we dodge whatever the next big thing is and I mean, if you look at the and I know you know Steve Simonson, but like whenever he's talking, he's always talking about, okay, what's happening in China now and how is that going to impact things? A year for now, it's two years, or now five years or now.   Bradley Sutton: So even just looking ahead at stuff like that, where You're able to make decisions that mean that you're not going to be Sure changing yourself in the long run for a bigger game, now, I think something that successful sellers also have to know how to do is when to pull the plug on on products and everybody and this is one of those things that there's not one size fits all, everybody has their own criteria. How do you guys decide what to what to retire as far as the product goes? Is it strictly just you know a profit margin? Is there a certain sales velocity that you need to to maintain? Is it you know? If the reviews dip below a certain you know point, what's your decision-making factors on it?   Ben: Honestly, one of the the biggest things we care about is how annoying it is to deal with. So just just being perfectly honest, because we do have, we do have a very wide catalog at this point Counting our kind of variations. We have over a thousand skews. So when we're looking at things and figuring out what we want to do, if the way, if we're sending it to the warehouse and the warehouse has to touch it four times, even if it's making more money, we may want to cut that faster than something the warehouse doesn't have to touch. So we look into not just the profitability of the product but also the profitability of the product compared to the labor, how labor intensive it is. And Also, if the warehouse people don't like dealing with it, then and we're not making much money on it and why keep dealing? Why keep doing it? So that that is one of the big things. But beyond that it is Almost exclusively profit, profitability. Like I don't really care if I'm selling something a hundred, a hundred units a day, if I'm making $12 a day on it. I would rather sell one thing for $12 and a hundred things on the flip side, what is?   Bradley Sutton: are the triggers where it's like, hey, we need to Launch this product, or we need to launch this you know new thing for this brand, or hey, we need to launch a new variation? Are you guys just? Do you have a department that's just constantly looking at new opportunities per brand, or or you're looking for certain signals in a market? How's that work?   Ben: Yeah. So I mean we do look at every single review that we get and and. So if we see a lot of reviews come against saying I wish this were larger, I wish this were a different color, like the obvious things like that Are things that we that play into it, or we're getting negative feedback saying there are all these issues, then solving the issues is a very easy way to improve on that. But the the other aspects of it are Just. If we look and we see a competitor come in and they're doing something different and it looks better, it's doing better, it's taking sales away from us, then we figure out, okay, how do we beat that? What can we do differently? So a lot of it is competitor and customer driven, as opposed to Keyword or sales velocity driven you know you talked about.   Bradley Sutton: You know you've Use helium 10 for years and your team has what. What is the number one thing you're using helium 10 now for? And if you were to Join our product team for a few days let's say you were to you were to be in charge of our product team what would be on your wish list on, like, how you would add something to helium-10 that we don't have right now. That would make your lives as on the Amazon side, yeah, easier the conversion rate trends for that keyword For each individual product.   Ben: So if you're looking at it, you can see like, okay, this one is selling this number this month a day, but being able to go in and figure out if their conversion rate is moving up and down month over month, as opposed to just sales moving up and down month over month, because I think that the Conversion rate is just getting more and more important and at the keyword level, not just the overall conversion rate, but even at the keyword level.   Bradley Sutton: Yeah, yeah, I'm dead. That's definitely the top of my list as well. You know, once Amazon, you know, make search query performance available in the API, then then that's like yeah, to me that's like a must-have for sure. All right, so now I knew you. You know you were like a nationally ranked tennis player back in a. You still get on the courts every now and then. What were your main hobbies last year of? You know like, hey, you need to get away from the Amazon world and just, you know, enjoy yourself. Yeah, what were you doing?   Ben: So the US National Whitewater Training Center is in Charlotte so I learned how to whitewater kayak so I got a membership there. It's a closed course that they controlled the the flow of the water, so it could be anywhere from a class 1 to a class 5, depending on the day that you're out there with the rappers they're going to be. So that was my kind of fun. It was a 10-minute drive from our warehouse. So go Do some kayaking and then they have Like. On Thursdays they had concerts and stuff so you can go Hang out and be around people.   Bradley Sutton: Now Is that just a local hobby for you, but or or? Now that you know I knew you travel sometimes too, or have you know when you travel? Have you ever gone real like a whitewater kayaking?   Ben: I have once and it's way more terrifying. That's what I was about to say.   Bradley Sutton: That would be a little bit scary if you're just doing a controlled environment one thing, but then to Be out there Okay.   Ben: Yeah, when it's big stuff of a controlled water flow, if you flip over it's like, okay, I can handle this. If it's not controlled, we're the rocks. I don't know what's happening. I'm about to die, so that's not quite as good. But one of the things I've tried to do Well traveling is trying to try and go fishing Everywhere I go.   Bradley Sutton: What were some of your cool places you've been to in 2023?   Ben: Yeah, so I went to Fiji for the first time, Wow did you stay in over water like a over? Sadly, no, that was. I was not on an island that was conducive to that, so I'll have to. They'll have to be added to my next trip.   Bradley Sutton: That's on my bucket list, fiji I've never been there.   Ben: Yeah, it's, it's a beautiful place. I went to Estonia To the ambition event there, which I'd never, never been to Really Eastern Europe before, so that was a lot of fun to get to go and meet a lot of the sellers there and get to explore An area in a culture that I'd never gotten to experience. So I always enjoy getting to do stuff like that. Try to think of one more. I started in Greece in college and I got to go back there this year, so I'm going to go back and see what I saw in college and appreciated a bit more as an adult, from a historical perspective. Yeah, as opposed to the 21 year old kid who's just like if alcohol here, I need all of it.   Bradley Sutton: Yes, your priorities are a little bit different at that age, I think it's like getting to go on an adult trip there was.   Ben: It was a nice change.   Bradley Sutton: You know, before we get into your final strategy of the day, if people wanted to reach you or find you on the interwebs, how can they find you out there?   Ben: Facebook is probably the easiest. It's just Benjamin Weber and I think I don't have a picture of myself there. I think it's a picture of the Frank Lloyd Wright falling waters house. So if you, if you see a Benjamin Weber with a house, that's probably me.   Bradley Sutton: Now we're at the stage where we asked for your 30 or 60 second tip. You already gave us a doozy, you know, with that, looking at the how you rank at the keyword level as far as how you deserve to rank. So do you have another one for us?   Ben: I mean, obviously everybody's talking about AI now, but using that within your product development to expand on what you're doing. So one of the things that we used to do with our Entire staff was, every day, as a kind of learning, mental strength, mental training exercise Say what are 10 things that you would pay $50 to never have to deal with again. Then we look to see if we can make products out of those, and so we had this massive list of Thousands of these. Now we do that with AI. So we're going into AI and saying what are problems like, let's say you're in the kitchen category. You would say what are 1020, however many things you want to say things that people would pay 30 dollar, 10, what are 10 problems that people would pay $30 to solve In the kitchen, so they don't have to deal with that every time they're doing it and then see what results come back from that and look at the products that come from it. So it's a way to get essentially consumer research via questions with AI, versus having to go in and look things up. So just using the, the AI as a creativity exercise can be Incredibly huge for coming up with new product ideas, and that's where the last, like seven products that we've made have come from us Just typing questions like that into AI, and there are things that no one is selling on the market right now.   Bradley Sutton: All right. Well, ben, thank you so much for joining us Again. You've definitely given us some insightful tips and you've got some very unique things that nobody else is doing, you know, like being your own Amazon last mile carrier, and everything is less, less great, and so I'll love to see what you do in 2024, and then we'll bring you back in 2025 and see how things are going.   Ben: It sounds good. Thanks for having me.

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Jan 23, 2024