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

Special guest Shivali Patel, brand evangelist at Helium 10, shares a success story of making $45,000 in just two weeks by leveraging BlackBox for product research and adding unique value. They also explore finding hidden gems in the market, such as bat-shaped bath mats, and offer actionable strategies for increasing customer engagement and obtaining reviews.

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: 00:00 - Married Couple's E-Commerce Success Story 05:05 - Transitioning to E-Commerce  09:17 - Side Jobs to KDP and Amazon FBA 08:24 - Hooking With Software and Numbers 12:48 - Comparing Opportunities in FBA and KDP 17:40 - Transitioning to Full-Time E-commerce 20:53 - Viral Success on TikTok and Amazon 27:31 - Start Small Business With TikTok 31:50 - Learning in the Space 34:39 - Promoting Business With TikTok and Shopify 37:30 - Strategies for Promoting Products on TikTok 44:21 - The Importance of Branding in Strategy 45:19 - Amazon and TikTok's Impact on Lives ► 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.

This podcast episode covers the latest updates in e-commerce, including TikTok's potential new shoppable feature, Amazon's faster delivery service, and Walmart's plan to add more stores. It also discusses Etsy's AI-powered gift mode and China's Temu challenging Amazon. Additionally, it highlights Amazon's new consult-a-friend feature and Walmart's advertising options for suppliers and marketplace sellers.

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: 00:00 - Revitalizing Project X With Product Differentiation 03:16 - Selling Out and Replacing Products 09:51 - Coffin Shelf Launch With Unique Packaging 10:54 - Two-in-One Coffin Product and Packaging Idea 17:47 - Watch Out For Future Episodes 20:43 - Recommendations for Beginners on Helium 10 21:42 - Product Validation and Research Techniques Transcript Bradley Sutton: Today we've got an update to our Project X series where we show you step by step how, with our coffin shelf product, I'm trying to tackle the problem of having price wars and increased competition, and I found a way where, instead of lowering the price, I could actually raise my price by over $10. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Do you want to see how your listing or maybe competitors listing rates as to best practices for listing optimization? Or maybe you want to compare a group of ASINs or Amazon products to see how they compare to each other? Maybe you want to see within seconds the top keywords for a single listing or a group of listings? You can do that and more with the Helium 10 tool listing analyzer. For more information, go to h10.me/listinganalyzer.   Bradley Sutton: 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 monthly ask me anything training. This is something that we do every week for our series sellers club and elite members, and then, once a month, we open it up to everybody out there. Go ahead and have an opportunity to come on and ask questions, and I'm also going to give some cool training tips that will help you this time, especially with your product research, and I'm actually going to be going deep into Project X. That's why I'm wearing my Project X hat here. I'm going to show you some updates on what is going on with Project X and, like my thought process, on how I am revitalizing the original product. How many people don't know what Project X is Basically? Project X is a series that we did on YouTube a few years ago, where we found some products and then we basically took it from zero to here. As a matter of fact, it's here in my background.   Bradley Sutton: Let me go pull this product. So this was one of the products that we had. It's a shelf shape like a coffin. So this was a product that we found using helium 10 techniques. We launched it and now we've sold hundreds of thousands of dollars of this product. And now I was like, hey, I need to let me explain what happened. My sales had gone way down on this coffin shelf and there's a couple of things I noticed. Has that ever happened to you guys, where maybe your keyword rank starts going down on your main keyword and now you're unable to make the sales that you used to be making before. Well, that was what was happening with our product. One of the reasons was that everybody started lowering their price. We used to sell this coffin shelf for over $30. Over $30, and people started coming at $26, $25, $23, even, like now, $20. They were selling a similar coffin shelf and so we were like all right, this something has got to go. Now, if we maintained our keyword rank, we still would have been doing okay, but our keyword rank just wouldn't go up above like 10 or 15 anymore.   Bradley Sutton: So what I've been doing is I've been trying to sell out. We actually had run out of stock, but then Amazon miraculously found 25 units of our coffin shelf somewhere, and so the listing went live again. But I've been trying to sell out of this product over the last couple of weeks, and then a few months ago, I started development on something that would kind of replace this product. But let me explain my thought process here, and this is something that maybe one of you guys could do to one of your products. All right, so let me show you my thought process. All right, so you guys should be able to see our coffin shelf. This is our real product. It was out of stock for like a month and again, like I said, amazon just found it again, and so that's why you see a little bit of sales here.   Bradley Sutton: But the first thing I thought about, like, regardless, if I relaunch this product or start a new one, I wanted to like do something to differentiate my product. Okay, and one of the things was I was like, can I add some accessories into this product? Like, is there something that won't add too much cost for me? But if I add it, it's going to differentiate my product. Okay, let's take a look here. Let me show you what I did. I went and I clicked on our reviews and I was like what are people using in this coffin shelf? Okay, so I hit the reviews and then I went to the reviews with images, all right. And then I hit see all photos. And then I started looking at what are people who are taking pictures of this product putting into the images that they're leaving with the reviews, right, and look how many a lot of people are using these pumpkins and looks like there's some light up pumpkins. And then I saw a bunch of people putting crystals and then I see tons of people putting these like miniature skulls. I don't know if you guys can see that here in the images more pumpkins, more skulls and so I'm like, okay, this is, this is something that, like, people are buying extra and then they're putting it in into this coffin shelf Right, what? If so that I thought you know, here's another one that's pumpkins and other things. I was like, what, what could I possibly do in order to maybe take advantage of this knowledge? I was like, okay, that's my product. What about some of my competitor products? All right, so here is a competitor product. All right, let's take a look at their images. All right, this is one of the guys who's just been been selling a lot of, you know, trying to sell super cheap, and I looked at what. What are his customers doing? And again, people with coffin shelves. I see, look at this, tons of miniature skulls everywhere. There's a miniature candle that shaped like a pumpkin. All right, so I'm like, okay, this is definitely what people are doing with these coffin shelves.   Bradley Sutton: So the first thing that I started thinking about was I was like is there something I can buy that I could put in here that cost me maybe pennies, like less than 25 cents, and I could include it in my package without adding any size. So let me just show you guys. I'm going to open up a new window here and let's go to Alibaba, and I forgot what I typed in. I might have said mini, let's see mini LED pumpkin candle. I'm not sure if this is what I searched, but it's just going to give you guys a vibe of what I search for. And this is not it, because I don't see mini pumpkin. Did I type in mini pumpkin? All right, let me try mini LED pumpkin, let's see what happens there. Here we go. Okay, perfect, this is what I started seeing. All right, I was like, nah, $1 for a lot of these, no, that's too expensive $2. But basically I kept looking and then I found this kind of thing here. I was like, look at this, here are some little mini miniature pumpkins I can get for like 10 cents. So basically what I did was like all right, let me see if I can find a miniature pumpkin for about 10, 15 cents. And that's exactly what I did.   Bradley Sutton: The other thing was I wanted to get like a mini skull, mini decorative skull, all right, and I was like can I get another skull for like 10 cents, or something like that. And sure enough there was a bunch of these that were super expensive, like $4. I'm like I'm not going to pay $4 for this miniature skull. So what I ended up doing was I actually found a miniature skull that was a candle, it had a wick right and it was only like 20 cents. But then I was like wait a minute, I am not going to have this candle like a real candle with a wick, and people put that in their coffin shelf and they're dumb enough to light it and then it burns their house down with the coffin shelf. Like that's not the kind of publicity I need. So I went to that factory and I was like all right, I want to buy this miniature skull that you have for like 15 cents, but I want to make it not a candle. So can you produce this to me, for me, for like 20 cents and have it? Not have a wick, candle, wick right. And they're like sure, no problem. So I'm like there's two things. But like, is this enough to really set me apart from the competition? And I was like no, it's not.   Bradley Sutton: So then, all of a sudden, I just started doing some just general product research, and now this was around the time of you know, October, November, so giftable things started getting popular. So I'm like, all right, how can I take advantage of this maybe giftable theme and what I saw, some of the top selling products? They had these really kind of expensive looking gift boxes. Okay, let me see if I can actually find one that I was. That I'm talking about. That really inspired me. Hold on, let me show you. It was a heart shaped one, perfect, all right, this is. This is similar to what I found, all right. So I searched and I found these heart shaped gift boxes. I'm like these gift boxes don't even have anything in it, all right, they're just shaped like a heart, whatever. These are literally empty gift boxes and people are paying $20, $15, $25 for these things. And then I started looking at some of them and I noticed that they were advertising this as something that people could not only use as a gift box but then also kind of like for some, like trinket storage, like take a look at some of these images, like look at this, people were putting like roses in these gift boxes. So it's kind of like an evergreen product. This wasn't this gift box, wasn't just a product that you know is meant to put the real gift inside. But the gift box is almost the gift product in itself, because the person you're giving it to can use it for storage, for things like chocolates. They could use it for macaroons, like we see.   Bradley Sutton: So then, now, all of a sudden, that got my creative juices working and I'm like all right, what if I launch this same exact coffin shelf? And not only did I now have this LED light, pumpkin light and a miniature skull figurine, but I also made a gift box with it. But then I thought what of what good use is like a shoebox shaped gift, you know, like that really doesn't go with the vibe. So then I started looking at packaging factories. I'm like, hey, who can make me a gift box that is kind of like with the vibe of those heart shaped gift boxes that I saw back in October. But check this, I want to make it in the shape of a. What do you guys think I did? In the shape of a coffin. So that means the coffin itself, which is again this product that you see right behind me here, is going to be inside of a coffin gift box that people could then use later for storing their socks or storing their chocolates or whatever. So it's kind of like people are buying two in one.   Bradley Sutton: Now my cost it's expensive to make a custom box, guys. Let me just tell you, all right, this is not for the, the, the, the weary here. All right, this is not something that is easy to do. This box ended up costing me like two bucks, like almost as much as the coffin shelf itself, which costs like about three, four dollars or so. But I'm like, hey, this is worth it. So I've got my coffin shelf. That's normally like four bucks. I'm going to go ahead and pay $2 for this coffin bookshelf. I'm going to pay 40, 50 cents for these two miniature figurines and instead of having to sell my coffin shelf at $23, I'm going to go back in the market at like 33 or more dollars. So I'm adding $10 to my retail price. But I'm only adding like $2 and 50 cents. And in zero I'm adding to shipping because, remember, if anything, this box is smaller than the box I was having it in, okay, and since there's a hollow area of my coffin shelf that allows me to go ahead and put those little trinkets in there, so I'm adding zero to my shipping, zero to my transportation costs, very, very little to my taxes, you know, because it's these. This stuff only costs like $2, right. And now, all of a sudden, instead of playing this price war, I am going to go ahead and sell this product at a premium because nobody else who's selling coffin shelves is going to have this, and I'm not ready to launch it yet. I have it all here in my warehouse. It already delivered to me a couple of weeks ago.   Bradley Sutton: Let me show you the images that AMZ one step did for me. Take a look at this. This is just from Google Drive. Right here, here is going to be the new listing product. All right, there's a. This is the exact little mini miniature skull that I put a LED pumpkin like light little candle here. All right, that's one of my infographics. Let's see what else we got here. Here's some new images I got that show the products that are coming with it. There's another one that shows the size of the product. Here's one example of a main image I could use, but hold on, you guys haven't seen the cool part. And then look at this box. This box is epic, guys. It's shaped exactly like my coffin shelf. And look, people are going to see this and be like oh wow, I can use this box as like another coffin shaped storage. It's literally like having two products in one Now where they can put like dead roses and things they can put a ribbon on it. Let me show you some other images I have here. There's my infographic of the size here. This is super cool, guys. Here is my new coffin shaped box, and then the coffin fits right in there. These are the images I'm going to be using for my new listing.   Bradley Sutton: And again, now, all of a sudden, somebody types in coffin shelf into Amazon and sure, they're going to see a bunch of $23, $22 coffin shelves, but don't you think mine is going to stick out with a main image? You know, maybe that looks like this, where it shows I've got a coffin shelf, I've got a coffin storage box, I've got a miniature skull, I've got a miniature pumpkin LED light. It's going to be no competition. I'm going to be priced $10 or more than the other coffin shelves, but my click through rate is going to be pretty darn good, I think. All right. So this is something that I think is beneficial for anybody out there who are selling products in niches that get a little bit saturated. Okay, they get a little bit saturated and you're like I don't want to play the price war. And, guys, let me tell you I don't think you should play the price war. So this is again.   Bradley Sutton: This is Project X, this is our product that you guys know and love from Project X, and it's been selling for like almost four years now. And on Amazon, you can't just keep things status quo. Sure, we were successful with this product a couple of years ago and it's still been successful, but it's fallen off because of the competition. That's what happens on Amazon. Does it mean I need to give up right away? No, if this doesn't work, should I close this product? If I'm not profitable, yeah, I probably should close it, but don't just give up just because there's a lot of competition or there's price wars. There's different steps you guys can take in order to try and get your market share back and where you don't have to play these price games. All right, do not do a race to the bottom, because that's where all your profit is going to go. So this will be. You know, this is going to be live on Amazon, like probably in a couple of weeks or so.   Bradley Sutton: The other test I'm going to do on here, guys, is I'm going to test this as a separate product with a honeymoon period, or launching as a new variation on this existing listing, taking advantage of those 1800 reviews I have, and doing a test on what works better getting that new honeymoon period and launching on a brand new ASIN or launch or taking advantage of all the reviews. But there could be something weird going on on the Amazon algorithm. That kind of like shadow blocks me from getting past position 10. So that's. I just wanted to give you guys a little mini tutorial on a real life experience that I'm doing here for Project X and what I'm doing to relaunch this coffin shelf product. Another thing I'm going to be doing I'm going to talk about in a future episode is the egg trace. That was the other product that I was selling for Project X. It's so funny. We got a brand new shipment in and the factory confused my product with another customer, so they gave me egg trays. That's the wrong shape and the wrong finish. It's like a shiny finish and I'm going to get some money back from the factory, but I'm like I don't want to throw these products away. I don't want to go without selling coffin or without selling egg trays for months, while I have to get the right product in. When I launched this product as like a new variation, a new product for me, I'm going to show you guys how I'm going to do that. You know, next month, in next month's episode. And that was the other Project X product.   Bradley Sutton: All right, now, guys, this is now your show, 100% of the rest of the time I want you guys to put in your questions. Violet says how do you find the supplier for the coffin box? So for me, I actually have a sourcing agent. Okay, so I think this is super important. My sourcing agent is boots on the ground in China. I just give her the parameters of what I'm looking for and she goes out and finds it herself for me. Rhonda says does the manufacturer design the new coffin shape box for you? No, I designed it. So I, I guess I just told my my sourcing agent. I was like hey, I want something that fits the exact shape of my coffin so that it doesn't add to my shipping dimensions, and make it happen. So she did. Oh, great question by Jonathan.   Bradley Sutton: Once you find items to create differentiation, do you ship these to the main supplier who boxes it all together. Yes, so this is another way to kind of like foolproof yourself against. You know, like manufacturers doing shady things. So you can have, you can just send the products directly there, or you could send it to a third party. Like maybe you have a separate place that packages everything for you. Like maybe I can send everything to the where I get the package. Actually, I think that's what I did. Instead of having the coffin shelves packaged at the coffin shelf factory, I think I send it to the packaging company that has the coffin shaped box and that's where they put in the coffin shelf and they put in those little trinkets that come from. Now, three different factories, making it that much less likely that you know, somebody's just going to copy exactly what I'm doing, because I'm making it too difficult for them to copy me.   Bradley Sutton: And David says do you have any reference for an agency that does a plus content? I've used a few myself. So the two I've used are both in hubhelium10.com. All right, go to hubhelium10.com. One of them is AMZ one step is has done it. And then the other one I've used is, uh, marketing by Emma. All right, marketing by Emma. So go into hubhealym10.com, look for both of those companies and you'll see how to contact them. Brenda says what videos do you recommend for beginners on HealyM10? If you're brand new on HealyM10, I recommend going through our Freedom Ticket Program. It's in the Learning Hub right there on your HealyM10 dashboard. That would be probably the best thing to do and then you know you could find the Project X videos in there as well, and the Project X videos are also on YouTube. Sergio says just launch what would you say is a good amount of sales per day to aim for. All depends on your keyword. All right, basically, if you want to get to page one of a keyword, you got to be selling probably through PPC for that keyword X number of products over 8 to 10 days in order to be able to get a good chance to get to page one. And if you're wondering how to find that number, that's inside of HealyM10. Just look at the CPR. So add your product to keyword tracker, your exact ASIN, and then look at the CPR number for your main keywords and that's kind of like how many units you need to sell over 8 days to give you the best chance to get to page one.   Bradley Sutton: Ollie says let's go, bradley, these two sessions really lifted my spirits up in the process of launching my product was in doubts. How do you deal with the thought of whether the product will work or not? Well, I validate, validate, validate, all right, super important. We've been talking in the last. You know, you might have been in our Sellers Edge webinar where we're talking about how to find the product opportunity. But that's only half the journey. The next step is how to validate it. All right, you see something that looks good, but you just you don't just blindly say, all right, let's go with this, all right and let's make a million dollars. No, you've got to validate it All right. Now there's different steps that you have to do. So I take a look at you know, how strong are they on keywords? How strong are their listings? Is there enough demand for this product? Is there a must sales? Is there enough search for this? What's the seasonality? There are so many things that I look at to validate it. And then in Project X we talk about before, you might want to do a test listing. If there's not enough data, maybe you came up with some new idea that there's that doesn't have enough validation points on Amazon for you to make a rational decision. You might need to make a test listing to try and get those data points All right. So who knows, maybe that'll be the next Sellers Edge workshop that we do next month to talk about that.   Bradley Sutton: Jacob says I've been using Opportunity Explorer on Sellers Central. Is there a good minimum for number of top clicks products? Excellent question. So for me this is how it can go either way. So for those who don't know in Product Opportunity Explorer the number of clicked products, it's the number of products that it takes in a niche to equal 90% of the clicks. So if there's only 10 products, that means that those 10 products have 90% of the clicks of that whole niche. If it's 1000 products, that means it takes 1000 products just to get to 90% of the clicks. Whether one is good and one is bad, you can go both ways on that, but that's how you look at that information. There's different circumstances where you might want to see different things. You might want to go into a niche where it's wide open, where there's no 10 products that are dominating, or on the flip side, you're like no, the 10 products that are dominating, they kind of suck. So I don't want to compete with 1000 products, I want to compete with only 10 products who suck. So that's another way you can look at it too.   Bradley Sutton: Constance says what role does the first ASIN that I select play? When I select ASINs on X-ray to run them on Cerebro, you always say the first ASIN should be a random ASIN, not the top seller. Yes, so that sets the baseline product, the way that Cerebro is set up it's supposed to be. You have your product as the first one and then five or 10 other products that you're comparing it against. So then when you look at the competitor rank average, it's excluding that first one because that's the one that you're comparing to. But if you're just doing general product research, like on X-ray, you maybe don't have your product on there. So you don't want to select all the just top 10 good ones because, remember, it's going to exclude that first product. So you need to click on the first one something from the bottom of the page that's maybe irrelevant to your product, and that's the one that it isolates. And then the competitor rank average and the sponsored rank average of the competitors. It's going to be all of those subsequent nine 10 products you choose.   Bradley Sutton: Good question, Constance Jonathan says when validating, do you order a smaller quantity than build up, or do you validate mostly with online data points? I validate mostly with online data points, but if I don't have enough, that's when I do a Tesla scene and I'll have like five or 10 units only for that. All right, guys, that's about it for all the time that we have today. So I hope you guys enjoyed this episode where we went over some Project X updates that you guys will actually see live on the website on Amazon, probably in two weeks, if you guys are watching this on YouTube or another place. This is what we do once a month, but every week anybody who is in our Serious Sellers Club or Helium 10 Elite actually gets this call. All right, every single week I'm on here answering every single question, but once a month we open it up to everybody. So make sure you sign up next month to take advantage of this episode, or sign up for Helium 10 Elite. Get on the waitlist h 10.me/elite and you can take advantage of getting asking me questions every single week. Thank you guys for joining us. We'll see you guys later. Have a great day, bye, bye now.

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: 00:00 - Ranking Strategies For Walmart Listings 04:22 - Walmart's SEM Offers Growth Opportunities 12:37 - Walmart Listing Optimization Guide 13:40 - Walmart Traffic, Influencers, Branding, and Agencies 16:54 - Walmart Application and Brand Registry 22:43 - Ranking Strategies For Walmart Products 24:16 - Join The Winning With Walmart Group ► 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.

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 Amazon aids seller listings with new generative AI partnership https://chainstoreage.com/amazon-aids-seller-listings-new-generative-ai-partnership Etsy targets gift shoppers with AI-based tool 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: 00:43 - TikTok Shipping 01:25 - Amazon Listing AI 03:32 - Etsy Gift Finder 04:23 - TikTok Usage Slowing 05:32 - Amazon Search Terms 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  

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: 00:00 - Amazon Carrier Strategies and Profit Margins 06:45 - Optimizing Amazon Stock Check-in and Distribution 09:08 - Inventory, Manufacturing, and Global Expansion 10:52 - Product Warehouse Benefits  15:43 - Amazon Advertising and Listing Optimization 16:52 - Analyzing Conversion Rates and Product Quality 24:31 - Factors for Retiring Products  25:33 - Warehouse Efficiency and Competitor Analysis 31:50 - Using AI for Product Development 33:52 - 2024 Tips and Unique Strategies ► 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.

Navigating the unpredictable rapids of Amazon and Walmart marketplace selling, we had the pleasure of being joined by Lesley, a maestro with a flair for reviving online seller accounts from the depths of suspension. In our conversation, we uncover the labyrinth of issues that can snag unsuspecting sellers, from the snares set by underhanded competitors to the resurgence of 'inauthentic' item flags. Lesley, drawing on her rich tapestry of experience that spans from journalism to digital marketplaces, guides us through the complexities of maintaining a pristine account on platforms like Amazon and Walmart, while also sharing her own transition from traditional business consulting to the fast-paced e-commerce arena. The episode takes a turn into the shadowy alleys of the online marketplace, exposing the black hat tactics of less scrupulous sellers who resort to fraudulent reviews and other deceptive maneuvers to gain an edge. Stories of sabotage and extortion unfold, revealing the lengths to which some will go to undermine their competition and the sophisticated strategies Amazon employs to counter these threats. Lesley's insights prove invaluable for those looking to safeguard their ventures in this cutthroat environment, ensuring your business not only survives but thrives among the giants of the digital retail world.   In episode 528 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Lesley discuss: 00:00 - Strategies for Amazon Account Reinstatement & Protection 05:00 - Common Suspensions and Appeals on Walmart  07:59 - Amazon KDP Issues and IP Theft  11:10 - Amazon Account Suspensions and Prevention Tips 17:18 - More On Account Suspensions on Amazon 23:25 - Amazon TOS Compliance, Fraud, Extortion, and Black Hat Tactics 23:45 - Fake Orders and Amazon Locker Strategy  34:20 - Lesley's New Book And The Importance of SOPs in Business

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 launches generative AI tool to answer shoppers’ questions https://www.cnbc.com/2024/01/16/amazon-launches-generative-ai-tool-to-answer-shoppers-questions.html FedEx announces its own commerce platform for merchants https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/15/fedex-announces-its-own-commerce-platform-for-merchants/ Amazon May Start Charging Users for Certain Alexa Services https://www.mensjournal.com/news/amazon-alexa-plus-subscription-service Helium 10 Elite / AVASK Plus Workshop: A Day of E-Commerce Mastery in Frankfurt, Germany h10.me/avaskgermany The discussion concludes with a dive into using Amazon’s brand analytics data together with Helium 10’s Black Box to unearth niche keywords and product opportunities, offering you three different sets of strategies for identifying market gaps and leveraging data to enhance your Amazon-selling game. Join us for an episode that's not just about the news, but about giving you the insights and strategies to level up your Amazon journey.   In this episode of the Weekly Buzz by Helium 10, Bradley covers: 00:48 - Amazon App AI Tool 03:21 - FedEx Marketplace? 05:02 - Alexa Plus 06:17 - Walmart Video Ads 07:08 - FBA Shipment Window 08:42 - Reduce Returns 10:32 - Europe Conference 11:33 - Pro Training Tip: Amazon Product Research Tools ► 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 has started rolling out its consumer side generative AI shopping assistant. FedEx making an e-commerce marketplace. Walmart, sponsored brand ads and video ads, have a beta launch. A first-ever Helium 10 workshop in Germany next week. This and more on today's episode of the 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'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show. That is our Helium 10 Weekly Buzz.   Bradley Sutton: We give you a rundown of all the news stories and articles that's going on in the e-commerce world 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. We've got a lot of articles today, so let's go ahead and hop right into it now. The first one here is actually from CNBC and it was an article Entitled Amazon launches generative AI tool to answer shoppers questions. Now, this is pretty interesting because you know we've been talking about this for over a year, about how amazon has been testing Different tools and they're going to be coming out with things that allow the consumers you know, like shoppers of amazon to perhaps have generative AI like Conversations when they are shopping. Now it hasn't gotten to that point yet. However, something new that has been spotted in the wild I haven't seen it in my app yet is that there's a prompt that asks customers questions about a specific item and then it returns an answer within a few seconds by summarizing information collected from product reviews and the listing itself. Now something to note again. Like I said, this is not some conversation like you can. You can do with ChatGPT. It says, unlike open-art ai's ChatGPT, amazon's new feature isn't equipped to carry out a conversation, but it can respond to creative prompts. It says on a listing for a woman's vest, it could write a haiku about the product.   Bradley Sutton: How that Is going to help us sell products, I'm not sure. So take a look here. It says it was also able to describe the item in the style of Yoda from star wars. All right, and it actually had a screenshot of this. So I guess somebody who has this app they typed in Can you describe the product as if you are Yoda from star wars? And then the answer that this amazon app says Yoda why is jedi master would describe this product thusly. And it says crop puffer vest. Women wear zipper closure. Yes, okay, I'm sorry that was a bad Yoda impression, but literally I wasn't making that up. This is a screenshot from this article and it it answered about this product in this style of Yoda. Again, I am not sure how that is going to help us sell products. There's probably a lot of other things. I wish amazon might Maybe put a little effort into more than Allowing its ai app to respond in the or not in the voice, thank goodness, but in the tense of or the form of Yoda. But hey, it is what it is. Um, technology is getting kind of scary. Could this, you know, a future iteration of this actually help sales for us? Maybe it's too early to see so generative ai it. It's not coming anymore. It has come All right, so look out for this in your amazon app.   Bradley Sutton: Next article is actually from tech crunch and it's entitled FedEx announces its own commerce platform for merchants. Now, right off the bat, let me just go ahead and say you know, I did a little clickbait. I said, oh, this might be a marketplace, no, FedEx says it's not a marketplace. it's this new commerce platform they're calling fdx, all right, and it's in private preview, with a wider launch schedule for fall of 2024. Now it's not really known what in the world it's going to be. You know, like they said, it's not going to be a marketplace. However, they did purchase this service called shop Uh runner a couple years ago, or a few years ago now, and it allows people to see estimated delivery time on websites, handle shopping carts, track packages, record carbon emissions for those who are interested in that managed returns, etc. You know, but they specifically says we are not in the business of the marketplace, we're trying to help businesses build the best possible experience From demand to post purchase.   Bradley Sutton: So, like I'm just confused, like I have no idea what the heck this is. You know, since, since FedEx is not, you know, really being open with it, but you know, shots were fired Earlier this year or last year. Now when, when Amazon's like, hey, we're gonna be a shipping company. Now you know, like you don't have to be selling products on FBA, you can use Amazon as a shipping company, like that's like direct competition for FedEx and UPS. So FedEx is like I'm gonna clap back at you right and say, alright, well, let's get into the commerce game. How they're gonna do that? I'm not sure are they gonna be successful, who knows? But be interesting to watch out if there's a new player on the block.   Bradley Sutton: Going back to the articles, men's journal comm had something Says Amazon may start charging users for certain Alexa services. They're gonna launch this thing called Alexa plus later this year and they're gonna be able to have exclusive Features and it's gonna be the revitalized, subscription based version of its voice assistant June 30th. Now this is another one I'm very skeptical about. I mean, alexa has not really improved in years, you know, and it's been struggling. I, if I were Amazon, I would not be trying to put a price tag on it Until it was proven to really really be better, because I'm just not sure that Alexa is worth any kind of money. Well, I know Alexa is not worth any money. You know nobody's gonna pay extra money for it now. Now Could they make something super cool again using generative AI? That would make it worth couple bucks a month potentially. But let's see. You know, the thing that affects Amazon sellers is Are more people gonna be shopping on Alexa because of some new features it might have? That's to be determined. Now that's gonna affect us, like not many people I know ever buy anything on Alexa, but if that changes, that would be very helpful to Amazon sellers.   Bradley Sutton: Next article was actually an email I got from Walmart, so guys, check this out. If you got the email, you might be on this beta program where they say, hey, Walmart connect is it excited to inform me that we are testing sponsored brands and sponsored video inventory on browse and topic pages on Walmart site, starting last week actually, and it's gonna run a minimum of four weeks. All right, we have generated next Recommended next step, so check if you got this email and you can click on it. It says, hey, all self-serve sponsored search advertisers With scheduled live or net, new sponsored brand and sponsored video campaigns will automatically be updated and part of the test and they gave a couple of screenshots of how sponsored brand ads might look looks very similar to what we all know and love in Amazon Advertising. So check your email, whatever your Walmart email is, if you have that Next article is actually not article, but it's from the seller central dashboard and this is an update of something previously announced and it's Entitled automatic closure policy for shipments will be updated on February 1st.   Bradley Sutton: All right, so this was announced before, but they clarified it a little bit. So let's say this is again Effective February 1st. Let's say you create a shipment, all right, using the send to Amazon workflow. So so you're trying to send inventory into Amazon from your let's just say, your own 3pl here in the United States or in Europe. Domestic shipment, in other words, from US addresses, if it has not arrived within 45 days After the shipment creation date, the Shipment will automatically be closed, all right. Or I mean, if it doesn't arrive within this, this time of the policy now for International shipments, that means you create a shipment that's going to be coming from your Chinese or Indian or Pakistani Factory. Well, you're gonna have 75 days from the shipment creation date. For most of you this doesn't have. You know this might not affect you, but but what if they're shipping delays? Or maybe you accidentally, you know, create your shipment too early and then you know Chinese New Year's came, you know, like what's happening right now, and then it delayed your shipment a month. You know, could you be pushing this time limit? It's, it's a possible. So just take a look at this in your dashboard if you have any questions. They clarified a couple of things, but you can't just create open-ended shipments anymore and, you know, expect five years later, or five years or five months later for Amazon to accept your package.   Bradley Sutton: One last news article from the seller central dashboard this was from last week and it's something new on Amazon where it says reduce customer returns recommendation. This is in the growth opportunities tool and it's supposed to gonna tell you, like the financial impact of Money you could have gained over 90 days if you've done the recommended actions. This I can pretty much take with the tiniest grain of salt I have ever eaten, because I have never found value in these Estimations that that Amazon gives and I'm not trying to throw Amazon to the bus, I'm just keeping it real, guys but I haven't seen anything that gives me faith that this algorithm is gonna work. That being said, the reason why I'm bringing this up is because there's gonna be some recommendations that's gonna have. Now, this could be potentially, you know, beneficial. You know, forget the what's the potential impact. Just being able to see what the Amazon algorithm Thinks you should do will be interesting because it's supposedly, as this article says, it's gonna be based on Customers, customer issue trends and reviews and it's gonna compare your listing to other top-selling brands. Now that is something I could see that could be helpful where, hey, here's a brand that has a similar product and it's a really selling well and they've got, like this field filled out that you don't have filled out now. That could be Beneficial. The other thing that seemed interesting, but again I'm skeptical on, is it said hey, find out whether placing content in the title bullets or product description of your detail pages, we'll have the greatest impression on customers if they're just making this up, you know, like I'm pretty sure that us experience Amazon sellers probably no better than Amazon as far as how the algorithm works, as far as things like this. But again, if they've got some advanced new information that that is coming out, this could be a potential way to have insight into the Amazon algorithm. All right, so so look out for that on your, your dashboard as well.   Bradley Sutton: Last thing, again, next week, a chevalier myself will be in Germany, Frankfurt, Germany. We are gonna be at our very first ever all-day event that Helium 10 is doing together with the VASC. So if you'd like to attend, go to h10.me/avaskgermany. It's only 75 euros to attend all day. We've got tons of speakers coming from multiple countries All over Europe. I'll be there myself. We're gonna have a networking social. We're providing food. It's gonna be in the Frankfurt airport, all right. So, like I don't care where you are in Europe, you're, you're like a Ryan air 30 dollar Ryan air flight away from Frankfurt. You don't even need to get an Uber. You just walk out of the terminal and you're right there. All right, guys. So again, h10.me forward slash a VASC Germany. Please come out. It would be great to see you all and meet you guys in person next week, on the 25th of January. All right, that's it for the news this week.   Bradley Sutton: Next up, let's get into our training tip of the week, and actually it's multiple ones. I want to spend just a couple of times just showing you the power of the new Helium 10 tool that came out a few weeks ago in black box, called ABA, top search terms, which is for Amazon brand analytics. The possibilities are endless with the kind of research you can do, so I just picked a couple of scenarios here to show you. Let's pretend that you have a product or a factory that makes products made of bamboo. I actually have a brand that makes bamboo products and you're like hey, what are some trending bamboo Keywords, right, so. So then you go in and you go into black box, you go into the new tool, aba, top search terms, and then what you can do is you enter bamboo, just like you would in Amazon brand analytics inside of seller central. But then now I can enter in other things, like, for example, I'm gonna enter in the helium minimum, Helium 10 search volume of 500. I'm going to say, hey, I want to see where the top three clicked ASINs, okay, per brand analytics have a total of less than 200 reviews. Meaning, hey, these the top products in this keyword, they're not even, they don't even have that many reviews Overall. There might be some. You know room for me.   Bradley Sutton: And take a look at the keywords that came up here. You know we've got like bamboo cool underwear here, bamboo boxer briefs. I'm already seeing like a you know some, some trends here. And then, as I scroll down here, this one jumped out to me bamboo lampshade. And right here in this brand analytics tool I can see, wow, okay, this has a thousand search volume. It's increased 35% this search volume over the previous week. And then I'm looking at these top three clicked and, yeah, these are products are fairly new. Look at this, the number one clicked item for this keyword only has five reviews. All right, so let's just go ahead and take a look at this on Amazon and I can see this Amazon page, like you know, the number one, page one, position one, only has 14 reviews. Position two, six reviews. Position three has a hundred reviews and it's sold a hundred units. So this is pretty interesting. You know, like I found a new niche, potentially for myself, if I'm selling bamboo products, just by using the brand analytics data together with Amazon or Helium 10 data allowed me to find this new niche. So guys, play around with that.   Bradley Sutton: Option number two let's just say, hey, I'm doing some, some new research and I'm like, hey, I want to see a keyword that, per brand analytics, the total click share of the top three items are 70%, meaning that the top three click products. If you add up how much percent of the clicks they get, it's over 70%. But if you add up their conversion share, meaning what share of the sales of this keyword do these top three click products have, it's less than 35%. What does that mean? Think about that for a second. Theoretically speaking, if, if all products and listings were created equal, if there is a listing that or some listings that get 70% of the clicks, well, it should have 70% of the sales, right. But most, most keywords, most products are not created equal.   Bradley Sutton: Sometimes people click into a product and they're like, wow, this is amazing, so it's conversion rates going to be super high. Other times, everybody's clicking into products and it's like, nah, we don't like this, this listing sucks, this product sucks, whatever right, and the conversion rates going to be lower. So that's what I'm looking for. Show me where there's a lot of buyer intent for three products. That means whatever they see in the search results, it looks good. So if they click it, it like 70, 70% of all the clicks for a keyword. That's a lot right, but everybody's clicking out of it and buying another product that wasn't even one of the top three click. So that's literally what I'm looking for here, using brand analytics. You know you can't do this in seller central unless you download stuff and make some pivot tables.   Bradley Sutton: I'm also using some other Helium 10 data points like hey, I want these keywords to have 2000 search volume at least and at least three word count. I want these keywords. It not only has to match everything I just said, but I wanted to have a search volume trend that's going up. I want to see this going up 50% week over week. Search forms, like it's a trending keyword. And then take a look there's a hundred and 78 keywords that that had this like look at this one human dogbed that that's a crazy keyword. Human dog bed has a 500% increase in search volume. recently. All right, that that's kind of insane. there's other you know products here mini chainsaw, cordless. You know there's some, just random, one wagons cart, foldable. The heck is that cigar ass trays for men has a 1000% increase in search volume. And then take a look here the top three clicked products for this cigar ass trays. Look at this the number one click product for this keyword has 94% of the clicks but 0% of the conversion. So there's something fishy going on there. Everybody seems to love it in the search results but nobody likes it on the page. However, another product there had 0.6% of the clicks yet 11% of the purchases. So again, there's just so much valuable information in brand analytics that you guys can do for your product research. But now you have a completely new way to search for it using helium tens brand analytics tool.   Bradley Sutton: One last scenario here. Let's say you're doing keyword research. Hey, you look up all the coffin shelves, let's just say, and you put all of the ASINs of the top selling coffin shelves into this tool and basically what you want to see is hey, where did any of these products show up as one of the top three clicked for any keyword? Well, boom goes the dynamite. You just put in the ASINs and within seconds you are going to get every single keyword where it was one of the top three clicked and you'll be able to see if it was one of the top three purchase. You can see it's click share Like here's a keyword I didn't even, you know, think about, for I might not even be focused on in for our project X coffin shelf, alternative decor. All right, that's a new keyword for me. I discovered it right here in brand analytics.   Bradley Sutton: So, guys, if you haven't used this tool, make sure to use it. I believe for now it's open to diamond and up members. You know we always try and you know, give our tools first to elite, then to diamond and then it'll get down on platinum. But you know there's tons of you diamond users out there. So make sure you guys are getting the value out of this tool. Open up, play around with it. Let me know what you think. What other kind of filters would you like to see? All right, guys. That's it for our Weekly Buzz this week. Thank you so much for joining us. We'll see you next week to see what's buzzing.

Listen in as Gefen from Vendocommerce joins us in this month’s TACoS Tuesday episode to share expert insights on the evolving landscape of Amazon PPC advertising. We're unwrapping the tactics that have driven success in 2023 and looking ahead to what 2024 holds, with a keen eye on the emerging trend of vertical video ads. Discover how an integrated approach to advertising, factoring in the halo effect on overall sales and product rankings, can amplify your brand's presence during crucial retail events. We also delve into how to use Helium 10 to easily optimize and track these strategies for superior performance in the year to come. In our conversation, we compare the accessibility of Sponsored TV with the robust control offered by Amazon DSP, especially for smaller brands looking to maximize their advertising efforts. Learn why testing and patience are critical when navigating these platforms, and understand the strategic organization of sponsored product campaigns to optimize ad groupings. Plus, Gefen imparts valuable advice on marketing products with different attributes and the potential pitfalls of violating terms of service when it comes to product hang tags on Amazon and Walmart. Tune in for an enlightening discussion that could reshape your approach to Amazon advertising. In episode 527 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Carrie and Gefen discuss: 00:00 - Amazon Advertising in 2023 and 2024 03:10 - Vertical Video Ads Trend 09:29 - E-Commerce Behavior on TikTok Shop and Amazon  13:13 - Amazon's Sponsored TV and Publisher Ads 14:25 - Comparing Sponsored TV and Self-Serve DSP 16:51 - TikTok and Amazon Trust and Fulfillment 19:19 - Amazon Advertising and Product Attributes 20:46 - Optimizing Advertising Creatives on Amazon 30:10 - Helium 10 Tool Cerebro ► 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: Sponsored TV ads. What worked for ads in 2023 on Amazon and what to look forward to in 2024 with Amazon ads. This and so much more on today's episode of the Serious Sellers podcast.   Bradley Sutton: How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. If you're like me, maybe you were intimidated about learning how to do Amazon PPC, or maybe you think you just don't have the hours and hours that it takes to download and sort through all of those sponsored ads reports that Amazon produces for you. Adtomic for me allowed me to learn PPC for the first time, and now I'm managing over 150 PPC campaigns across all of my accounts in only two hours a week. Find out how Adtomic can help you level up your PPC game. Visit h10.me/adtomic for more information. That's h10.me/adtomic   Carrie Miller: Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers podcast by Helium 10. My name is Carrie Miller and I will be your host, and this is our TACoS Tuesday, where we talk about all things Amazon advertising, and we have an expert guest today. So this is Geffen from Vendo. So welcome, Geffen.   Gefen: Hey, Carrie, it's a pleasure to be here.   Carrie Miller: Thanks so much for joining us today. I'm very excited to have you on. I know you've been on here before and a lot of people really liked your episode, so we have some more good content for everyone today. And so for those of you, for those of the people in the audience that don't know you or know about Vendo, could you tell us a little bit about yourself and your experience, and then also about Vendo?   Gefen: Yeah, 100%. So I'm the VP of advertising here at Vendo. So just a background on what Vendo, who and what Vendo is. So we are a full service e-commerce agency specializing in Amazon and Walmart, full service management From an advertising perspective. We have kind of brought in those services across Amazon and Walmart also to bring in things like programmatic, various retail media networks, as well as other marketplaces too, and so those have been incredibly, incredibly growth focused. I mean, 2023 was a very crazy year. The team did an incredible job from a strategic standpoint, from a number standpoint, to grow across the board and when it comes to PPC, as most of the people I hope know, on this call, a lot of those different strategies rhyme. So we've been able to replicate the immense success that we've had on Amazon. We brought it over to Walmart and then we brought that over towards the various retail media networks, as well as things like Page Search and Social with Google, facebook, tiktok, etc. Amazing.   Carrie Miller: Yeah, so you guys are into everything. That's awesome. So I guess, since you were talking about 2023, what are some things that you think worked really really well Specifically in 2023 that you might carry into 2024? And then maybe some new things on the horizon because of just the changing landscape and things that Amazon is introducing right now.   Gefen: Yeah, yeah. Well, I'll start with the second half of that question, because I think that vertical video is going to be a really big push for Amazon this year. I know that everybody's talking about that in the space. I'm very curious to see how it's going to be rolled out. I mean, if you think about it from a practical standpoint, it's going to take up more page real estate than the, than the former video format. Now they might have both horizontal and vertical in play. We also don't know where on the search engine results page it's going to show up. Is it going to show up on row four, which would be row four, five, six on mobile, potentially even row seven, depending on how, you know, zoomed in your screen is, or is it going to be at the bottom of the page? And I think those are big questions because that's going to place a big emphasis on where you're ranking. And so I think that that leads into the first part of your question, which is something that worked really well for us, because we don't look at ads in a vacuum, right?   Gefen: So you know, ACoS is great, but obviously this is TACoS Tuesday and taco of your sales, yes, and so when we're looking at total sales, something that we brought in and I know it's a little vague, but we really looked at the halo impact of ad strategies and how they impacted ranking, ranking and total sales, right. And so when we focused our ad strategy maybe on a cost per customer acquisition model, maybe on a taco's model, and we look to really prioritize, hey, where are we showing up, right? So if, if we're driving all this traffic and we have a 20% conversion rate, let's say, on this keyword, are we tracking, using a Helium 10? Of course, are we tracking that ranking properly? To say, hey, we started running these ads aggressively on August 1st and if we've been tracking ranking on that keyword for the last two months since going aggressive on that term, where are we ranking now and how has it changed?   Gefen: And are there broader KPIs that we're measuring outside of just direct ad revenue? And that worked really well for us because we centered that around 10 poll events and this is a really big strategy of ours. That is incredibly complex, it takes a whole village to actually execute. But when we, when we focus our customer acquisition and ranking models around major times in the year so think Prime Day, think fall Prime Day, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Holiday, and then, of course, if you're a one off brand, if you I don't know are ski related, then obviously your season is January to March. You know like there are differences, but really peak seasons. If you're able to focus your growth model around the times that are going to give you the most reward, then that worked really well for us last year and we expect to see a lot more of that this year, especially as we all expect people are going to be more deal oriented, the constant battle for margins. So the better ranks you are, the more organic sales you drive, the better your TACoS is.   Carrie Miller: Yeah, so are you. Are you also maybe sending a lot of outside traffic for that ranking as well, or just utilizing? Can you tell us a little bit about that and what your strategy is there? That kind of goes in with what you were just talking about?   Gefen: Yeah, absolutely so. One of the verticals that I oversee is paid search and social, and so that's going to be met in Google primarily. There's Pinterest, there's Reddit, there's now TikTok. That can drive back to Amazon as well. I think there's two buckets. I think you have the always on external strategy right, which is the constant drip of, say, a Facebook campaign that's driving, whatever the budget is $200 a day, $150 a day, whatever it is back to Amazon. We all know that Amazon is going to reward external conversion a little bit more. Also, the Amazon attribution program gives you a bit of a boost with getting up to 10% back usually around 5% to 7%, but up to 10% back on each sale, which is nice. And then you also get a boost in your actual ranking. The influencer programs that we've run specifically for 10 poll events again, to go back to that first point, those are the ones that have really kind of set themselves apart or set those brands apart, the ones that are willing to have very strategic and targeted strategies towards high return on investment periods. And so you have the always on, which is great, that is a constant, and we run that for many brands. And then we have a few brands, usually on the larger side, that are willing to invest some serious cash into some of the of Amazon programs that are just going to drive as much traffic as possible. Those are the ones that see big gains, and it's not necessarily that you have to hit a home run with one TikTok influencer. You can have 10, you can have 20, you can have 30 micro. That actually get you the same result potentially for cheaper. But you have less risk with putting all of your eggs into one basket, and so that external traffic has been really helpful.   Carrie Miller: Yeah, I actually know some people in our elite group said that their ranking just organically just shot up just from their TikTok stuff that they were doing. They were focusing on certain keywords in their title and they just all the traffic from TikTok was really bad, yeah, and now there's actually a TikTok shop, so that's actually going to compete with Amazon.   Gefen: We've actually launched multiple brands on TikTok shop. We're seeing phenomenal success with those. It doesn't necessarily directly translate to Amazon sales, but what we always say at Vendo and it's the approach we've taken that has been very successful for all of our brands is you can't separate your customers anymore, right, you can say that an Amazon customer is in its own bucket and they're never going to be a DTC customer, and vice versa. Yeah, every customer everywhere you're exposed is a form of advertising and you can't force a customer to buy in a certain place. So if you're available on TikTok shop and that's where they find you, maybe next time they're going to buy an Amazon, right? Or maybe they're going to buy your DTC. As long as you're looking at the business holistically and Amazon is a piece of that pie, or TikTok is a piece of that pie, then, and your business is growing, then you know that your efforts are pushing the whole business up.   Carrie Miller: Yeah, I was saying that I think that a lot of people aren't necessarily comfortable yet purchasing on TikTok, so I think that's why a lot of people are just going to Amazon. They might be like, oh, I saw this on TikTok, but maybe it'll change eventually, because I think we're still seeing quite a bit of traffic on Amazon, even though TikTok is like not wanting anyone to do that. Have you seen that same thing?   Gefen: Yeah, I can't remember what the exact term was. It was like I saw this on TikTok, or I found this on TikTok, or seen on TikTok, or something like that.   Carrie Miller: Yeah, TikTok.   Gefen: whatever the thing is, TikTok is game here, yeah it was one of the largest search terms a few months ago. And so, to your point, 100% right, yeah. And that is actually, I think, more proof to my previous point, which is, wherever they're seeing things, they're coming to other places, to their comfortable place to buy. And so if they're coming there and from an advertising perspective, we're showing up where we need to show up, then we're in a good place, right yeah, because then we're going to get that conversion and that you just you spent elsewhere. Maybe your customer acquisition was slightly higher, but you drove that conversion.   Carrie Miller: Yeah.   Gefen: And, at the end of the day, if you have a good product and your customers are loyal, then it's going to pay off in not even the long term.   Carrie Miller: Do you see that a lot, because I know you do a lot of DSP too. Do you see that a lot with DSP, where you're kind of putting a lot into Amazon and maybe you don't necessarily see the exact conversion on Amazon, but then all of a sudden their website goes way up or kind of other platforms.   Gefen: So a couple of points to that. So, when it comes to programmatic, there is there is native programmatic on Amazon, right so. And then there's also non-native programmatic, right, so we can use something like the trade desk that can kind of target any programmatic targeting across the entire internet. Basically, the latter, yes, right, so the latter we do see that kind of um, that kind of halo impact across either website, and you can, you can also measure that right. You can put in a pixel and you can actually, so you can also put in a pixel on the, on the um, on the Amazon DSP as well. So you can put a pixel on your website for Amazon DSP and even though traffic isn't necessarily driving to your website, it will still pick up if there are sales on your website or, at the very least, visits from that same campaign. And so the interconnectedness of this world is growing, where the advertising synergies are becoming a lot more um, a lot more intentional, and so you have to have the pixels on your DTC site, right. You have to be launching on TikTok, you have to be on Amazon, on Walmart, because if you're not measuring that, then you won't know if, if your sales are lifting across the board. And if they are lifting, then you don't know where you can take spend. Maybe you're bloated in one area and two lean in another and you can put those and so, uh, to your question, 100%. Um, we do see the halo impact from DSP with Amazon DSP specifically. I will say the biggest halo impact is actually in the performance of the PPC ads. Um, we usually tend to see, especially on our mid, mid to large size brands, um, when we launched DSP for them, their PPC ads tend to pick up in specifically in performance. So their, their ACOS tends to go down. Um, and that's probably because Amazon, as we all know, is a, uh, is a pay to pay platform, so they're just rewarding you with being further entrenched in their ecosystem.   Carrie Miller: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I did have actually another question, um, kind of about just some newer things that are going on with Amazon. Have you started the using the, the TV ads and then also just the sponsored um ads that go to uh like things like Buzzfeed and um, I forgot what the it's called, I think it's uh Sponsored Product Ads but they go to publishers. Have you started using those?   Gefen: So yeah, Sponsored TV.   Carrie Miller: And then also they're sponsored ads that go to like Buzzfeed or yeah, yeah.   Gefen: So two points. So, first off, Bradley’s point. We actually don't use Paki for Amazon. We uh use them for Walmart. Uh, we actually use software for Amazon, besides Helium 10, of course. But as far as management software goes, uh, it's, it's all manual, um, um, but, and we can talk, we can have a whole 10 podcasts just on that. Yes, there's a ton there, but as it pertains to sponsor TV, so that's something that Amazon launched at uh, unboxed this past year, um, and the goal is to create similar to how sponsored display is like DSP light, sponsored TV is like STV or CTV light, right, so they want to bring the, the, the TV portion of programmatic, into a self-serve area. There's pros and cons. The pro is that there's no minimum, there's no barrier to entry. You can throw up a video and it gets blasted out towards a bunch of different publishers at a um at a uh, fairly, fairly decent rate. It's a little bit more expensive, obviously, because you're not able to put your max CPMs or anything like that. At the same time, you have no control. So, similar to sponsor display, um, you know, if you work with and uh with an um, with an agency like Vendo, uh, we don't have any minimums on our uh, on our uh, on our DSP self-serve seat, so we're able to uh to say, hey, you know, if you want to spend a thousand or 2000 or 3000, you can, you don't have to spend 20.   Gefen: Um, and so my recommendation is, if you're a very small brand, you're starting out, definitely test out sponsored TV. Don't expect because they're usually non-engageable, or or, if they are engageable, um, the really the primary KPI and what they're optimized for internally is views. Um then, don't expect a strong row as treat that as a top of funnel approach. Yeah, at the same time, if you do have a little bit more budget and you want some more control, go into self-serve DSP. You're just going to get more. You can choose what your destinations are, what your publishers are, you can choose your audiences, you can choose your retargeting. You can't in sponsored TV too, but there's just a lot more control and so, similar to sponsored display, it's a great launching pad. But I wouldn't say, hey, if you're going to take 10 grand and throw it into there, take 10 grand and throw it in the DSP, you're going to see better results.   Carrie Miller: Yeah, that's very good advice for everyone, as far as the DSP, Very good advice for everyone, especially for smaller brands, Cause usually it's all you know, it's harder because a lot of people are focused on big brands with kind of strategies and smaller brands is like I don't know if it's time to do even DSP or the sponsored TV. So that's good advice about the TV and there is no real, like right time.   Gefen: I would just say hey, if you have some budget, if your ads are performing well, test it out.   Bradley Sutton: You know, we test as much as we can, I mean if it works, amazing.   Gefen: You know. If it doesn't, then we know it doesn't and maybe we'll test it out later on. But we can put that budget immediately into other areas.   Carrie Miller: How long do you usually test it for DSP? Two or three months or?   Gefen: Technically, DSP is a 14 day window before it's actually giving you proper data and usually DSP you'll know within a month.   Carrie Miller: Okay, that's good to know too. Okay, so then we have Chris Shipperling said to your point about trust people also want to see the product ASAP and Amazon owns product operations. I bought a product from TikTok which is from Shipbob. I'll say no more as a customer.   Gefen: Yes, you can technically fulfill with Amazon for TikTok shop. I don't have too many details on that, but I know it's possible. I don't know how much of that is being conveyed to the customer, and so that's a great point about trust from the. From the customer standpoint as a seller, it doesn't really take much more. I don't know the fees, I don't know what it kind of entails, but I know that I've heard that is possible.   Carrie Miller: I it is possible and that's definitely a better. You basically connected to your Shopify site and then use the fulfillment by Amazon. But I I did purchase something on TikTok and it was literally shipped all the way from China. So I didn't know that was happening when I bought it. So that is kind of the that's going to kind of ruin some trust, I think, with people. So something to think about moving forward.   Gefen: If you even talk about Temu here either, because that's a different ballgame.   Carrie Miller: Yeah, that's another one. All right, and let's see, Chris Shipperling has something else. He says, which, which is why you always KPI individual platform metrics, but blended CAC is so important when you do have several activities running to drive traffic and conversion. Completely agree with what you were saying, so yeah, 100%.   Gefen: We use a cat model for a ton of our brands. We track new to brand customers on Amazon very closely new and repeat as well, and we have we have a lifetime value graphs that we track over multiple years to see what the actual return is for our clients.   Carrie Miller: Amazing, that's awesome. Okay, so, Michael, would love to hear your thoughts on how to organize Hold on sponsored product campaigns. Thank you, you lost your audio there multiple skews in a category, independent skews, not variant ASINs that share many keywords. When is it better to combine ASINs into an ad group and let Amazon pick the best for separating each SKU into its own ad group or campaign?   Gefen: Thanks, it's a phenomenal question and this is where you're going to hear the variation in answers. You're going to hear shows that advertising still, to an extent, is a good amount of art versus science, because there are different opinions and I manage my own brands for Vendo as well, and I've actually done both in terms of separating out and then keeping them together. So a couple of different things. Number one there are always differing what's the word differing attributes to a product, right, whether it's a count, whether it's a size, whether it's a color, at the very least you can separate out by that. So, for instance, if you have TVs, right, you might have a smart TV. Right, so let's. But you could have a 45 inch, a 55 inch and a 65 inch smart TV. So, right off the bat, you can look at the search volume. For what is a 65 inch TV bring in in terms of search volume? Okay, that's, that's a separate campaign, right, 55 inch, separate campaign.   Gefen: And then to your question, my recommendation and best practice is you can never rank and and equally grow all of your products, right, you have to have a hero item or a hero couple of items. So, for instance, let's say you go back to these TVs. You've got, I don't know, 10 sizes, 354555, whatever it is. Some of those are going to be best sellers, right? More people search for 55 inch and 65 inch versus 24 inch, so you know that those are the ones that have the highest potential and those are the ones that you're going to want to rank. So you might as well take those, and maybe take three of them, and put them into their own hero term campaign, so smart TV, tv, etc. And then that way you're focusing the majority of your ranking spend on the highest search volume terms towards the few that are actually going to generate that sales and performance.   Gefen: And even within that, I mean usually think about it. I mean, how many brands do you see that have three products ranked on the top row? Right, it's usually one. And so at the end of the day, we are going to try and diversify our sales as much as possible, but at the same time, one product is going to win out. And so to the last part of your question, when it's better to combine a since into an ad group on Amazon, pick the best when it comes to your hero items. Let's say you've got three and that whole product line the three best selling colors, three best selling sizes, whatever it is, put those into their own ad group and then Amazon can choose. If you're again going back to smart TV, it's like, okay, someone's typing in smart TV, Amazon's going to eventually know whether or not someone typing in smart TV is more likely to buy 55 inch or 65 inch. And you'll be able to see the conversion rate, you'll be able to see the performance and you can say that's good, that's not good, etc.   Carrie Miller: We'll go into kind of ad creatives like videos and stuff. How do you optimize those? Are you doing a lot of tests and split testing? What is your process for creatives And so when it comes to the best. ?   Gefen: So, again, we have five ad verticals. Every vertical requires different size creatives. So we have a phenomenal team working on our creatives that can really customize to whatever it is that we want or need. A Facebook creative is going to be different from a DSP creative. It's going to be different from a, from a credo creative. But to backtrack for a sec, specifically on Amazon, specifically for something like sponsored brands because you're sponsored brand lifestyle imagery and sponsored brand video, right, those the two main creatives that you're going to be generating. And I will say, first and foremost well, first of all, by January 31, all of your product collection ads have to have a lifestyle image on them, if not, they're going to be paused. So that's a note to everybody that's selling you need to have a lifestyle image on your product and ads, if not, they're just not going to show up. That's by the end of this month, but I've found, from a video perspective, having a video versus not having a video gets you 80% of the way there. Of course, it needs to look like decent, right, but if you have any form of a decent video made by, made by a graphic designer or software, that's good enough to pass for you to be like okay, I'm fine with that. You're 70 to 80% of the way there. Obviously, that 20% for much larger brands matters.   Gefen: So that's where you bring in different testing, right, and usually that's at the discretion of the brand's creatives, right? We're not a full creative agency. We have creative support, and so what we like to do is we like to take their direction and actually make the asset. So usually they have a marketing team that's going to bring us either static imagery or video imagery, and then we're going to scale that into, let's say, three different videos from that static imagery of just like slideshows or whatever, and then maybe we'll test out those three. Now Amazon's sponsor brand video has different ad groups that you can test out, which is awesome. So you can do like three different ad groups there and whatever ends up working. Basically, from a CVR standpoint conversion rates going to be your primary KPI there Then that's the one that you go with.   Carrie Miller: All right, very good, we actually have something else from the audience. I sell yoga pants. Can I print my website on the product hang tag? Does it follow Amazon and Walmart terms of service?   Gefen: I don't think it does. I don't think that you're allowed to drive any form of traffic to off Amazon. Don't fully quote me. I am not an expert in all of Amazon terms of service. I know the ad portion. But if you were to ask me my two cents, I would say if you're referencing your website anywhere on your product and Amazon catches you, it's probably against TOS.   Carrie Miller: I do actually on mine, have on our packaging our website, because we use the same packaging for all different platforms and I know big brands also have their websites in there and they even have you know things where maybe it's not enforced. Yeah, I don't know if it's enforced as much, but I think it's if you kind of drive traffic to your website or you're kind of contacting people with their info. But it is kind of a gray area there. So yeah, that is a hard one.   Gefen: Yeah, it's tough. I know that on any assets you have on Amazon you can't do that. We've even made videos where, like at the end, like we've just taken a video from their website and put it onto sponsor brand video and it was like at the end, like the last slide was like buyonx.com.   Bradley Sutton: And it got taken down. Yeah, exactly.   Gefen: It just depends. I mean there's a lot of gray area. My guess is that's against TOS. Also to your point, Carrie if a lot of people are doing it, maybe it's not really a police stuff that much.   Carrie Miller: Yeah, I think. I think the kind of differentiator is are you trying to drive traffic away from Amazon, or you know? I think it's also when you think about big brands. I don't think they're all going to change their packaging just for Amazon?   Gefen: I guess that's going to not yeah, yeah, so that's also a good point.   Carrie Miller: It's not really. You know it's when you're like you've got an insert and you're like buy this on my side or you know something like that. That's kind of a difference, whereas if it's just on your packaging, I think it's, it should be fine.   Gefen: Yeah, um, that's actually a good question. So, do do branded campaigns help in the organic rank of your product? It's yes and no. So when you're launching, 100% yes If you're launching a new product line inside your existing product catalog, um to leverage your branded campaigns is huge. Or, excuse me, your branded traffic with branded campaigns is huge because that's how you build your sales velocity quickly. Same time, if you are seeing that you know a majority of your spend is going towards branded um, then I would look at the CPCs and I would say you're probably not um helping out with ranking as much as you could be for non-branded terms. Remember, amazon will rank you based on how you perform on non-branded terms. If you don't drive traffic to non-branded terms, you can't convert against them. If you can't convert, then you can't rank. Yeah, good point.   Carrie Miller: All right. Another question from Douda to Silva how do you harvest search term reports from a main keyword running as phase type, phrase type? That uh generate tons of variations of the main keywords. Those keywords are all different, with one clicks costing me a dollar.   Gefen: Yep, that's some. That's probably arguably the largest source of waste it's been. Um is phrase terminology, phrase terms, phrase keywords that generate one click, $1, no conversion. You have a thousand of them, you spend $1,000 and you didn't get anything as a result. Um, switch it to exact, pause it out and then test out them in like groups of 15 or 20. It's more manual work. It kind of sucks. But if you take the thousand dollars you spent, let's say over a month, and then you um, you take 500 of that, so you save yourself 500 and you put it towards 30 keywords and you test and let's say you generate sales after driving 10 clicks on each, on five of them, and then you use those as ranking campaigns. That's how you're able to scale the business. You're going to spend that money anyway. You might as well go deep rather than shallow, all right. Sounds like he was. He was testing me. He said correct.   Carrie Miller: Hmm, that's. That's an interesting test, all right.   Gefen: I'm glad I passed.   Carrie Miller: Yeah, yeah, you're definitely passing all these little tests here from people. Um, uh, just on a kind of an ending note um, are there any other kind of things you want to leave for people in 2024? Kind of final thoughts of you know what to look forward to, what, what people should be focused on, and uh, and yeah, just any final words of advice search volume trends.   Gefen: We use Helium 10, I mean hourly, but daily, obviously uh to to look at where the search volume trends are in the space. And when I talk about 10 poll planning, when I talk about uh, uh, high, high traffic times, um, it's just the nature of the beast that you are going to perform better at certain times of the year. Um, you need to have a strategy that is able to address low demand and high demand to what you need your business to do, and so the more demand you're tracking, um, the better, uh, you're going to be able to prepare for that. And just a very simple equation or a simple example, excuse me, is um, if you know that last year you did phenomenal in December, um, then take the steps in October and November to make sure you're ready for that. And if that might mean taking or spending less in August and September, if you do have an annualized budget, then make sure you're looking at December in February, so you know that by the time August and September comes, you know what you need to do to prepare for that time of year. And so you, you know, we have, for almost every term, we have four, five, six years of data. At this point. You know what the best times of the year are. Obviously, things change every year, but we do know that, hey, if you're a holiday or a gift brand, prepare for that Right. And if you, if you are a brand some brands don't, but if you are a brand that has a hard dollar budget, make sure you don't get to December and you're out of money.   Carrie Miller: Yeah, that's a good point. Something to point out too about the Helium 10 tools Cerebro. We have um. It has shows trending if of keywords trending up or if it's trending down. So you can constantly check the trends and how much, what percentage, they're trending up and down. But then you can also do historical keyword searches for 24 months in the past. So that'll really really help. You know, you can kind of see year over year in the last two years what happened. But then you can kind of project also moving forward based on kind of the difference there and track it that way. So definitely, you know that's a really good point. Is, you know, kind of projecting out and making sure you plan properly your budget in the right places, very good? Well, thank you so much for joining us on this episode of tACoS Tuesday. If somebody wants to reach out to you, how can they find you?   Gefen: They can find me by my email, geffen at vendor commercecom. Yeah, would be happy to talk anything. Advertising, um, we, like I said before, we run ads. If you can run ads on it, we do. But we take a different approach and that we make sure that we are looking at your business holistically and we're not just spending to spend, we spend to grow and so, um and so, because we spend to grow, we might recommend different strategies and say, hey, you know, even if it hurts us, right, because we take a cut from that, even if it hurts us. Say, hey, you know, you shouldn't spend 100 can meta. Maybe let's look at these different avenues or save that money for later on. We want to make sure that we are going to provide the best service for you guys.   Carrie Miller: That's amazing. Yeah, thanks so much. I love you guys. Want to reach out to Geffen or Vendo? You need somebody to help you with TikTok ads or Facebook or Amazon or Walmart Walmart especially. I get asked all the time about Walmart, and Vendo is definitely one of the uh the top uh players in the game for Walmart.   Gefen: So one of the largest advertisers on Walmart. Um, I think we have one of, if not the most, brands on Walmart advertising and um, we've just seen so much growth there.   Carrie Miller: And so, yeah, thanks again for joining and thank you everyone for your questions and for joining us live, and we will see you again on the next TACoS Tuesday, which will be next month, and we'll have a different guest. But thanks again, Gefen, for joining us.   Gefen: Of course, see you later.