Helium 10 Buzz 5/24/24: Online Sales Surging | Amazon Alexa Change | Walmart Virtual Shopping

Join us in this episode as we bring you an exciting update on Project X, where we gear up to launch a new product on Amazon. We walk you through our meticulous process for keyword research, listing optimization, and advanced photography techniques, essential for any Amazon seller looking to boost their e-commerce game. Utilizing tools like Helium 10's Xray and Cerebro, we identify top-performing competitors and extract valuable keywords to build a successful product listing. This episode is packed with actionable insights, including expert advice from Lailama Hasan, Helium 10’s marketing content manager, and Tayyaba Hasan, project manager at AMZ Onestep. Next, we explore the significance of competitor analysis in optimizing your Amazon listings. Using Helium 10 Listing Builder’s Competitor Performance Score (CPS), we highlight the importance of identifying high-performing keywords that competitors are ranking for, such as "coffin letterboard" and "coffin decor." We also discuss how to enhance product descriptions by addressing common customer pain points and incorporating unique product characteristics. By reviewing competitor images and customer use cases, we gather valuable insights to improve our own product's features and marketing strategies. Finally, we dive into the art of creating impactful product images to boost conversions. With expert guidance from our expert guests, we explore the three main types of images required by Amazon: main images, infographic images, and lifestyle images. Practical tips on lighting, equipment, and setting up backgrounds are shared to help you capture high-resolution, detailed images. Additionally, Tayyaba Hasan explains our four-step approach to creative image development, from research to optimization, and the importance of A-B testing and updating creatives based on customer feedback. Stay tuned as we wrap up with a sneak peek into next week’s webinar about TikTok Shop. In episode 570 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley, Lailama, and Tayyaba discuss: 00:00 - Listing Optimization Workshop for Amazon Sellers 02:12 - Amazon Product Keyword Analysis Strategy 09:06 - Optimizing Amazon Listings With Competitor Analysis 11:09 - Using AI to Write Product Listings 20:21 - Optimizing Amazon Listing Images for Conversions 21:16 - Product Photography 32:51 - Listing Image Optimization for Amazon 33:04 - Optimizing Listing Images for Conversions 36:24 - Image Concept for Pre-Cut Letter Boards 41:23 - Product Sizing and Reviews 43:38 - Stay Tuned For Our TikTok Shop Webinar Transcript   Bradley Sutton: Today's a deep dive update into Project X, where we're going to launch a new product soon and together we're going to go over how I found the keywords and how I make the listing for this product plus get guest expert advice on photography, A+ Content and more. How cool is that? Pretty cool. I think   Bradley Sutton: Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that's a completely BS-free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And you guys can see that I've got all my Project X gear on today because this is a Project X update where you know for those of you who don't know Project X was this case study we did where we found coffin shelves and a whole bunch of other products that we started selling on a real Amazon account and we've kept it going throughout the years. And so I decided to launch a new product, a coffin letter board and I'm going to open up my strategies into how I find the keywords a little bit of a generalization on it, but how I find the keywords, how I put together my listing, and then we're going to talk about some advanced strategies for photography, like when you should use a agency, when you can do it on your own, and how you should tackle things like A+ Content, and how you can look at competitors to get ideas, et cetera. So we're going to go deep into this. This is a recording of a live training that we actually did a few days ago, and so we've cut it up so that you guy s can get the best of those strategies and hopefully you can take some of this and apply it to your next product launch or maybe your first product launch out there. So hope you enjoy this listing optimization workshop.   Bradley Sutton: And I'm going to take you from ground zero, getting the keywords first. So here is on Amazon. First of all, let's go to the main keyword for this product coffin letter board. All right, and this is just a easy way in which we can get the main keywords. Okay, once I get to this page, I like to run Xray on the page to see who are the top sellers. All right, so who is really making the most money in this coffin letter board niche? And this is a niche that you know. I've been watching this for a while. You know like I wish I would have been one of the first ones to sell this, like I was for the coffin shelf, but unfortunately, I wasn't. All right. But that's all right. I wanted to show you guys hey, you don't always have to be the very first to the market.   Bradley Sutton: Now, when you're running Cerebro on a product that you don't even have yet. Like me, I don't have a coffin letter board yet. I need to choose another product to be the baseline product, all right. So I'm just going to pick one here from like around the bottom of the page. It's not selling. Well, let's go ahead and pick this. So that's the first one that you click on. Needs to be a product that is not going to be one of the main competitors. And now what I want to do is I want to select the like five, six, seven or eight top competitors for this product. All right, that are very similar to my product informant function. So this is the number one guy. This, this nom new coffin letter board. All right, believe it or not, this guy is selling 500 of these coffin letter boards a month. Kind of crazy. Uh, here's another one. They're only selling about 29, but we'll go ahead and throw them in, uh in there as well. Here's another one. They're selling 119 units a month. So I definitely want to see what's going on with them. I'm not going to choose this LED one, all right. So this is interesting. This is a. Is this a coffin letter board? Yes, but because it's got this LED like and it's very small, I can tell because of the price is $12. I am not going to look at the keywords for this product, all right, because I don't think that it's going to be super relevant, uh, to me. I want to get hyper relevant products to my product. All right, let's go ahead and choose a couple more here. This one's selling 65 units a month. Here's another one that's selling 29 units a month. All right, this is good. Let's go ahead and enroll with this, all right, so we're going to hit run Cerebro.   Bradley Sutton: What am I doing? What did I just do? Why is this an important step? I want to analyze the competition right. That's where I'm going to get my keywords. What are the keywords that are driving sales, and some of them are doing incredible sales, and these are the keywords that are going to form the base of my listing. And now what I'm looking for is I want to get like the top 10, 15 keywords and make sure those are in phrase form in my listing. All right, and listing builder is going to help with that. But then I don't only want to be relative or indexed for 15 keywords, these uh products. There might be 50, there might be a hundred, there might be more than that of keywords that they might be getting sales from, uh, or that they might be ranking on page one for, and that means that I probably should be able to rank on page one for these, for these keywords. So this is going to be what I'm looking for what are all of the relevant keywords to all of the products, or at least some of the products that I want to be indexed for or searchable for? Okay, so let's go ahead and see the results here. All right, so 8,000 keywords. I know there's a lot better way to find this in 8,000 keywords. Now what I'm going to just do is I'm just going to show you a quick one that I can do, but again, this should take like about an hour by itself. I'm going to do this in five minutes. I'm going to say minimum search volume 200. And then I'm going to go to these advanced rank filters and the number of competitors. I'm going to say minimum one is between rank one and 30 under competitor rank. So basically, what I'm saying is show me all of the keywords Helium 10, where this product, these products, one of these letter boards is ranked between one and 30. That means they're on page one.   Bradley Sutton: Okay, and so I have a whole bunch of keywords that have come up here. You can see some of these coffin letter board sign. Here's a keyword that's a brand name. I always delete those. I don't want to have a brand names on here. I don't want to. You know that's against Amazon terms of service to put brand names in your listing. Okay, um, so I probably should take a lot more time to see if there's any other brand names, but let's just go with this as is. Again, we have videos that have very detailed a strategy on keyword research, but you guys can watch that. We're just going to pretend that we already vetted all of these keywords.   Bradley Sutton: So now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to export this to the clipboard, okay, and then, the next thing I'm going to do is I'm actually going to go into listing builder and I am going to put these keywords in. Now, this is the. This is where listing builder comes in. I could just have this list of keywords, right, and you know, have it in a Google doc or an Excel file or something, right? But I want to be able to make sure that I'm indexed for my important phrases. Plus, I want to make sure that I'm indexed for the phrases that maybe I don't have room for. But I need those individual keywords, and if you're trying to do that just with a naked eye, you know, like that, that's almost impossible to make sure. All right, I'm going to show you how Listing Builder is going to help with that.   Bradley Sutton: So, here in listing builder, um, I'm going to add a new, a new listing. All right, I'm going to say create from scratch and let's just start building. Okay, the very first thing is I need to put in my keywords. So I'm going to hit manually add keywords and I'm just going to paste all of those 114 phrases. Now there's a lot. I know I probably don't want to see like I already see another one that has that brand name. I'll just go ahead and delete that. But again, we're just kind of like fast forwarding this process. But whatever tools that you use to get all of your keywords that you want to rank for, go ahead and make sure that they are all here in your keyword bank and then hit the word add to bank. Ok, now it's going to show me all of these keywords plus their search volume, and now I'm pretty much ready to start going with my listing.   Bradley Sutton: So I'm going to go ahead and hit next and now you can see here that I've got all my 112 keyword phrases and I've got all of the one word roots that come from it, the two word roots, et cetera. So this is the important thing because, as you see, if I were just to write my listing right now, if I were to type in Halloween decor, okay, do you see what happened here on the left-hand side, Halloween decor as a phrase got checked off because I just put it in my listing, and then those individual words of Halloween and decor both got checked off, and so this is important, because this is how you're able to make your listing and know that you have used all of the keywords that you want. So, at the end of the day, my top keywords, I want to make sure I've got in the phrase form. There's no way I can get 112 phrases right into my listing in phrase form, but at least my top 10 or 15, plus every single one of these individual ones that and these are the words that make up these phrases here.   Bradley Sutton: Okay, so let's go ahead and go to the next step. You'll notice that this CPS is blank. Okay, so CPS is blank. This is very important. This is what tells me which of my keywords are the most important, because they're getting sales for most of my competitors. So what do I have to do? What do you guys have to do when you're making your listing like this? I have to go down here and I click keyword performance rank, okay, and now I have to hit add competitors. And so what competitors am I going to put in here? I'm going to put the same, the same competitors that I had in Cerebro, okay, now I want to. I want you guys to see what's going to happen when I do that. What's going to happen now is this competitor performance score, which actually is the same thing that was from Cerebro. If you look in Cerebro, the very last column in Cerebro, guys, is competitor performance score. This is not new to Helium 10. This has been in Helium 10 for years. This is what tells you the strength of the keywords compared to the competitors. All right, so this really helps you understand which are the keywords that most of the competitors are ranking for. Okay, and there, I did it there.   Bradley Sutton: Now everybody's got a score. All right, I got to take away this because it was still giving me a score, even though I only had one keyword in there. But look at these scores. All right, so this is the number one, uh, one, and sure enough, they're the number one seller. You look at that, guys. The number one seller happens to have the number one listing SEO score. All right, so this is based on all of the keywords, how many of the keywords they're using, how many in phrase form, and how they have it optimized throughout the listing. All right, right now, what is my score? My score is seventh out of seventh, I have a zero because I haven't put anything in my listing, all right, so now I can sort this, my keyword phrases, by competitor performance score. All right, now I can see some of the top keywords here. Coffin letter board is a 10 out of 10. Coffin letter board sign. All right, uh. Coffin decoration, coffin decor All right. So these are some of the keywords that I know I have to have in phrase for my listing. So what's the next step? I'm actually going to do this, where I'm going to get some help from AI to actually write some of this listing. And again, these steps, you guys should take at least 30 to 45 minutes. I'm going to try and do it in like less than five minutes here.   Bradley Sutton: So, right, here I want to start putting in some of the characteristics of this product. So let me go ahead and do that here. Let's go ahead and say hey, this is 17 inches by 10.5 inches. This product, our product, actually includes a special coffin-shaped um chalkboard as well, includes mini coffin shaped chalkboard. So I'm going to write that as a characteristic. That's something that's I chose so that I can differentiate it. So  that I can differentiate it from what's uh, what's going on. Let's uh with the competition. All right, what else do we see? Well, can I put includes wooden stand. Can hang on wall. What are some other places that I can get ideas on what to put here? Let me show you really quick. Let's say, I go into that top selling coffin letterboard right here I'm going to run Helium 10 review insights. Now, the first thing I'm just going to look, though. I want to look at the images. This is important for all of you guys. Look at the images of what people are leaving reviews for. Take a look here at some of these. This really gives you a good idea about what's going on, about how people are using this product. So you should do this for your competitors.   Bradley Sutton: Okay, so I'm going to look here at the review images that people have been doing. So now, look at this. I can see that people are using. Guys, this is a crazy product. Like I cannot believe how many people are buying this and how many people love this kind of product. It's kind of crazy. But you can see here this is something that I identified early on in the process that I didn't want to do. Do you guys see these letters and how you have to, like, twist them to take them off. So our product is going to have pre-cut and pre-sorted letters. So you know what? That's a good thing to put right here. So let's go ahead and do that. Includes 500 character or letters and spooky emojis. Letters are pre-cut and pre-sorted, all right. So that's like a definitely a key feature, because these images people are complaining about this how you know, like, like this is like impossible to one by one take away these letters. But now I can see, um, you know some, somebody did one for like a divorce party. It says 99 problems, but a husband ain't, one is one. So there there's a little like humor I can find to do here. I see some people have this for coffee shops. Some people, a lot of people, have it for looks like a wedding and birthday party. So there's all of a sudden, just in seconds here I'm getting tons of use cases and guess what, guys, we're going to talk about this later. This is also the kind of thing you should be looking at when you're trying to plan your images that you're going to take. Don't just look at the images that the other sellers made, but now go ahead and take some cues from what customers, actual customers of this product, are using this as use cases, you know, because there's tons of stuff I never would have thought about, you know, like I wouldn't have thought about a divorce party having it. Look at this. Somebody has says on their coffin letter board tips appreciated, normal is boring, stay weird. I mean, some of these are pretty ingenious, right. So this is some great ideas.   Bradley Sutton: Now the other thing that I can do is I want to run review insights here. Okay, and this is going to tell me what are some of the two, three, four word phrases that people are mentioning a lot in the reviews. All right, so the way you can do that is you click here on keywords once it loads all these reviews, and now I'm going to get some instant insight into what are people concerned about with this product and hit keywords, and then here we go. So look at this, a lot of people are saying so many letters. So maybe I want to see what are people saying when they say so many letters. Oh, it comes with so many letters. Perfect size comes with so many letters. So this one had 500 letters, and so this is. This is again something I should have looked at before, which I did, which is why I wanted to make sure mine had 500 letters, because I could see that a lot of people like that it had a lot of letters, right. But now I want to see what else that people are complaining about letters off, what is that? All right. I recommend use a sharp scissor to cut the letters off. This person says it's pretty easy to pull the letters up, but a lot of people are concerned about their having to pull the letters off or cut the letters off. That's why I made sure to call out in my listing that, hey, our letters are pre-cut and pre sorted, all right. I'm going to go ahead and analyze these and get even more points that I can put in my listing. All right, uh, let's say here good for parties and weddings, all right.   Bradley Sutton: So now let's go ahead and put our brand name, Manny's Mysterious Oddities, and I want to put that at the beginning of the title. What is the product name? I'm going to say coffin letter board sign. Now, this is really important because I saw here that two of my most important keywords are coffin letter board and coffin letter board sign. Now, if I just put coffin letter board sign in the title, that means I get two keywords for the price of one in my title and it's going to help me on my bang for my buck, for my SEO, my SEO title. All right, let's go ahead and pick a tone here. Let's pick humorous. This is a humorous product, right? Um and again, I? I should be filling this completely up with a whole bunch of information. I only filled up 200 out of 500 characters, but you guys get the uh, the picture. Now I'm just going to hit hey, write it, write it for me. But look at this in seconds. Now I have a title that says Manny's Mysterious Oddities coffin letter board sign. There it is. That was exactly I wanted to get two keywords in one. Beetlejuice decor, Halloween party decorations with mini coffin chalkboard. You see, the AI knew what I had in here 500 pre-cut letters and spooky emojis, perfect for parties and weddings. It got so much of my stuff just in the title. All we have done here is the title, and now I can see that once I say use suggestion, look at this. I was able to knock out a lot of my individual keywords and keywords, and that's basically how I do the rest of the listing, guys, what I'm going to do is just say, write it for me, and now AI is going to give me some suggestions. And then the point is I want to try and use up all of these individual keywords as much as possible so I can be indexed for all of these phrases. And then anything that has a high competitor performance score I definitely want to make sure that I have in phrase form in my listing.   Bradley Sutton: Okay, so that's how you make a listing. Again, this this took me 20 minutes to explain. It should probably take you an hour or two hours because you should be doing a lot more work on this. I would probably go in here and I'm going to just I'm not going to just go with the AI um, suggestion for it. The AI can really give me a good start with using the keywords and having like a certain theme or vibe to it. Like I, in this case, I put a, um, you know, humorous vibe, right, and now I just finished writing my listing up and I make sure that I use these uh keywords, uh, make sure that I use these keywords up. So this is important, guys. This is just a simple way of doing your listing.   Bradley Sutton: Now, speaking of SEO, what if English is not your first language and you're trying to write a listing here in Amazon USA or me? I don't speak perfect Japanese and I want to write a listing for Amazon Japan. I'm not going to use my own knowledge of Japanese to try and write that. No, you can write these prompts here in Listing Builder in whatever is your native tongue, and then you tell Helium 10, hey, this listing is going to be for Amazon Japan. This listing is going to be for Amazon Spain, and it will write the listing in a common language of where that marketplace is, and when I say common language, I mean, like common grammar. Right, it's not, like you know, Google Translate, which is all weird and everything right. So this is really a great way to make your listing and, like I said, I did this in 20 minutes and I almost have a better listing than most of these competitors already. Imagine how good I can make it if I just spent an hour or two hours, and this is the beauty about listing builder right. So that is how you can go from keyword research to actually making the structure of your listing and then making sure that you are optimized for it based on the score.   Bradley Sutton: One last thing I just want to quickly show you is, as you write your listing, you want to see how your score is going on, right? So here is my listing. Let's go ahead and rewrite these bullet points. My score is going to start changing as I start utilizing this, and the goal is hey, I want to be more optimized for the main keywords than my competitors. I want to be number one here, and so that's what you kind of shoot for when you are doing this. Image copy is just one aspect, right, it's just one aspect of the listing. The rest of it is what images? It's A+ Content. So I brought in some experts to talk a little bit about the photography aspect of things and some other listing optimization aspects. So let's go ahead and invite our first guest up here is Lailama Hasan. Welcome, how's it going?   Lailama: Hello, thank you for having me on. I'm just going to quickly introduce myself. I'm Lailama and I'm currently working as a Marketing Content Manager at Helium 10, where I plan and execute social media strategies. I have a background in Amazon selling and as a commercial photographer specializing mostly in Amazon brands. I've also consulted these brands on optimizing their listings with the goal to boost conversions optimizing their listings with the goal to boost conversions. So here I am, back on this webinar with Bradley talking some more about product photography, how to do it yourself, and then whether it makes sense for you to outsource to an agency or not. And if it does not make sense for you to outsource, then how do you go about conducting research for those images that you will create out of the pictures that you've taken?   Lailama: Now, a lot of people are overwhelmed by photography, right? A lot of people say I don't have the creativity to take my own pictures. Well, where do you begin? I just want to start by saying simplify, you know, let's break it down into the three image types that are required by Amazon. So every listing has three types of images and each image requires a different photography approach. So we'll go over each image separately to understand, like what is the goal of these images and how to go about photographing them? The first one is your main image. It's going to be a white background image. You need bright lighting. The main purpose is to bring people onto your listing, so you want to give them all the information possible about your product. Maybe there's a USP that you want to highlight, so make sure you put it in bright white lighting. People are able to see the color, the textures so they can make an informed decision and go on to your listing.   Lailama: And then the next one we have is infographic images. So these are usually the second type of image that you see in the middle. These are going to be like your hero shots. These are really functionality or USP focused shots. You might need to throw in some reference items for sizing or explain to people how to use these products. So that's the goal you want to keep in mind. And so take pictures from every angle. Explain how to use it. If it's not a simple product, what benefits and features it's going to give you. So you want to. When you're doing the photography, you want to keep these goals in mind.   Lailama: And then, lastly, you have the lifestyle images. So here you're selling your brand a lifestyle. You want to have models in it. You want to have the models that are representative of your target audience and so usually like have the product you know, show the use case of your product here. And then you know, just before when you're taking the pictures, you just want to, again, keep the goal of the image in mind. So once you have that, it's gonna make the task of photography a lot easier for you. Now the next question that comes up is okay, there's so many options out there. What equipment do I use? You just need a few items to get started. So I'll break it down again by image types just to make it easier for you to. You know, pick out your equipment. The first one for main image, you simply need a camera. This can be your phone. If you have a good quality camera or you, you could also rent out a DSLR and put it on auto setting. Again, there's no really preference here, but if you want a higher quality image, then I would recommend renting a DSLR camera. And then the second thing you want to have is two sets of lighting. These can be, you know, any lights around the house. Make sure that it has a white hue to it and then you can mix it with natural lighting. If you can photograph next to a window or outdoors, that's going to, you know, really bring up the quality of your image.   Lailama: I do recommend again renting out Godox lights just for that professional look, so that you can have a higher quality of image. The reason I talk about higher quality is because when you're uploading these images to Amazon and finally when people come to your listing, they're going to have that zoom in feature and so if your image quality is high, they'll be able to see the details. But if the quality isn't high enough, then your image can look a bit blurry. So just to like mitigate that risk, I would say rent out equipment, and just for the DSLR camera and for the two lights, the rentals might be $150 max if you're not going for anything new or fancy. But again, phone and regular lighting will do as well. Next, you, for your main image, you want a solid white background, so for that I'd recommend going for like a sturdy piece of paper. This could be a construction paper that you can find at any stationery shop, and then, if you have a bigger product, I would say, go for like a white cloth. The only reason I wouldn't take, you know, pick that as my first choice is because that'll need to be ironed out and that's more work. We want to make things easier, so, you know, a piece of paper might just work better.   Lailama: Okay, and now for infographics. Of course you're going to need the same camera, the same lights, but for backgrounds, you know, these are your hero shots, so you want to show your product and its functionality, and so these are going to be like really clear images of your product, but also looking aesthetic. So you want to pick out a background that might be like a solid color that is a part of your branding palette. Or you can pick out like a linen cloth, a wooden textured, you know, paper or something. So let's say it's a kitchen product like this example here. You can go for a marble background, a wooden texture, you know, switch it up whatever looks aesthetically pleasing but also like doesn't take away from your product. And if you don't want to go through any of this hassle, then you can also just take a picture on a white background, just like you would for your main image, and then overlay it on top of an artificial background with apps like Canva. And then, lastly, we have our lifestyle images. For this, you're really just gonna need your product put onto like a relevant lifestyle setup. So in this case, we have a yoga mat, and they've literally this could have literally been shot in your living room. Um, if you have like an outdoor sport product, let's say it's like um, soccer ball or something, then you might want to go to a park. So there's like lots of options for like free locations where you can do your photo shoot. And so, once you've done your photography, you figured it out.   Lailama: A lot of people are also thinking, okay, well, should I do it myself? Is it worth it, or should I simply outsource it? Like, what is it gonna? How do you decide that? How do you make that decision? I think it's all a matter of time, money and effort. So you know, these are all three of them are resources, because time and effort is also a big resource when you have to move fast, when you're launching your product, and it really just a lot of the times boils down to what your budget is. So if you have a low budget, then you're going to have to pay with more time and effort, and that's when you go the DIY photography route. But you know again, the question is okay, are there any other factors that I should consider outsourcing to an agency? Well, you are going to be a one man army versus the agency is a whole team. So you're going to need the expertise of a photographer, videographer if you're making a video a creative director, an Amazon specialist editor. You're going to need models. So it's a lot of moving pieces and this can take a lot of time and effort on your part, and maybe even some freelancers to put all this together. The agency has it all figured out. They have a blueprint, a process of how they're going to go about executing this project for you.   Lailama: So you can save time and effort. Um, by outsourcing. And that's why I say outsourcing isn't just a cost-saving measure, the cost being your time and effort. It's also a strategic move that empowers you to focus on your core competencies. And so, let's say you've decided against outsourcing to an agency. Well, you're going to have to create these photos into listing images. And how do you go about that? There's a lot of research that goes behind it to make sure that these images actually convert, because it's not just a matter of putting these images up. They need to resonate with the buyer, they need to give the buyer the information that they need in order to convert them from a view to a sale, right? So how do you turn these images photos, into listing images? Well, it's usually you know it is a time consuming process, but you can use something like it's one of my favorite tools. It's called Listing Analyzer by Helium 10. And they have this feature called media comparison where you get a holistic view of all of the pictures that your competitors have put up, and so you can really see, okay, what are the best ways that I can showcase the features of my product? And, you know, make a decision once you've looked at all the visuals and you pick out the maybe seven best images out of that. So, now that you know how to showcase each features, but which features should really take priority, and that's where your customer comes in.   Lailama: And so you're going to have to do review analysis, the Q&A analysis, go on to your, you know, trying to figure out like what are the burning questions, what are the common misconceptions within your product niche? So pick out your top 10 competitors five might be the best, five might be average and run Review Insights which is again a Helium 10 tool on each listing and dive into the one star, the two star, the three star rated reviews and find out what these misconceptions are and incorporate that information into your image. And then, another thing that I like to do when running research for images is outside marketplace analysis and this is your external inspiration. Um, that'll help you elevate your brand because you're looking at the best players in your niche, but outside of the Amazon marketplace. This could be Pinterest, you know, and you'll see, like a mood board, like this, or it could simply be a Google search and you go on to like the best companies that are in your niche. These companies will usually have strong branding, so you can really learn how to present your brand and its messaging from these top brands.   Lailama: And lastly, you can never predict what image will perform better, which one's going to resonate with your audience, and that is why I recommend doing split testing, so you can showcase the same information in multiple ways, but you'll never know which image is going to communicate your message the best, and this is especially true for main images like here you know it's the same dog leash, but is it better to use a model? Is it better to use to showcase your variations? If yes, then do you show all of them in one picture or do you focus on the main variation? So these are the questions you'll have answered through a split test. I really like using Helium 10's audience, which will allow you to split test your images and make that decision pre-launch, which is the biggest advantage here. So run the split test and see which one will convert the best.   Bradley Sutton: All right, let's go ahead and go into our next speaker, who's going to talk a little bit about something. Some other aspects that you need to be thinking about when you're doing your listing optimization. All right, well, take it away, Tayyaba.   Tayyaba: Sure. Well, hi guys, how's it all going? I am Tayyaba Hasan and I'm going to be talking about the creatives and the image aspect of Listing Optimization. And we're a Canadian company, so that is optimization with an S I'm going to be giving you some insight into how we created the listing images for the coffin letter board. I'll discuss a little bit about our approach and get into the process and maybe you can take some tips and tricks and apply it for your own business.   Tayyaba: So a little bit more about myself. So I work as a Creative Director. I worked as a Creative Director at AMZ One Step and now I work as a Project Manager. So we work with Amazon sellers to scale their business with data-driven creatives that convert, and we do all things creative. So images storefront everything in between.   Tayyaba: Now I do want to talk a little bit about our process and kind of how we approach creating some images and these creatives that convert. So there's a few steps, four steps that we typically take. So the first one, of course, is that research. Lailama and Bradley went into some good detail about how to do that research, but the main part, the main takeaway, is really just to identify the unique features and benefits of your product. This can be done using all of the tools and the strategies that were discussed. And then the next plan. The next step would be just to create that plan. So gather all of your ideas together and put yourself in the shopper's mind and really create like a storyboard outline for the images. This is really just a fine balance of knowing you know what sets my product apart, what questions would the shopper have, and then how can we just show the two visually. Now, after that's all done and you've got a really good idea of what you want each of the images to kind of portray and what the text is gonna say, you're gonna get into production. So, of course, that is just the shooting and executing the design. Whether you do that yourself or you outsource it to an agency, that's up to you. And the fourth step would, of course, be that optimization. So Lailama did touch a little bit on A-B testing. So if your creatives are done by a professional agency, ideally there's less chance of misrepresentation and negative reviews, but every so years, in any case, if you decide to upgrade your product, change something about the features, improve it, you're going to need to update the creatives, and a few years. Even if you don't update your product, a few years will give you enough data to really spot any trends in your customer reviews and adjust accordingly.   Tayyaba: The research aspect, like I mentioned, is pretty much dependent on understanding the difference between a feature and a benefit. So a feature is very straightforward it's that specific attribute or the functionality of the product. But the benefit is actually the value that that feature is going to offer the customer. This is the part where we're going to address their needs or, you know, solve a problem. We're going to tell them that this is how this product is going to optimize their life in any way, or how it can play a role. So how does this apply to that coffin letter board? Well, when Bradley came to us, he let us know that there was a very key feature and that, of course, was that 500 plus, you know, pre-cut and sorted letters. That's an amazing feature, but the benefit to the customer is really what you want to relay. So what is the benefit? It's going to be the fact that it's that hassle-free. It's that hassle-free message creating and you have uniform and polished letters every time, as opposed to where you had to cut them. It saves you time and, of course, it reduces mess.   Tayyaba: So first we sort of came up with the image concept to tackle the image that's going to portray this feature. So we wanted to show the polished look of the pre-cut letters with someone using our product and maybe show that versus a competitor. We want to show this in a way where it shows also a common use. So in this case, the header very straightforward. You can even ask ChatGPT give me a header for an image like this, give me 10 headers and they'll do that. So pre-cut for hassle free decorating very straightforward, and some icons or text that really are going to drive the benefit home is the fact that there is a uniform and a polished look and it's mess free. And then we also have to consider the common uses. So, if you recall, one common use was that these coffin letter boards are used in Halloween themed parties, kind of like a welcome board with a punny or a clever text. So this was sort of a screenshot and we just sort of analyzed all of the images of the competitors so we can see if you were to zoom in, you'd be able to see that a lot of them have that punny text and a lot of them you can see actually have they're not pre-cut, they're all just you've got to cut those letters out. So these images that you see in between, that's all showing you the letters that don't arrive pre-cut.   Tayyaba: So the common uses we want to consider this and then apply that to our products. So we want to look at these trends. We see that there's, you know, messages written on the board. They're all sort of a play on words. It's either Gothic or Halloween themed. We see the we want to show how the polished look of the pre-cut letters is better than, as opposed to just the mess of dealing with competitor products which are not pre-cut. And then we sort of applied that into a rough kind of a sketch. So we created a plan. Now this plan, we knew that we wanted to use the relevant setting right. So this is sort of like a Halloween gothic themed party. We know that we want to showcase the coffin letter with something punny, and so I just wanted to chatGPT and said you know, give me a quirky, punny message for a Halloween party letter board. And then I know that I wanted to showcase the competitor image as well. So if, ideally, you can order the product of the competitors, but if not, you can use some Photoshop magic to manipulate it. So this is the actual image that we came up with in the end, so to give you a little bit of an idea. So, tying all of those together, this is a Halloween theme. The chatGPT said something very cute like eat, drink and be scary. So we let our production team know to write that message on the board.   Tayyaba: And this is actually white background photography. So, just for the sake of simplicity, I'm just showing you what it looks like when you do white background photography and you Photoshop that into a Halloween sort of a background and it's not really, you know, necessary. You could recreate this in a real life setting. You could get the props, but this is just a more budget friendly option. So if you look at the text, it really drives that point home and we were not actually able to order the competitor product. So what we did was we just took a close up of the existing one and if you look at that. It's a bit torn, which is pretty accurate as to how it might look when you know when you're removing it yourself from a competitor product. So we just sort of fake the fact that the competitor's product is not nearly as polished or uniform as ours is, and then those icons, like we mentioned, really drive that point home. So uniform and polished look and mess free. So that's what that image looked like. Tayyaba: Now it's not all about just the features and the benefits and manipulating the visuals. Sometimes it can be just a lot more simple, and so you have to put yourself in the headspace of a shopper. You know what questions would the shopper have, and so the other approach is just to sort of tackle, tackle, that kind of um question. So Bradley did mention that while most of the competitors are selling coffin letter boards with a stand um, you know, for for a niche like this there's not that many like bundled items. So maybe the shopper is just a little bit going to be curious as to what exactly am I getting? I see there's a letter, I see there's a smaller chopper, what does this mean? And so we want to just answer that question for them. You know exactly how big is each item? How much space is it going to take up in my home, especially the fact that these are bundled items and one is bigger, one is smaller? So the review insights tool is a pretty good way just to get like an idea as to exactly what questions do they have.   Tayyaba: If you don't have the access to look at all of these you know three thousand reviews, two hundred and seventy nine reviews, nine thousand reviews and just really analyze them and look for the trends. That's where AI comes in, so you can use the review insights tool, export all of those, copy the Excel sheet into ChatGPT and ask it to analyze the questions so you can say something as simple as, like you know, look at the negative reviews, what trends do you see? What are customers complaining about? Where does this product fall short of expectations? And that's really where you want to address something. Or you could take a much more sort of simpler approach and even just look at the very quickly, just look at the tags. So this is actually something that I saw off of the competitors. So one thing that they were talking about was sizing. Now there are overall positive reviews, but if you look at what I've highlighted here, Amazon has sort of summarized that it fits. You know it's good, but it's larger than they thought that it would be. So that is something you know you could ignore it because it's such a positive overall review 57 positive and five negative but it's really important to just catch that and then use that to your advantage.   Tayyaba: So when we look at the competitor images and I look at the way that they've approached the dimensions image, it's pretty easy to see why there might be confusion. You know, yes, the numbers are right there. In fact, some of them even go into two decimal places. But the reality is shoppers are not going to pull out a measuring tape and you can't really rely on that. So I'm going to give you a little bit of insight into how we approach creating the dimensions image and how we can went about maybe mitigating these negative reviews. So, instead of just giving them the numbers, what we did was we threw in hands in there and so immediately you can sort of picture just how big the bigger one is and how big the smaller one is. And hopefully I can already imagine that shoppers without an image like this and just going back and you know if we should show the chalkboard like this, I can imagine already negative reviews saying you know, the chalkboard is way too small, it's a lot smaller than I expected. Which it is it's about? You know, three inches wide and that's about the length of my pinky. So what this does is it really gives them the idea of they can picture it basically in their home. So this is just one way that we approach creating images to avoid negative reviews. And that brings me to the end of my presentation. I hope this has provided you guys with a little bit of insight and thank you guys so much.   Bradley Sutton: Tayyaba for you. If anybody wants to reach out to you for more information or to get more help or to utilize your services, like I contracted you guys out to do this coffin letter board, how can they find you on the interwebs out there?   Tayyaba: Absolutely amzonestep.com, and if you've got any inquiries, any sort of creatives that you'd like to get done, feel free to reach out.   Bradley Sutton: Okay, and then also you can. If some of you have different plans, I suggest contacting them through hubhelium10.com and look for AMZOneStep, because they sometimes give different coupons for different members out there as well. All right, guys. That's all the time we have for today. Thanks for staying here to the end. Thank you to Leilama and Tayyaba. We will see you later next month with another new topic that's going to be in Freedom Ticket. Actually, next week it's all going to be about TikTok Shop. So look out for an invite for special training on TikTok shop and until then, we'll see you guys later. Bye-bye now.

Could this single change to Amazon's Subscribe and Save program revolutionize your Amazon selling strategy? Listen as we unpack all the latest buzzing news in the E-commerce space! We’re back with another episode of the Weekly Buzz with Helium 10’s Chief Brand Evangelist, Bradley Sutton. Every week, we cover the latest breaking news in the Amazon, Walmart, and E-commerce space, talk about Helium 10’s newest features, and provide a training tip for the week for serious sellers of any level. Registration is now live for Amazon's premier selling partner conference: Amazon Accelerate. Go to: h10.me/accelerate to get your tickets and use the code “HELIUM10SELLER” to get additional discounts Virtual Packs Are Available on Walmart.com https://www.linkedin.com/posts/david-milstein-53692611a_walmart-walmartmarketplace-ecommerce-activity-7205970821775822850-m-0y/ TikTok Shop is huge for the beauty industry https://www.theverge.com/2024/6/11/24176221/tiktok-shop-beauty-wellness-industry-growth-ecommerce Amazon Is a Top Destination for Brand-Focused Beauty Shoppers https://civicscience.com/amazon-is-a-top-destination-for-brand-focused-beauty-shoppers/ Temu Attracts More Repeat Buyers than eBay, Challenges Amazon https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/temu-attracts-more-repeat-buyers-than-ebay-challenges-amazon/ar-BB1o4ili TikTok comes for Google as it quietly rolls out image search capabilities in TikTok Shop https://techcrunch.com/2024/06/11/tiktok-comes-for-google-as-it-quietly-rolls-out-image-search-capabilities-in-tiktok-shop/ Finally, gear up for some valuable training sessions, including a free TikTok Shop webinar and strategies for making the most of Prime Day with Amazon’s latest advertising tools. Plus, a cool new update to Helium 10’s Demand Analyzer tool. Don’t miss out on these essential updates and strategies to boost your e-commerce success! In this episode of the Weekly Buzz by Helium 10, Bradley covers: 00:50 - Amazon Subscribe & Save 03:12 - Amazon Accelerate 04:32 - Walmart Virtual Packs 05:26 - TikTok Shop Beauty 06:38 - Amazon Beauty 07:57 - Temu Vs. Ebay 10:03 - OX Insights 11:34 - Walmart 4 Star + 12:46 - TikTok Image Search 13:53 - TikTok Shop Webinar with Helium 10 14:20 - Prime PPC Webinar 14:51 - New Feature Alert & Training: Demand Analyzer ► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast ► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension ► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup  (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life) ► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft ► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos Transcript Bradley Sutton: A big Amazon subscribe and save change. Walmart's got two new features coming. TikTok shop is skyrocketing. The beauty niche these stories and more on this week's Weekly Buzz how cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show. That is our Helium 10 Weekly Buzz, where we give you a rundown of all the news stories that are going on the Amazon, Walmart e-commerce world. We also give you training tips of the week and we also let you know what new features that Helium 10 has. That'll give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Let's see what's buzzing. Bradley Sutton: We got a number of news articles and things to go over today, so let's go ahead and hop right into our very first story, and this one is actually just directly from the Amazon seller central dashboard and it's for me, it's a, it's a big change. For some of you this might not affect at all, but basically this is entitled. Subscribe and save will launch for seller fulfilled orders on June 27th, All right. So those of you who are just using FBA, this is meaningless to you. For those of you who are like me and every single one of your products is FBA and you have an FBM SKU because you've got your own warehouse or you've got 3PL. Well, this is kind of big because until now you can only enroll FBA SKUs into subscribe and save. But now those of you who do both, like me or maybe there's some of you who just, for whatever reason, for regulatory reasons maybe there's some products that's not allowed in FBA, like meltable products or other things at certain times of year, guess what you can now keep that subscribe and save going, even if you are FBM. Bradley Sutton: All right, so this article talks about how they're automatically going to enroll all of your eligible replenishable products at the default discount set in your subscribe and save settings. All right, so the whole percentage discount thing is going to apply, like the you know, the 5% discount, uh, et cetera. Now, remember, you know these subscribe and save orders normally are just generated automatically for FBA, but now in your FBM pending orders you're going to start seeing subscribe and save order. So make sure to take a look at that. And if you, for whatever reason, don't want to, um, have this automatically set up, I don't know why you wouldn't want to if you have subscribe and save on. But maybe there's a reason why you don't Like, maybe you're not confident in your FBM inventory. Well, you can go to growth and hit explore programs, click increase conversion and then, under subscribe and save, click learn more and you'll have a dashboard there where you can opt out from this automatic enrollment or, as it says, set your discount funding for each product after the June 27 launch. So some pretty cool stuff that is coming to subscribe and save. And don't forget that on the Helium 10 insights dashboard, you can actually add a module or widget for your subscribe and save metrics. So if you haven't done that, make sure to go ahead and do that. You could start seeing the rate your units sold, the amount of sales and the total discount for your subscribe and save orders. Bradley Sutton: Next up, an announcement from Amazon. This is not like not some breaking news, but now the Amazon Accelerate Conference, which, in my opinion, is the premier event Amazon event in the entire world to go to, like. If people ask me uh, what is one event I have to go to? 10 out of 10 Amazon accelerate amazing event, the only time outside of Helium 10 cell and scale summit that we had a couple of years ago where you could actually go up to high quality uh or high ranking reps from Amazon and get your problems fixed. But anyways, as of yesterday, you can now register for Amazon Accelerate. It's going to be September 17th to 19th To get tickets. Go to h10.me/accelerate. There's already a hundred dollar discount right now and then you can use the coupon code. I'm not sure what kind of discount or if any discount it gives, but give it a try. Helium 10 seller no spaces, but you already get a hundred dollars off if you go ahead and register now, and then that Helium 10 seller might give you another extra discount. But again, I'm going to be there. The whole entire team is going to be there. What feels like the whole entire Amazon seller community is going to be there. Thousands of sellers there. Make sure to go. If you're a Helium 10 Elite member, get your tickets a day early, because September 16th we're going to do an event as well, so be there from the 16th through the 19th. Bradley Sutton: Next news article is actually not really a news article, but it's from LinkedIn, a post by David from Cell Quarter. He's been on the podcast a few times before and he's actually going to be on the podcast in a couple of weeks. He's been on the podcast a few times before and he actually is actually going to be on the podcast in a couple of weeks, but now he announced hey, virtual packs are available on Walmart.com. It's kind of similar to what we know as virtual bundles on Amazon, but it has a couple of advantages, according to David. All right. So, like you know, on Amazon, when you do virtual bundles, you don't get any kind of discounts on your fulfillment fees, right. But according to this for WFS, you are actually going to get discounts on your fulfillment for multiple packs, all right, and you also don't have to seemingly create listings one by one. So that is something that is going to be pretty cool for you Walmart sellers who want to do virtual bundles or virtual packs. I guess Looks like there's some cool stuff coming to Walmart. Bradley Sutton: Switching to another marketplace now, TikTok Shop. This article is from theverge.com and it's entitled TikTok Shop is huge for the beauty industry, all right. And there is this article where it says hey, TikTok Shop is the ninth biggest online beauty and wellness retailer in the United States. You might think ninth. My goodness, I can't even name nine marketplaces, you know. There's Amazon, there's Walmart, there's Target. No, it's not marketplaces. I mean, that's any website. You know people go to Sephora.com. People go to Ulta Beauty whatever the heck that website is right. People go to the. You know Maybelline or whatever. You know actual companies. Including all of those websites, TikTok shop is already number nine out of everything. So that's kind of crazy. This article talks about beauty. Content is one of the most popular types of videos on TikTok, with some creators making a living by sharing tips or testing out products. All right, so this is kind of you know, impetus, I would say for the few of you maybe in the beauty category who have been completely ignoring TikTok shop might want to jump on that bandwagon because it's blown up in the beauty category. Bradley Sutton: Next article Along those same lines how is Amazon Beauty doing? Well, you know this is an article from civicscience.com and you know, to no surprise, amazon, according to this article, has 68% of US adults buy beauty and personal care products on Amazon, at least on some of their purchases. So yeah, they are by far. Amazon is by far number one. However, there's distinct differences when it comes to how beauty buyers shop on Amazon. It says official brand storefronts are the most popular destinations among Amazon beauty shoppers. It says shoppers are twice as likely to purchase a beauty or personal care item from an official store than from an independent third party seller. All right, it says many prestige and luxury beauty brands are partnering with Amazon's premium beauty storefront. So this is something to think about. All right, you know, we just talked about hey, make sure your beauty products are on TikTok shop. You should probably make sure your beauty products are on Amazon, of course, but you know, branding is important in the beauty category on Amazon, right, if you're a no name brand, that doesn't mean you have zero chance at making sales, but there seems to be more of a skew toward more branded, you know, or brands that are more well-known in the beauty category on Amazon. Bradley Sutton: The next article is from MSN, and this one, you know, to be honest, I'm a little bit skeptical about All right. So now the title of this from MSN is Temu attracts more repeat buyers than eBay challenges Amazon. Now, this article had a general statement that seemed pretty legit, says hey, you know, we see that Temu is making more, or customers in the US are making more repeat purchases on Temu than on eBay. Maybe, all right, but here is what I'm just like flabbergasted by All right, let me quote this directly. It says the survey, which pulled 1000 consumers, revealed that 34% of respondents made purchases from Temu at least once a month. Hmm, you guys know what my initials are? Right, my name is Bradley Sutton. You know what my initials are. I'm raising my initials flag on this one. Okay, I don't know one person in the last year who has bought even one thing from Temu. Bradley Sutton: Now, don't get me wrong. I understand Teemu is the thing. I know there's people who buy stuff out there, but I'm just finding it hard to believe. 34% of people of 1000 people, 340 out of 1,000 people bought something on Temu. And I don't know one freaking person who bought something from Temu. I'm just not. This made me a little bit skeptical on this article. You know like I'm not the one who made this poll, but again, I'm just throwing that out there. Now. It says Amazon dominates the field, with 76% of the respondents shopping there at least monthly. That number seems almost low for me. What? Only double the amount of sellers or buyers bought something on Amazon to Temu? Only 76%. I mean, like I think every single person I know buys something from Amazon. You know I'm not talking about, obviously, people in the Amazon industry. I'm talking about, just, you know, people here in my community, you know. But anyways, this might be an article you want to take a look at. I still maintain whether it's right or wrong that that Temu is no real threat to Amazon, maybe outside of the the you know clothes, you know low price clothing category, but hey, who knows, maybe Temu is making moves that I'm just not aware of. Bradley Sutton: Next article is from going back to Amazon Seller Central and it's entitled Use Reviews to Improve Product Launches with New Customer Review Insights. So customer review insights is nothing new. This has been in Amazon Product Opportunity Explorer for a while now, but they have new features in there. So there's something new called review trends that show shift in customer sentiment. There's Parent ASIN Insights, so it gives insights at the parent level of products. As you know, Helium 10 Review Insights has been doing that for seven years now almost six years. It takes Amazon a little bit to get caught up, but no, this is cool that Amazon is doing this. They've got some other cool stuff that Review Insights doesn't have. They've got ASIN benchmarking, where it compares your product star rating now to the category average star rating. All right, that's new. And then also they have topic drill down. So like here's a picture, like I'm looking here in Product Opportunity Explorer at one of the competitor coffin shelves and then I could see some of these new features that they have here where they break it down to the child level and they show some topics. So a lot of this you know is available in Helium 10, you know the review insights tool for Helium 10, elite members. We've also had an advanced AI review sentiment tool that you guys have had access to. I'm not sure when or if that's going to be released at Diamond and Platinum, but elite members, make sure you're using that. If that's going to be released a diamond and platinum, but elite members, make sure you're using that. And if you don't have Helium 10, we'll make sure to use for free the review insights tool inside of seller central product opportunity explore. Bradley Sutton: Next article. It's not really an article, it's an email update from Walmart connect. All right, kind of cool announcement, but very, maybe it's going to be very similar to something you know. But basically Walmart Connect says, hey, we're launching an A-B test on item pages that introduces an additional carousel called drumroll, please four-star and above items. All right, does that sound familiar? I think we've seen four-star and above before. Nothing wrong with that. But this is going to start on June 17th and it's going to be a test that they're going to run for about four weeks and it's a carousel that's offering prominent placement opportunity that can promote inspiration for shoppers. Now the difference here is it looks like you can actually target this carousel. As we know, the four star and above on Amazon it's just kind of random. It's not like I can just choose to my product to show up in this four star and above place. There are some that are automatic, according to Walmart, so it's not all manual, but you can automatically get in there or you can manually get in there. So this Walmart Connect if you guys are a Walmart seller, you should have gotten this Walmart Connect email. Make sure to check it out and see if you can get in on this test. Bradley Sutton: Last article of the day is from techcrunch.com and it's entitled TikTok comes for Google as it quietly rolls out image search capabilities in TikTok shop. So it's pretty much this article is just as that title sounds. So you know how you on Amazon and Google you can like take a picture of something. I do this on eBay a lot too. You take a picture of something with the app and then search by picture instead of searching by the keyword. I use that on eBay all the time when I'm like trying to like price match baseball cards and different things like that. That's how I. That's how I do it, instead of actually searching with words. Well, uh, you can now do that on Tik TOK shop. Now, to me, this is a notable because it took years for, like Amazon and eBay and other apps, even Google, to have something like that, and now TikTok shop in the US hasn't even been around for a full year and it already has it. So that's kind of cool that that TikTok shop is making these kind of moves, and anything that makes it easier to find your products on TikTok shop actually obviously would be, um, you know, beneficial for us. Bradley Sutton: Now, speaking of TikTok shop, um, we've got a TikTok shop freedom ticket training coming up next week, okay, so if you haven't registered for it completely free of charge, make sure you're joining. We're bringing a guest expert and they're going to be talking about how to get set up on TikTok shop. This is going to be a module that's going to be in Freedom Ticket. So if you want to register for that, make sure to go to h10.me/tiktokwebinar. Also, you know we've got Prime Day coming up next week. I did a special training on advertising for Prime Day and beyond with Amazon Advertising Headquarters in New York. If you guys didn't catch that live, make sure to catch the replay. You might have to do a free registry. It's completely free, though. If it asks you to register, just go ahead and register for free and you'll get access to it. The link to get to that training is h10.me/primeppc. Bradley Sutton: All right, let's get into our New Feature Alerts. Now, this is actually going to be new feature alerts slash training tip of the week, because it's we're re-releasing a tool that we had to redesign of. For the last six months. You haven't been able to use it, and so let me show you what that tool is and then show you how to use it. So we're combining two for the price of one. Let's say you're on any other website on the internet off of Amazon. You're on Etsy, you're on a Shopify website, or watch this. Maybe you're going to be on Alibaba, okay. So maybe I'm searching for coffin shelves and here, as you can see, I see a whole bunch of factories offering, offering coffin shelves. Let's just go ahead and pick a random one here. And then something that I like to do, um is I like to sometimes check other products that the factories have. So I'll hit their factory name and then I'll just start browsing their product catalog to see what kind of stuff they have. So let's just take a look. I'm here looking at this Alibaba store called Shangdong Junji Trading Company, all right, and I'm just going to start taking a look if anything jumps off of the page, all right. So I see they've got a lot of bamboo products. I actually have a bamboo brand and one of my Amazon accounts, so let's go ahead and look at some of their stuff. Bradley Sutton: So here, sofa arm tray I'm not sure if that's the main keyword, but maybe I'm wondering hey, is there any demand for this kind of product on Amazon? Instead of having to go now into Helium 10, instead of having to maybe go to Amazon and run x-ray, watch what I can do, I'm going to use this re-release tool from Helium 10 called demand analyzer. How you can access is in just the Chrome extension button. Hit that and then select demand analyzer and now all I have to do is type in the keyword that I think is what they're talking about. So let's do sofa. I forgot what even when I said sofa arm tray. Bradley Sutton: Let's see, is there any search volume for this keyword on Amazon? And lo and behold, holy cow, a keyword I never heard of until right now. There's actually 3,000, as you can see here, 400 searches a month. Revenue on the main page is almost $600,000. And I can see some of these top sellers and actually, look at this guys. I did not even look at this. I found the exact same product that is being sold here in this Alibaba store for $6 and on Amazon it's selling for $24. Now, right off the bat, I can tell you I don't think that's enough profit margin, but right here I can just instantly see what is going on with his demand. I'm still on the Alibaba website right now. I'm not on Amazon. I'm not on Helium 10, but I'm able to get this Amazon data Thanks to the Helium 10 Chrome extension. I can see other keywords that are in this niche, such as sofa, tray, table, and I can just dive a little bit deeper into it. So this is a great tool. Bradley Sutton: Guys, maybe you're searching for product ideas, or you're doing just something on any random website at all whether it's Etsy, whether it's Pinterest, whether it's Alibaba something comes to in your mind. Don't think that, yeah, oh, let me go log into my Helium 10 account or let me go to Amazon and start searching an Xray and stuff like that. No, but you're one click away from getting Amazon and Helium 10 data by using this new tool that we're releasing Amazon Demand Analyzer. So it's going to work, should work on any page. Make sure to start using it now. All right, guys. That's it for this week's Weekly Buzz. Don't forget to tune in next week to see what's buzzing.  

Join us for an insightful episode where we sit down with Christi Michelle, an expert in scaling Amazon businesses and the founder of The COO Integrator. Christi shares her fascinating journey from running an Amazon brand management agency to becoming a fractional Chief Operating Officer. Discover how she blends visionary ideas with tactical strategies, and hear about her comprehensive competitive analysis of 25 brand management agencies, revealing the importance of understanding unique value propositions. Christi's wealth of experience provides valuable lessons for e-commerce entrepreneurs looking to scale their businesses effectively. In another segment, we explore key strategies for measuring business health and scaling effectively. Learn how to assess your business's performance through crucial data metrics like PPC statistics and P&L statements. Understand the significance of evaluating employee performance and fitting within your organization. We also discuss Tony Robbins' 10 life cycle stages and their relevance in identifying your business's current strengths and weaknesses. Practical tools such as the EOS organizational checkup and core values exercises are highlighted to help you align your company's direction and goals for balanced growth. Finally, we tackle the challenges of managing remote teams and maintaining productivity in the e-commerce world. Discover strategies for fostering a strong company culture and maintaining relationships. Learn the importance of holding productive meetings that drive progress without creating unnecessary busy work. Additionally, Christi shares her transformative experience at a two-week water fasting retreat in Costa Rica, offering insights into personal growth through struggle and simplicity. Whether you're looking to scale your business or find balance in your entrepreneurial journey, this episode is packed with actionable advice and inspiration. In episode 569 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Christi discuss: 00:00 - Scaling Amazon Businesses With Expert Guidance 04:34 - Brand Management for Major Brands 08:03 - Business Evolution and Maturity Stages 09:32 - Measuring Business Health and Scaling 14:27 - Navigating Amazon's Rising Costs and Fees 20:11 - Key Role of HR in Business 21:03 - Effective Remote Business Operation 23:52 - Creating Constructive Meetings for Company Culture 25:33 - Costa Rica Spiritual Retreat Experience 29:20 - Business Growth and Simplification ► 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: So many Amazon sellers don't treat their Amazon businesses like a real business. So, we brought on somebody today who's an expert in this and she's helped countless number of businesses really scale up, and there's going to be great points that you're going to be able to glean from this as well. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. What was your gross sales yesterday, last week, last year? More importantly, what are your profits after all your cost of selling on Amazon? Did you pay any storage charges to Amazon? How much did you spend on PPC? Find out these key metrics and more by using the Helium 10 tool Profits. For more information, go to h10.me/profits. Hello everybody, welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show. That's a completely BS-free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And I'm still here recording in Spain, Madrid, Spain. I'm here at the Avosk office and we are here with somebody who has not been on the podcast in like two, maybe even three years, over three years Christy in the house. How's it going? Christi Michelle: Hi, doing well. How are you? Bradley Sutton: I'm doing just ducky. I recorded Leo earlier today, but he did his presentation already, so I was able to ask him some stuff on it. But I don't know what you're going to talk about yet, so I'll ask you that in a little bit. But since it's been so long since you've been on the podcast, what in the world have you been up to? Christi Michelle: I think the last time I was on I was running an Amazon brand management agency, and so that was the first one that I was running at the time. And after that we merged, slash, sold to a larger agency where I was the head of operations as well. We had about 100 clients, about 90-ish employees, so really kind of scaled up, which turns out that's kind of my forte, and I was there for a little while and then I left and apparently, I just can't get enough of the agency world. So, for the last about two and a half years I've been running what's my new agency? The COO Integrator, and so I am a fractional chief operating officer. So, it's that second in command. It's the one that says, OK, here's the big vision of what the visionary wants, the CEO wants, and OK, now how do we turn that into tactical strategies that we can, implement and get everybody rowing in the same direction? For so I do that. Bradley Sutton: Hold on. So, you're the CEO of this company or you're, like, a CEO of many companies. Christi Michelle: I'm the CEO of my company, my agency, but I play the role of the COO, which actually quite works for me because I'm a good blend of both the visionary and also the integrator. I like taking the really big concepts. That's a lot of fun for me, but I need to distill it down and make it very practical, set some goals around it, and I use a lot of my business strategies to make sure everything gets executed. So, it's both. Bradley Sutton: Went out to dinner last night and I remember you Vincenzo was there and you found out he worked at a PPC agency and you're like, oh man, a couple of years ago I did I looked into like 25 PPC agencies was it? Christi Michelle: It was a brand management agency. So, I was trying to do a competitive analysis. I wanted to understand. So, one of the things that I think a lot of companies, especially when they're getting started or they're so kind of single focused you don't realize that they don't understand their unique value proposition. And so, what makes you different? Why, if I were looking at two different agencies, why would I choose yours over someone else? And most folks, unfortunately, they're oh, it's you know, we've got great customer support or we're so good with our clients, and it's very generic and they all kind of say the same thing. And so, I really wanted to understand okay, well, who are my competitors in the space? And I find it to be a very non-competitive space in the sense that we're all very friendly, it's very open. What I love about the e-commerce space is that it has kind of that good feel to it as an industry personality. But theoretically, these are my competitors and I wanted to see, well, okay, what are they offering? What do they charge, what are their contract terms? So, I really, I called dozens of them and I just said, hey, this is what I'm doing. I'm just I called dozens of them and I just said, hey, this is what I'm doing, I'm just what's unique about you? I just want to know these different things. So, it was a competitive analysis. It was just sort of a landscape. Bradley Sutton: And you know, obviously you don't have to mention any names, but what was just some things that stuck out to you about, I don't know, maybe price point or something that you saw was a hole in the industry or something that everybody had, or what were some of your big takeaways, I guess, like I'm asking. Christi Michelle: You know that most companies actually did have something that was quite unique. I would say more than half the companies. They would tell me something and I'm like I haven't heard that before. That's really unique, like that is. Do you know that as unique to you? So, in a way I was kind of helping them with their marketing like go ahead and highlight that. So, some folks you know they would specialize in major brands like big Fortune 100 company kind of brands. That's not typically what an Amazon brand management agency, but if you think about it those are. Most of those companies are kind of dinosaurs so they don't know how to kind of pivot and get online. So that was a unique one. A lot of companies had different contract terms but most of them were a flat fee plus once you had a certain point. Then we take a percentage. Unique ones were maybe it was a contract they just go month to month, and other ones they said we just went two years because we're going to invest with you. So really, I think knowing what those are, what your differentiators are and what's important to you, can help you, I guess, decide what type of clients, your ideal client, who you want to go after. Some clients are just like I just want to test this out, is this going to be good? So, they would probably want to go with an agency that has a lower fee and month to month contracts. But other ones who want to deep dive, they know they're going to invest in this, they know where they want to go build that partnership. So, it helps, you kind of weed out the clients that you do want and get rid of the ones that you don't. So, I don't know what really stood out. There was a lot. Bradley Sutton: Okay, now let's just flip the script a little bit. I'm an Amazon seller, I'm new or I'm big, I'm a seven-figure seller, eight-figure seller? Who is the persona or what type of person should be looking for a brand management agency as opposed to you know what? You probably should just try and handle things on your own at your stage. Christi Michelle: That's a loaded question. I would say that it actually depends on your personality type. So, there are people who want to understand there's a level of control that says I want to bring all of this in house, I want to bring in an expert who is a good PPC expert, someone who does graphic design. I want it to be so customized because it's my business. If that is your personality type, you probably want to build in house. But if it's not and you really just want kind of the simple life, you can find a partner partnering with an agency that has all of that already in-house. I would go that route. But it really depends on how you want to run your business in general. So, it's more of a personal decision on your lifestyle. With that there is an influx point, especially because, like I said, a lot of agencies will have sort of a flat fee to start with for the first 90 days or whatever, and they get to a point and they say, okay, wait, we expect to build traction at this point. Christi Michelle: So, from that we want to, once we hit this threshold, we want to flip and we want to take a percentage of sales. Well, that's fantastic, especially if they're doing a really good job. But if you go from doing, 50,000 in sales and then a hundred thousand in sales and then 500,000 in sales, and suddenly you’re doing millions in sales that you know taking 5% or whatever that is, at some point you're going to be paying the agency hundreds of thousands of dollars that it makes more sense than to just bring it in house. So, there is a scaling point that I would say unless you're super comfortable and you just love working with them and you don't care to give away that percentage as long as you don't have to think about it, because clearly, they've done a good job, then at some point you would probably want to bring it in house. Bradley Sutton: Okay, all right. Now I think, looking now I remember looking at the title of your talk today like wasn't one thing about helping people scale, all right, so we have listeners of this podcast, from newer sellers all the way to maybe seven, eight figure sellers. What are some? I know a lot of the stuff you talk about is targeted, you know, depending on their exact persona, but maybe there's some general things that you could, some tips that you can give out about, because I think everybody wants to scale, unless they're just like trying to do this in their hobby. That hey, I'm very happy at my level of the rest of my life. My, my day job is this. That's probably like 3% of people. I think 97% wants to scale. So, what are some tips you can give? Christi Michelle: It's very customized because it depends on where your maturity of your company is. And so, I use the word maturity and the evolution of your business because most people say, well, I'm a million-dollar company or I'm a $5 million company or I'm a $40 million company, that really doesn't matter, because I've had clients that are 40 million, I've had clients that are 2 million and they're at the same stage. They experienced the same influx of issues. So, I like to identify them. So, Tony Robbins has a really good. He has a really good model that's called the evolutionary 10 stages of your business and it starts literally from like a child. It's like birth. You have infancy, you have toddler, teenager, young adult, and then you're in your prime and then eventually, at some point things always kind of deteriorate and you kind of go down that path. So, I like for people to be able to identify where they are. That helps them understand what their bottlenecks are. Able to identify where they are. That helps them understand what their bottlenecks are. So, one tip would be figure out where do you stand like, where is your evolution of your company and what is it going to take for you to go from a teenager to a young adult, or a young adult to get to you when you're in your prime. So, understanding that about yourself. Another thing that I would say is most companies, you're just very focused. Most people don't understand this. If you didn't get an MBA, you don't understand all the facets of business, right? They think, well, I've got a product and I've got a or a service. This is what I'm doing. Understand that if you want to scale, you kind of need to do it. The best way to do it is very, is as balanced as possible, and so another exercise that I do is based off of EOS, which is the Entrepreneur Operating System. They have a model. So, this is that's a business blueprint. Christi Michelle: Every company should be working from a business blueprint, and so, if you can do that, there's a several questions that kind of prompt you well, how well are you in each of these categories of your business? So, you can say, okay, well, how is my data measurables Like? Do I know what I'm measuring? Do I know what my PPC statistics are? Do I know what my P&L looks like? Do I know what my turn rate is? Do I know? There's lots of things to know. So, understanding that category, understanding your people. Do I have the right people? Have I hired you know? Are they doing the best that they can? So, there's lots of different ways that you can measure the health of your business. You can take it as a 20-point questionnaire. You can go to EOS I think it's called; I don't know. You can download it for free. In five minutes, you can kind of figure out sort of like a general health of your business. That will also tell you OKAY, here are the areas that I'm unbalanced. These are my strengths and these are my weaknesses. But as you want to scale, you want to scale as balanced as possible. Also, understanding different personality types. You start off as the visionary of your company and different visionaries and I kind of have had several different buckets that I would put them in. But there's different visionaries, create different problems, create different solutions and problems in their companies. So, you get the ones that are. Christi Michelle: They're just very what is it Gregarious? Like, very like outgoing and big and let's try all the things, and they don't have a big sense of risk. They don't have a correct sense of risk. They go above and beyond and that's really fun. They're usually very grateful. They're a lot of fun to work with, but there's very little. The opposite side of that is they don't come with a lot of accountabilities they just trust you. Yeah, go do the thing. I like you. You seem smart, let's go. And they won’t’ve that type of leader. Understand what your strengths are and also understand what your weaknesses are. Right, because that can create a lot of uncertainty in your employees, and a lot of employees love you, but they just feel like they're constantly concerned about what's happening with their job. So, I could go down a whole rabbit hole on different personality types, but those are the things is understood who you are, what you bring to the company and kind of the health of the business overall. I mean there's tons of tools out there that in five minutes. I love doing workshops because I want people to learn about themselves, where they stand relative to who they are, what they bring to the table and you know what they're going to need to balance them, because everybody has strengths and weaknesses. Bradley Sutton: Now I'm looking here. I'm guessing this is part of, like, your workshops that you're going to be doing, Christi Michelle: Yes. Bradley Sutton: Or is this a handout that people are going to have? Christi Michelle: Yes. Okay, very tactical hands-on. Bradley Sutton: Maybe you can describe some of this so that people can maybe do this at home even without you. At least get started on this framework here. Christi Michelle: Sure, well, I mean, I kind of did mention a little bit, so I would look up Tony Robbins. So, business mastery he has the 10 life cycle stages of your evolution of your business. So, if you can look that up, he kind of gives a definition, as I said earlier. So, you have birth, you have infancy, you have the toddler, you have the teenager, you have the young adult. What are those? What are the pros and cons of each one of those? So go look that up and if you could do that, read there, help yourself identify. Once you identify, let's say, you figure out that you're in a teenage stage. That's a very exciting stage. It's also one of the most dangerous stages and a lot of people get stuck there, a lot of visionaries get stuck there, and so I won't have time to go into detail about it. But if you are able to identify yeah, that kind of sounds like where I am going ahead and look at what the next stage is after that. What is it going to take for me? So, the teenager stage I think it's usually fun and reckless, right? Teenagers? I think of them as driving 100 miles an hour down the highway that they've got their sports car because cash flow at that point is less of an issue. But they say yes to everything and they don't know how to say no. Everything looks like an opportunity, so they pull resources from everywhere. It's very unfocused. So, I think about that teenager driving 100 miles an hour down the highway. If they take one wrong turn, they could seriously wound the business. They don't really recognize that. There's a sense of overconfidence with that. So, if you look that some of those are usually the signature problems that you have as a teenager, then look and see okay, well, what is it going to take to get to be a young adult? And I kind of like quote that as a young adult would be a rebirth. You grow up right. You're like okay, we have to have some responsibility. We're going to bring in some professional staff at this point. We're going to so anyway. So really good way. Christi Michelle: Another thing that I have here, as I said, sort of this grading. I turn it into sort of a wheel exercise so you can kind of self-grade. And it's the EOS, I think it's organizational checkup. Go there, it's 20 questions, it's Likert scale one through 10. Grade yourself. You can share that with all the other people in your company, so that you get a collective grading for everyone. And it comes back and it says okay, well, your score is a 57 out of a hundred. Okay, well, what areas do we need to work on? So, it will quickly highlight for you some of those pieces. But I core values exercise, creating your one page, your business blueprint. Who are we? Where are we going? Why are we doing what we do? What makes us unique? What's our ideal client? Really, building on a business blueprint? Because when you look at going back to the stages, if you look at the when you're in your prime, this is like, this is like Apple. I mean, there's just, there's a. You just know that they come out with excellence at all times. Right, and you can be in your prime for decades. You can be in a prime for a long time. When you understand what that looks like, you want to strive to get to those levels of like. What's the pros of each one of those? So, self-education. Bradley Sutton: Taking it back to, I think, something that is at the top of mind of a lot of Amazon sellers nowadays. You know you started selling on Amazon and kind of like the glory days where you could just like fall into making tons of money by accident, not even knowing anything. You're doing right Nowadays I'm sure you talked about this with Amazon sellers. I think I see so much more fear and anxiety over all the new fees that Amazon has. You know rising PPC costs, rising logistics, this and that and now many people are stressing about how I mean not only just how to scale, but just how to stay afloat. And so, some of your successful people you talk to what are their characteristics or what are they doing to? Because it's still very viable to make money on Amazon. So, what are the successful people? How are they navigating all of these fees and increased costs? Christi Michelle: Well, first of all, they're treating it the successful ones are treating it like a holistic business. It's not just I'm going to throw up a product, make some money and then maybe I figure out a little bit of PPC with that right. There is an evolution to actually truly building something like a business, and so I say that in tandem. When I think of truly building a business, it's you have to look at all aspects, so it's not just the single focus of what are my resources within the Amazon or e-commerce space. So, for example, so when we talk about fees, one of my clients you know is has nothing to do with this, but it overlaps he gets the best rates on UPS and FedEx that you can imagine. Okay, well, maybe we can't. If you're doing FBA, then you can't necessarily use those right, because you're not going to get better fees. But if you are diversifying and if you are going, if you want to do FBM or if you want to do Shopify and you want to go to other places, those fees you can offset them by getting unbelievable discounts for those and you can kind of offset the cost of what Amazon is rising by decreasing the costs of other platforms in your Shopify store, let's say. So, that requires that you step out that you would not know that this person, this type of service exists, because it's not really talked about here, because most people go FBA if they're going to be selling on Amazon. But being resourceful and looking at just look at the problem plainly Okay, amazon fees are going up. Christi Michelle: What is my? If you look at your balance sheet, if you look at your P&L and you say these are all the costs that are associated with my business, what are ways that I can offset each one of these? Like I look at it, I like put my little MacGyver hat on and I'm like, okay, what else can I do? What else can I bring to the table? What else is working in completely different industries? What are they doing that I can kind of take and then bring that over into my space? So, I say two things. They treat it like a business, like it's holistic, it's not. I'm not just selling a product. They know that they're building a brand, they know that they're trying to. And if they try, if they know in two years they've got their vision, two or three years we want to sell for X amount, okay, well, you start working with folks, that will help you kind of get you set up for a sale. We'll do that a year and a half in advance. There's some brilliant tactics for how you can set for decisions you need to make today that 18 months from now will greatly pay off so that you can find the right buyer. So, these are all different ways that are just it's not just looking at selling a company or your business, it's what are all the resources that you're going to need in the future. So, thinking in advance, treating it like a business and looking for resources outside of space. Bradley Sutton: I think what you said is important, because there's a lot of Amazon sellers, I would say that this is probably the first business they've run. Maybe they came from the corporate world or they came from working a nine to five and so they don't have that experience. And there's a tendency, it's because it's such a different beast, on one hand, where it's like, oh no, it's not a real business, but then all of a sudden, they're like wait, this is a business doing seven figures a year. In your experience, when you first talk to people like that, what are they doing wrong? As far as not treating it like a business, like what's the most common things that you're like, okay, we got to get this fixed right away, okay. Christi Michelle: Okay, I'm going to answer this in sort of an evolutionary piece. So, most people, when they start a business, it's just you in your basement or wherever, and you're selling either your product or service, but probably your product, right, if you're not going to do an agency style and you figure that out. So, you go through that and it's just you, it's you're trying to do everything, and then you kind of get that going and then maybe you hire a customer service person or maybe you hire someone to help you out with the day-to-day operations. Okay, let's bump up the sales, let's do the marketing, let's get in some PPC how else can I get a lot more sales? So, then you switch your focus next to the department I'm going to put that in air quotes the department of marketing and sales, and you try to figure out let's pour some gas on this. We've got your product and service. Then you have your marketing and sales, okay. So finally, then we've got that flowing, we've got that going, we know what we're doing there. Oh crap, I'm making a lot of money. Now, what's my P&L look like? What's my balance sheet look like? What does my profit look like? What is margins? What is this about? So, then you start taking okay, do I have the right people? Okay, am I like doing the best that I can, and do I have a high turnover? So, then it gets to HR. So, my answer is actually HR. Christi Michelle: People ignore HR because in the evolution, it's the last, it's, we call it like crisis by management by crisis. Most, every one of those stages you're saying what's the biggest crisis that I need to focus on? So, HR doesn't feel like it's crisis, but it actually is like the underpinning of everything. So, most people ignore HR. So, one of the very first things that I do when I come in is I say what do our people? What does it look like? Do we have the right staff? Do you trust your people? Because a lot of times they'll hire someone but they don't trust them and so then they micromanage them and they never let them flourish. And then you have it keeps growing and growing and growing. And then you have this owner who now has like 15 employees. They've technically become successful, but they've got golden handcuffs because they can't leave, because they haven't figured out how to actually delegate and trust. That is one example. So, when I come in, the first thing I do is. I say what does HR look like? Because usually and, by the way, the whole time, whether you're doing the you're, you're doing your product surface, your operations, your marketing sales, your finance, you're still hiring people along the way. But that always tends to fall on the visionary, which most people didn't go to HR school. They don't know how to interview, they don't know how to hire the right people, they don't know how to manage and make sure that they're setting those expectations. Christi Michelle: So, I tend to think of that as I will come in first. I'll look at HR, because I know that that's one of the number one thing that's going to make or break a company. But it feels like it's the underpinning. It doesn't feel like it because it's not so much a big crisis loud thing usually, but that's the underpinning and it always falls on the visionary and that's not necessarily going to be their forte. So, if I can teach them how to do that and we can kind of clean house and get the right people in the right place and get the systems and all of that, that's typically what I see. Bradley Sutton: All right Now. You and I were just talking to elevator about. How Helium 10 are remote company. I would say nowadays most Amazon businesses as they scale and become a real business, it's almost all remote. Either they're hiring people within the United States remotely or in most cases hiring people from other countries, be it Philippines, Pakistan, et cetera. What are some things that Amazon, business owners can do to. In a remote lifestyle where they can just make sure, hey, everybody's on task. Like Helium 10, we started as an in-office company so it was easy for us to know like oh wait, this person is slipping when we run remote or like we know what. But, Amazon sellers from day one. They're kind of a remote company. So, how do they structure it to make sure that it's still operating as a well-oiled machine, even though maybe they've never even met some of their employees in person? Christi Michelle: Sure. I mean, I think it's a really good question. I think there’s a lot of challenges the people have because it’s not a natural state if you think about humans and how it all interactive with each other coming from villages that living, but this is very new thing. Covid did not help but it really exacerbated the fact that we so I would say the same way that you would handle a social situation if you moved away from your friends and family you, it takes effort. You actually have to put in conscious effort to reach out and create a relationship with. You can't like, if you moved away and you have all of your best friends and your family that lives back in your hometown, you no longer it's not. You have to actually put in the energy and effort to ask them how they're doing, see what they're up to, have constructive conversations. When you're in person, you just don't really think about it. You kind of take it for granted. You're like, oh, I'll just go bump into you at the water cooler. Hey, just pop in my office. That kind of thing. It's so much, it happens kind of effortlessly. It takes effort to actually maintain relationships and you have to build. You kind of have to rebuild your social skills. So, I would say that, from a culture perspective, is that you need to figure out what that looks like. So, I have a lot of clients where we'll implement. Just, you know, we do like happy hour Fridays where everybody, at three o'clock or four o'clock, we're like hey, let's all get on here, we’ll share, we’ll do trivia, they’ll do things. So, there's lots of things you can do from a culture perspective. Christi Michelle: But in terms of just operations, of business, cadence of meetings and I say that carefully because I think a lot of people roll their eyes, I have a lot of meetings, lot of meetings. A lot of people roll their eyes at me because they hate meetings. Most people hate meetings because they're not productive meetings. I, like I said, I am a hands-on, tactical person. I don't want homework after a meeting. Don't make me do anything. As soon as we're over the phone, I'm done, I did my job. So, the moment that I get on meetings, I know what we're working at, I know what we're trying to solve and if it's, we don't know the answer. I'm building a matrix. I'm building, we're typing it out, we're having a constructive conversation and leading it. I'm constantly monitoring people to say okay, what are we trying to solve? You have this question how can you get our audience to solve? What do you need to move forward? So being you just have to be more cognizant about having constructive meetings. So, it's a lot more communication in that sense. But that more communication does not need to be waste of time. Christi Michelle: I think a lot of people have that sort of this equals that? Not true at all. Just have productive. So, learn how to have. So, I had to summarize one. Decide how you want the culture of the company to be and put an effort to make sure that that happens, that you are making building relationships again, whether that's a happy hour, you guys do like a weekly, like shout outs or something like that. And then the second one is learn how to have productive meetings. Learn how to have constructive meetings where you actually get work done during the meeting while everyone's together. They can put in their input if that is needed. Learn how to have constructive meetings that you don't have to have a lot of busy work on the other side and then you guys are learning and building and growing together, which just creates more camaraderie. Bradley Sutton: Awesome, awesome, all right, any last words of wisdom like a message you want to get out to Amazon sellers around the world here, what can you help them with? Like I sometimes call this like a 60 second strategy, but I'm not going to tie you down to a certain time, but just anything you want to close this out with. Christi Michelle: Oh goodness, I mean I think I've harped on the fact that treat it like it's a business. Truly, if you're not working on a business blueprint, you know EOS is a good one, it's. It's a limited. It's very, very good, but it's limited. There's, you have system and soul. There's lots of different ones. Get like, find, a business blueprint to work from, because most people don't understand strategic frameworks and it's not anybody's fault If you didn't go get an MBA, if you didn't know this, but you have the entrepreneurial spirit. You do have to educate yourself on how to run a business. So, treat it like it's a business, that there are all different components and aspects to it and I think that you will find that scaling and growing and educating you will be more balanced and less stress and you'll have less of those true deep pitfalls that I see a lot of people having. Bradley Sutton: All right, one more thing. At dinner last night I kind of got a little bit of this. But Boyan was telling me you went to Costa Rica and you didn't eat food for like two weeks or something. So, tell me a little bit about what prompt cause? You never. there are some people out there who are I'm not trying to throw anybody under the bus, but like the whole very spiritual and touchy, feely and yoga every morning, and let me go find my, my inner priestess, or whatever.  You never struck me as that kind of person, but so I'm wondering what prompted you to do this retreat, what did it involve and what did you get out of it? Christi Michelle: So, funny that you said that, and I don't think that I used to be, but I'm happy to openly admit I'm actually quite a spiritual person. I'm not a religious person, but I am a very spiritual person. And so, what prompted it? Two things I could say. We grow by the most through our struggles, and I've read this in a lot of different places and people talk about I wanted to go do something that was challenging. I wanted to do something that pushes you, because in this particular retreat I was in Costa Rica, definitely out with the bugs. Every night I had to look for spiders and scorpions and snakes. In my bed, on top of not eating at all, you had a one job and that was to drink as much water as humanly possible. Bradley Sutton: So, I was doing you ever have those things in your bed? Christi Michelle: Not in my bed but, I definitely have a situation a very large spider that was a. Bradley Sutton: Crossing Costa Rica off my bucket list. Christi Michelle: But it's so beautiful there, but you're there and it's. You know, I meditate a lot, I mean. So, I thought I was. Oh, I'm just going to go there, I'm going to meditate for a couple of hours every day. I'll take some naps. No, you had one job to do and that was to drink as much water as possible. So, I was drinking up to 1.75 gallons a day. But the thing is, when you're not eating, when you're not eating, you're not replenishing the electrolytes, so you have to drink 16. You can't drink any more than 16 so that you don't flush it, so it's little sips. So, from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to bed, so from 7 am to about 10, 10.30 at night, all you have to do is drink, and you're not supposed to. There's no internet, there's no WIFI, there's, I mean, you can have your phone, but there's nothing that you can't, like you know, download anything. No one tells you physically purging. Most people that went there I was very different. Most people who went there had very much had cancer, had different things. Cleansing of your body is. It's fantastic. I recommend anybody research what fasting like water fasting can do. It's one of the best things I think you can do for your body, but so there was a combination of wanting to kind of do a good cleanse, but it challenges you mentally, emotionally and physically to be uncomfortable, to be in a space you don't have any. Christi Michelle: Most people use food for comfort or to repress I mean, we all do it right or to repress some feeling, or to kind of just enhance. I mean we use food almost like it. I mean it truly is kind of like a drug where you don't have that to rely on. So, then you're sitting there by yourself, no one really to talk to, nothing to entertain you in traditional ways. You're stuck with your thoughts and you go through a lot through that. So, I like to do pretty strong challenges and so that was one of my big challenges for this year. Can I do it? And I would probably not ever do it again, I mean, unless I got very, very sick, and I thought this would. If I did, I thought that would be the best thing that it could do. But, it's just to, to challenge myself, to grow to do something different. Bradley Sutton: All right, cool. All right, man, we'll see. I've tried a lot of different things. Maybe, maybe I can try that, just minus the scorpions and snakes and spiders. Yeah, all right. Well, how can people find your company, or are you out there on the interwebs these days? Christi Michelle: I am in fact on the interwebs. I think that we have so I am right now. So, my main is I'm the coo integrator that is my agency, so that's just coo for chief operating officer, the coo integrator, that is my website. And right now, I mean, the truth is I I'm extremely fortunate that I do have a backlog of clients. And, funny enough, I don't really scale my company of all the things. Who don't she helps people scale, but she doesn't when you've had so many companies and you're responsible for hundreds, you know dozens, if not a hundred, plus people there comes a point in your life where you're like I think I'm just good with keeping things simple, but you kind of have to go through that to appreciate this. It's kind of like water fasting you have to go without food before you can appreciate the food there. but yeah, so I'd love to. I usually do free analysis with people, thank you, thank you, just to kind of help them and I can point them in the right direction. So, I'm always just kind of happy to help guide people, and anymore now I spend some time on boards of companies and I do other investments and things. So, I love the game of business. I'm always happy to talk about it. So please reach out to me, Christy, at the CEO integrator, and I'm happy to chat. Bradley Sutton: Awesome. Well, hope to see you sooner than later and I don't have to travel around the world just to be able to see you. Like Karen Spade, Christi Michelle: Yeah, going to Europe, right All right, we'll see you guys in the next episode.

Join us in this episode as we sit down with Leo Segovio, a top expert in the space, to discuss a wide range of topics that are essential for E-commerce sellers. Leo shares his unique insights on how optimizing Amazon images can significantly impact indexing and ranking. He also opens up about his recent ventures, including a software project for influencer and affiliate marketing, and an intriguing Airbnb project in Italy. Additionally, Leo provides valuable tips for Amazon sellers looking to diversify their income by investing in real estate, highlighting the importance of strategic investments to complement a thriving Amazon business. Listen in as we explore the evolving landscape of influencer and affiliate marketing strategies. We discuss how leveraging platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube can empower brands by building robust affiliate networks. We highlight successful brands and share advanced techniques for optimizing listings to ensure better visibility on Google and Amazon. Practical tips for using press releases on high-authority domains to improve Google indexing are also discussed, offering listeners actionable advice to enhance their marketing efforts. Finally, we talk about the significance of Google indexing for Amazon sellers and the benefits of driving traffic from Google to boost Amazon rankings. We discuss the theory that paid traffic may hold more weight and the value of optimizing images with keywords to enhance discoverability. Additionally, we examine Amazon's evolving search algorithms and how intent-based optimization is changing the way products are discovered on the platform. This episode is packed with valuable insights and strategies to help Amazon sellers navigate the complexities of e-commerce and achieve greater success. In episode 568 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Leo discuss: 04:14 - Investing In Real Estate Investments 09:41 - Leveraging Creator Marketplace for Affiliate Networks 15:56 - Google Indexing for Amazon Sellers 18:16 - Google Traffic Boosts Amazon Ranking 24:01 - Google Indexing Boosts Product Visibility 26:46 - Search Algorithm Evolution and Intent-Based Optimization 29:13 - Optimizing Amazon Listings for Intent-Based Search Transcript Bradley Sutton: Today we've got one of the top minds in the entire Amazon game back on the show, Leo Segovia. He's going to be talking about a wide variety of topics, such as the impact on indexing and ranking by optimizing your Amazon images, and much, much more. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.   Bradley Sutton: Hello everybody, welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show. That's a completely BS-free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And speaking of the e-commerce world, I'm on the other side of the world right now. For those of you listening, maybe I sound a little different. We are in the AVASK office here in Madrid, Spain, right in the middle of our Elite Workshop, and just about 15 minutes ago we had our very first speaker. All the other speakers are very mad at him because he started off and he set the bar really high with his talk, but we've got no stranger to the show, Leo Segovia. Leo, how's it going?   Leo: Bradley, good morning. How are you doing?   Bradley Sutton: Doing great, doing great.   Leo: Awesome. Yeah, this morning was great. I'm actually happy this is my first time in Madrid. Yes, I actually just stopped once. I think I was on my way to Puerto Rico, but yes, I got to enjoy the city. Today I'm here at the AVASK office in Madrid, so happy to be here and happy to be your guest again.   Bradley Sutton: Awesome, awesome. So now you know it's been a while since Leo's been on the show, so let's first just catch up with what you've been up to. Have you been launching products on Amazon? You've just been focused on building software. What have you been up to the last couple of years since you've been on the show?   Leo: Yeah, it's been a crazy year for me actually. I've been involved in a couple of different projects. We are obviously always looking for new products to launch. What kept me very busy in the past year has been software that I've been working on for influencer and affiliate marketing, and actually this Airbnb project in the south of Italy, which has been kind of a roller coaster. Yeah.   Bradley Sutton: So, you actually moved, I remember you went from Canada to Florida and then a few months ago you moved back to your home, uh, country of Italy, but then this was always meant to be kind of just like a like a winter, uh or summer home for you.   Leo: Yeah, that is correct. Uh, I have a family in Italy. So, and recently their area of Italy is called Puglia, it's in the southeast was becoming more and more popular and more expensive, and so I decided to buy a property there so that we could spend a week or a month in the summertime, perhaps, when in Florida is too hot, you know, go inside of Italy. Invite some of my Amazon friends, you know, mastermind, and so that's the plan. Now, I was supposed to be there only for a couple of months, just to see what was going on, but when I got the keys, I realized that the place needed a lot of work, and so I've been stuck in Italy since November, actually, of last year, and I'll probably stay there until for two more months before going back to Miami.   Bradley Sutton: What passport do you have? What country passports? I have Italian and Canadian passport. Okay, so then, when you bought this house, you use your like Italian citizenship?   Leo: No, actually I well, I could participate to an auction because I bought this place at an auction. Not the $1 ones, it was more than that. But yes, because of my Italian citizenship it allowed me to participate to an auction. But everything that I'm doing is as a Canadian citizen. It works out better from tax perspective and all that.   Bradley Sutton: Okay. So that's why I was asking about this, because I think this is, you know, like somebody might be jumping on the show. What are we talking about? Airbnb here? But as e-commerce entrepreneurs, Amazon sellers, maybe we make a little money, maybe we're not interested in exiting our business, but now we have extra money, like do we start other businesses? You know, maybe something that has nothing to do with Amazon, but I hear of more Amazon sellers doing something similar. Where they go you know, not necessarily Italy, but another country, buy a house and then so, as a Canadian citizen or as an American citizen I would assume it's about the same. What's the process of participating, like in this Italian auction to be able to buy this house?   Leo: I think you need to have someone in Italy or a friend, someone with an Italian citizenship, in order to buy a place at auction. Otherwise, you just have to go to a real estate agent and buy a regular place. The reason for me it was convenient is because it was a good deal. If I was able to win the auction, and so in real estate, you make money when you buy, not when you sell. Right, if you buy for less, that's most likely guaranteed revenue or earnings whenever you sell, and so that's the reason why I did this. Now, I don't know exactly the process if I didn't have any Italian citizenship, but yeah, a lot of entrepreneurs you know, especially Amazon sellers whether, when they exit or you know if they're already doing quite well and they have good cashflow, they normally tend to invest in real estate Airbnb’s. You secure yourself passive income from that, and it's always a good investment.   Bradley Sutton: So then would I have to have all cash though to once the auction closed, I can finance over there.   Leo: Okay. So that's an interesting thing. I was going to finance the project. I ended up buying a cash because it just made more sense for me, but in Italy they actually give you a mortgage as long as you can prove that you have income outside of Italy.   Bradley Sutton: Okay. And then so you calculated out, like how much you can maybe get an Airbnb. And then so have you calculated hey, for the other months of the year where I'm not staying here, I need to rent this place out x amount of time of the year. And it's going to be worth it, have you like, and did that analysis?   Leo: Yeah, so in this specific region of Italy and the location of what I bought in August for a place with a pool and four or five bedrooms, you can charge 5,000 to 6,000 euros a week. So you make your money in the summertime. Ideally, as an investor, you don't want to go and spend time in the summertime there, but you want to go, perhaps either early, like May or September, when the season starts to kind of slow down and so you don't take out money from your profits, right? So my plan is to rent it out June, July and August. If I have some good offers in September, maybe I'll rent it out, otherwise I'll go myself there in September or May, but, yeah, normally throughout the year.   Leo: You know Italy is a destination where you have a lot of tourism during summertime, unless you're in Rome or Venice or Florence, which is always busy throughout the year. You know south it's a summer destination, right. So you get a lot of tourism summertime. Wintertime dies down, so you probably can get us or what you can get in the summer. But you know it works out well because if you have a small apartment, for example, in a big city, and you are charging, you know, 200, 300 a night? Um, at the end of the year you make the same money. So with this kind of properties is a little bit of a different um investment. I went more on the luxury kind of market, hoping to work only with Americans. You know foreign tourism, but in my opinion it's a great one.   Bradley Sutton: Okay, so there you have it, guys. You know, like, maybe you've had some success on Amazon and you're thinking of what kind of things to invest in. You know, getting a property at a low price and maybe fixing it up even though it's a headache a little bit, you know could be the route that you want to go. Now you know we're going to talk a lot about some really cool Amazon strategy coming up, but you've been developing some software lately for a while now. That's not necessarily for on Amazon, but it helps Amazon sellers. Can you talk about that a little bit?   Leo: Yeah, I've been working. The software is called Spliced. I've been working on this for about two years now and I was supposed to be already in market, and the reason why I'm late is because of what I just explained. It took me, you know, it took resources and energy a little bit off the other project, but now we're ready to go, and the reason why I built this software is, you know, Bradley, you know I have Convomat, which was my first software that I built, and then Amazon changed it to iOS, and so I had to find a way to pivot. But I already knew that influencer and affiliate marketing was the way to go, also for us Amazon sellers, in order to have a little bit more control over the traffic, over the business and the revenue that we drive to our brands. And so, with Spliced, my goal is to leverage the creator's marketplace, which is huge between TikTok and Instagram and YouTube, and leverage that to build affiliate networks for your own brand.   Leo: There are already a lot of sellers out there that are doing a good job when it comes to affiliate marketing. Look at a brand like Goalie. Goalie, one of the key strategies for Goalie was actually the affiliate marketing, and so with Spliced, my goal is to allow brands to look up into our marketplace, which has already been built with we have over 20 million creators and then approach them with an affiliate partnership instead of just UGC content. This is the reason why we didn't build in Spliced, just UGC campaigns. There's already plenty out there of softwares that you can use for UGC, but in my opinion, if you have a solid affiliate network, you can keep launching new products, relaunching the same products. We use it for reviews. If you need something like that and you have more control over your business, and if you decide to launch your D2C website, you can leverage the same network and start pushing traffic off of Amazon. So there are a lot of reasons why I believe people should use a platform like that. It's like building an email list, but instead you're actually leveraging the creator marketplace.   Bradley Sutton: Okay, yeah, interesting, I think TikTok how it works, people's eyes are really open to more of influencer marketing. I mean, it's basically influencer marketing. There's not really SEO on TikTok, or it's not even. Even if you understand the hashtags, it doesn't necessarily guarantee the rally. It's a numbers game like getting you know. You get out to 25 influencers and maybe 24 do nothing, and then one person, even though they're small, they get on the For you page or something like that and literally can bring thousands and thousands of dollars. There's somebody I've been helping with, you know, shipping their products and they're you know they're doing me sometimes some days a thousand fifteen hundred units of sales for like this planner and it was a hundred. They didn't spend any for PPC on TikTok 100%. You know they just push the product to influencers and then one here and one there just goes viral and it just means a lot of business.   Leo: Yeah, I think you know it's probably right now a big hype. I mean the TikTok shops everyone is talking about them working with affiliates and it's probably one of the oldest marketing strategies, if we want to call it that way. You know the affiliate marketing works because of the power that the individual creator in this case has to influence people right, and so people want to buy from people, and if you, as a brand, do a good job in recruiting a few super affiliates in this case we're talking about good creators that will turn into affiliates, then you have to worry less about that promotion part of you know launching new products.   Bradley Sutton: Interesting, interesting. Okay, now let's move a little bit back towards the Amazon world and actually I'm going to go a little bit off of Amazon, but it's something that you talked about today in your speech and we're not going to go too deep into it. If you guys want to really hear his presentation, you have to be an Elite member. So you Elite members definitely make sure to look out for the recording on that. But one thing you were talking about when it comes to images, but the way you discovered this was you said you were checking indexing on Google. So we know, on Amazon, if you want to check indexing, you just use Helium 10 index checker, right? Or if you don't have Helium 10, you can use the old school method of put the ASIN plus the keyword and then search and see if it comes up. For just rudimentary index checking for keywords. If you want to see if your Amazon product is indexed on Google, how do you even see if you are?   Leo: Yeah, so normally on Google you will copy your URL, search it on Google. You can also do a site column with your URL and then Google will show only search results that are related to the domain you're searching. But if you type the whole domain, the whole URL, the canonical URL of your Amazon listing, if you are indexed, it will show there.   Bradley Sutton: But what about if you're? Can you look if you're indexed for a specific keyword?   Leo: So if you're indexed for a specific keyword, then you want to put that URL plus the keyword and then or amazon.com/dp/your ASIN, or you can also do ASIN in quotes plus the keyword and then you will see if you get, if you're indexed on Google from that keyword. It works in a similar way. Um, but yeah, the presentation we touched a lot on you know the details of what was going on Google which was dependent on, uh, the way that the listing was optimized on Amazon.   Bradley Sutton: You talked about some advanced strategy. We'll talk a little bit about that, about like images and stuff. But without the images, is there a way to force yourself to be indexed on Google, like, for example, if you create a custom canonical URL, just insert the keywords and then if you actually happen to you know, like maybe run some Google ads, get some conversions on that, will that index you for that keyword on Google?   Leo: Yeah, so, based on some experiments that I've done, the easiest way to get indexed on Google is to publish some press releases on domains with good authority score domain rank and have your you know pointing a link to your listing with the anchor text that you potentially also want to rank for using that specific canonical tag that you get from your Amazon listing. So the reason why this works better is because normally Google indexes across these websites. Like you know, if you publish through PR, news or something like that, they will be crawled, and so Google will find these links and then follow your Amazon listing, which obviously, as a consequence, would be indexed.   Bradley Sutton: Okay, interesting. Now, taking it a step further, why should an Amazon seller even be concerned about indexing on Google like, um? Obviously, if you're running Google ads, you know your goal is to get direct sales from it. But just being ranked organically, um, what kind of bumps do you see on sales? Or how does it help a to be ranked high? I'm not just index. I mean index doesn't do much if you're ranked on page 30 or something, but how does ranking organically for a keyword? What's the potential there for helping sales?   Leo: So there, are a few reasons why you want to be indexed on Google, and for the most, let's start from the most advanced ones, right? Advanced sellers they normally try to send traffic to Amazon, especially during the launch period, using external traffic, right? So Google, we know, is a good referral that tends to help your rankings, and so Amazon tends to reward you if they see traffic coming from Google. So if you're not indexed, you lose a chance to show Amazon that you are getting traffic from Google. Now, I have a theory that paid traffic has a little bit more weight than organic, but the reason why you want to be indexed and the reason why you might want to be indexed for certain keywords is so that when you drive traffic through the URL to Amazon, you can actually give attribution to that keyword. That's number one, right? So you can actually use these URLs as your two-step.   Leo: Number two if you do a good job with your indexation and your listing is optimized, you actually also appear in the images, right? And so if people are looking for specific products, sometimes I search on Google using images because I'm looking for specific products that might be hard to find on Amazon, but if I look through the Google images and I find the product, then I go to Amazon, and so if you're not indexed, you're also not going to be able to be found there, and Google images actually gets a ton of traffic. So here are some of the reasons why, two of the reasons why. I can think of many more, but the most important are these ones. Google is still one of the largest search engine, and so missing out on that opportunity, I'm afraid it causes a lot of missed visibility for an Amazon seller at a listing level.   Bradley Sutton: And then you've done some tests before where you noticed that if that Amazon can read what the search was from Google, so that when you get sales from a keyword in Google, it also potentially could help your Amazon ranking for that keyword, right?   Leo: Yeah, that is correct. There was a test that we have done two years ago where everyone was talking about Google traffic and so we drove traffic straight from Google paid to Amazon without using any keyword in the URL, and then we noticed that for the keywords that we were actually bidding on, we saw a lift in ranking. I remember going from position I think it was 35 or so to position seven or five. So surprisingly we saw that Amazon was able to attribute that search query on Google and then the ranking as a result for the keyword was actually improving on Amazon as well.   Bradley Sutton: Okay, interesting, interesting. Now let's switch and talk a little bit about images, because this also has to do with ranking on Amazon. It has to do with ranking on Google, getting indexed in Google. What has more of an impact with getting discovered or being able to be read by Google? Is it if you have an infographic and the actual words appear in the infographic, you know on the actual image, or is it the metadata, or it only works the best if you're doing both?   Leo: In my opinion, you have to do both, and the reason is that right now, every search engine uses AI to detect subjects, text and everything on an image. You know, if you look, if you're a Facebook advertiser, you probably know that they've had this for a long time. If you add more text on an image than the image, the visual itself, your ad wouldn't have been approved, and so AI detection for images has been going on for a while. But now, since you know, ChatGPT came out and you know Lama from Facebook, we have, you know. We know we have a lot more information about this topic, and what we found is that the search engines, including Amazon and Google, they scan the content of your image and they're able to rank these images based on the content of that image, including subjects, context and in the subjects and text. Did I say that?   Leo: So, basically, what Google cares the most on top of that is also the metadata, because the metadata helps the search engine classify that image. So, while the content itself helps them understanding okay, this is what this image is about the actual metadata is more technical for the crawlers, the engine themselves so that they can place you in certain categories. And so when it comes to Amazon, the content on the image right now, I noticed that through some different experiments, that is being used for ranking reasons. And so if you look at some products that don't have, for example, keywords on the images, they are less. You know there are multiple factors. Obviously, they play when it comes to rankings, but if you put two products side by side same ranking, same ratings, same being on market for the same time period, timeframe and same price one has text on images and keywords and one doesn't. Most likely the one with keywords on images is going to rank better.   Bradley Sutton: Okay. So then what Amazon sellers should be doing is for their main images, or you know, the in their image carousel and their A+ content is I mean, obviously you can't have text in your main image. You know that's against terms of surface, although if you can have the packaging there, that's a good, that's a good opportunity. But then to get, hey, you use the right keywords, but then also, if you're using like photoshop or something you have and we're not going to go into detail, it's like there's a bunch of crazy stuff about copyright and there's fields there that he talks about in his presentation. You'll have to watch the Elite workshop for that. But you've been doing testing where it one has, it one doesn't, and then it gets you indexed on Google. You've actually seen where the ones who did it, their Amazon sales were like way higher than the ones who did it.   Leo: Yeah, that is correct. We analyzed an e-brace on Amazon and this is, you know work that I was doing with a friend of mine, and we were trying to understand why these competitors were actually indexed on Google and they were indexed for certain keywords. Not the main keyword, but a variation of them. And so what I did I created this Google sheet where I was helping me understand which ones were indexed and for what keywords they were indexed and that led me to see that the ASINs that actually were indexed on Google were indexed for keywords that were present on the A+ banners. And so when we did that, what happened, this happened within 48 hours, we noticed that Google indexed that specific product image and they were actually featuring it as a search result on Google for the main search query, so that image wasn't used as a snippet or thumbnail for the listing itself. So the URL wasn't amazon.com/dp/ASIN, it was amazon.com/ the search you know embrace.   Leo: So it took me to the search results page, but the image that they took as a featured image was actually the one of my client, and so that was very interesting because Google detected a refinement and it detected an update in that listing. It saw that that image was very relevant for the search query because of the way that we optimized it using metadata and then they used it as the main image on the Google search results. Now this, to me, is fascinating and is very important, because if you are a shopper and you're searching on Google for an e-brace and then you see this image, most likely that's psychological,   most likely when you land on the Amazon search results page, you're going to go and find a product, you're going to go and click that product. So that added traffic, that added conversion rate, helped us recover the racing and the sales that we were losing. But that was a very interesting experiment that we did.   Bradley Sutton: Interesting, okay. So again, if you guys want to get more information about that, that almost might be worth it just to subscribe to Helium 10 Elite for one week, just to get that presentation. So if you guys want to look into that, go to h10.me forward slash Elite and see it's only $99 extra, so make sure to sign up for that. Now, another thing that I think a lot of people have been talking about not just you, but you were one of the first ones to talk about semantic search and Cosmo and things like this, and we'll talk about what that means. But I think, just to set some groundwork, I think everybody understands that any search algorithm will evolve over time. That's the whole purpose. Like the companies who don't want to do well, they'll just keep their algorithm the same right. But anybody you know whether we're talking about Google, Facebook, TikTok has an amazing algorithm, Amazon. It changes over time and we've seen that.   Bradley Sutton: You know, if we were searching five years ago on Amazon, it's different. And now if you've bought some how many of you who have bought something you search for a keyword that has to do with that and that thing that you bought is now at the top on your Amazon maybe not somebody else. That didn't happen like five, six years ago. Last year we showed an example of how you search a keyword that doesn't really exist. It's called noodle camera and no listing has the word noodle camera in it. But there was like maybe 30 listings that came up and it was like a stethoscope camera it looks like a noodle. So five years ago you put noodle camera it would say zero results because nobody has that in their listing and these listings don't have that keyword in there. But it's showing up because Amazon shows history that, oh, people don't know what this is called stethoscope camera but then they think it looks like a noodle. So now it's showing listing. So we've seen this even for a year. Now, first of all, Amazon science documents we've talked about it, but maybe 80%, 90%, never actually is 100% in production. Sometimes it goes into production, sometimes it doesn't. But what was it that made Cosmo so interesting these documents that talked about it, that you're like man. This is something that you think that Amazon is going to move towards.   Leo: Yeah, the reason why, I think is something that would be applied at scale across the marketplace is because, as searchers, as buyers, as shoppers, our goal when we use a search engine is to find a product or information that we need in order to solve a problem. And so, as a technology company in this case we're talking about Amazon their goal is to improve, like Bradley said, the algorithm in order to simplify that search result and give you exactly what you're looking for, by burning some steps in the middle, right. And so that's what Cosmo is designed for. Cosmo is designed to be a man in the middle, between yourself and the search results, right, when you work together with it to give feedback back and forth. And so what they do right now they learn. You type a search query, they give you some result, you refine that result by clicking on some products that you think are relevant. And what they do with this information? They start building this knowledge graph, right. So a classic example if you go on Wikipedia and for something, Wikipedia normally links to other relevant sources. That's what they call the knowledge graph, right? They know that this is relevant to that right. And so what cosmo is trying to do, instead of you having to refine the search. They're refining it for you.   Leo: So the example that I give in my presentation this morning is that, if someone is searching for winter coat, we saw a product that ranks number one on Amazon that doesn't have the word winter coat in the title. But yeah, they're ranked number one, and so this is shocking, right, like everyone's like oh come. Title is supposed to be the most important element on the page when it comes to optimization and some SEOs, but this time Amazon understood that you are looking for something that keeps you, to keep you warm, right. So now we're shifting from a keyword-based search to intent-based search, and so, as sellers, right now, what we need to do is understand what is the actual intent behind the person. What am I selling this to? I'm selling this to someone that wants to stay warm, right, that's what the purpose of a winter coat is, and so, with that intent in mind, we need to optimize listings so that we can convey the message through images, through the title, bullet points and description, so that Amazon, the new Cosmo, understands that this product is something that helps people stay warm.   Leo: And what I think is going to happen also because of the shift in the way that these search results are built, which is more intent-based, is that Amazon then will start recommending also related products. So if you're looking for, if you type in winter coat, they say, okay, well, this person is trying to stay warm and so let me show them also some winter gloves and winter socks and maybe some winter boots, and that will change everything right. They will change the way we advertise, they will change the way we try to be associated with other products. They will change the way we also promote our listings. So that's very interesting and fascinating, but I think it's a good thing for the buyer, right, while for our sellers might be challenging to figure out again, how do we optimize our listings keeping this semantic concept in mind for the buyer? And they've already proven. If you look at the Amazon science document in the research papers, they're already saying that they're seeing a lift in conversion rate when Cosmo is applied to a search result page. So we must pay attention to these and monitor certain. It's challenging right now to understand where this is applied, but we need to monitor better the Amazon marketplace and then evolve and adapt as Cosmo gets released into more categories.   Bradley Sutton: Not to be controversial here, but to me it's almost it's different, but it's not different. Like, at the end of the day, Amazon wants to make money, right, so that winter coat that became number one. It's not number one necessarily because of new algorithm, because it would not be number one unless that is one of the best converting ones, because that's what gives Amazon the best chance to make money. But I think where the difference here is, or what's something that's quote unquote new, is it gives people more at bats. Like maybe I never. Even if I didn't have winter coat in my title, it might've been almost impossible for me to get on page one. But now Amazon is all right, let's just throw it here. Oh, shoot, look at that, how well it's converting. Let's go ahead and push it all the way to the top, whereas maybe you know, four years ago, you know, unless you were super optimized for a certain keyword, you would never even have the ad back. Like you would never even be able to get on page one, you know, outside of PPC or something. So to me that's like the difference, but something also. Again, I keep saying I don't want to be controversial, but it's going to be because there's a lot of people I respect in the industry who have been talking a lot about things that and I agree mostly with them. But I completely disagree when they say things like, oh, tools like maybe Helium 10, if they don’t change it’s going to be out of date. To me, I cannot see a world where the traditional forms of keyword research, are going to be not as important In the future, if Amazon is super intuitive, of course that's going to evolve.   Bradley Sutton: But the main reason we do keyword research is to get indexed and to also make our listing. Initially because the Amazon algorithm is based on buyer interaction, right. So once it's been out there for three, four weeks, they have so many data points and how people searched and what they clicked on and stuff that. Okay, now we can start doing advanced algorithms. But to even get it in the right pages you had to have done the regular keyword research to show Amazon. Because when you're brand new, day zero of your listing, Amazon has no idea what it is. It goes by the image, it goes by what you have in the title and how you have it. So my personal opinion is that no like. Of course, little things are going to change with keyword research here or there, but the main core of hey, let me find the most important keywords. That's not going to change because you have to tell Amazon on day one what is your product.   Leo: So, Bradley, I agree with you and I think there is one important detail that is the link between what you're saying and what this all semantic stuff is about. Right, the reason why that winter coat might be ranking number one, even though the winter coat is not in the title is attributes of the winter coat. You know Amazon right now, which before they probably weren't doing before Cosmo, right, they're looking at the attributes. So most likely they are ranking this one very well because it contains, uh, goose feathers, or they have 300 grams of goose feathers per square meter or whatever foot, and so they now are using these attributes to understand is this product warmer than this one? So, while the keyword research tools are always going to be needed, what I think is an opportunity for companies like Helium 10 is now provide additional information to the seller together with the main keywords. That helps also the listing be more relevant for Cosmo, using attributes related to those keywords. So, if the keyword is winter coat, what are the main attributes of coats? Right? What does a coat have to have? Waterproof, has to be warm. What kind of feeling? Is it polyester? Is it goose feathers? Also, is it long or short? Things like that are going to be the difference between the traditional keyword research tools and the semantic powered keyword research tools. If you guys give the sellers the same list of keywords and, by the way, here are some attributes related to these keywords, that will help Amazon Cosmo understand more about your product. I think that's the winner, in my opinion.   Bradley Sutton: Yeah, and in his presentation he talked a lot about different things you can do to be more semantically relevant and you know, using ChatGPT, so some really good features there. But that's important because you know, the it's not just, we're not just talking about Amazon SEO, it's also going to help you on Google and Bing and these, these other things and there's things that just the human mind we can't process, but a computer can process and tell you hey, this is, this is the keywords with the buyer intent and this is the most important, this is how you can relate yourself. So, regardless of how much of this Amazon develops, it's already important now for outside of Amazon indexing. Now, before we get into your last strategy, and I have just a couple of questions for you if people want to get more information, reach out to you, find out about your new project you're working on, or just reach out to you. How can they find you out there?   Leo: I have my own website right now. It's leosgovio.com, so you can reach out to me on through my website.   Bradley Sutton: And spell that, because it's not spelled exactly as you might think.   Leo: It's l-e-o and then s as in Sam, g as in George, o, v as in Victor, i o. Yeah, over there I have some information also about the semantic SEO stuff. So if you're more interested about this, I'd be happy to share my knowledge in depth, and LinkedIn is one of the platforms that I use the most.   Bradley Sutton: Excellent. All right Favorite Helium 10 tool?   Leo: Magnet   Bradley Sutton: If you were a head of product at Helium 10, what is one tool or function that you would bring that we do not have currently?   Leo: I believe I will combine what we just discussed about into one tool, and so it's an hybrid between a listing analyzer powered with recommendation based on the semantic stuff.   Bradley Sutton: And your 30 to 60 second tip can be about anything for sellers out there.   Leo: Leverage. Try to think about your current strategy when it comes to product inserts. To leverage it for UGC.   Bradley Sutton: All right guys. If you want more information, go to leosgovia.com. Check them out in the Helium 10 Elite, the Q2 workshop replay. But thank you, guys, so much for joining us and we'll definitely be reaching out to Leo next year to see what he's been up to.   Leo: Thanks, Bradley, I appreciate you having me again and, yeah, looking forward to the next one.   Bradley Sutton: Adios desde España.

We’re back with another episode of the Weekly Buzz with Helium 10’s Chief Brand Evangelist, Bradley Sutton. Every week, we cover the latest breaking news in the Amazon, Walmart, and E-commerce space, talk about Helium 10’s newest features, and provide a training tip for the week for serious sellers of any level. TikTok Shop Puts European Plans on Hold, Concentrates on US https://www.pymnts.com/news/social-commerce/2024/tiktok-shop-puts-european-plans-on-hold-concentrates-on-us/ Amazon Small Business Report https://sellingpartners.aboutamazon.com/impact The Amazon 2024 Force for Good application is now open! Amazon is searching for mission-driven selling partners who drive positive change in their community. https://sell.amazon.com/blog/force-for-good   Learn how Amazon uses AI to spot damaged products before they’re shipped to customers https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/innovation-at-amazon/amazon-ai-sustainability-carbon-footprint-product-defects But that’s not all! We’re also thrilled to announce Helium 10’s new Japanese version, designed to support Japanese users with native language navigation and subtitled tutorials. Plus, we've got a brand-new dashboard widget for tracking Amazon account metrics over time. Don't miss out on the hidden gems of our Chrome extension that could transform how you manage your Amazon business. And for those looking to optimize Amazon FBA fees, we share critical tips on monitoring package dimensions to save on unnecessary costs. Tune in as we unpack these game-changing updates and arm you with the tools to elevate your e-commerce game!   In this episode of the Weekly Buzz by Helium 10, Bradley covers: 00:52 - TikTok Shop Cancelled? 02:33 - Amazon Small Business Report 04:33 - Walmart Review Mapping 06:11 - Amazon Force For Good Awards 07:30 - Amazon Project PI 09:22 - Follow The AM/PM Podcast On LinkedIn 09:50 - Helium 10 New Feature Alerts 12:39 - Pro-Training Tip: Under The Radar Chrome Extensions Features Transcript   Bradley Sutton: TikTok shop plans canceled in some countries. A chance to win cash direct from Amazon. Walmart now allows you to tie reviews to orders. This and more on today's Weekly Buzz. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that is our Helium 10 Weekly Buzz, where we give you a rundown of all the goings on in the Amazon, Walmart and e-commerce world. We give you what's new inside of Helium 10 as far as new feature goes, and we also give you training tips of the week that'll give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Let's see what's buzzing. We got a few news articles today and then we got some cool training tips that I want to get to as well. So let's go ahead and hop right into the news Now   Bradley Sutton: The first news article of the day is from Payments.com and it's entitled TikTok Shop Puts European Plans on Hold. Concentrates on US. So it's full steam ahead here in the US. But if you remember, a few weeks ago on the Weekly Buzz, we had reported that, hey, a release in places like Europe and Mexico and Canada was imminent, but now it is backtracking. So it says here in this article that, hey, TikTok had planned to roll out shopping platforms Spain, Italy, Germany, France and Ireland as early as July, but they have put a pause on these expansion plans, along with intentions to bring the TikTok shop to Mexico and Brazil. Now this article says, hey, that this decision reflected ByteDance, which is TikTok's parent company, their strategy of focusing on the US market in order to avert a possible ban. Now, one of the other reasons that they did this it says that they were afraid that European expansion plans might run into potentially regulatory scrutiny, kind of like it has happened in the U? S. And so they are like, hey, we're not about to uh, deal with that at this time. So for those of you who are excited in Europe about being able to start TikTok shop, unfortunately it's a no-go Now if you are in another country. It's pretty difficult to sell on TikTok shop in the USA because you need a social security number. But if you're based in the USA, you want to learn more about how to sell on TikTok shop. Make sure to check out our workshop next week. We'll have signup information this weekend in your email where we give you a detailed training on getting set up with TikTok shop.   Bradley Sutton: Now, the next article here is actually from Amazon, and there's some interesting stats that you might not have known. Right, you know, like before, in the past, 50% of sales came from third-party sellers. You know how much it is now 60%. Do you know how many employees Amazon USA sellers are employing? 1.8 million. That's crazy. 1.8 million people are employed by Amazon sellers out there. How many sellers hit the seven figure mark for the first time last year? 10,000. So 10,000 sellers hit that seven figure mark for the first time last year. Are you one of them? Well, where is all of this data coming? This is from a report that Amazon put out called the 2023 Small Business Empowerment Report, so linked somewhere here in this. You know, above or below. Wherever you're watching this on, make sure to download this report, because it is super detailed and it's got a lot of cool information Like did you know that? The five most shopped categories from US for third-party sellers, what do you think? Number one health and personal care. Two, beauty. Three, home. Four, grocery and five, apparel. It also has this interesting map here we can click on any state and see some stats Like, for example, I live in California. There are 77,000 sellers in California who sold 715 million items. Now if I go to New York, there's 37,000 sellers but almost sold the same amount as the California sellers 721 million. I was like just picking random states here to see, hey, which one really doesn't have that many sellers. And I hit South Dakota. South Dakota only 600 Amazon sellers and they only sold 5 million products. So it's a pretty cool article and also this download is super detailed, with a whole bunch of information on what Amazon has done last year and some stats that maybe you never knew, that you wanted to know.   Bradley Sutton: Next article is actually not really an article, but it's an email I got from Walmart. Maybe some of you Walmart sellers got it and might make some Amazon sellers jealous. What have Amazon sellers always wanted to be able to see, as far as like, for example, negative reviews, I mean for years and years. This is what Amazon sellers asked for. Is what? Yes, it's like hey, can I see who is the one who left me this review, or can I see which order it was? And, as we know, that's not available on Amazon. In Amazon, you can, if you're a brand registered seller, contact people who have left you a negative review using the Amazon templates, but you still it's. You know, for the majority of orders you can't really tie the order or the review to an order. But check out this message from Walmart here. This says it's entitled Ratings and Reviews. This brand new dashboard serves as a centralized hub for monitoring and managing customer reviews. So it's a new review dashboard, it says. Now you can connect reviews to specific orders and pinpoint the products behind negative or positive feedback. This streamlined approach makes it easier to resolve issues with fulfillment, listing, quality or customer service. So if you guys didn't get this email, go check your dashboard in your seller center in Walmart and see if you can start mapping those reviews, both positive and negative, to exact orders. And then, are you, you know, does Walmart allow you to contact those buyers? Again, I think this is something that Amazon sellers definitely wish we had. But now, Walmart sellers, you can now tie reviews directly to orders.   Bradley Sutton: Next article is actually a press release from Amazon. It's entitled Amazon 2024 Force for Good Applications is open, all right. So this is basically an award that you can possibly win be featured on Amazon Accelerate. You can win cash prizes. This is for, you know, those who are third party sellers who have you know good stories about. Hey, are you giving back to your community? Are you involved in charity? Are you doing something with the proceeds from your Amazon business? You know that is for your local, community or neighborhood. Last year, there were three individuals that won these prizes. We don't know exactly what they won, but they're also featured at Amazon Accelerate, so it's free to apply for this award. You only have until June 12th to apply for it, so check somewhere below. If you're watching this on YouTube or listening to this podcast on a podcast player, we should have the link there or you can find it in sellercentral.com. Just look up Amazon Force for Good Application and, who knows, maybe we'll get to see you on stage at Amazon Accelerate and you'll be able to treat me for dinner because you just won a whole bunch of cash for winning this award from Amazon. Actually, yeah, if you do win and you found out because of this podcast, I expect a nice dinner at Amazon Accelerate. On you, all right, all right. Last article of the day, also about Amazon, and it's entitled Learn. On you All right, all right. Last article of the day, also about Amazon, and it's entitled learn how Amazon uses AI to spot damaged products before they're shipped to customers.   Bradley Sutton: Now, this, I think is kind of cool. First of all, this is something that Amazon is saying hey, we're actually doing this. You know there's a lot of speculation and a lot of change coming with AI and some things we see. You know, we see in seller central, where Amazon is allowing you to use AI sometimes to make your listings, which I don't think anybody's actually doing, um, because it's still not that great yet. Um, you know, there, there there's rumors about where Amazon search might be going with AI and the kind of roles that it's going to play. We don't know, but this is something that's a hundred percent confirmed. I mean Amazon is doing this. Um, but this is something that's 100% confirmed. I mean Amazon is doing this in certain warehouses. It's kind of interesting. There's like this tunnel now that Amazon is putting products through, and then you know this AI can, like, detect, like is the package broken or is it damaged or other things that this article talks about, and this it's called a project PI for private investigator. So I think this is, this is, overall, going to be good for us, for sellers. How many times have we lamented that we see a bad review and what we find out is that a customer got a product that was like return from another customer and it's in bad, it's in bad shape and we're like why in the world did Amazon even send this product, you know, in this shape, to the customer? Um, well, hopefully those kinds of situations are going to be decreased the more that Amazon uses this uh project PI here to kind of detect those things. So move in the right direction, I think, by Amazon are.   Bradley Sutton: One last thing, last thing A lot of you guys have LinkedIn and you follow Helium 10. Great, you also see you follow me on LinkedIn. Excellent, make sure you're following Helium 10 and myself. Just look up Bradley Sutton on LinkedIn, but now also add the AM PM podcast. All right, so just type in AM slash PM podcast on LinkedIn and you'll be able to get some snippets from the AM PM podcast that you otherwise might have missed out on in some little nuggets from Kevin King here and there. So again, LinkedIn. Follow three accounts myself, helium 10, and then now also follow AM slash PM podcast. All right, let's get into the new feature alerts for Helium 10. All right, now this first announcement I'm actually going to give in another language. You'll see why in a second.   Bradley Sutton: 皆さん、お知らせがあります。 Helium 10の日本語版の正式にロンシー。. Basically, I just said all right, guys got an announcement. Helium 10 now has been launched in Japanese. Now this is kind of big, because this is not Helium 10 works for Amazon Japan. No, helium 10 has worked in Amazon Japan for years, but a lot of our Japanese customers were like, hey, that's great that we can use it, but we want to actually see Helium 10 in Japanese. So now for all Japanese users, you can go to the very top of Helium 10 and change a language. Japanese users, you can go to the very top of Helium 10 and change a language. You've been able to do English, German, Spanish, Italian and Chinese, and now you can do Japanese, so that all of the menus inside of Helium 10 and you know the columns and everything else is in the Japanese language. Also, you're going to be able to see all of the learn button videos in Japanese with Japanese subtitles. So I hope everybody is able to get use of that.   Bradley Sutton: Now, the next new feature alert from Helium 10 is a new widget for your dashboard that allows you to view different metrics from your Amazon account over time. So let me show you how you're able to add that. So when you're on your dashboard, go to the very top right and where it says add a chart, hit that button and then select chart library. Now the very first preset that's going to come up is a brand new one. It's called performance over time. When you add that, it's going to show up here now at the bottom of your main Helium 10 dashboard, and now you can chart different things up to four different metrics over time.   Bradley Sutton: For example, right here I have tracked day by day gross revenue on the same chart as net profit expenses and my cost of goods sold. I can actually change one of these and start tracking advertising costs or units sold maybe page views, sessions, unit session percentage and now you can see how different key metrics for your business might interact with each other. And I can do this at a daily level, a weekly level, monthly level, quarter or even a yearly level to see these charts. So at the bottom here you can also see alerts. So if something happened, like for example here on this day it says I got a new one-star product review, maybe I want to see did that have an effect on my sales or did it have an effect on my sessions. I can actually chart that here and see, hey, when it started and if it had an effect on any of these metrics. So, again, start playing with this. Add this chart, customize it however you want, and then you will be able to get some insights into your product performance.   Bradley Sutton: All right, let's get now into our training tip of the week, and what I wanted to talk about is just a couple under the radar things that you can do with your Chrome extension that I bet 95% of you are not using. Here's the first one. All right, if you're on a product page, like maybe your product page or your competitor product page, I'd say do this to your product first. At the very top, there's this product summary widget that comes up right. Click the see more data right where it says all marketplaces. And now what this is going to do it's going to tell you this product, if it's yours or if it's your competitor's product. What other Amazon marketplaces is this product being sold in? Like? Look at this product. This product is being sold everywhere, from Amazon United Arab Emirates, amazon Saudi Arabia, amazon India. The only one where it's not being sold, it seems like, is Amazon Netherlands Right now If this was your product and you know you're only selling in US and Canada and all of a sudden you see active listings like this is showing, plus the stock of the inventory of the products, now you know what your product is. Your listing is being hijacked in other marketplaces and somebody else is selling your product, or maybe a facsimile of your product, and you might need to take action. So that's one thing that I think everybody should do with your own listing. Let's say you're on your own listing.   Bradley Sutton: Another under the radar thing is kind of a hidden technique. Scroll down here to right underneath, where the Helium 10 BSR widget is All right, and underneath here you're going to see it says calculators and you're going to see revenue calculator and sales estimator. For this one you have to click on Revenue Calculator and then click back on Sales Estimator. And when you do that, this new secret widget comes up and I like it because it has the item dimensions and the package dimensions right here. Now how is this beneficial? Like, for example, this collagen peptides? Obviously it's not something that you fold or expand. You know the product itself is going to be really similar to the size of the package, right, and sure enough. You see that here Helium 10 is telling you the item dimensions is 7.3 by 4.4 by 4.4 and the package dimensions 7.2 by 4 by 4.4. So obviously it's a little bit wrong. You know how can you have the package dimensions a little bit smaller than the item, but you'd be happy if you saw that here. Where is this very crucial? Well, what if you know that your package should be about the same size as your item, but your item dimension length is 7.3, but all of a sudden the package length is something like nine inches or 10 inches.   Bradley Sutton: Well, now you know that Amazon must have probably remeasured your product and you didn't know about it. And you could be wasting hundreds of dollars a week, if not more, on extra FBA fulfillment fees because Amazon has the wrong dimension. So this is kind of like a cool way to just use Helium 10 to see, hey, does my package dimensions make sense compared to my item dimensions? Or do I need to dive a little bit farther and then now go to Helium 10 Alerts to see, hey, when did Amazon change my package dimensions? I need to get some money back from Amazon. So there's a couple under the radar things you know everybody always talks about Cerebro, Magnet, Black Box, Xray, but these are a couple of things here in the Chrome extension that I bet a lot of you weren't using, and I hope you can get some use from it. All right, guys, thank you very much for tuning in this week. Don't forget to tune in next Thursday to see what's buzzing.

Can a minor tweak to your Amazon listing images earn you an extra $40,000 a year? We uncover the incredible power of optimizing click-through rates and how even a 4% increase can transform your sales figures. Using split testing and tools like Helium 10 Audience, we guide you through the process of obtaining crucial market feedback to enhance your listings. From experimenting with main images and titles to leveraging Amazon's "Manage Your Experiments" feature, we leave no stone unturned in our quest to maximize your product's potential. What if you could figure out exactly which product image will capture consumers' attention before you even launch on Amazon? We dive into a fascinating case study involving a coffin shelf to reveal how audience testing can refine your images and help customers see the full value of what you offer. By investing in audience feedback, you can start with the best possible image, avoiding costly mistakes and boosting your chances of success right from the get-go. Ever wondered how psychological and demographic factors influence shopping decisions? We explore advanced listing optimization strategies and the importance of organic ranking during product launches. Through a real-time example with our Project X egg rack product, we illustrate how offline split tests can provide quick insights without risking revenue loss. Plus, discover the mechanics of A/B testing for product images, using Helium 10 Audience powered by PickFu to enhance your listings and drive your Amazon sales through the roof. Don't miss these game-changing tips and practical advice on making the most of your Amazon presence! In episode 567 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley discusses: 00:00 - Optimizing Amazon Listing's Click-Through Rate for Sales 01:08 - Split Testing Images for Amazon Success 09:22 - Amazon Listing A/B Testing Image Results 11:17 - Optimizing Product Images With Audience Testing 16:00 - Improve Your Product Launches With Helium 10 19:13 - Targeting Audience for Advertising Campaign 24:13 - Listing Optimization Strategies and Launch Tactics 26:18 - Importance of Helium 10 Audience Testing 30:34 - A/B Testing for Product Images 31:33 - Testing for Best-Selling Variation in Audience 34:30 - Utilizing Tools for Amazon Sellers Transcript Bradley Sutton: Did you know that improving your click-through rate from search results on a product even only 4% for a product that maybe only sells even on just 10 units a day could mean up to $40,000 of extra sales in a year? Today, I'm going to show you exactly how you can split test your listing images in order to achieve results like this. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Not sure on what main image you should choose from, or maybe you don't know whether buyers would be interested in your product at a certain price point. Perhaps you want feedback on your new brand or company logo. Get instant and detailed market feedback from actual Amazon Prime members by using Helium 10 Audience. Just enter in your poll or questions and, within a short period of time, 50 to 100 or even more Amazon buyers will give you detailed feedback on what resonates with them the most. For more information, go to h10.me/audience.   Bradley Sutton: All right, hello everybody, welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that is our monthly Ask Me Anything, where we do a training on a certain topic and then we open it up to all the members out there to go ahead and ask whatever questions you have about Helium 10 or Amazon that we can help you with. And today we're going to be talking about split testing images, both on Amazon, off Amazon, and we're going to do some live examples of this, and we're going to talk about why this is important and how it can help you. I think it's one of the most slept on things that a lot of Amazon sellers aren't doing.   Bradley Sutton: All right, let's get started here. Now let me just give some framework on why I think this is something that literally every Amazon private label seller should be doing. When we create a new listing right, we have in our own mind what might convert the best as far as images, as far as titles, things like this, and it's based on, you know, hopefully some solid research. You know, maybe we've checked out the competition, maybe we know this certain niche right, but the problem is sometimes we might be a little bit biased, or we might kind of like overvalue our own knowledge of a certain niche, and when we do that, we could be leaving money on the table. You know, let's just do some calculations, guys. Let's just say that you know you want a certain click-through rate from the search results.   Bradley Sutton: Let's just talk about main image, right now. Let's just say that your conversion rate, once people actually get to your page, is 10%. Let's just say it's 10%. All right, 10% of the people who click on your product they're going to convert. Now, if your click-through rate is also, let's just say 10%, right, that means that on a certain keyword page or just overall, let's just talk about it overall let's just say you know you're getting like a thousand impressions, right? You know a thousand people see your product and if you have a 10% click-through rate on it I'm not just talking about PPC, just in general I'm doing some general numbers here that means a hundred people click on your product. If it's 10% your click-through rate and then if your conversion rate is 10%, how many people buy your product? 10. All right, so 10 out of 1,000. So let's say your product is a coffin shelf, that's $30. With these numbers. Right, that means you're doing every day about $300 worth of orders. Okay, $300 worth of orders over the course of a year, that's about a hundred thousand dollars. So you've got a six figure product, a hundred thousand dollars.   Bradley Sutton: Now let's just pretend that nothing else changes except your click-through rate. That means that the more the people see it in the search results, then the more they're going to click on it. What if we could bring your click-through rate from 10%, not even 5%. Let's bring it from 10 to 14. So that's a 4% increase. All right, 4% increase. So that means if, instead of 100 people a day clicking on your product, how many is that going to be? So we take 100, or we take 1000 and multiply that by 0.14. That means that 140 people are going to see your product. And if you still have the conversion rate of 10%, how many people are buying that per day? That's now 14 people who are buying that a day. So we take that 14, Times it by what's the retail price? $30. That's $420 a day you are doing on your product. We times that by 365. Now you have gone from a product that does just over $100,000 a year $109,000.   Bradley Sutton: Now you've got a product that is getting $153,000 per year. You just increased by over $40,000 and you did not even change your conversion rate. You only changed the amount, your click-through rate, the amount of people who see your product in the search results and click through it, and not even by 5%, a 4% increase. Okay, Now, that's what I'm talking about here. So this is why I think this is a very important topic, and I'm just only talking about one thing you know what are the things that influence click-through rates. You know it could be your price point, it could be the way you have your title set up. It could be your main image, which is what I was talking about. So, this is why it's so important to make sure that, at the very least, you start split testing different things of your listing. All right, now Amazon has a live split tester and we're going to talk about that. First, how many people use, you know, manage your experiments. Those of you who have, who have brand registry. All right, let me show you how to do that, and then I'm going to talk about in what situations I use it, but then also the potential drawbacks of using this.   Bradley Sutton: This is in Seller Central, in the how Cool Is that? Project X account. The part that you can do split testing for free if you have brand registry is called manage your experiments. So you click on brands and then you click on manage experiments and what this does is it allows you to do live split testing of new things. All right. So, the kind of things that I can split test is my A+ content, I can do my Bullet Points, Product Images, Product Description, Product Title, A+ Brand Story, or I can do Multi-Attribute. All right, we're just going to keep it real simple and mainly talk about main image, because in my opinion that's one of the biggest things that could really make an impact on your either click through rate or conversion rate. All right. So I did a few of these recently, all right, one of them is going right now, all right.   Bradley Sutton: So this is a product I had called a bat bath mat, all right, and I had two different main images I was split testing. Let me show you the actual content. One was an old, like computer generated image I had and one was a newer one that AMZ one step did, all right, so you can see very similar images. Those of you watching this online, I can see. You can see it's very similar images, but just different angles, all right. And so it's like hey, I wanted to split, test this in the search results and take a look at this is ongoing. This is literally going right now. That's why it hasn't gone through yet and you can see that one of them, I sold 24 units and the other one 18 units. All right, one of them, 11 units sold from search. The other one, 4 units from search. Okay, one of them has a 0.07 conversion rate. One of them has a 0.05.   Bradley Sutton: All right, so it looks like version A, which is what I have, is going to win. Okay, so that's one that's literally going right now. Here's the other one we're going to be going over today is the coffin shelf, all right. So here is this one and it completed. Okay. Now look at this one here, this one actually, I started around the same time, but look at this one. This one had a 0.1 version at a 0.04 conversion rate and the other one had a 0.005 conversion rate. That option A sold nine units over this very short period of time, and the other one only one unit. So this one already stopped because Amazon's like, oh my goodness, this is like night and day. This is going to be the good one compared to what I was showing. All right, so this one shows good information. But here's the thing. Let's just say that, on this live split test that I was doing with Manager Experiments, this one was it was almost like a 10X better one image over the other. But how Amazon is doing this is it is showing this product with the different images and search results like half of the day showing one, like half of the day showing the other.   Bradley Sutton: So the problem with doing this live split test if it's a brand new listing especially is that, by definition, sometimes half the time you are showing an unoptimized image. What if, during this time, I was showing just the good image? I would have maybe, in this situation, almost doubled my sales, if not more, because I was wasting half of the day showing an image that was not well converting. Ok, now I think there's a time and place to do manager experience, especially some with some of the nuances of your bullet points, A+ content or more mature listings. But when you are trying to, you know rank or you've got a brand new product, you can understand maybe a little bit why it's probably not good to just go ahead and launch a product and then do a manager experiments from the get go, because you don't want to be, by definition, screwing your listing 50% of the day, if that makes sense, all right.   Bradley Sutton: So let me show you what I think that everybody should be doing and I've been doing this for years is using a service called PickFu and inside of Helium 10, it's called Helium 10 Audience, and before I even launched my listing, I am doing this research, all right. So let me just show you. I did the exact same test yesterday and we're going to do a couple of tests together. Let me show you what I did yesterday or last night in Helium 10 audience. I set up a poll and I told the customers hey, you are searching for a coffin shelf. This coffin shelf includes a gift box and spooky accessories. If you saw the following 3 images in the search results for a product, which would make you want to click it the most, and do you see the one that won by overwhelming amount, a score of 56 to 22 to 22, this one that won in the manager experiments.   Bradley Sutton: Now, let's just pretend that this was a brand-new product release. I mean, this is not a brand-new product release. This is the Helium 10 coffin shelf that's been out there. But I came to the exact same conclusion using my test audience, and so I could have started from day one with the right image without having to have 50% of the time a bad image showing up because it's a live listing. So this is the beauty about using Helium 10 Audience that I think everybody like literally every single product launch. You should be running this. Now granted, you know some of you may have, you know, be launching, like you know, 20 products at a time. I was just talking to my friend, a Helium 10 Elite member, Yizhak, and he was launching some leggings and you know, when he launches leggings, he's got like three different kinds of variations. Launching some leggings and you know, when he launches leggings, he's got like three different kinds of variations. So every single group has, you know, like 100 variations because it's three different kinds. He's got size and inseam and color and then each of those has like eight combinations, right. So I'm not saying, oh yeah, Yizhak should have done 100 Pickfu or Helium 10 Audience tests, that that's not very economical or feasible, but at least you want to check it once.   Bradley Sutton: For the main, you know image results, right? So the beauty about this is it's not just, oh, random people are voting on what image they think is the best to be able to get money. The people who are doing the Helium 10 Audience, you know they actually get paid. That's why each time we do this, it costs money between 50 and $60 or so because each of the people who are responding are getting paid to give their responses. And to give their response, they have to give you information, and you don't have that in the manager experiments in Amazon. So, for example, some of the people who picked option A, which is the one that won you can read here what they're saying. This one person says hey, this image shows me all of the accessories and multiple angles of the box. Another person says option A shows the coffin both open and closed, as well as clearly showing what the accessories look like. Now, this is important. This is important, I never would have thought about this. Did you guys catch this? They think that this tells me something right here the fact that two people said multiple angles of the coffin. Let's go back to the image. This is not multiple angles of the coffin.   Bradley Sutton: All right, these are two products that are included in the product. One is a coffin shelf and one is a coffin shaped box. So, right away, this is not something that I'm just going to go and say oh, this image one, right? Because now, all of a sudden, my thought process has changed. I thought that this image is going to clearly show that a gift box is included and it's two separate products. But no, here are two people who just said that they think it's the same product, but just showing open and close in different angles. So now I know I might need to go back and figure out something to make it more obvious that, no, you're getting two products for the price of one. This coffin box is a gift box that's separate from the regular coffin. Let's keep reading. I literally haven't looked at these until this second. Here's another person. I find A more appropriate. It has an all-around preview of the product. Okay's another person I find a more appropriate. It has an all around preview of the product. Okay, another person says I like to see the two trinkets at the bottom right of the image. That was important to me because I wanted to make it clear that people who order our coffin shelf they get, like this LED candle plus something else.   Bradley Sutton: So, I'm going to keep reading this and see how many people are saying that they think that this is just showing a different angle. So, you see how it's different levels. All right, it's not just a matter of oh, which image is best. But now I might have to go back to the drawing board and say how do I make sure that people understand that they actually get two products in one? And then I would. I would go ahead and try to make a new image and then run it again versus this one, versus the other images. So sometimes I run Helium 10 audience maybe three times on a certain, a certain product. Okay, I hope you guys understand the value of this Number one. The first value is before I even launch a product, I can make sure that from day one I am launching with the most optimized image. The other option I could have done is even taking it a step further is Photoshop this into like Amazon search results and actually show the title and maybe show a couple of competitors. This is why I run Helium 10 Audience, sometimes 2,3 times. Yeah, it cost me like 200 bucks to do it. I mean I was using this since it was PickFu, since it wasn't in Helium 10, but it was worth it to me, the kind of insight I get.   Bradley Sutton: So number one is hey, am I running the most optimized search result image or experience? I guess, if you can consider the title also in the price? And then, secondly, am I completely overlooking something like I just did here, where I thought it was very clear that people are getting 2 different products here in the same package, but some people thought it was just a different angle of one product? Okay, we are going to run this live, a brand new one, and it just has two options, and it's a brand-new product launch that I'm doing. So let's go ahead and run this live together. I'm going to go to Helium 10 Audience and I have 2 images that are very, very similar. Okay, very, very similar, and it's a product I'm going to launch today or tomorrow on Amazon. So here's what we do. We go to tools in Helium 10. Under listing optimization, we hit audience and then I'm going to hit create new poll. All right, and I could do use poll builder or build from scratch. I'm going to go ahead and use the poll builder and we are going to do. You can see all the different things that we can test here A+ content, a general idea, logo, infographics or secondary image, product listing, product title, a video, a voiceover, even something about a website. All of these things we can do. I'm going to do product images, which is main image, right here.   Bradley Sutton: Okay, do I'm going to do product images, which is main image, right here? Okay, now I'm going to write my question. So let's go ahead and write. A question is, you are searching on amazon for a stackable egg rack? Which of these main image options would make you want to click on the product more? I can probably have made this better, but we're going to do this live, all right, let's go to the next step. All right, what are my two options? Let's go ahead and add these. See, very similar, but again, I want every little bit counts. Remember, I just showed you guys that having a difference of even just 4% for my click-through rate could mean $50,000 a year, almost all right. So you can see there's two different images here. One has a full rack of eggs and one only has half of them, and it's a slightly different angle. Let's go ahead and see the next step.   Bradley Sutton: I can pick the audience, all right. So I could just go general audience first, available respondents. I might just go ahead and do that now. Or I can choose a custom audience where I'm like hey, I want men, I want women, I want dog owners, I want people who exercise four times a week. There's a billion different options here. The one that I usually pick is Amazon Prime subscribers. All right, that's what I'm looking for. I could pick an age range, right, in this case. I want this to run super fast, because the more I segment it like this, it takes longer. I'm just going to hit general audience because this product is general. You know, like men like it, it all ages. But like if I was doing a pet grooming product and it's specifically for dogs, you better believe I'm going in there and I am going in and choosing, you know, like dog owners or something like that, or if I have a product that's specifically for men or for women of a certain age group. I'm going to go in there and make sure that the people who are going to vote on this are exactly my target market. I'm only going to choose 50 people for the audience. I can find out, you know, behavioral habits or personal traits of the people who are responding here if I wanted. I'm just using the free option here. Next, step 50. Let's just go with this.   Bradley Sutton: All right. Now again, is this the best way to do it? No, the best way is probably to also show my competitors you know image, okay, and maybe even show it in the search results. I'm doing something simple, just so you can see how this works. All right, let's go ahead and proceed to checkout. Boom, okay, it is working now. All right. So, this one is going to be in progress. We're going to poll it up right here and we're going to keep going back to this. This is live. It's literally going out to a whole bunch of people right now. We're going to go back and check that. What situations would you want to use this, compared to when you would want to use the Amazon manage your experiments. Well, if I haven't launched my product, 10 out of 10, I am doing this, I mean literally 100% of the time that I launch a product I'm running a Helium 10 Audience on some of my main aspects right, because, remember, I don't want to start off with potentially an unoptimized or not the best option for my image or title. Right from day 1, especially during the honeymoon period, I'm trying to get the best click-through rate possible and the best conversion rate.   Bradley Sutton: Now, sometimes, if I'm just testing something else and I don't, I think I'm doing pretty well and there's nothing I'm going to do. That's going to be a big change. Well, yeah, I'll go ahead and run manager experiments, because it's free, right on an exact listing. And actually, when you run manager experiments, you can get additional details on what's going on, as you saw from what Amazon was showing, right? Let me just show you again what are the kind of things that you can see. You know you can see what your conversion rate is. You can see how many units are sold from search, how many sales from search. You can see the exact sample size, et cetera, et cetera. So in that situation, if I'm like, hey, I've got a pretty optimized listing. I've already run my Helium 10 Audience before and I just want to tweak something that I don't think is going to make a big difference.   Bradley Sutton: Well, yeah, I'll go ahead and use the manager experiments, but if you have not tested your main image on a brand-new listing, you haven't launched yet. 100% guys, I do not launch any product without having run this, and so if you are out there and you're launching products and you are not split testing your image first, or split testing perhaps your price point or how the product might show up in the search results, I strongly believe you could be leaving money on the table. I mean, some people can change your click-through rate by up to 10%. Even if you change it 1%, 1% guys, on that one that I was showing you, that would sell what did I say? Like 10 units a day only. If I was only selling 10 coffin shelves a day and if I just change my click-through rate by 1%, we're still talking thousands of dollars difference per year I'm getting by increasing my click-through rate just 1%. So is that worth a $50 Helium 10 audience? Well, you better believe. That's why I do it for every single one of my listings.   Bradley Sutton: Any questions so far with this concept of like split, testing your images before you launch. Kan says can you show me please how to navigate to the experiment page in Helium 10? Yeah, absolutely, let me show you really quick. So where this is you click your main menu in Helium 10 at the top left where it says tools and under listing optimization. And, by the way, everybody has this option. This is not something that's only Diamond, because it's a pay-per-use, so everybody has access to it. You click under listing optimization. It's Audience. All right, there's. Oh, my goodness, look at this, guys. I just started this like what? 5 minutes ago, not even 5 minutes ago. What am I saying? Like 3 minutes ago, and I've already got 18 results. And do you remember? I said you guys were kind of split down the middle between option A and option B. Well, take a look here. We've got now 10 to 9, so it's very similar with what you guys had thought, except it's slight chance to option A.   Bradley Sutton: All right, so what are, what are some of the things that people are saying all right, one person here says I'm more likely to click on A, the left one, because this is full of eggs, which makes me think that'll hold a lot more likely to click on A, the left one, because this is full of eggs, which makes me think that'll hold a lot more, even though I know they hold the same amount. It feels like it can store and organize more. It's also more visually appealing to see the eggs neat and orderly like this instead of the other image, so it makes me, you see, like that's something I didn't even think about. You see this other one where it's like you know, somebody with like ADD or something like might be looking at this and like, hey, why do people just have random holes in this egg rack used? And it's not all full. It's like it's just a psychological thing. All right, so I see, always when I run this guys, I always have new things that I didn't think about. Look at this in the last one minute that I was talking, seven more people already responded.   Bradley Sutton: Let's go ahead and load those seven. We are still at almost half each here. Wow, that's crazy. Right on the line of what people want more. I could see hey, what's the age range of the people who are responding right now, it looks like 58% of younger people are choosing B, but of the older age range, 45 and up, 66% want option A. So there's something right there. All of a sudden, I have some insight. Well, if my target market is older people, I might go ahead and favor option A regardless of the score here, because that's who likes my product more. So that's the kind of level that you can go in, all right.   Bradley Sutton: So, your takeaway, guys, is if you're in the midst of launching a product, don't ever launch a product without running Helium 10 Audience. Okay, this is how important I think it is. You might think you have the best main image or the best title, but really make sure you have some solid proof before doing it. Now, if you already have a listing active, you still if you never split test anything and it's something big like the main image it might be still better to run Helium 10 audience just so that you can get instant results within like a day, of which one might be better, and then immediately change it if you need to. Because remember, if you run manager experiments in Amazon, it might take 30 days to get a. You know enough results and in those 30 days 15 of the days, half of the day, half of the month you are running an image or a title or whatever. That is not exactly that. That is not optimized, and so you know you can just kind of understand that you might be leaving hundreds of dollars on the table half the month if you're running something, a live split test like that. So that's why I always like running my split test immediately in one day and offline.   Bradley Sutton: All right. Did you say that when you do an A-B test on Amazon, they automatically convert the listing to use the best image they tested? If you choose that. So that is an option on Amazon where you can say automatic it's called, automatically publish the winning result or something like that it's called, and you just check that if you want it to automatically do it, or you just say you uncheck that and then you just look at the results and then you decide which one you want to go with. You have both of those options on Amazon. All right, we already have. The vote is finished for the egg rack pictures, and the one with all of the egg racks won with a score of 52 to 48. So this is not like a very clear cut winner here, but you know, like the other one, the coffin shelf one which had a score of like 50 to 20 to 20. But now at least I have a little bit more confidence to go with this image that has all of them, and then I'm going to start reading these comments here to see if I get more information. Look, it's 50 people respond in like what? 10, 15 minutes here and now I have all this data to go through to really make my decision when I launch this later today.   Bradley Sutton: Matter of fact, as soon as I get off this call, I'm probably going to do it. What am I? Which image am I going to use? And is there something I didn't consider. Like remember what happened on the coffin shelf? I realized that people think that it's the same. It's the same image, just a different angle. So I'm going to definitely read this once I'm done with the call. Ali says using launch strategies like the Maldives honeymoon, when do you really start focusing on actual profit and long-term viability of the product? What's the perfect balance? So all I think about during the launch strategy is getting to page one organically. I'm not concerned about profit. Now, I usually can't, you know if I'm not launching a super competitive niche. I can usually get to page one within a week and then at that point I start maybe rate if I got, if I started getting my Vine reviews or other reviews, I might start raising the price up and take my foot off the gas. But I'm usually going really hard and heavy. Even if I get to the top of page one for 10 full days, even if I got to the top of page one after only 2 or 3 days, which happens sometimes in my launches.   Bradley Sutton: All right. So I try to go really hard and heavy at least 10, 10 days to help me stick my landing more, and then at that point it's a matter of all right now do I start to try and rank organically for my secondary set of keywords and then I just do it all over again. I still go really hard and heavy and losing money. Now if after 30 days of launch and losing money and putting a lot of money in PPC, I'm not getting the conversions I need organically or maybe I'm getting bad reviews, I have to. I have to like, kind of like, take a step back and look at what am I really doing Right? What am I doing wrong? Why am I not sticking my landing? Why are people not converting? Or why is my listing, not converting even though I'm at page one, all right. So these are things that you have to start considering, you know, after 30 days or more of your launch. Great question by Alex says how would you do your A-B test for your image against competitor images on Amazon search result pages?   Bradley Sutton: All right, so what I would do? Let's just say I was doing this large coffin shelf. Well, I'm not going to take a picture of the Helium 10 widget up here, right, I might take a screenshot. I would have to take away this previously viewed of this whole image right here, from the top of the image all the way down to the price, potentially right. And then I would make that an actual image, right? And then I would go ahead and choose a couple of the main competitors and take that same spot. And then you say, hey, you searched for large coffin shelf and these were the 4bmain search results you saw at the top of the page. Which one would you select and why? And always, I'm going to get comments on not just the image. Sure, I'll get comments on the image. But then some people are going to comment on the price, some people are going to comment on the reviews and the star rating. And then now you can understand how people kind of like navigate the search results a little bit more by using the Helium 10 Audience there.   Bradley Sutton: Joan says a little bit more by using the Helium 10 Audience, what do you test show if you have six variations? Well, you want to pick which one is the best-selling, right, because that's probably what's going to be in the search results. So, for example, for coffin shelves, I've got three variations, right. I've got a black one, I've got a purple one and a pink one. I do not test the purple and pink ones why? I know even before day one of when I launched my coffin shelf, the black one is the one that sells the best for everybody else and it's the one that shows up in the search results right. Now if I was doing some super, super niche tests where I was like, hey, I just want to test my pink coffin shelf versus other pink coffin shelf, sure I could do it, but in this situation I'm only going to test the black coffin shelf because I know that is the one that sells like five to one over the other ones, and that's the one that is the one that shows up in search results for everybody's listings.   Bradley Sutton: Kim says would you also recommend doing A-B tests on infographic images or is it more useful, important for the main image? All right, this is a great question. And then Kim says essentially have you found your conversion improved by testing infographics? Yes, okay. So remember I said I was only talking about one thing today, which is improving your click-through rate of the actual images. And remember I said at the beginning hey, we're going to assume that your conversion rate is going to stay the same and I showed how much your sales could increase just by improving your click-through rate from the search results. But you can take the opposite. Let's say you already have a fully, fully optimized main image and price point and title and your click-through rate is not going to improve. Well, what's the other thing you can improve? You can improve your conversion rate. It's the same exact thing almost. I mean not as much of a scale as the click-through rate, but if you can improve your conversion rate by 3%, right, that means if you get 100 clicks a day, you get three more orders if you improve your conversion rate by three.   Bradley Sutton: So it's the same thing. So maybe, if you think the infographics can make a difference if it's not optimized. Absolutely, that should be something that you can test. All right, I always want to start with the thing that moves the needle the most and that's the click-through rate. Because, remember, if I improve 3% click-through rate on a thousand impressions, that's a big difference compared to changing the conversion rate by three, right. You know, on something that only gets 100. So you want to go ahead and split test your A+ content. Split test the things that are inside of your listing, your bullet points, like I've done that before. I show screenshot of bullet points and then Photoshop in other bullet points and then see what people think. Absolutely. All right, guys. Hope you guys enjoyed this episode. We're going to go ahead and shut it down soon. We did a live test of Helium 10 Audience. I showed you how to use manager experiments in Amazon.   Bradley Sutton: I really hope I got through to you, because I'm looking at numbers of how many people use Helium 10 audience or how many people are using PickFu, and it should be 100% of private label sellers Literally should be, but it's not anywhere close to that or what people are using. So if you don't have Helium 10, use PickFu. If you've got Helium 10, you've already got it right there in your Helium 10 Audience tool. Make sure to do that If you've never run it. Go to your number one selling product and get some variations of the image you know based on what else is selling, or compare your image to your competitors and get some insight, guys into how your target audience is interacting with your images and price and title in the search results. And if you're launching a new product anytime soon, always have your graphic designer give you three or four options of main images and then split test that first before launching your product. So hope you guys found this beneficial. Thank you guys for joining and we'll be back next month for another. Ask Me Anything, but if you're a Serious Sellers Club member or Helium 10 Elite member, we'll see you either next week or the week after, since we do this every single week. Thank you guys very much and enjoy the rest of your day or weekend. Bye-bye now.

Join us on our latest journey through the innovative world of AI-assisted Amazon selling! We kick off with the transformative capabilities of Helium 10’s Listing Builder tool. Listen in as Bradley guides you through the intricacies of crafting the ultimate Amazon listing, utilizing cutting-edge tools with the power of AI to enhance searchability and PPC effectiveness. We also unravel the secrets behind the Listing Quality Score, ensuring you leave with the knowledge to make your product stand out in the Amazon marketplace. Discover the future of e-commerce imagery with our dive into AI image generators, perfect for your lifestyle main images, Amazon Post, and all A+ content formats. Bradley also shares his personal experience in creating stunning visuals, emphasizing the prompt-writing process to achieve images that could even eclipse the originals. In this conversation, the power of keyword optimization comes to life as we import vital search terms into Listing Builder, setting the stage for an Amazon algorithm-friendly listing. Whether you're a seasoned seller or new to the game, you'll gain invaluable insights on making your product shine. In our final chapters, we tackle the craft of creating and optimizing Amazon listings with the assistance of AI. Bradley walks you through the process, from studying competitor listings to tailoring the tone of your product description. The strategic use of keywords is front and center, as we focus on targeting specific audiences and enhancing product visibility. We wrap up with a look at how to optimize listings against competitors and discuss the advantages of syncing listings directly to Amazon. With these strategies at your disposal, you're well on your way to mastering the art of Amazon listing optimization. In episode 566 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley talks about: 00:00 - Mastering Helium 10's Amazon Listing Builder With AI 03:39 - Optimizing Keywords With Listing Builder 07:52 - AI Image Generator and Listing Creation 09:53 - Generating and Editing Amazon Listing Images 13:35 - Optimizing Keywords and Competitor Analysis 14:43 - Creating Amazon Listings With AI 21:22 - Optimizing Keywords in Listing Creation 25:11 - Understanding Amazon Keyword SEO Score 33:10 - Optimizing Amazon Listings With Listing Builder 33:41 - YouTube Keywords Analysis for Listing Optimization 40:38 - Creating Amazon Posts Efficiently with AI ► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast ► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension ► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup  (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life) ► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft ► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos Transcript Bradley Sutton: 10 strategies that's going to help you craft your best Amazon listing with the help of AI, as well as even image generation and more. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Hello everybody, welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that's a completely BS-free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And this is another one in our series of Seller Strategy Masterclasses where I go deep into one of the Helium 10’s tools that helps with a specific use case, and today we're going to be talking about Listing Builder. That's why I got my LB hat on right here. So we're going to be talking about everything from how to check the SEO score, about how optimized your listing is to the Amazon algorithm potentially, to how to generate images for Amazon posts, how to generate captions for Amazon posts, how to write a listing from scratch without even AI, how to use AI to write a listing in any language that you're trying to make for a new marketplace. How to import listings, how to export listings and sync them. We have a lot of strategies today. Hopefully, I don't have to split this up into two episodes. I don't even know how long this is going to take me, but this is going to be a lot of great information today that you're going to be needing in order to make your first or next listing on any Amazon marketplace that Helium 10 works on. So let's go ahead and hop into it. Bradley Sutton: Let's first talk about an introduction and overview to just Listing Builder tools so you can kind of get to know it and understand how to navigate in it. So, Listing Builder if this is your first time going into it, the way you can navigate there is through your list in under listing optimization in your menu and then hit the Listing Builder button. Now, if you've never had Listing Builder before, you're not going to have any listings here. I've got a few here because I've already obviously made some listings and done some test listings here in Project X. But this is the main dashboard when you sign in, where you're going to be able to view all of the listings that you are editing here in Listing Builder. And then there's different filters up here, like if you want to see, hey, which ones are the ones that are linked to Amazon listings, which are the ones that are synced to Amazon listings. We're going to talk about what that means later. Now one thing right off the bat is if I want to add a listing, I hit this button at the very top, add a listing. And here is where I can actually go directly to the image generation with AI tool. So there's going to be a specific training on how to use this. But if I just want to hop in and say, hey, I don't want to make a listing right now, but I want to be able to take one of my images and create something with AI, you're going to be able to do that. I can also create a listing from scratch or optimize an existing listing that I might have already. Bradley Sutton: Now, the core functionality of Listing Builder is just as the name sounds it's to build listings. So, in Listing Builder, this is a place where you can start writing your title, your bullet points, your description and even your backend generic keywords, and, if your listing has it, you can have subject matter here as well. Now, why even make a listing in Listing Builder as opposed to writing in Seller Central? Well, it's about the keywords. Obviously, Helium 10 is known for our keyword research tool like Cerebro, Magnet, etc. You've probably utilized it to get the best keywords for your product or niche. Well, what you're going to want to do is import all of those keywords to Listing Builder. I'm going to show you how to do that in a later strategy here. Now, by having all of your keywords here in Listing Builder, now you can make sure that you're using it in your listing. There's a line that comes through every time you use it. It even tells you how many times that you have used those keywords and also it shows you all the individual keywords that make up those phrases up here at the top. So again, this is so important because you could have the best keyword research in the world. But if you didn't put that keyword in your listing, are you going to be searchable for it? Are you going to be able to run PPC on that keyword? Probably not, because you're probably not even going to be indexed. Bradley Sutton: Now, some newer features of Listing Builder that we're going to talk about is listing quality score. There'll be a strategy about this, your keyword performance rank. You know I developed a formula over the course of like six to eight months where I launched tons and tons of listings and I was able to try and get as close as I could to the kind of way to optimize your listing that is most beneficial for the Amazon algorithm in ranking, and so we developed a formula so that this score will go ahead and reflect how optimized your listing is. So I'm going to show you, throughout these strategies, how to use that score to make sure that you've got the most optimized listing compared to your competitors. Now, if you have a diamond plan, you've got access to those listing scores, as well as also the ability to build your listing with AI. Bradley Sutton: All right, now, who might this AI feature before? It could be. Maybe you, like me. If I'm selling in Amazon Germany, I don't speak German. I can use Helium 10 to get all those German keywords. I don't even know what those keywords maybe mean. I can actually write a perfect sounding German listing with AI, even though I speak English, by writing English into Listing Builder and putting all the German keywords I want to rank for, and this Listing Builder will go ahead and use AI in order to write all my title, bullet points, et cetera, using those important keywords I want. Another use case might be well, maybe you're a native speaker of the language that you're trying to write a listing in, but you've got writer's block. That happens to me sometimes. Right, where I'm like man, where do I start? I want a different vibe, right? Well, in this Listing Builder AI tool, you put the description and everything, and then you can say, hey, I want this to be a humorous vibe or educational, or empathetic or inspirational, et cetera, and then this will go ahead and create your listing in your own language, but maybe you're not going to use it exactly, but at least it gets you on the right track and like, ooh, I like the way, I like where the direction this is going. Let me go ahead and hop in there and kind of like tweak it a little bit so you can do that for your listing, or even make a Amazon post captions as well. So a lot to kind of like, you know, tackle here in Listing Builder. We're going to have a total of nine, 10 strategies now that I'm going to show you how to do a lot of the things I just alluded to here in this video. So let's go ahead and hop into it. Bradley Sutton: How to create images for Amazon using AI. Why is this important? How can it make you money? Well, in the past, you know, our only option was to maybe take you, you know, rudimentary, kind of like ghetto looking images with our phone or something like that, or pay a lot of money if we had it, you know, for professional pictures. That's still what I do, actually, but not everybody has enough money to be able to invest in professional photography right off the bat, or maybe we did, but then now we're like, oh man, I have this other idea for an image, or I want to do this or that, right. Well, that's where AI can come in, because AI can help you create different images. Now there's a lot of different kinds of images that AI can help you with. Now our AI image generator. Let me show you what it can do. It can create main images for your listing. It can also create images in the format of Amazon Post, which is a different format than a main image. You can make A plus logo images, A plus image header images all the different A plus module types of images you're going to be able to create using this AI image generator. You also would be able to make images that are designed for best viewing on a mobile browser. Bradley Sutton: So what is the process for this? I actually pulled up a listing here of a competitor product. All right, this is a coffin shelf. That is not my coffin shelf, but I saw a couple of his images and I'm like you know what this very well could have been done, maybe with AI, or maybe he paid a lot of money for this picture. And so, like I'm like, is it possible for me to duplicate this image that this guy has of his coffin shelf on this wall? You know, for those listening to it on their phones, I'm trying to describe it here. It's just a picture of a coffin shelf on a gray wall. There's like a plant on the ground, um, some books on the table, et cetera. Right, so I just downloaded his main image of his coffin shelf and then I went ahead and started writing this prompt so, so this is the prompt I wrote. Now, what I could have done is I could have just, you know, chosen a theme here and a theme setting, but I went to go in and make a description, so I put here hey, the pictured shelf is hanging on a light gray wallpapered wall, includes subtle decorative elements such as a small plant, a few simple artwork on the surrounding wall, separately from the main image. All right, I have things such as the product scale. This is the size I want the product to look like in the image. I can have things like a void, what I don't want to see in the image. I can choose different engine models stability, ai or AWS, bedrock, titan. What is the AI style? I chose photographic. I could have chosen comic book, digital art, anime, analog film, 3d model, et cetera, and then basically let's go ahead and see what happens. You know I didn't put too many details here. Bradley Sutton: Let's hit, generate images. All right, here we go. This is what has shown up. I got four images it put. A couple of these are pretty decent. I mean, arguably, these images are maybe better than what this Amazon seller was using. You know, like this is not a good resolution that I'm looking at right here because I'm not zoomed in, but you know, I would almost say it's better than this image that this best-selling coffin shelf is using right now on their listing. So now, if I want to use it, I just go ahead and download this and I can go ahead and upload this to my listing. All my previous images are going to show up down here. This is just scratching the surface and maybe you guys are better at making prompts than me. You can even use ChatGPT to help you make a prompt to generate some higher quality images. But if you're looking to make, you know, take one image and make it in the format for A plus content or Amazon post, or change out backgrounds. You know, maybe you're doing a holiday theme, you know, for one of your listings and you want to put, like, some Christmas ornaments or some Halloween things or whatever. This is a way that you can just do it without having to like have a reshoot. So hope you enjoy using that feature. Bradley Sutton: How to import keywords into Listing Builder. Why is this important? How can it make you money? Well, this is pretty much the crux of using Listing Builder. Otherwise, you don't even need to use Listing Builder if you're just going to make your listing in Amazon Seller Central. But the whole point of Listing Builder is showing you, first of all, that you've used all of your main keywords and your secondary, supplementary keywords, your indexed for, and you've organized it in a way that is best for the Amazon algorithm. And that's what Listing Builder is going to help tell you. Where do these keywords come from, first of all? Okay, so that's a very good question, and you would hopefully have gotten your keywords from other tools, in Helium 10, Cerebro, for example, like let's just go ahead and say that I had done a search for bat-shaped bath mat and I had the 77 keywords as part of what I was going to target for my listing. Now you might have 100 keywords, you might have 150, you might have keywords that come from Google, you might have keywords that come from our other tools like Magnet or Blackbox. But let's just pretend that these list of 77 keywords is all we had. All right, I'm just going to go ahead and copy these to the clipboard. Bradley Sutton: And in Listing Builder. Now there's two places in Listing Builder where you can add it. You could just go ahead and add keywords here if you happen to get on this page, but I suggest doing it right here on the main first tab, which is add keywords for listing. I'm going to click on manually add keywords and all I have to do is paste all of the keywords right here. Then I hit the button add to bank and now all of those keywords are going to show up here on the right hand side. I'm going to see the search volume too. You might notice this CPS, that's competitor performance score. I haven't entered any competitors yet. That's why these are all blank. But this is now the list of all of my keywords, then it's all right here now on my main keyword bank, and what Helium 10 is doing here is it's splitting all of these keyword phrases there were 77 of them into one word, two words or three words, okay. So, for example, right now, by default, one word is chosen. So I see Gothic is a keyword that is in a lot of these phrases right here. We've got decor, we've got Batman, we've got witchy. Now I hit the two word roots. I can see home decor is something that is in some of these phrases. Three word, uh, three word roots. There's only one rugs for bedroom. That is appearing multiple times here in these phrases. But again, this is going to be the key because this is going to be your guide now, as far as hey, these were all the keywords that I found in my keyword research. I have to make sure that I get them into my listing. Uh, you know, the way the Amazon algorithm works is usually you're not going to be indexed for keywords that you do not have in your listing. All right, so again, import the keywords from wherever you did your research into Listing Builder, and then you're going to be ready to start making your listing. Bradley Sutton: How to import an existing listing into Listing Builder to edit. Why is this important? How can it make you money? Well, I've told you before that this is not just about creating new listings. You can also import your existing listing so you can start managing it in Listing Builder and making the updates inside and seeing how your SEO works. Another kind of strategy that I think is slept on is you can import your competitors listing into your Listing Builder. If you kind of want to see. Hey, how is their keyword density like where do they include certain keywords in their listing? Let me see how they have their SEO set up. Let me show you how you can do either of those. Right here in Listing Builder, I'm going to hit the button add a listing. All right now once I do that, I have three options create from scratch, optimize your listings or generate images with AI. Let me just show you what happens if I hit optimize your listing. It's going to be linked to my Amazon account. If you have already included your Amazon connected your Amazon account to Helium 10. And now I can just choose any one of my listings and it's going to go ahead and import it right here into Listing Builder. But, as I said before I can import anybody's listing. So, for example, here is a competitor bath mat out here. Maybe I want to see how they have their listing set up. All I have to do is copy the ASIN and then I hit create from scratch and then I choose the marketplace. So remember, I can go ahead and import a listing in Amazon USA, Germany, France, UK, Brazil, Belgium even didn't realize we had that India, Japan and more. This one is going to be from the USA. I'm going to go ahead and put the ASIN right here and then I'm going to hit start building. Bradley Sutton: Now, what Helium 10 is doing right now is it's importing the title, the bullet points and, if it's available, the description right into my own Listing Builder. So if I had a whole list of keywords now I'm going to be able to see hey, how do they have their listing all set up? Now, if you've got the diamond plan, you kind of don't need to do this, this kind of competitor checking, because we've got the competitor performance score that I'm going to talk about in a later strategy. But if you're just in the planning plan, you want to be able to have visibility with how your competitors have their SEO set up. This is the way to import their listing right into your Listing Builder and so, as you can see right here, I've got their product title, I've got their bullet points and no description, since they had A plus content. So, again, if you're getting started with your own listing ad connected from your own account so you can have a base here and just remember, Listing Builder is not just about making new listings. This is kind of like your hub where you can manage your existing listings so that later, when I show you how to sync them, it's going to be a lot easier as opposed to having to go back and forth to Seller Central copying and pasting. But even if you're not doing that, this is also another way that you can look at your competitors' SEO, with how they have the keywords placed and how many of the important keywords that you identified they have in their listing. Bradley Sutton: How to create an Amazon listing from scratch, with or without the help of AI. Now, why is this important? How can it make you money? I've said before that you know maybe you don't speak a certain language fluently that you're trying to write a listing. Well, you can get help from AI. Maybe you do speak the language fluently, but you have creative writer's block right that we all have sometimes. You might need AI to help get you started. Or maybe, hey, you speak a language just fine. You just need a place to be able to write your listing with the help of understanding that you are using all of the keywords. Well, this is what I'm going to show you how to do in less than five minutes here. Now, let's just say you're going to go ahead and write a listing with the help of AI. Now you would have hopefully already put which marketplace you're going to write the listing in and, based on that, it's going to know it has to make the listing in English, Japanese, Spanish, etc. You can write the description for the AI in any language you want your own native tongue. Now for this situation, all I'm doing is just writing a listing for the Amazon USA marketplace for that bat-shaped bath mat, and remember those 77 keywords I had found in a previous strategy. Well, I've got them all here in my keyword bank, and now what I did was I have 500 characters where I can put as many characteristics as possible. Bradley Sutton: Now you can see I only use 161 characters. This is not going to be my real listing. I'm going to use I'm just doing this for demonstration purposes but some of the characteristics I put as different phrases is like bat shaped bath rug extra thick, 32 inches by 20 inches thick, chenille, fiber machine washable, water absorbent, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The other thing I can put is the brand name, and then, where I want to put the brand name, I also have here the product name. That's what is going to show up at the beginning of the title, and then I have here what's called the tone. So we have some preset settings where maybe you have a listing where you want it to be formal, or maybe you want it to be casual or empathetic or inspirational. I chose humorous because you know, I think you need a little humor if you want a bat shaped bath mat, right? Um, I also have target audience, so I put just a couple things here, like men and women who like gothic decor or people who want to buy gifts for spooky decor lovers. There's also a section here for words and special characters to avoid. Bradley Sutton: Now, the first thing you're going to want to do is you're going to want to go ahead and make the product title. Now maybe I want to definitely include my most important keywords in my title. All right, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to edit these keywords that I'm definitely going to include in the title and choose them from my keyword bank. Now one thing you could do is just kind of like use find keywords that are nested within each other. I've talked about that in other episodes, but in this case I just chose two words. I'm like saying, hey AI, I want to have these in the title Bat Rug and Spooky Bathroom Decor. Then all I have to do is I hit this AI write it for me button and it's going to take all of this information up here that I had put in and then take a look at the keywords that I entered in. You know I had put those from Cerebro and it's going to go ahead and create a title. Now take a look right here. It made the title right here just in seconds. It says spooky bathroom decor bat rug, non-slip, water absorbent, 32 by 20 inch bat shaped bath mat with thick chenille fiber, machine washable, no creases. The perfect gift for Gothic decor enthusiasts, Manny's mysterious oddities. So, basically, it wrote a pretty decent title for me If I want to use it. Um, I can go ahead and hit use suggestion. And now look what happens. Now that I wrote this here, there is now going to be a line on the left-hand side through all of the individual keywords that I now have in my listing and it's also going to show me all the keyword phrases that I have if I have used them. So, for example, remember I said use bat rug. There's bat rug right there. Spooky bathroom decor. It's got a line through it because I used it right here in my listing. Bradley Sutton: Same thing with the bullet points. If I'm satisfied with the title, I'll just move on to the bullet points. Hit the button that says AI, right for me. And now I have five bullet points that it made. Some of these say bat shaped bat rug, perfect for goth bathroom, this unique bat man rug. And if I can hit use suggestion and look how many, it's trying to use up all of my keywords in my keyword bank, both individual and the phrases, as much as possible, and that's how I would write my listing. That's AI and how it can help. Now, if you've got the diamond plan, that's how I suggest starting your listing and then maybe just tweaking it to make sure you've used all your keywords. What if you only have the platinum plan? You still can use Listing Builder and just write it manually. You would use it the same way. So basically, you would start writing your listing manually, trying to make sure that you are using all of the keywords in your listing. Like, let's just pretend I was going to come up with this bullet point right here and I start writing this gothic rug is great for Halloween decor, something like that. Did you guys see what was happening here on the left hand side as I was writing this bullet point? Well, it started crossing out the words that I am using. By the way, if you are watching this on YouTube, you can see. If I put my mouse over some of these keywords, I can see what are the search results, the top 10 search results for that keyword. It kind of gives you an idea about, maybe, how relevant it is. If I want if that's annoying to you, I wanted to turn it off I just hit the settings button up here and I can turn this top 10 ranked products keywords off. Bradley Sutton: But anyways, I would just keep making my listing, trying to make sure I have all of the individual keywords and or phrases. Now, remember, you've got to know which are your most important keyword phrases. All right, usually you want to get at least 10, 15 in phrase form of your most important keywords and then all the rest of the words to be indexed for the phrases. You just have to have the individual words, and that's why that root keyword section is very valuable. You know, hey, I just got to get these individual words once in my listing to have a chance to be indexed for all of those other keywords. So here is another great technique of how you can completely make your listing, with or without the help of AI, using Listing Builder. Bradley Sutton: How to measure your listing's Amazon SEO score. Why is this important? How can it make you money? Well, if you are trying to make a listing, you don't want to just keyword stuff. Right, all fields in a listing also are not created equal. If you put a keyword in the title, it's worth more than if you put it in the description. If you have a main keyword phrase in phrase form, it's better than if you just have the individual keywords from that phrase just in random spots in your listing. There's so many things that kind of like drives relevancy for the Amazon algorithm. Now, nobody knows the exact formula of Amazon, and if anybody tries to say they do, they're full of baloney right. But you know me, what I did for over eight months was I tried to study the algorithm as much as possible you know, launching hundreds of like fake products just to be able to see the effects on the algorithm when you change keywords around and so I was able to come up with our data science team this formula that helps sellers understand the effects of placement in the listings. But again, this is not like some exact formula. I do not have special insight into the Amazon algorithm. I can only make this formula based on my observations, but it's definitely going to help you for sure. Bradley Sutton: Now let's go ahead and hop in with how you can actually use this. The first step, if you want to have a listing score, is you need to go down here to listing analysis and then hit keyword performance rank and once you get there, you are going to have this button that says add competitors. Now, once you get to the add competitors page, you are going to need to enter in all of your competitors, like right now I'm in a coffin shelf listing and it already gives me like suggestions of which ASINs I can pick. But I suggest putting your own ASINs right in here. I entered, I think, like seven or eight ASINs and then, once I do that, instantly you are going to get a full score for your listing. Now, the reason why you didn't have a score before was because it's using the competitor performance score and the search volume to be able to know what your score is. So, for example, right here, my keyword performance score is 181,011. And I can actually see what goes into it. Bradley Sutton: There's different ways that it calculates your keyword SEO score. Like, if I have it an exact match, one of the keywords for my list, it's going to give me a certain number of points If I have it a plural or singular match. What does that mean? That means, like, if the keyword is spider web shelf but then I put spider web shelves, it's still going to give me points, but not as much as if I put the exact keyword spider web shelf. If I have it in phrase match, that's a. The keyword is Gothic, coffin, spider web shelf. Well, you can see here in the title I've got Gothic and coffin together, but then spider web shelf is way at the end of the title, I still have all the keywords. So that's what's called a phrase match, where maybe a part of the phrase is together and then the other part of the phrase is in a separate part of the same section. Then I've got field broad match. That means I can have a full phrase but it's spread apart with no two keywords together in a field in your listing. And a field means the title, bullet points or description, right, and then I have listing broad match. That means maybe I have a three-word phrase and then you know, one keyword is in the title, one keyword is in the bullet points, one keyword is in the description. That's called field broad match. Bradley Sutton: So as you write your listing, this score is going to change. So, for example, here's a keyword coffin decor that it says I haven't used an exact phrase form. Let me go ahead and throw it in my bullet points. By the way, you can see, my score is 181,000. Let's go ahead and put just randomly coffin decor right here in that first spot and then, yeah, look, I got a line through coffin decor and my score now went up to 183,000. So first of all, that just shows you can manipulate this score. So, like you know, technically you could just throw keywords anywhere and get the highest score. I would like to hope that you understand that that's not the point of this tool is to just try and get a high score at all costs. You can't just keyword stuff. Nobody likes that. But that's just to show you how that scoring system works. Bradley Sutton: How to compare your listings Amazon SEO score to competitors? Why is this important? How can this make you money? Well, you can optimize your listing to get the highest score that you want to get. But at the end of the day, your goal should be to have a more optimized listing than your competitors. And if you can do that, theoretically speaking, interactions with your listing is going to help you more than your competitors. Like, if I have the keyword coffin shelf an exact phrase and I've got a coffin shelf and I have got it two, three times in my listing, Amazon knows I'm very relevant. Somebody buys my product after the search of that keyword. I'm theoretically going to get kind of like more bang for my buck with that purchase, as opposed to somebody who might be just indexed for that keyword and they've got coffin in their title and shelf somewhere in their bullet points, all right. So that's the value of this score is you're trying to make sure that you are well optimized for SEO, especially in comparison to your competitors. So how can you do that? Once you've entered in all of your competitors and you've optimized your score, you're going to want to check this keyword performance rank of your competitors and right here, as you can see, you can see that this coffin shelf I have is number one. I've got a score of 181,011, and the other listings on this page or that I imported, they all have less of a score than myself. Bradley Sutton: All right, I personally don't look too much at the title ranking and bullet points ranking. That doesn't affect things too much, but it's right here, just in case you want to see it. So again, check this frequently, because this is going to change based on your competitor listings and you want to make sure that you stay number one. If you want to, just if you're wondering, hey, did this get refreshed or not? You can just go in here, delete them from your competitors and then add them right back to make sure that it has the latest version of the listing, but use this especially against your main competitors, to make sure that you always have the best SEO score that you can in comparison to your competitors. Bradley Sutton: How to check your keyword performance for your Amazon listing. Why is this important and how can it make you money? Well, you might not be able to fully see the effect of how your listing optimization has affected that score. All right, I showed you before. You could just go ahead and put a keyword in. You can see your score move up and down. But maybe you want to dive a little bit deeper to really get into the nitty gritty of what is going on in that score scoring system. This is how you do it. If you've got the diamond plan, you've got access to this button up here called keyword performance. So just hit the open keyword performance and it's going to open this thing at the very bottom. And now this is how you can use this section. It's very, very powerful. Uh, first of all, on the right hand side, I've got this section called root keyword usage and performance and it has all of those 72 root keywords, those single keywords that make up all of those phrases, right here, and it's interesting because I can actually see, um, how many times these are used in my listing, like, for example, the root keyword sick coffin. I've got 16 times in my listing and I could see oh, it's four times in the title, it's six times in the bullet point. Now here's a really, really cool thing what, in which keywords do I have coffin in it? I can hit this filter button and now on the right hand side I can see all of the keyword phrases that has the word coffin in it and which ones I've used and which ones I haven't used, and it says I've got 49 phrases that have used the word coffin, right, and then so here's one of them coffin shelf. If I look down here I can see, first of all, how important is this keyword. Well, it has a competitor performance score of 10. What does that mean? That means that most of the top competitors are all ranking for that keyword. By the way, that's an important metric to be looking at to understand how important the keywords are. I can see title match exact phrase and also I have it as a field broad in the title. All right, so I have that keyword right there in the title. It says I've got it in exact phrase form in my bullet points and I've got it in exact phrase form in my description. So I've pretty much maxed out the points that I can get on this keyword coffin shelf. Bradley Sutton: Here to the right I can actually see some stats about that keyword. Like, should I be focused on it? Oh, wow, it's got 2,500 search volume, 20 estimated sales for a keyword. It's got a title density of 25. It's got a brand analytics data right here. So this is pretty cool in that it's going to give me a lot of data about this keyword. If I'm ranking for that keyword, that rank is going to show up right here on the right-hand side. Now, this is a listing that is not even active right now. That's why it's not showing any organic rank. Take this other keyword here. Let's just pretend for a minute that this keyword coffin knife holder is super important for this listing. Obviously not, but instantly. Just by looking at this in a second, I could have identified that. Wow, this important keyword I do not have in any phrase form or long tail form or any form at all anywhere in my listing. And if this was an important keyword, like if it has a very high competitive performance score, that's a hole in my listing. Bradley Sutton: Another way that I like to do this that actually helps me with PPC is, as I am making my broad campaigns in PPC, I want to see what are the root keywords that show up most in my listing. Remember I told you coffin has 49 keywords, or 49 keywords it's in. I probably am going to make a broad or phrase campaign, PPC for the word Coffin because it has so many long tail keywords. All right, maybe Gothic. All right, Gothic has 11 of them, so Gothic is another keyword that potentially I can go ahead and use in a broad match campaign. So, guys, this is really what's going to help you understand what is driving that score, because it's going to tell you what keywords you've used, how you've used it and where you use it in your listing. Did you use it in exact phrase form? Did you use it in the plural form? Is it just in field, broad form? And if you have important keywords that don't have a good placement in your listing, it's going to be super easy to visually see which keywords those are and what part of the listing that it doesn't even have anything in it, so that you can make sure that you can go ahead and edit your listing and get those important keywords activated. Bradley Sutton: How to analyze your listing's competitor comparison table. Why is this important? How can it make you money? Well, you know, we've been talking a lot about just the overall score of your listings. We talked about looking at the keyword performance of your own listing. Now this is the tool that's really going to bring it all together. It's called the Competitor Comparison and now, instantly, you're going to see which ones of your competitors are really well optimized for certain keywords and which ones that you are extremely lacking on. Take a look at how easy it is to use this. If you've got the diamond plan, you're going to be able to hit this button up here called open Competitor Comparison, and once you do that, it's going to open up this amazing and super detailed chart. For those of you watching this on YouTube, you're going to be able to see all of those keywords that you had identified that you wanted to be in your listing, right? I've got 111 keywords here and now I can instantly see, all right, the most important keyword, the one that has a 10 score here in my competitor performance score coffin shelf I can see how everybody has it in exact phrase form. These are all my competitors and I can see hey, everybody's got it, except one person in exact phrase form in their title, right, I can see that this coffin shelf large. On the other hand look at this not one person has it in exact phrase form in any part of their listing. So again, if this was an important keyword for me, what I'm going to be able to take from this is wow, I've got an opportunity. Then if I put coffin shelf large, it means that I'm going to be the only person in this niche to have prioritized this keyword and have my listing optimized for it. Bradley Sutton: Same thing down here. I can just easily see the keywords that nobody has in any phrase form in their listing, myself included. Like here's another one a spider web shelf. Obviously this is not irrelevant, that relevant of a keyword, right, but I can instantly have seen if it was that it's a big opportunity for me, because not one person. Not only do they have it in phrase form, they don't have it in broad form, in plural form or any other form in any part of the listing. So I can just go through and compare how I have my listing set up compared to these competitors. Bradley Sutton: So again, these aren't the old days of selling on Amazon, where all you need to do is hey, let me just throw in all my important keywords. But it's also about where you're placing your keywords and how your competition is placing their keywords. How are they indexed for certain keywords? Do they have keywords in exact phrase form? Do they have it in plural form? What do you have? These are all things in this new world of selling on Amazon that you have to be considering that maybe you didn't consider back in the old days. And having a tool like Listing Builder here, and especially with the diamond plan so you can get access to these advanced features, it's really going to help give you a leg up on the competition where, all of a sudden, your competitors will be like how in the world is this guy beating us on these keywords that we used to be getting sales from and beating them on? They don't realize that you've got this secret weapon of Listing Builder. Bradley Sutton: How to sync your listing to Amazon? Why is this important? How can it make you money? Do you need to use an outside tool to sync a listing to Amazon? No, you can just edit listings right from Seller Central. But tell me this how many of you before have tried to edit your listing in Seller Central and sometimes it just doesn't update and it might not update until you use a flat file sometimes. Or maybe you have to open up a whole bunch of cases to seller support. Well, interestingly enough, you know, the Helium 10 Listing Builder is not like guaranteed to update your listing, no matter what kind of garbage you put into it, and it's going to overwrite something on Amazon. It doesn't always work that way, but it actually has a higher contribution status than if you were to just hit edit listing in seller central. I've had situations where I tried to edit my title or bullet points in seller central and even after 48 hours nothing happened. But then I do it in Listing Builder and I hit sync and within 30 minutes that update has processed. So that's definitely one of the reasons why it's good to use Listing Builder. Bradley Sutton: The other reason is just because if you're making your listings in Listing Builder, you want this to be the source of truth, right, and not to have to remember wait, did I go to Seller Central and then copy and paste one by one the different fields? If you don't have the diamond plan at Helium 10, that's what you have to do and there's nothing wrong with that. I mean, our first tool before Listing Builder was called Scribbles and you could not sync the listings. You had to go into Seller Central and copy the title, copy the bullet points. There's nothing wrong with that. But obviously, if you have a one button push to Amazon, that is what you're going to want to use. So here's how you can use that. The first thing you have to make sure is that you’ve linked to one of yours in your Seller Central account. And the way you can make sure that if you did that is this button up here. It'll say link to Amazon. If you don't have it linked, mine is linked, I already linked it to a certain SKU. So all I have to do is hit this button, sync to Amazon and it's going to update whatever I have. Now, keep in mind, it's going to overwrite whatever is in your seller central, all right. So just make sure that you have everything filled out in the right way. Bradley Sutton: Now, sometimes there are certain things that Amazon does not allow you to update. Like, some listings have more than five bullet points, right, if you, if I, had six, seven, eight bullet points, it's only going to sink the first five. Another thing that sometimes doesn't sink over is the subject matter, because not all listings have the subject matter available to be written, but it does allow you to overwrite the generic keywords here as well. Now, how long does it take to update after you have hit the sync button? Could be as quick as 5-10 minutes. Sometimes it might take a day or so. It all depends on how Amazon works. So, everyone, if you have linked your product to Amazon, make sure that you are syncing your listings after you edit it in your account. Now, how you know if it has been synced or not is go back to your regular page that has all of your listings, your dashboard, and it's going to show in the status right here if it has synced or not or if there is an error. You'll also have that message. So again, everybody, make sure to sync your listings. You've got the diamond plan and that's pretty much all you need to know about creating listings and looking at SEO scores and syncing them all the way to your Amazon listing. Bradley Sutton: Now, in the next strategy, I'm going to talk about something that actually you can do inside of Listing Builder but doesn't even have to do with your listing. How to generate captions for Amazon Post with AI? Why is this important? How can it make you money? Amazon Post, for now, is a completely free service. Think of it as kind of like an Instagram newsfeed, but for Amazon. Let me show you what Amazon posts are here. I just found a bath mat company and if I went to their storefront and I hit the button post, here are their posts. It especially turns up really well on a mobile browser. This one, obviously, is a desktop browser, but you can see that they have a lifestyle image of their product and then they have got a uh caption here for each one. All right, so you've. The best practices is to create an image every day here and then make this post. Now, as you can see here, products are linked here to these posts and so obviously, the main goal is to be able to get brand followers and then, hopefully, they see one of these posts, are inspired by it, they click the product and they purchase it and you're not having to pay for any of this. Now, as I said, the best practices is to make an image every single day and a caption every single day. That could be time consuming and maybe very difficult to do. Number one if you don't have that many images, how are you going to get a different image for 365 days out of the year. Well, that's, first of all, what you could have done with that other strategy I told you about in an earlier video, which is how to use Listing Builder to create the AI Amazon Post images, right? Well, what about the caption though? Right? Watch this. This is pretty cool.  Bradley Sutton: Now, do you remember earlier I had written, with AI, this listing that was a bat-shaped bath mat. Well, if I scroll all the way down, I can actually see Amazon post sections. All right, now there are five sections right here. I just have to hit this one button. Write it for me, all right, and within seconds, it's going to write five Amazon posts based on my listing, and boom goes the dynamite. Just like that, I've got five different posts that I could use, with five different images that I might have produced from my AI image generation. Take a look at one of these. Add a touch of the macabre to your bathroom with our bat-shaped bath rug, and even put like a bat emoji. Perfect for gothic decor enthusiasts and a spooky addition to your Halloween decor. It even had a hashtag here gothic decor and Halloween rug. Here's another Amazon post it generated within seconds while I was talking there. Step out of the shower onto our spooky non-slip bat rug. Make your bathroom uniquely yours water absorbent and machine washable Hashtag bat rug. All right, so within seconds I got five different captions. All right, so there's my one week almost all finished, and then, as I showed you before, if I just hit one, I can just do one generation of Amazon AI images for Amazon posts. I would have had four or five images like that. I combine it with these and I can have one of my VAs or employees just every day. Hey, go ahead and put a new post up and I don't have to take 365 pictures or 10 photo shoots of 36 pictures each. I don't have to pay a professional copywriter to write captions. So this is a really quick and easy way that you can create this content for nearly free. That is free on Amazon. So make sure to use these AI-generated Amazon post captions along with our AI Amazon post image generation in order to get those extra views for your Amazon store and your Amazon products and get those quote-unquote free sales that aren't costing you any PPC or any professional copywriting. Bradley Sutton: All right, well, I hope you enjoyed this Seller Strategy Masterclass, where we went deep into Listing Builder. This is the crème de la crème as far as a listing creation software that is out there in the space. So make sure you use every bit of what we went over today. And is there something that we're missing? Is there something you'd like to see? Make sure to let us know. We'd be happy to take all requests and the ones that get asked the most. We'll go ahead and integrate those into the tool. A lot of the features that you saw today come from our customers asking us for them, so I hope you enjoyed this episode and we'll see you in the next one. Bye-bye now.

We’re back with another episode of the Weekly Buzz with Helium 10’s Senior Brand Evangelist, Shivali Patel. Every week, we cover the latest breaking news in the Amazon, Walmart, and E-commerce space, talk about Helium 10’s newest features, and provide a training tip for the week for serious sellers of any level. Walmart launching sale ahead of Amazon Prime Day https://www.axios.com/2024/05/30/walmart-plus-week-sale-amazon-prime-day Amazon Prime now includes a Grubhub food-delivery subscription https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/30/amazon-prime-grubhub-subscription.html Amazon gets FAA approval to expand drone deliveries https://www.axios.com/2024/05/30/amazon-faa-drone-delivery Amazon expands A-to-z Guarantee in Europe to include property damage and personal injury claims https://www.aboutamazon.eu/news/customer-trust/amazon-expands-a-to-z-guarantee-in-europe-to-include-property-damage-and-personal-injury-claims Why Temu’s E-Commerce Model Is a Threat to U.S. Patent Holders https://observer.com/2024/05/why-temu-poses-a-threat-to-american-businesses-and-patent-holders/ Join us as we break down the latest feature alerts from Helium 10, along with a must-know training tip of the week on how to know who is running ads on your product page and your competitor’s product pages. Don't miss out on the insights that can make you a serious player in the e-commerce world! In this episode of the Weekly Buzz by Helium 10, Shivali covers: 00:45 - Walmart+ Week Announced 01:40 - Amazon x GrubHub 02:51 - FBA Inventory Analytics 04:02 - Amazon Drone Deliveries 05:00 - Amazon A-Z Claims 05:43 - Temu Counterfeits 06:33 - Helium 10 New Feature Alerts 07:40 - Pro Training Tip: How To Know Who Is Running Ads On Your Product Page ► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast ► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension ► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup  (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life) ► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft ► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos Transcript Shivali Patel: Walmart+ week dates released. Amazon Prime now including a Grubhub food delivery subscription, and Amazon's new analytics page. This and more on this week's episode of the Weekly Buzz. Bradley Sutton: How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show. That is our Helium 10 Weekly Buzz, where we give you a rundown of all the new stories that are going on in the Amazon, Walmart and e-commerce world. We highlight the latest New Feature Alerts from Helium 10, and we review a training tip of the week that'll give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Today, our host is going to be Shivali Patel, and so Shivali, take it away and let us know what's buzzing. Shivali Patel: First up, we have a news article from Axio stating that, in a strategic move to outpace Amazon, Walmart is launching its Walmart+ week ahead of the annual Prime Day sale in July, signaling an early start to the summer shopping season. Last year they ran it around the same time as Prime Day, but this year they are running it a whole month early, from June 17 to the 23rd. Since, while Amazon has yet to announce the exact date for Prime Day 2024, it is expected to be in July, I hope that those of you who are Walmart sellers have enough inventory in Walmart WFS to cover the increased sales that you'll be experiencing. And for those of you who are Walmart buyers, this year's event extends well beyond product deals to include significant discounts on gas, travel and more, so that's something that you will want to stay on the lookout for. For example, they're doubling their gas discount to 20 cents per gallon at certain gas stations. Shivali Patel: Next up, we have this news piece from CNBC, which informs readers that Amazon Prime will now include a Grubhub food delivery subscription. This is definitely an enhancement to their Prime membership program, contributing even more to the ease that it offers its users. The decision aims to attract and retain members amidst the growing competition from Walmart and Target's loyalty programs. Previously, they actually used to offer a year-long Grubhub subscription, but they've now switched that over to free 99. Who doesn't love free 99? And that allows for free delivery on any orders over $12. Additionally, non-prime members can place Grubhub orders directly through Amazon's website and app. This announcement follows Amazon's 2022 agreement to secure up to a 15% stake in Grubhub. That was contingent on performance metrics and, though this might not directly affect sellers, there's always room in the conversation for added perks that Walmart and Amazon give to their Plus and Prime memberships, because, theoretically, the more value that they're able to add, the more that people will stick around on those platforms, leading them to shop for our products. Shivali Patel: Moving on, we then have some news directly from Amazon that you can find inside of the news section of your Seller Central account. Some news directly from Amazon that you can find inside of the news section of your Seller Central account. Amazon just launched a new FBA inventory, age and excess analytics page to help sellers analyze their aging and excess inventory. As it says here, the new tool is meant to provide a summarized view of aging trends over time. It aligns FBA sales and aged inventory surcharges with aging inventory, as well as offers other key performance indicator cards like SKUs with estimated excess units, excess inventory recommendations and surcharge summaries. If you click onto the page that it's linked, it provides additional information, such as the page allows for filtering by date range, SKU granularity, such as daily, weekly, monthly, to tailor your analysis, and then an inventory age trends graph, which will help you visualize the aging inventory data, with options to include non-aging units and view fulfilled sales and surcharges and more. Note that this page includes one year of historical data and for more information and access instructions, you can always just head over to your Seller Central News. Shivali Patel: Now the fourth news segment is a topic that we've touched on time to time on the Weekly Buzz and there's not too much expansion, but maybe this will change with this. New ruling received Federal Aviation Administration or the FAA's approval to fly longer distances without visual spotters, allowing the expansion of its prime air service, as it says right here. Now why this matters. Amazon aims to deliver 500 million packages a year by drone by 2029, and this authorization marks a significant step in meeting the safety standards in the crowded skies. The company has spent years developing proprietary detect and avoid technology with drones equipped with cameras to scan for obstacles on the ground as well as in the skies, and it's finally set to scale, beginning with more densely populated areas in College Station, Texas, and expanding to Phoenix later this year using next-generation drones. Who knows, maybe soon we'll have drones flying overhead with coffin shelves on the way to project X customers. Amazon also is expanding their A to Z guarantee. Amazon's A to Z guarantee ensures that customers can shop with confidence, offering protection for every single product that is purchased in its stores. This guarantee has actually been in place for over 20 years and it's provided hassle-free process for refunds if customers are dissatisfied with a product's delivery or condition. But as of May 2024, the guarantee now spans several European countries to further include and cover property damage or personal injury caused by defective products. I think that this commitment underscores Amazon's dedication to providing a really secure and trustworthy shopping experience. Shivali Patel: Lastly, let's switch over and talk about Temu. So Temu sellers might be copying your Amazon products. As you can see here, it says as an inventor, Temu sellers are a great way to get your Amazon products. Entrepreneur and small business owner with multiple patents, I've experienced firsthand the impact of the economic battle we're fighting against Temu and similar foreign companies undercutting domestic businesses. As a creator, I front row to the behind the scenes e-commerce corruption that typically involves unethical practices and fraud. So things that can occur are counterfeit or unauthorized replicas of well-known brands, including your brands, hopefully not being generated across these platforms, and so you will want to be vigilant about whether or not your products are getting listed, or your images or title bullet points. Whatever the case may be, are they getting duplicated so that way, you can come up with strategies to navigate that. With that, that is it for this week's news. Shivali Patel: Moving on to our New Feature Alerts, we have just one for you this week, and that's going to be our Tracked Keyword Widget. The Tracked Keyword Widget is something you can add to your dashboard. It's separate from our Insights Dashboard, as you can see here, when you are on your dashboard page, what you are going to do is click the plus chart icon or button, and when you select that, you'll be given the chart library option, and by selecting that, you'll be able to see it loaded right here. In doing so, you can click add and go down to the bottom and you'll see it load right somewhere on that dashboard so you can access this even if you are a platinum user, and essentially it brings that Keyword Tracker to the main page. You'll be able to toggle organic and sponsored. You'll be seeing all those keywords that you've selected inside of your Keyword Tracker in descending order of search volume. And let's say you have multiple products, you can always select this dropdown and switch into a different product if you would like. So that way, every time you're going into your dashboard you're always seeing your keywords in that spot. Very quick access and you can monitor your keyword ranking. So that way you know if you need to switch up your strategy. Shivali Patel: Switching over to the training tip, before we close out, do you guys want to start keeping track of who is advertising on your product page and your competitors' product pages? Run Xray on any product page. I have the coffin shelf open here and it's likely only going to show me products from the variation when I open up Xray, as you can see here. But what you will want to do is click this filters option and then uncheck, mark, hide sponsored products from results. So when you do this and you click apply filters, what you're going to see is it's going to reveal to you many of the sponsored product ads and widgets that appear on the page, allowing you to see who is advertising. You can then use this information in other product targeting campaigns or to determine where to increase bids on your defensive product targeting ads, so that way your products will appear more frequently. All right, guys, that is a wrap. Hope you guys enjoyed this week's episode. We will see you next week to see what's buzzing.

Join us for an insightful conversation with a true pioneer in the online marketplaces as we journey through a remarkable 20-year e-commerce journey featuring Rolando Rosas, who has two decades of selling experience, including 10 years on Amazon. Listen in as we unpack strategies to amplify product reviews on Amazon, ensuring compliance with their stringent terms of service. The discussion takes a turn down memory lane, recounting our guest's rich personal history from Panama to the United States and an unexpected career pivot that led him away from the medical field. The e-commerce landscape is constantly shifting, and our latest chat explores how sellers must evolve to keep pace. We reflect on the transition from physical storefronts to digital dominance, discussing the necessity for adaptability in response to the surge in online shopper activity. The dialogue further reveals the struggles and triumphs experienced by our guest, as we navigate through topics such as profitability challenges, hybrid business models, and the utility of analytical tools like Helium 10 for pinpointing underperforming products. In our final segment, we focus on maximizing profitability through cost control and the strategic use of available tools. We talk about the potential impact of Amazon's forthcoming FBA fees and how meticulous inventory management is key to thriving in e-commerce. Rounding out our discussion, our guest Rolando Rosas offers his insights into maintaining an online presence and the significance of podcast collaborations, sharing his accessibility on various platforms and his journey with Helium 10. So, tune in to gain valuable knowledge from a seasoned expert who has navigated the e-commerce waters with agility and success. In episode 565 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Rolando discuss: 00:00 - 20-Year E-Commerce Journey 11:04 - Evolving Strategies for Amazon Sellers 12:44 - Adapting to Changing Amazon Strategies 17:24 - Optimizing Amazon Seller Profitability 20:34 - Sellers Discuss Zero Fees and Profit 22:51 - Strategies for Maximizing Profitability With Amazon 24:37 - Amazon Advertising Strategies for Success 28:53 - Strategies for Reselling and Private Label 29:23 - Cost Control and Profit Increase Tools 34:01 - Online Presence and Podcast Collaboration ► 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 somebody who's been selling online for 20 years and on Amazon for 10 years, and it was even on a Helium 10 podcast before I ever was. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. How can you get more buyers to leave you Amazon product reviews? By following up with them in a way that's compliant with Amazon terms of service. You can use Helium 10 Follow-Up in order to automatically send out Amazon's request or review emails to any customers you want. Not just that, but you can specify when they get the message and even filter out people that you don't want to get that message, such as people who have asked for refunds or maybe ones that you gave discounts to. For more information, visit h10.me/followup. You can sign up for a free account or you can sign it up for a Platinum plan and get 10 % off for life by using the discount code SSP10. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the series sellers podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host Bradley Sutton and this is the show that's completely BS free unscripted and unrehearsed. Organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e -commerce world and we've got a serious seller who is doing what I think I gotta think about this might be a first so we've had many people who started maybe on the AMPM podcast and came here actually I'm one of them so my very first podcast I was ever on was when I was a new employee at Helium 10 and I was a guest of Manny Coats on one of the last podcasts he did for the AMPM podcast and then a few weeks later we actually started this one. Now, we've also had unique situations where we've actually had somebody on the German podcast, and they were on the Spanish podcast. We've had somebody on Serious Seller's Podcast English, and on the Spanish, Elizabeth Rivas for one Helium 10 elite member. But this might be the first time we've had somebody who's been on the AMPM podcast, the Serious Seller's Podcast in Espanol, and now the Serious Sellers Podcast English for a record-breaking moment here. Rolando, how's it going? Rolando: I am doing fine, that is right. I did appear with Manny Coats sometime in the middle before he, before, you know, changed over to Kevin and they had been on Adriana's now twice on the Bradley Sutton: Also you were a guest of Manny and Kevin then? Rolando: Yes. that is correct. Bradley Sutton: All right but and you've been listening to it since the Manny Coats days way back in. Rolando: Yeah well yeah that didn't nothing looked like this it was I was a whole I was at the very beginning of starting to appear and going on people's podcasts it was very I was a new new newbie at the time so Manny kind of broke me in in terms of you know getting out there it was probably the second or third time I'd been on a podcast at that point. Bradley Sutton: Oh, first of all, where are you at right now?  Rolando: I live just outside the nation's capital in Washington, DC. Bradley Sutton: So is that where you were born and raised or? Rolando: No, I was born and raised in Panama. And my parents came over when I was six and we moved to Louisiana. And in Louisiana, you know, back in the early 80s, boy, it's not like what it is now. There was a, there weren't any, bodegas like you'd see in New York City and in Baton Rouge, Louisiana Eventually Bradley Sutton: You must not stay there very long because I don't hear the accent at all. Rolando: Come on y 'all. Come on y 'all I get there. I get there if you want me to I can talk a little bit. Bradley Sutton: There we go. Okay. Where's the water boy? I don't have I don't have any water boy vibes here Rolando: No, you don't hear very much because Bradley Sutton: Let me get some high-quality H2O. Rolando: Yeah he's a great wait, great, great movie. And I lived in New York for some time new york, you know, loving the pizzas and all that. You know. He, he, he, uh. And then for some time, when I went to college, I went to college in the in the Midwest Minnesota. So you can't get as clean as a talking voice. Bradley Sutton: Is that the Golden Gophers? Rolando: Goldie, go, goldie, that's right, look at that. Bradley Sutton: All right, my mascot skills still. I still have it, even with a fever. Rolando: And then after college I said, you know what? Minnesota is just too damn cold and so I live right now outside the nation's capital, and I've been doing that for the last 20 years wow, okay, all right. Bradley Sutton: So what was your major there? Uh, in the frozen tundra of Minnesota Rolando: I majored in Psychology and Bradley Sutton: What were you looking to? I mean, like, what was it like when you, you know, when you start college, you're like, all right, pick the major. You have something in mind that you wanted to do. Like what was your? Rolando: Oh well, I wanted I started as a pre-med and I started as a pre-med, my brother also. He we went to school when we both he was only one year behind me, and so we both were in the same school. We both were looking at pre-med. I got about into junior year and I was like you know, I don't know if I want to do school for another eight more years, 10 more years. If you throw some specialties in there and my brother did so, he's a very successful surgeon right now and I wanted to just get out of school and just start working, because you know, hey look, I don't know about you, but I didn't have money. I was po, po, po po, and so I wanted to start making money and I started. I came out of college, worked for a fortune 500 company, did that for a while and then, at the tech bubble bursting in the early 2000s, that's when I backed into being an entrepreneur and started my e-commerce journey Bradley Sutton: How did you discover? Rolando: By, totally by accident. So the bubble burst. I got nowhere with job applications really for months. Nothing, nothing. You a lot of interviews, nothing happened. And I happened to have a box of samples of the stuff that I was selling in the previous job and I really was so bummed out I'm like God, maybe I just throw this, all this stuff away. I don't even want to look at it. And so I said you know, all right, you know I'm going to do something better than that. So, instead of throwing in a landfill, I'm going to call a couple of people that I had already known. And one of those said, yeah, come on down, this is a call center. And they said come on down, we'll talk. And I said look, here's what I got. I know you're looking for some new stuff. And they said, yeah, but we want more. And I was like, oh really, I was just purely thinking I'm going to unload this stuff so I don't have to throw it away. And then we want more. And that was where the beginning I thought, hmm, maybe there's a business here selling this. But the downside was I knew that I have to either be on the road the entire time trying to build a business and I didn't want to do that because that's what I was doing in my previous job or this new thing called e-commerce. Like, people could go to a website and buy what you have. At the time, Amazon was at its infancy and only selling books and a lot of other websites. I was on a Yahoo stores. You either dialed the number that was on the page and you call and say, hey, I want such and such, or you send in a fax and it had your credit card number, which we also did. And then that's one thing led to another, and then, several years later, I started the Amazon journey. Bradley Sutton: While you were talking, I actually looked up on the AMPM podcast website your name. I found your Kevin King episode, but then I did find that you were on with Manny. And now I just have a question because I'm looking here on the pod. By the way, it's episode 141. So for sure this is a first. Somebody has been on with Matt, I mean Manny, me and Adriana. Now you just have to learn German to be on our German podcast. Rolando: I can do it, that's all. Bradley Sutton: Yeah, yes, exactly, but I'm looking at the timestamps and so I just have to go back to your story, because what does this mean? Rolando the archaeologist, have you any idea what that could have been referring to? Rolando: Oh heck, yeah. So when I was in college, one of my professors said hey, look, there's a discovery that we've made in the current hotspot today that Ukraine and Russia are fighting over in the Crimea Peninsula. I'd been there and so I said look, yeah, you know, one of the things I did that I thought was kind of cool is that I went on an archaeological dig. We found bones, we found a first century synagogue underneath another temple and yada, yada, yada. And you know, it was interesting, fascinating, to meet Ukrainians and Russians and there's a difference, there's a very there's a difference. There's similarities, but there's a difference there. It was cool to play Indiana Jones, but it's not glamorous. There was no cell phones, there was no Google, nobody knew where we were. We were in a military controlled zone at that time. At the time it was right when Ukraine had separated from Russia, so everything that could go wrong went wrong. You know, in terms from going to what was called a resort. It was not a resort; it was a resort that had freezing cold water. So if you want to take a cold shower, you were lit. It was like today you're doing some Wim Hof cold shower. That's exactly what it was. The toilets weren't working. A lot of people got sick. So everything you could think of about roughing it back in the day prior to you know being on Instagram and be like, oh look, I'm suffering, Look at me, and none of that. You just had to suffer, and that was it. If you wanted to get out and some people did they were like, okay, we can airlift you to the next base over in Germany. We'd have to fly to Kiev, get you out, and that's how you could get medical attention. So that was my introduction to archeology. I'm sure it's a lot better now. They did a bunch of other digs after that. So that's my archeology story.  Bradley Sutton: Indiana Rosas. I like it All, right cool. All right back to Amazon now. At what point in your e-commerce career did Amazon become your main source of income? Rolando: It took some time. The first nine months, probably the first 12 months on Amazon, it was not our main source. Our own website was, and we're making really good living on our own website. Bradley Sutton: What year are we talking about? Rolando: So we're 2024. So, I want to say that it was about late. 2014 was when we started the Amazon trip, the Amazon journey, and so we got to around 2015. Still nothing, you know, like $10,000 the year. But that's because the mindset was that you know, Amazon doesn't work for folks that are selling the products that we were selling. There's no real business folks buying on Amazon. All of these assumptions about Amazon at that point were really unfounded, so I really wanted to see okay, can we do something there? So after about 12 months, I said, you know, let me dive deeper and found out look, you need a different mindset. You need to give a different approach. This is not your own website. You have competition. It's not like selling Google or putting products on Google shops, nothing like that. The rules don't apply here. And once that started to kick in, okay, what do we do? We got to do some ads and we got to do some this and we got to do some research and they get some keywords. The mindset of the shopper is high intent, so we got to attract them. And so once that started happening remember that first December, which normally holiday periods are really slow for us, even to this day, and it wasn't. It was like a nice steady increase. And then January got better, February got better, then we made as much in one month that we had the prior year, and then that built on top of each other. Then the next quarter we sold more than we sold before, and then eventually our Amazon sales got parity with our own store, and that's when we thought, hmm, we got to go all in, what can we do here? And so eventually our Amazon sales surpassed our own store, which was kind of an amazing thing. So then, as things progressed, as you know, you can't use the same playbook from 10 years ago, and I think that's what today a lot of sellers are going through, and I'm sure you've seen, whether it's on Facebook or on LinkedIn, several sellers that are seven figures, some eight figure sellers are just throwing in the towel, and that's because the times today require a different playbook, and I think sellers need to really grasp that reality. Amazon's moved on. They want more money, period, end of story. They don't care, they want you want to use PPC, that's the tax you pay. You want to ship into FBA. You got to do it their way, and if you don't, you're going to be left behind or you're going to be finding yourself far behind your competitors that get with the times, far behind your competitors that get with the times. Bradley Sutton: Maybe people who started around the time you did and just saw ridiculous success, if those kind of people could have, without much effort, relative effort, been doing seven, eight figures. But then if you, if you're trying to use 2015 strategies even in 2018, let alone 2024, you'll quickly learn that you can't be lazy on Amazon or you can't be stagnant on Amazon with your strategies. I mean, things are changing on a daily basis sometimes. Rolando: Exactly, the pace has accelerated. What Amazon wants to do with its sellers it changes. You guys put out so many updates and you're trying to keep up and you guys have a big team of people to try to do with its sellers. It changes. You guys put out so many updates and you're just, you're trying to keep up and you guys have a big team of people to try to do that and it's challenging. So being current and being relevant are getting harder and harder and for those sellers that already found it a challenge, finding it even more challenging. And I don't think it's a surprise and I've been talking to other friends about this that are in the Amazon space I'm not surprised if more sellers are just not going to be in the next 60 to 90 days. They're not going to be part of it. And something that happened over the weekend our largest competitor they're 10x larger than us they declared bankruptcy. I'm not going to say who they are, but they declared bankruptcy and I was blown away. I was completely in shock when I heard that and decided to look it up. Sure enough, that's true. I checked out the court records. I was like, wow, I thought they were a beast. They were, but what is coming to the forefront, and I think every seller should think about, is profitability. No matter what you're selling, if you don't have money left at the end of the day to pay bills and buy more inventory, you are going to suffer. End of story, full stop. Bradley Sutton: So is your business model like? Is it all private label? Are you doing wholesale? Are you managing other people's brands? What's your model now, in 2024? Rolando: We started what you all call in the Amazon wholesale, what we call resell. So we resell brands in the electronic space. These are named brands and been doing that for 20 years. But what we brought along the way was a hybrid model where we are going to have our own private label of accessories on Amazon where we can control the inventory, we can control how we want to show ourselves and that kind of thing, and so that gives us a little bit of a balanced approach in terms of what we want to do. And I think if you're a private seller, you're going to face some challenges that resellers or wholesalers don't face, and vice versa. I don't think one is necessarily better than the other. I think the approach is different and you have to look at what your strengths are. For us, because we'd been in the reselling game or wholesale game for such a long time, we had the relationships, we knew all the distributors, we knew all the executive managers at all these different brand companies. So that's our strength. But we brought in the high, we brought in the private label to fill in some gaps for us and without even going too far into a bunch of different people, folks like your audience would know. Like Steven Pope, he runs my Amazon agency and I had him on my podcast and he said the same thing. He sold his brand and you would think that somebody that has 400 people would be able to manage to keep moving forward on Amazon. But that's how tough it is and he told me why. And you have blind spots and those blind spots can lead to mistakes and hopefully not all of those mistakes are grave mistakes that over time, pile up, and that's essentially what he said. So, like you said, you got to be current, you got to use maybe a different playbook, you got to experiment, you got to watch the cash flow. And if I want to say something about Helium 10, I will tell you that one of the things I really love right now about Helium 10 is that you can go in right now, this very moment, find where your dogs are and I guarantee you every seller has dogs on their catalog and you can clean that up and easily boost your profitability 10% to 15% right now by looking at exactly what every single SKU is producing or not, and if you're-. Bradley Sutton: What's your cutoff point that you guys use to determine of who gets cut? Rolando: So we look at first of all, let me step back something that we've just done this year. We have somebody that I would term something like our chief loss prevention person, and in retail you have somebody like that to making sure stuff isn't flying out the door under somebody's coat right at their local Walmart and whatever. This person is making sure that we're not losing money out the back door. And so one of the things that we try to do is anything that is making less from profitability. Every single SKU, anything that's 10% or less, immediately gets flagged, and that week we have a discussion around it why is it 10%? Why is it 9%? Why is it 5? Why is it minus 4? If there isn't some major justification like oh yeah, man, there's a crazy amount of returns that came in that week. Good, all right. What if we back the returns out of the equation? It's profitable, okay. So then we hand that information now to my catalog team and they go through and look through the reasons why the return was. If it's one order that gobbled up the returns, we understand. Okay, we're going to have some outliers. If it's something more like this product sucks, the product sucks. You guys are bums. This product sucks, and that means we need to go even further find out what happened. Oh yeah, you know what the 3PL that we have? They put the wrong accessory in the bundled kit. We got a problem right, so now we can address it early, rather than six or eight months later when you're doing an account review with your CPA or whomever and you're like, oh crap, yeah, we're 10 points lower this month, but that's kind of our process. Now you have to have the mindset of somebody's got to be in the numbers on a regular basis, looking at for us 10% or less, and be able to justify their existence If we can. And we see a pattern where, man, every month we're only making 5 points, we're only 5% profitable. It's not going to pay off in the long run, especially if you're constrained with cashflow. Cashflow is king, and this is something that I talked to a former CEO of Blockbuster. He told me our problem was cashflow. It wasn't Netflix. Netflix just kind of pushed us over the edge. The problem was that we were constrained with cashflow, and cashflow, I think, is what every single, almost every single Amazon seller will struggle with at some point. And addressing the dogs helps improve cashflow, helps improve profitability helps improve long-term longevity on the platform. Bradley Sutton: Are you guys utilizing FBA mainly, all right. So FBA is pretty much where the these new fees in 2024 have affected. You know people, people doing, you know shipping inventory in, or how much inventory they have in storage, return rates et cetera, et cetera. Let's talk about the first one how have you guys dealt with the inbound fee? Has that affected you? Have you changed what you do? Have you had to raise prices at all? How are you dealing with that first fee? Rolando: So we took all the data around. So we did some experiments. First, before the cutoff date, we started doing the inbound. We were paying for the placement fees, right, because we wanted to send stuff here and there, so we were paying for that. Then we switched that off to let Amazon go ahead and start shipping with so that inbound fee, those inventory placement fees weren't attached to it. We came out ahead even when factoring in the extra shipping. And I think every category needs to look at that, because if you're shipping furniture, your situation is going to be different than ours. But a lot of our items are around a pound. So in talking to other sellers they were. They pointed out to me hey, Rolando, did you know that in some cases you're going to come out where the fee is zero and overall you're going to come out ahead. And I was like what are you talking about? And so we did some math. Sure enough, we come out ahead. So I think inventory fees are a real thing they make an impact. But even more crazy than the, the, the inbound fees, are the low inventory fees and those initially we thought we were going to really be hit with that. And then they came out with this 20 units or less exception. So with the 7 days prior, a seven-day average. If you have sold only seven, I'm sorry, the seven days prior to you going out of stock or whatever, they look at how many units you sold. If you sold under 20, you're good, you don't have to worry about it. And so we have a bunch of low selling, low velocity items that were in that bucket and some that went out of stock that were in that bucket, and so it took our fees down, I think by 75%, and then the net result for us is only like 150 bucks net that we would have to pay on top of the sales. I'm like, okay, that's not too much to worry about, but we have all these things to look at. So I think in the end, this could make Amazon sellers better, because you're paying more attention to the inventory, which I don't know about you, but inventories are number one cost bar none. Like you could, you could get rid of all your staff. You still going to have inventory cogs outweigh almost everything else that you have on the books. Bradley Sutton: Okay, okay. So what about electronics? I'm assuming you know returns are, are an issue. Is that going to affect you, that the new return fee, or are you pretty much below the threshold on everything there? Rolando: We're good Almost. We did a review Again. This requires you to take a spreadsheet. Put it in, our chief guy of numbers or loss. He looked at it, and we're in good shape. And one of the things about returns is that it takes a multi-prong approach to bring the returns down. It's certainly not anything to sleep on, because they chew up a lot of profit. So one of the things that we did was we looked at a program that Amazon has. It's called the PLS program, the product lifecycle support. In electronics. You have a lot of returns from people that say, oh, I don't know how to use that or I couldn't turn it on, and you know how easy it is to return something. Amazon just lets you send something back. You know whether you used it or not, or you dumped it in the toilet and dunked it. They don't care, they'll still take the return. So, we looked at creating videos. That helped. We looked at this product lifecycle support. So, the product lifecycle support lets the customer click on the get support that's on the app and it comes right to us on a landing page approved by Amazon where they can chat with us online, they can call us, they can email us and we give them information. We have videos from, and so on, so that's been really good to tamp down returns even in this very easy laissez-faire environment that Amazon allows when it comes to returns. Bradley Sutton: You've been talking about it throughout this episode and you specifically definitely referenced the importance of profitability in 2024. I mean, honestly, if anybody is doing any kind of business, you know what are you doing if you're not focused on your profitability. But I think it's more top of mind this year just because of everything that's going on With the new fees that are happening. And then it's not like PPC costs are going down per se or there's less opportunity to advertise. There's always more things you can do. How do you make the decision with your products? Hey, which forms of advertising am I going to partake in? And then, how do I just keep it all balanced to make sure that you know again, I'm still profitable. Rolando: So, this is where a tool helps and there's always a push and pull debate between an agency and you know in-house, and we run a lot of campaigns and so it's not. You know, we have five campaigns and it's easy to you know, just sort through. We have quite a bit of campaigns but internally, when you can have someone that you know what your goals are and they align with what you're trying to accomplish, it's a lot easier in some ways than hiring an agency bringing them in and they're going to have their strategy, but the goals they're trying to work with don't always line up. So what we do is look at ROAS. For us, ROAS is always very important. And then the second piece, which is again another reason plug for Helium 10. I love that. You can go by each SKU and in any given time you know, in the last 30 days or 14 days or whatever you could see if ads have outstripped the profitability. So, what if we'd removed ads from the equation? Oh yeah, we would have been profitable. And those are for the ones that are under 10%. But the ones that are over that, that are 15, 20, 30 or more, what if we kick in an extra 5% on the budget? Or what if we went up more on the placement so that we show up more on the top of search? These are all the experiments that you play around with as a seller. Okay, let me give this one a little bit more. See what happens. Can we rank with more keywords? So you have a little different strategy when it comes to ranking, and you've had so many lovely, wonderful guests on the show talk about ranking and keywords. I would not do it any justice by trying to jump into that mix. I could just tell you, for us ROAS, the profitability by SKU and looking at how that fits into the product, if we have margin for it, I tell my PPC person go ahead, give it a little more juice, let's see what happens. We do some external ads as well, outside of the platform, and that's doing some wonders for us also. So, we're running some experiments externally, pointing into the Amazon platform. Bradley Sutton: What is the most profitable form of advertising for you these days? I know when videos came out, that was very hot, you know like it was like oh man, my cost per click is so low compared to others, I convert really well. Or is it just the? You know the, the standard? Uh, you know sponsored product that you guys are doing, or maybe it's a some kind of sponsored brand? Or are you guys doing DSP or other forms? Rolando: No DSP at this moment we do play around in sponsor brands. It's a smaller part of our portfolio. When it comes to PPC and advertising, the heavy left, the heavy gorilla, the big gorilla is in sponsored products. I think, Dr. Travis, you know who I'm talking about. He had something that I am going to borrow from him. Amazon is a high intent platform that I'm going to borrow from him. Amazon is a high intent platform, so what you want to do is meet the demand. So if somebody, if there's a lot of traffic for bananas just throwing this out because bananas is in my head If you want to sell bananas or banana products, maybe you want to look at where the demand is for that instead of you know, let's say, like mung fruit, mung fruit is not going to be very popular in the US. So how can I plug myself in to the high intent shoppers that are on the platform that are looking for bananas and bananas product? Because whether I get 1% of those sales, 2% of those sales or 3% of those sales, especially if we're talking about a big number, right, that's better than 50% of monk fruit, which is a teeny, little pie, right? So that's kind of our philosophy. Try to meet the demand instead of creating demand. There was a gentleman who's head of marketing for Vermont Teddy Bear. I talked to him a few years ago. He more or less said the same thing to me. He said you know they do radio ads, they do TV ads they were doing. He said on Amazon, you meet the ads, they do TV ads. He said on Amazon, you meet the demand because you'll find that you can't even get your arms around all the demand. So try to meet the demand that's there and you'll find you'll be more profitable instead of creating the demand where now you're really investing. You're really investing to educate. Amazon is not ideal and set up for that. Amazon is great for meeting that demand. Bradley Sutton: All right, any last strategies for the rest of this episode. Let's talk about some quick-hitting strategies or something you can hit us with. Not many people in the game have been in the game for as long as you and you've kind of seen two sides of the spectrum People who are doing reselling and people who are doing private label. There's a lot of them out there. You've done both. What are some strategies for either side of that aisle that you can help people to be profitable or to have success in 2024? Rolando: Today it's all about controlling costs. There are very few levers you can pull on them. You can't control the referral fee. You can't control what your competitors are doing. You can't control all the returns coming in. You can't control Amazon's fees. But there are things that you can do right now that you can control and affect your bottom line and I've mentioned a few of those. But when it comes to inventory, I just saw today the supply chain, the freight costs coming from China just jumped up to almost $7,000 for a full container where they were $1,500. Those may require you look at. What about if we ship air freight? You may find you can get really good deals on air freight and maybe use a different carrier. Find you can get really good deals on air freight and maybe use a different carrier. Go in and take a talk to if you use a 3PL or a warehouse. Maybe it's time to look at a different warehouse. And we did that last year. We switched the 3PL that we were using. We're saving money. We got even a better warehouse. They were more involved. They caught mistakes All of the mistakes you can catch before it goes into Amazon saves you money and makes you more profitable. And then have somebody designated to look at your blind spots, because I guarantee you, you will find some. We found a really huge error. We were double billed for stuff we were using, caused us to overpay taxes. All these things again. These could all be catastrophic. But if you don't have somebody that's the chief numbers person looking at all these things and tying them together so that you can take action on it, I guarantee you, if you look back at everybody that's leaving, it's a series of things that have eventually just pushed them over the edge. So put some chief loss prevention person in place. Look at Helium 10, look at every single SKU. Find the dogs, get them out, get them off the board, liquidate them. You'll put more money in your pocket right now, and that's what every seller needs more money in their pocket. Bradley Sutton: You've talked about profits being one of your favorite Helium 10 tools. What else is one of your favorite Helium 10 tools and why? Rolando: I love the dashboard. That's where I spend more time in. The other parts of my team do different things. They're looking at inventory, they're looking at cogs and maybe they're using Cerebro for keyword search. But I love the dashboard because you can customize what I want to look at. You know, if somebody says, hey, you know what's going on with so and so I just look at and I get a good overview and I can customize it just the way I want and I can have, like, I want that first column to be the gross volume. I want to know overall what's happening. Second column I want to know profits what did it generate last month or this month or whatever time period we're talking about? And then profit margin, because then it factors in everything. I don't have to guess, I don't have to like go 10 reports deep. Oh, it's minus one for the last month. We got to do something right now. Get Anthony on it right now, please. Anthony, can you look at what happened here with this? And so the dashboard is great for that high level view, customizing it, and then, if you want to take some action on it. There's a lot of things you can do from there. Bradley Sutton: If we were to give you the keys to our product team for a week to develop a new feature or tool that we don't have yeah, it could be an existing tool or it could be a brand new tool, something we don't have what would be your priority for what we would do? Rolando: Let me see if I could do it my way, if I could do it my way. So, what I'd love is a way to combine PPC data, brand analytics data and keyword data. Combine those three. Let your AI in the background digest, chew it, find some nuggets and say hey, you are killing it on this keyword. Your conversion is astronomical, the profit is astronomical. You can afford to spend more here. Now I have some serious data to then my team hey, this keyword or this phrase double the budget. Why we've got extra money on it. It's generating a lot of revenue for us, and the data says we're killing it on conversions. If I had that ability, that magic wand, that's what I would say to your team Get to it. Can you make it happen? Because you guys have the data. It's just putting it together, running some analysis and then saying here's the probability of this, here's the probability of this, here's the probability of that. Okay, good, now you've saved my team hours, hours of time going through all the different reports and all the different parts of this stuff. Bradley Sutton: Awesome, awesome. All right, how can people find you on the interwebs out there if they want to reach out to you? Rolando: Well, I hang out on LinkedIn quite a bit. You can go to Rolando Rosas on LinkedIn. I also have got a podcast called What the Tech spelled T-E-C-K. I'm also there. Send me a comment or a DM or something like that and we'll get in touch. I'll be glad to help if you're either looking to get into the space or you got some questions about why is this so hard and I can't do what I want. Bradley Sutton: Awesome, awesome. We're also going to be seeing a lot more of you maybe in YouTube doing some Helium 10 demos and things like that. They asked me who do I think should get him. I was like, all right, my first choice right here is Rolando. Rolando: Let's see, I'm honored. It says a lot, and you're in this game. You've talked to a lot of people, so you had no shortage of people on your short list and I'm honored. I was at the top of that list. Bradley Sutton: Awesome, All right. Well, thank you so much, Rolando, for being on the podcast multiple podcasts here at Helium 10 and helping me out with the Spanish demos and everything and sharing your knowledge with the audience. And we'll maybe reach out to you next year to see how things are going for you and if you haven't given up on those Spanish demos yet. Rolando: No, I'm going to learn German from here on out. Bradley Sutton: I want to there we go German. Yeah, we got to get you on the German podcast. All right, we'll have a good one. Rolando: Appreciate it.  

Unlock the secrets to boosting your Amazon sales without crossing the line with product inserts as we team up with our Freedom Ticket instructors, Kevin King and Rafael Veloz of Share It Studio. This episode is your ticket to understanding how to legally and effectively use product inserts to build your brand and keep customers returning for more. Ditch the confusion and stay ahead of the competition with actionable insights and real-life examples, including Kevin and Rafael’s success stories with calendar sales and customer-retaining newsletters. Prepare to transform your customer experience and drive repeat purchases with inventive strategies that resonate with your audience. We'll reveal the power of no-code apps as lead magnets, the smart use of QR codes, and how to craft calls to action that balance immediate sales with long-term loyalty. Rafael's Telly award-winning expertise shines as we navigate the nuances of customer engagement, ensuring your marketing efforts are not only effective but also compliant with Amazon's stringent policies. Wrap up with a toolkit of marketing finesse, from leveraging QR codes for product-related apps to utilizing calls to action that truly speak to your buyer persona. Whether it's offering warranties, discounts, or even prize draws, we've got you covered with legal and effective strategies that hook customers in. This episode is brimming with tactics and takeaways tailored to help you master the art of Amazon product inserts and skyrocket your e-commerce success. In episode 564 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley, Kevin, and Rafael discuss: 00:00 - How To Build An Unbreakable Brand With Product Inserts 00:59 - Advanced Amazon Product Inserts Discussion 08:57 - Leveraging Mail Leads for Calendar Sales 09:09 - Maximizing Sales Through Package Inserts 13:59 - Strategies for Amazon Product Insert Cards 18:10 - Enhancing Customer Feedback With QR Codes 26:35 - Amazon Review and QR Code Guidelines 27:15 - Prohibited Methods for Soliciting Reviews 31:02 - Generating Effective QR Codes for Customers 34:45 - Dog Treat Sample Pack Promotion 36:34 - QR Codes and Call to Actions ► 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: Is it okay to do product inserts on Amazon? If so, what can and can't you put on those? We bring on Kevin King and expert guest Rafael to answer these questions and more. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Bradley Sutton: Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that's completely BS-free, unscripted and unrehearsed, organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world, and we have our monthly special. This is called Seller's Edge, and this is actually a unique one, a new thing that we're doing, where we recorded live a module that's actually going to go mainly in the Freedom Ticket program about advanced Amazon strategy, and this one's going to be all about Amazon product inserts. There's a lot of misconceptions out there and so we brought on some people to talk a little bit about it. Now, the main core of this workshop that we did is actually in Freedom Ticket, all right. So. if you guys don't have a Freedom Ticket, any Helium 10 paying member has access to it. So, if you're a Platinum member, make sure to go into your Freedom Ticket account or your Helium 10 account and then hit Learning Hub. You can get the full details. Bradley Sutton: What we're going to have here is some clips from that training and then we're going to have a lot of the Q&A. What we did we did this live, where a lot of people were watching this training and they were giving a lot of questions like hey, what's okay to put in inserts, and can I send people to another website, and can I do this and can I do that? Kevin King got a little riled up there a little bit on some of the questions we were asking. So again, we're going to just give you some of their presentation just a little bit, and then mainly focus on the questions that you guys were answering. I'm positive. A lot of these questions are the same exact questions that you might have on inserts as well, so let's go ahead and hop into it. Kevin King: So I met today's guest Rafael around 2019, maybe 2020. But it was in 2020 where I really first got to know him. The guys over at PickFu actually came to me and said, hey, we're going to run this contest with like four different agencies and we want to feature your product. And at that time I was doing a hand sanitizer as a company called Germ Shark and I said I'm sure they said these guys are going to compete, they're going to create videos, they're going to create images, they're going to create A plus content. And then you get to go through it all, Kevin. You get to decide which one you like the best, and then it's up to you whether you want to go with them and pay them or not, if you, if you like it enough. And so, uh, Rafael's company, uh, Share It Studio was one of the winners. There was two, two companies that actually kind of came close uh, real close to each other, and one of them I liked one of their things and then them I liked the other thing, but a Share It Studio did the best job overall and they ended up creating a really a kick-ass video for us and a whole bunch of really cool content. So that's where I got to know him and you know this guy. His background wasn't necessarily an Amazon seller. He was a three-time telly, award-winning marketer and filmmaker, and then he decided to go out on his own and he saw this need in the Amazon space, where there's just not a lot of good agencies creating good, good imagery and video content. So in 2018, he founded Share It Studio and as a marketing Amazon specific marketing agency. Kevin King: Now they do a few things. It's not Amazon, but they focus on Amazon and it's they really want to set themselves apart, but not just saying, okay, we'll create some pretty pictures and we'll make some nice videos, but it's data driven. So they're actually looking at the data, looking at what it is that they actually need to do. What are the trigger points that are going to make people buy? Not just create a beautiful video that looks great, but what can they say, what can they do? What about those first three seconds? And just create a really custom, bespoke package of creative services just for Amazon sellers on the Amazon platform. They look at everything from. They do everything from PPC videos, premium A plus content, images, branding and a whole lot more, and they're really good at what they're doing so. Kevin King: Rafael is going to be coming on in just a minute and sharing us today specifically on package inserts, and before I bring him on, I want to talk about package inserts for just a second, because there's a lot of, what I believe, misinformation out there when it comes to package inserts. There's a lot of people that say you should not use package inserts on Amazon. You will hear that on Facebook groups. You will hear that from some of the people that help fight against Amazon. They say don't use package inserts, don't do it, you're putting yourself at risk. I 1000% disagree with that. 1000% disagree with that. I think there are certain things that you should not do on a package insert. Those anything you know people say well, you can't direct traffic off of Amazon. Bs, yes, you can. What you cannot do is put your package insert or your URL. If you read the terms of service carefully, Amazon says you cannot direct traffic off of Amazon, but that's on Amazon. That means that don't put your URL in your product photos. Don't put something in, don't email you know, using the customer follow-up something to take them off of Amazon. Anything on the Amazon platform in imagery or text. You cannot send them off of Amazon to do something that is against the rules. But when it comes to your package insert, all the big brands look at Sony, look at any of the big brands they have package inserts for warranty registrations, for accessories, for different things. It's totally fine in my opinion. But there is a line you have to draw and this is where a lot of people get in trouble and some people don't understand where that line is. Kevin King: You cannot do anything to influence reviews on Amazon, and that means in the old days people would say please leave us a five-star review, click here and they would take you to the review page. You can't do that. You can't put a smile and five stars. Five stars is a kind of a trademark icon of Amazon. That kind of indicates give us five stars. You can't do that. You can't say something like if you have trouble with this product, please email us. Don't contact the buyer, don't contact Amazon or contact where you bought it. If you have trouble, contact us. Otherwise, please leave us a review on Amazon. That's directing negative traffic to you, even though that's a good thing to do. You want to take care of the situation that's indirectly directing negative remarks that might have been a bad review to you. There's other ways to say that. You can say something like if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us, something like that that has no indication of. If there's a problem or there's something wrong, we want to fix it. And I understand you're trying to steer bad things away and you're trying to be good, but that can be seen as as as a negative. Or what happens a lot of times is people will have some sort of innocent package insert and then they will, they will send that and send it to a warranty page or some sort of registration page and then in the follow up sequence so everything is clean, but in the follow up sequence there's something that's a little gray or shady and that's where people get into trouble too. So but if you're doing the package inserts right, and I think you're totally fine and there is a way to do them you know I get a lot of Amazon packages and a lot of times I throw the package inserts out. Kevin King: I mean, it's one of the first things. I used to look at them to see what other people were doing. But now, obviously, I probably get 20 Amazon packages a week. I probably look at one package insert and that's what Rafael is going to show you today is some ways to make sure that that yours is the one that I'm looking at, and there's a reason that I only look at. One is because most of them suck. They're little business cards or they don't have good graphics, or they don't catch my attention or they're buried in the package in the wrong place. There's a whole number of reasons that I don't look at where there's no value to looking at it. It's just a bunch of text, or they all look the same. There's ways to stand out, and I use a package insert, and my calendar business is one example that I like to give, and what I do is I put a four by six card in there and I say congratulations, you've won a free calendar. That's what the package insert says, and what that package insert then says, because I'm selling calendars. Calendars are like selling milk they go bad. Kevin King: So right now we're in May of 2024. Most people don't want to pay full price for a 2024 calendar. The year started five months ago, so it's hard to sell them. So if I have extra calendars left over, I got to get rid of them. I can throw them away, I can donate them somewhere, I can try to liquidate them, but what I do is I use my extra calendars as a premium and so I say congratulations, you've won a free calendar. Just pay $10 shipping and handling and you can go to my website and get the URL out there and enter this code to get the calendar for $10. Or you can send a check or money order in the mail. A lot of people send checks or money orders in a physical envelope in the mail to my post office box and it works really well and I get a lot of leads that way. What do I do with those leads? The next year I've got 17,000 people on this list. The next year, when my calendars come out, calendars are pretty much bought between mid-November and mid-January. That's the big two months that most of the sales happen. You're selling 400, 500, 600 a day of some titles, but in September people aren't really thinking about 2024 like last year, so they're buying like two or three calendars a day. But that's where I use my list and I send them out. Kevin King: If I have their email, I send an email and I also send a physical postcard through the mail to them and says hey, the new calendars for 2024, or, in this case coming up 2025 are out. You can buy them directly from me and pay $9.95 shipping and handling, or you can go to Amazon, if you're a Prime member, and buy them on Amazon and get free shipping. And what does that do? It allows me to launch my product completely with no PPC, no launches, no having to do Vine reviews, no, nothing. Because people go and I have four different titles and a lot of them. They buy all four, so that gets them in the frequently bought together. And then they also buy other calendars so they might buy a motorcycle calendar or something like that. So then I start showing up on these motorcycle calendars as customers who looked at this or viewed this or those sections. And I started this flywheel going and I'm selling two or three a day in September and I just ride that wave all the way up and I do zero PPC for these calendars. I do zero launch and that's the power of a package insert. And then I can sell these guys other calendars that are not available on Amazon. Kevin King: I do it for my dog products with a dog sample packs. I do it with a lot of things, but in nowhere in there and no my emails, nowhere do I ever ask for a review? Do I ever indicate five stars? Do I ever indicate anything that's manipulating the system? It's all above board and I've been doing this for 20 years and there's nothing wrong with it. Usually, if you dig deep and someone says I got in trouble for package inserts, I didn't do anything, look deep into their package insert or into their funnel and you're probably going to see that there is something that's a little on the edge there. So if you keep your nose clean and do this right, it can be powerful. And so Rafael is going to come on right now and he's going to spend some time showing you some really cool ways to actually do package inserts. Hey Rafael, how are you doing, man? Rafael: How's it going, man? Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. It's an honor. Kevin King: Appreciate you coming on and doing this man, this is going to be great. I’m looking forward to seeing what you got. Learn a few things myself, hopefully. Rafael: All right guys. Thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate your time. I am the Founder and CEO of Share It Studio. Actually, my background was in law. I went to law school. I did four years of law school in Venezuela and then I went to filmmaking because I hated law so that's like a really little fun fact. And then I started working and I graduated from filmmaking. I started doing filmmaking, I moved to New York, etcetera. I worked in a lot of companies CNN, Nickelodeon and then in 2018, I was working for Nickelodeon and I decided to quit because I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I wanted to get out of that rat race, which I think a lot of us maybe were there and wanted to escape. So, yeah, so let's get started. Rafael: So this is a little bit of what we do at Share It Studio. I just wanted to give you a glimpse. I'm not trying to sell you anything. I'm just trying to give you a glimpse of what we do. So we only focus on creating content. Why I feel like a jack of all trades is a master or none. We like to specialize in one thing, one thing only, and anything that has to do with visual and visually enticing or visually manipulated. You could say a little bit that buy or that conversion, so anything that has to do with videos, listings, et cetera. So what are product inserts? You can read this, I know you can, but in my own words it's a way to give the customer more experience, right, to give them more value. The more value you give, the more value you're going to get in return. So it's a powerful tool, obviously, to enhance the customer's experience. You can request feedback, you can promote your repeat purchases. It's all going to depend on the product itself. It's the same thing to have a product insert for supplements for a hand sanitizer than for a garlic press, for example. Those are consumables. You can repeat them. The garlic press, you can probably buy one when it breaks. But if it breaks too fast, it means the bad quality garlic press, right? So, depending on your product, I would say try to steer and try to analyze and strategize that product insert. Rafael: Okay, let's keep going. So do's. Some basic do's. Deliver value. This is like just a general thing in life. Let's go into newsletters. I don't read newsletters. I find newsletters actually very boring or they're all the same. But I came across and I'm trying to plug this in in any way. But I came across one a few months ago which is Kevin King's newsletter right, the Billion Dollar newsletter and there's so much value that I actually enjoy reading them. That's because it's given me value, like a bunch of value. If it wouldn't give me value, I just would discard it, archive it or read it or delete it, et cetera. So make sure you deliver value. It's the most important asset. If you do not deliver value, you're not going to get anything in return. Some ways you can deliver value additional usage guidelines, care recommendations, general insights, coupons, customer experience. There's a lot, a lot of ways. Right, make sure you maintain informativeness, meaning that you are talking about your product's advantages or attributes on the product. That's dependent on the product. Again, these are all dependent on the product that you have. It's gonna. It's not a, it's not a one. It's not a cookie cutter, it's not a cookie cutter template, it's more of a. What do I have? What fits into this mold type of situation from my point of view, at least in my experience? Rafael: Encourage reviews. You want to avoid 100% encouraging any positive reviews or avoiding getting, or encouraging avoidance of getting negative reviews. Like Kevin said at the beginning, that goes against Amazon's TOS and, just like the taxman, the Amazon man is also going to find out at some point. Okay, so I would say, steer away from that. So politely, solicit feedback from the customers. As simple as your feedback matters could help. Extend support. Again, it depends on the product, but extend support If it's maybe it's a product that it costs I don't know a hundred bucks, most likely if that product is a little bit faulty or people don't understand that because it's hard to assemble, or something you can extend support, maybe a video, maybe a hotline, maybe an email I don't know something that gives them support. Um, cross selling if your product, you can match it with other products. For example, I'm going to show you an example in a bit of a baby product. But let's say you sell in the baby category and there's a lock and you're selling a lock um securing mechanism for the door for babies, right, and you and you can also cross promote the outlet protector for babies. So you know you kill two birds with one stone. Rafael: Don'ts. Avoid soliciting positive reviews, guys. Do not do that. That's like bad, bad, bad. Referring from cherry picking reviewers, such as what Kevin said, like hey, if you're having a bad experience, you know, come back and we can help you before you leave a bad review. That's a no-no. Steer clear from external links. Like Kevin said, Amazon wants everything in their ecosystems. What I've seen recently, though, is that they send them to a landing page, but the payment processing takes them directly back to the Amazon page. So what does that mean? That means that, from the product insert, it takes you to the landing page. You gather data from there, like the pixels, the Facebook pixels well, that's not Facebook anymore, it's the Metapixel, et cetera. Now you have marketing data from there, and then it redirects them back to Amazon. I've seen that recently. Eliminate misleading information, false hesitations, exaggerated claims, deceptive details. You want to be as transparent as possible and as truthful as possible. Remember, giving value is about being real, maintaining real, and abstain from manipulation. Definitely abstain from manipulation, because that's also you're trying to cherry pick that review. Okay, and avoid interfering with packaging. This is more on your end. You don't want to have a package that's extremely hard to open because of the product insert, because it's not going to give value to the customer experience, and customer experience is everything. All right. So it's a simple thank you enough. It could be, but you know it's there's not more, so it's basically wasting your money. Rafael: So if you want to win and if you want to actually get results, you should definitely take action. So things you should include you in your insert cards. Things I would include that we've included with our clients is warranties, how to guides, how to take care of the product, benefits of our products, guidelines, but it's going to depend again on the product. I want to make sure that everybody understands that it depends on your product. But, in summary, if you want to get value, you should get value. That's a rule of thumb in life. Actually, we should all get value in life, so we can get something valuable as well. So type of products, inserts or strategies. So review hunting that's like the most basic one, right? You want to get reviews. The most reviews you get, the better. I'm gonna show you some examples afterwards. You can put up a QR code and ask for feedback. You can use jokes, for example. So you put the joke and then you put the answer. Kevin usually actually does this. He puts stump bases in the beginning of the email newsletter and then at the end, he gives you the answer. This allows him, this allows that you read through the whole thing and then you have a reward at the end, which is kind of cool. So, for example, for this one, this is plainly emotional. Hey, scan this QR code and speak your mind. That's it. I just want your feedback, and your feedback means the world to us. It's very important. You're being sincere, trying to be as sincere as possible. Rafael: This is some of the content with this. For this seller, we also did that his packaging and he inserted it. And also, you added more value. He's not in a lead generator. So if you want to watch this video, it's time to install this. Watch this video, right? So you scan this QR code. Basically, it takes you to a landing page. It asks you for your email to unlock or to send the link of the video to that email. So, right there, you're getting more information. A simple joke is cool. So what type of candy is never on time? Chocolate, you get it, I didn't know. So ChatGPT helped us with that, by the way. So, yeah, so after they peel it, okay, and then, hey, since we're here, share your experience with our candies, and then they scan your codes. You know you're asking for it. All right, this is for stickers. Rafael: And another type of strategy is free purchase marketing. So there's a couple of things you can do. You can add custom coupons and you can add also cross-selling. So a coupon is you'll we all know what well, maybe there's new or sellers. Here's coupon is just basically a way that you give them something, a discount or, yeah, a discount for the next purchase or the new purchase or something, and cross-selling or it could be even an external coupon and cross-selling is when you promote something, another product, okay, based on that product, that at least simulates or in some way it connects with the main product that they just bought. So, for example this is the example I was going to give you it's a baby clear outlet plugs, right, and the baby toilet plug. So, welcome to Parenthood. Since you bought this, we want to help you. Here's more things that you can get and you're going to get these products. You head to storefronts and you get some offers from those products. Boom, so they're buying this, but they're also, oh, these guys also sell this, because maybe when they get this through their Amazon. They're like oh, I also need this. So you're cross-promoting that seller. Okay. Rafael: So list building it's extremely important as well. As we all know, Amazon is their own ecosystem and they have the last say in everything. So, like Kevin was saying about his calendars, it doesn't matter if he sells them on Amazon or not. He has a list. So Kevin doesn't even need PPC because he has a whole list already. So that's one of the things that you should be doing list building. So it's basically just as a gift. You can create a strategy. Number one is a gift. Basically, you create a lead magnet from your website or app and you just tell the customer like hey, you want this, we need this in return, and they gave you this, which is this well, you can ask for several thousand information, email, phone number, et cetera. Or strategy to a newsletter. You know, create a newsletter with interesting content to promote, to promote it and put it in your insert card. You're giving value. For example, we have a client that he sells bonsais. I didn't know this, but bonsais are very much. It's like a culture, like there's like a thing for bonsais and people are really into it. So they read newsletters, they read articles, they see videos, they watch videos. Part of this newsletter is giving value to them, so that's how they're building their list, also through social media. Rafael: This is, for me, the best strategy up to date, which is an app. Why? it's also going to depend on the type of product you have. But why the app? Because the app you're always going to have them there. There's nothing more intimate right now, technology-wise, than the phone for a human. It literally holds our work, our life, our secrets, our laughs. Like, if you leave your house without your phone, most likely you're gonna return back home just to get your phone, because it's literally a third arm that we don't have. So by having that, you have so much access to that particular buyer. For example, this is QR an app that it's going to help you, you know, work out and it's going to give you a workout. It's a workout app, right? This is the one I'm using for to get ready to for BDSS in Hawaii soon Kev. I'm just kidding, I don't have a six pack, so this app is going to help you that and there that you can promote also other types of products. For example, I have another app which is a scale. I bought a scale and that scale helps you track your weight through the app. And through the app, sometimes I get push notifications which is hey, we just launched this product, would you like to look into it? Or hey, we saw that you're hitting your fitness goals. We have this new product that can help you reach those fitness goals, et cetera. So there, you're going to give a lot more value. And what are they doing? They're just cross promoting, they're cross selling. So that's, I mean, I think that's brilliant. Rafael: Remember, one step at a time. It's depending on your level of being a seller. If you're in stage one and you just launched your product, focus on reviews. If you want to do everything at the same time, great. But if not, if you want to take it step by step, focus on reviews, then focus on repurchase marketing and then build in a list all right, but this is a must at the end. If you want to build a brand, building a list is a must. Another thing if your package is, you don't want to create it in any way possible, like you know, maybe you don't want to destroy or interrupt this opening process you can add it to a label like the top, because you all know that it can only be a sticker, for example, every bottle or not every bottle. Most of the bottles have a seal on top right, so if they have a seal, why not put it there? They either way have to open it up, so why not put your discount or give them that value there? For example, these are supplements. Hey, next bottle you get 50% off. If I like them, I'm going to use that 50% off coupon 100%. Rafael: So another thing that you could be doing, which I love this one is A-B testing. Marketing, just like life, it's not one plus one equals two. Marketing is just trial and error. Trial and error. Obviously, you're spending a bunch of money. You're investing a bunch of money into your future, so you want to mitigate that fail as much as possible. For example, when we were doing Kevin's videos for the Germ Shark, we ran like 100 pick food tests. We were actually the company that ran the most pick food tests. Why? Because we want to mitigate the most amount of errors as possible. We didn't come out of the studio we're like, oh, let's just create this, it's going to be a winner. No, we tried it out a lot of times. So what you could do is, in your packages you can have two QR codes and see which one converts the most, depending on your product. Again, and you know, get creative and that's it. Um for overachievers, make sure that you're evaluating your KPIs. So repeat purchasing metrics. Are they buying this again? Is this working? Is it not working? Brand loyalty metrics. Are they going back? Are they not buying back off Amazon influence, Amazon attribution, advertising and sales. Percentage of off Amazon sales. For example, Kevin gets a lot of off Amazon sales because he has that list right and that is it. Kevin King: That was good, good stuff, Rafael. I want to just do something real quick before we get into answering specific questions. Come and listen to what I'm about to say. You, absolutely positively, can send people out of the Amazon ecosystem. Okay, you do. You can put your social media links. You can put a link to your website. You can do that. Quit following for the misinformation that's all over Facebook that people are talking out their ass, that don't know what they're talking about are doing. Quit it. Quit spreading this stuff. I see this in the chat and it pisses me off because you're wrong. This is one of the reasons I created Freedom Ticket back in 2017, when Manny Coats came to me and said hey, do you want to create Freedom Ticket? One of the reasons I did is there's so much misinformation out there. Quit falling for it. You can absolutely do it. There's certain things you cannot do. Raphael showed you that Bradley just posted in there like you, don't want some people to go buy this on Target instead or Amazon's competition, but if you're going to create an app, that's a brilliant thing. You can create apps with no code software now, with AI, you don't even have to be a programmer. You can go and create a very basic app and say it's a great lead magnet, download this app. You know, he said he showed the example of the one that's for monitoring your weight. Um, which is probably a little bit more elaborate, but you can create a very simple little app. People are more likely to download a cool app that goes with their product than they are. Um, you know, if I'm doing dog treats, I could do a dog training app. You know it's got a few videos embedded in it and it's a great lead magnet. Kevin King: You can send people off. What you cannot do is anything around reviews or influencing reviews or something like that. But you can send people off, you can capture information. Just don't do anything that would hint at influencing reviews. That means putting five stars. That means saying leave us reviews and then putting five stars under it to say, kind of imply that you want five stars To say if you have a problem, contact us. Otherwise, go leave a review on Amazon. Don't do anything, don't offer discounts. If you leave us a review or if you do that, I'll give you a coupon. Don't do anything like that to incentivize reviews on Amazon. That you cannot do, and don't even do it on your own website, just so that there's no gray area there. But you can send people off and they can buy things on your website too. Okay, so I want to get that straight. Okay, so quit falling for the misinformation, quit. Bradley Sutton: All right, tell us how you really feel, Kevin. But let me start pulling up some questions. First of all, we answered Oleg. Oleg says Kevin answered my question before I even asked. That's perfect, all right. So let's just-. Kevin King: No, I think Kane says you can't. Yeah, they don't want you sending to other marketplaces, like that's what Kane just said here. You can go to your own website and they don't want you sending people over to Target or to eBay or over to a competing website. I would steer clear of that kind of stuff. Saying our product is available and you put the Amazon logo, the Target logo, the Walmart logo, that is a no-no. But taking them to your own website to do after-sale warranty, to get an app, to get some sort of other accessory for your product that's, an add-on to the product, or to grab a coupon for their next order on Amazon, all that is fine. Kevin King: Hope says that coupon codes last for 30 days on Amazon. Then you have to create a new one. So you can't. What you do is you put a, you create a QR code you can use Bitly or whatever your favorite QR code tool is and create one that goes to a specific landing page and then you update that page every 30 days. You create a new coupon and you just update the page. You update that page so that QR code stays the same. So even if your product doesn't sell for a year, you're updating the page, not the QR code to a specific place. That's an easy workaround. Rafael: Yep, and also not even coupon codes. Maybe you want to offer something new now, that QR code that Kevin's saying that you can update. You can do whatever you want with it. It's your QR code, basically. Bradley Sutton: I have one here. I know what I saw here that would have got this flag, but I just want I'm curious about what Kevin saw. Maybe you saw this one. But Maria says hey, I know somebody who had an insert that said let us know how we did Leave us a review on Amazon. We value your opinion. With a QR code below which said for a free book on the dangers of what their product was working to protect. Scan the QR code and Amazon close the listing, force the seller to remove these inserts. The seller did not ask for positive reviews. Is it not okay to ask for reviews at all? I know what I saw here, that that might have triggered it. What about you, Kevin? Kevin King: That's an incentive. You're basically I mean it doesn't directly word for word say it, but that can be read as an incentive that if you leave us a review, we're going to give you this free book. You can't do that. That's a no-no and that right there is an example of you've got to keep your nose super clean on anything around the words reviews and you're tying them together. They didn't say hey, go leave us a review and we'll give you a free book, but they tied them together in that same paragraph and you can read into that. That's kind of what they're implying. Don't do that. That will get you in trouble. As far as number of QR codes, I would never do more than two and put them on opposite sides of the page or opposite one at the top, one at the bottom, or opposite sides on the bottom so they don't get crossed. But I would never do more than two. One is best. You always want people to take one directed action. One action is always better than multiple and confusing them. But if you have a valid reason, you could put two, and I think that would. That would be okay. Bradley Sutton: All right. Mahak said how do I generate QR codes to direct customers? So there's, you know, any QR code generator can do it Helium 10 Portals. If you have access to Helium 10, you've got access to Helium 10 Portals you can create the QR code there. You know, Rafael showed some examples of QR codes in his presentation, but pretty much any QR code. Rafael: And also Mahak, it's not just creating the QR code. Make sure it's something like Kevin said, like it's in their face, like they want to see it, they want to scan it and it's not just like scan this, because most likely they're not going to scan it. You want to get, I would say, 5%, 10% of those QR codes scanned at least. If you're getting less than that, you should re-evaluate how you're presenting that insert packaging. Kevin King: Hope what you just asked is a no-no. Can I ask for an honest review in an email follow-up after they enter the review on a landing page? No, don't do that. Basically, Amazon will see as like you're filtering reviews. So you're saying, go leave us an honest review on our own landing page. They're typing it and, even though you made the confirmation page, may automatically say, uh, please, uh, you know, be kind and post this to Amazon or somewhere whatever. Amazon could see that as that you're filtering. Like if they left you something negative, then you're not asking them to do it, and if there's something positive, you are asking them to do it. So don't, don't do that. You can ask, you can say on your we love reviews, please leave us an honest review. That general wording by itself, with nothing else around it. Any other stuff about a free book or something is like way down the page or somewhere else or not even on there. That should be okay. You got one um. Bradley Sutton: Marcy says how many QR codes per insert do you think is acceptable? I've got one for my YouTube and one for my Facebook group. I want to add one for man. She wants QR codes all over the place. I want to add one for a 10% off, a coupon with an attribution tag so I can get the brown referral bonus. What do you guys think? Kevin King: Uh yeah, I just answered that. I said don't do more than two, don't do more. Rafael: Okay, I would present it. Marcy, maybe I would present the 10% in a different way. Maybe not a QR code, maybe it's just like literally just a code. But again, that does expire, like Kevin said. But I'm with Kevin 100%, I wouldn't do more than two. Like you saw in the light bulb example that I gave you, there was one at the top, one on the bottom. It wasn't next to each other, because it can get tricky like that. You want to separate. Even the color was separated in the package. It was like a different color in the background. So you want that separation as well. Kevin King: Tadara is asking can we add samples of other products and inserts or offer to send free samples? Yeah, you can add samples as an insert, especially with little accessories. Here's a free. If you're selling something sewing, here's a free button kit. Or here's a free bead kit or something. You know we have 16,000 other colors available on Amazon. Here's a free sample as a gift. You know there's little gifts like that work. I mean there's a video. Rafael will understand this there. Back in the day before that everything was digital, I had to order to do all of our video production. We had ordered beta tapes and we had ordered these big beta tapes, uh, and HD tapes, uh, these, you know, they're big like squares that you put in the big cameras and we'd order them out of this company in Philadelphia and every time they would send me these, these packages, uh, with my shipment of 10 tapes you know these tapes were like a hundred dollars a piece or something I would get two little packages of M&Ms, like you see at Halloween, the little, tiny, little sample size packages of M&Ms, and during the summer they didn't put those in there because, but instead they put a note sorry, due to the heat, these might melt, you know, and so they wouldn't put them in and it would always tick me off that I didn't get those two little packages of M&Ms. These are, you know, 20 cents. But the fact that I would get those in there was a thing so surprising people with a gift can be great. Kevin King: Another thing that I've done with a power to insert on my dog products is I've offered us I've had where I sell antlers, I sell bully sticks, I sell duck treats, I sell a variety of other dog treats, and what I'll do is I'll make a sample pack and I'll say get a free sample pack of all of our seven dog treats on Amazon that we sell on Amazon. I'll put a picture of the Amazon listing photo and actually you know and put it, put it on there and say we'll send you a sample pack with this along with a coupon. Just pay $7.95 shipping and handling. It costs me like $4 to send it out. $3 basically covers the cost. I send them a sample pack through the mail. That way. They have to give me their address, they have to give me their phone number because I'll say this is for how we deliver delivery, updates and shipping tracking numbers is by phone, so give me a valid phone number and then we send that sample pack out and in. There is a sample pack, and then there's a coupon that says get this on Amazon. I mean 20% off your first order, your first bag, use this coupon, it works really well. And then I capture their name and email address and I'm driving stuff back to Amazon. I'm creating this whole circle and it works really, really well. Rafael: Amelia has a good question. Bradley Sutton: So Amelia said here can you improve our current package design? If yes, would the insert card and the package design be connected to our current branding design and what would the creative process be behind this? Rafael: okay, um, I don't want to do any sales right now, but yeah, we can help you. But just in case, um, the insert, I would say that you do need to, um, to keep it harmoniously, um, I would say like it should be aligned to your branding. That's why it's a branding. It should be aligned to your branding. And if you can actually put it within the packaging, maybe you wanna save money in the insert cards and you wanna put it on top of the lid of the box or something like that. You could do that depending on your budget. So many questions that I have to be able to answer that correctly. But, yes, and the process you do it is what I was talking about. You should have understanding the product, the niche, the buyer persona, their needs, their troubles, their fears, everything that you can gather from them and give them to that, okay. So maybe if it's a fitness product, I'm trying to get fit for BDSS. Okay. So for me, it was getting something to help me maintain my weight scale, understanding where I should eat, what time I should eat. So when I was looking through products to help me with that, the insert cards or the products like the hero images gave me that it was like, oh, this scale has an app. It was through the hero image. I was like, okay, let me check this out, and that's how I got hooked on that scale. So yeah, I hope that answers your question, amelia. Bradley Sutton: All right, we got a question from Joseph, who's got a scenario here. He says all right, I've got this QR code. Says something to the effect of learn more about the benefits of our product here. Takes them to an about page on our brand website, which website is also a Shopify D2C website that has a shop page. Is that permissible? Kevin King: That's a gray one right there. Um, I would that. That's a gray one that one could be seen as either way. Um, I would probably, if I would probably, cordon off that Shopify page. Uh, I think Shopify allows you to do this. I think Esther Frystone has a landing page that goes on top of Shopify that allows you to corner off the rest of your Shopify site, like to focus it on a single product. Um, I mean, if they get creative and they hit a bunch of buttons and they might go back to your homepage, but I would avoid any confusion there. That's a gray one. Rafael: A question really quick from Henry. He says that all products need to have warranties. I'm not saying that your product shouldn't have a warranty, definitely if you want to include warranties. 100%. But what I'm saying is that what's going to take action to scan that QR code? Is it going to be the call to action for a warranty or is it going to be a call to action to like hey, for your next product, if it's a vitamin, for example, that you know they're going to repeat the consumption, here's 10, 15% off. I'm not saying don't include it, of course, 100%. If you want to include it, I include it. But when you say the call to action, what's going to be that action that's going to make them scan it? Is it going to be the warranty or is it going to be, depending on the product? That's what I'm trying to say there, just in case. I don't want to make any confusions there. Bradley Sutton: I was just saying Lance is wondering how to get in contact with Rafael. You can be connected directly to them at hubhelium10.com and just type in ShareIt Studio. They're all over social media as well. Rafael's on LinkedIn. If you're in Helium 10, the easiest way is just go to hubhelium10.com and enter ShareIt Studio and you'll be able to even see. Maybe if you're a certain member of Helium 10, you might get certain discounts with them as well if you're logged in on that page. Rafael: If you're seeing this, this is my insert card. If you're seeing this, if you say Bradley and Kev are the best, we'll give you a really good discount. Bradley Sutton: There we go. I like that. Kevin, you had a question you said you wanted to answer, or was it someone else? Kevin King: I just saw one. Someone said they're doing a. Where did it go? They offer a 100-pound Amazon voucher prize draw each month. It's an image or video tagged on Instagram or TikTok. Each image uploaded gets one entry in the drawing. Opinions, please. Yeah, I don't see any problem with that. That should be totally fine and that's good marketing. Yeah, so you should be totally fine with that. Rafael: Angela Reategui. I hope I'm not butchering your last name, Angela. She asked can I include a QR code for free e-book? Uh, yes, we've done it with clients, especially in the home and kitchen, like food sector. It's worked really well with them. Uh, so yeah. Kevin King: Kane's like says can we offer discounts only on Amazon? Can we offer coupons for our own website? Um it, you can offer a coupon for your own website but, like for accessories or something, I wouldn't do it for the same product. I wouldn't say, come and buy, you know this exact same product. Or you don't want to do stuff where you're putting people into their, into your flow. You know, if it's a subscribe and save type of product, Amazon's probably not going to like it too much that if you're trying to get them to come to your subscribe and save on your Shopify site versus you're on Amazon, that that's a gray area, and so I would. I would just stay away from something like that. But offering them a discount hey, you know you just bought this blender. We have an accessory kit. As an Amazon customer, you get 20% off. It's not sold on Amazon, it's only available directly from us. Then yeah, that should be fine. Bradley Sutton: All right. Well, guys, thank you for all the great questions. We're going to be back here next month with another guest, Rafael, Kevin. Thank you so much for joining. Don't forget to reach out to Share It Studio, hub.helium10.com. All right, guys, hope you enjoyed that training. Don't forget again, the full, actual detail of the training, without the Q and A and all that other stuff, is in the Freedom Ticket course. So go to your learning hub inside of Helium 10. And if you have no idea what Freedom Ticket is, want to get more information, just go to h10.me/ft for freedom ticket. And let us know if you're watching this on YouTube or somewhere else. What other advanced topics would you like us to do? A deep dive, Q & A and bring an expert on with Kevin? Let us know in the comments below if you're watching this on YouTube or another place. Until then, we'll see you guys in the next episode.