Optimizing Inventory with Heat Maps for Holiday Sales

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

Amazon’s Prime Big Deal Days was the company’s biggest October shopping event ever
https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/retail/prime-big-deal-days-amazon-fall-october-prime-day

Amazon’s new AI Shopping Guides make it easier to research product types and buy smarter.
https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/retail/amazon-ai-shopping-guides-product-research-recommendations

TikTok Rolls Out Automated Ad Targeting Options for the Holidays
https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/tiktok-rolls-out-automated-ad-targeting-options-holidays/729142/

You can now reward customers for engaging with your Amazon ads
https://advertising.amazon.com/en-us/resources/whats-new/reward-customers-for-engaging-with-your-ads/

Exciting news from Helium 10 includes the integration of Adtomic into the Diamond plan, offering efficient PPC campaign management with Advertising AI, and introducing a new feature that Helium 10 customers have been asking for for years is finally here! Variation Sales Strength is basically showing you which of the variations have the most sales. And lastly, don't miss our training for the Inventory Heat Maps tool to optimize sales strategies during the holiday season

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

• 00:54 - Oct Prime Day Success
• 02:22 - AI Shopping Guides
• 03:47 - VISA Verification
• 04:40 - AWD Too Full?
• 05:30 - TikTok Auto Ads
• 07:24 - US-UK Shipment Rates
• 08:05 - Customer Reward Ads
• 10:21 - 2024 Holiday Returns
• 11:01 - Sponsored Display Depreciation
• 11:45 - New Feature Alerts
• 14:14 - Freedom Ticket Webinar
• 14:42 - Elite Workshop in Milan, Italy
• 15:26 - Training Tip: Inventory Heat Maps

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Carrie Miller:

A new feature that Helium 10 customers have been asking for years is finally here. There is a new VAT tax policy that you need to pay attention to. Amazon warehouse distribution might be too full and TikTok rolls out new automated ad targeting 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 news stories that are going on in the Amazon, Walmart, e-commerce world. We highlight the latest new feature alerts from Helium 10, and we review a training tip of the week that will give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Now, today, our host is going to be Kerry Miller. So, Kerry, take it away and let us know what's buzzing.

Carrie Miller:

Let's go ahead and get into the first article. That's October Prime Day Big Deals, and we have an article that was released by Amazon and they announced that prime big deal days was its biggest October shopping event ever. Okay, so that's pretty exciting, especially going into Q4. Here. They said that more prime members shopped compared to last year and took advantage of early holiday deals, marking the kickoff to the holiday season with higher sales and more items sold during the two day event than any previous October shopping event. So that's very good news, I think, for a lot of us sellers. Globally, prime members saved more than $1 billion across millions of deals, including on seasonal merchandise and gifts, so it was definitely a good time for shoppers as well. And if we scroll down a little bit more in this article, it goes on to talk a little bit about the role that AI actually played in this event. So Rufus, which is the generative, ai powered conversational shopping assistant, helped millions of customers in the US answer questions on a variety of shopping needs and products in the Amazon store. Rufus can now help make tailored deal recommendations, making it easier to discover great gift ideas at a discount, and customers also use something else called inspire, which is an in app mobile experience that helps you discover new products with a personalized feed, amazon lens, which is a visual shopping tool that identifies objects and finds similar items on amazon, and then also they have something called the ai shopping guides, which basically leads us into our next article, which is amazon's new ai shopping guides that make it easier to research product types and buy smarter. So let's go ahead and talk a little bit about this.

Carrie Miller:

So Amazon has actually introduced AI shopping guides to simplify product research by consolidating key information and recommendations for over 100 product types. These guides use generative AI to deliver relevant details and product options quickly, making it generative AI to deliver relevant details and product options quickly, making it easier for customers to make informed purchase decisions. The AI guides are available on Amazon's mobile app and the website and are powered by Amazon's Bedrock large language models, enhancing their ability to offer personalized shopping results. So if you want to go ahead and take a look with me so we can see what this actually looks like, you can see right here that there's actually some recommendations to help shoppers to make better decisions. So, for example, if we go over to this one on the right, it says you know factors to consider the display type, the resolution, all of that great information so you can click on that and get more information about that. Or you can also go down. You can see that you can shop by popular brands, so you can click on the types of brands and then they'll also kind of have overview of the actual product. So this is quite interesting, making it, you know, kind of an interesting AI backed approach to this year's October event. So we'll probably see a lot more of this AI playing a part in the whole finding products, you know, on Amazon for customers. So we'll see how this goes and see how it improves our sales.

Carrie Miller:

So let's go ahead and get into the next thing and this is kind of word on the street Maybe there isn't really an article about it so I don't have anything to share with you but there are some changes to Amazon VAT or the Visa program. We do have some sources that say that Amazon has actually updated its VAT compliance requirements for sellers. So if you're part of the Amazon VAT information sharing agreement or visa program, amazon is no longer handling VAT compliance verification and now, even if you've already switched over to another provider, which I'm sure many of you already have. Sellers must actually inform Amazon about the change or you're gonna risk suspension, and this affects both US and European sellers, and it's similar to last year's seller verification process, where, when you fail to update the details, it led to account suspension. So you definitely want to take some action. If you need some more information about this, you can actually contact Avask. They're in our partner hub. You can find them at h10.me. Forward slash Avask and they can help answer any of your questions.

Carrie Miller:

All right, the next story is about Amazon warehouse distribution and whether or not it's actually full, and we're going to say AWD for short, which stands for Amazon warehouse distribution. We have heard from multiple customers in Amazon seller groups that they are getting messages from AWD saying things like this Sorry, this time we don't have enough space available for your inventory. We are unable to accept your shipment due to capacity limit. Try reducing your shipment volume or try again in seven days. Now I think this is a very big issue for AWD if they want sellers to start moving all of their logistics to AWD Now. I know a lot of sellers are trying to take advantage of this and Amazon maybe went pretty quick to market with this, but we really want to know in the comments if you've seen this message and what you're doing about it, and are you going to wait and send an inventory to the warehouse, or what are you going to do? What are your plans? Let us know in the comments below.

Carrie Miller:

All right for this next story, we have TikTok launching new automated ads. They're rolling them out for the holiday season, so let's go ahead and take a look at the article. So TikTok has announced a new fully automated ad solution called Smart Plus, which will take care of the whole creation from ad creation, placement and bidding process for you. So if we scroll down, you can see a little bit more about what actually the Smart Plus automated ads program is, so you can get more details there. But basically, tiktoks explained it as Smart Plus automates the performance advertising process across targeting, bidding and creative to deliver the right ad to the right person to offer the best performance. Advertisers simply input their assets, budget and targeting goals and smart plus automatically creates or selects the best creative asset. Okay, so basically they're kind of doing everything for you AI run, ai generated. I'm not sure how many of us feel about all this being kind of AI generated and not having any involvement in it, but it is kind of interesting to kind of run some of these ads in addition to the other ads that you might be advertising, and so let's go ahead and look at some of what they're saying. So advertisers using smart web campaigns to optimize for value have actually seen a 52% improvement in the return on ad spend. So that is actually really good news as well. And if we scroll down a little bit more, tiktok is also rolling out GMV Max, which automates TikTok shop campaign creation with the aim of increasing your TikTok shop gross merchandise value. And they further go on to say a little bit more about this down below here. They said GMV Max considerably simplifies ad operations, cutting campaign setup time in half, and allows sellers to reach their audience across all shoppable placements on TikTok, including the for you feed, shop tab and search within a single campaign. So go ahead and check those out. If you haven't checked out the TikTok ads. I definitely think it's a game changer and something you should really be taking advantage of in this Q4 season.

Carrie Miller:

Okay, next up, amazon global selling. Send rate rejection is happening for the US to UK shipments, so, in a bid to make international shipping more affordable, amazon has actually announced a reduction in send S E N D rates for FBA shipments from the US to the UK, and sellers can now save up to 15% compared to what it was in July. The program offers seamless seller central integration, custom support, competitive rates, door-to-door delivery and shipment tracking, and this move is set to streamline logistics for sellers looking to expand to the UK market, making it easier and more cost-effective to grow their business globally, so might be a really good time to think about expanding to the UK. Okay, this next article. It's from Amazon, and now you can actually reward customers for engaging with your ads. This is quite an interesting and exciting new kind of announcement and I will definitely answer some of your questions that you probably have about this. But Amazon is basically introducing a new feature that allows advertisers to reward customers for engaging with their ads, so now sellers can create campaigns that actually offer incentives like discounts or promotions when customers interact with their ads, making it easier to drive engagement and conversion. Now this innovative approach aims to enhance the customer experience while boosting ad performance, and the integration is designed to be seamless within the Amazon ads platform.

Carrie Miller:

So if we actually scroll down, you are going to be able to see what this creative looks like, and I'm going to just scroll. There's a little bit about the setup and I want to show you what it looks like. So, basically, what's going to happen is you're going to see within the searches or on your stores, there's these previews where you can get a $5 Amazon credit. So that is going to be kind of a big bold red thing on the actual. You know where people can click and you're going to be able to give that as an incentive for your products.

Carrie Miller:

And there are probably some questions, like I had. I had I said well, who's going to pay for the $5 credit? Well, the answer is definitely you. So at the very bottom, where it says where do I access it, it says the rewards ads experience is currently available via the Amazon DSP within a component-based creative ad template. Advertisers will be billed for the cost of the distributed or rewards. So there you go, you're going to be paying for those $5 credits or whatever it is that you're going to do. Advertisers also have access to two net new metrics, which is reward grants the number of rewards distributed and reward costs, which is the cost of rewards distributed. These metrics are currently available within the ADSP campaign builder dashboards, but are not available via public API. So definitely go ahead and check it out. That's where you're going to really find all that information. So I am really actually curious to know how many of you think you would use this and do you think you might raise your prices to be able to take advantage of this. It's kind of an interesting thing, especially with margins kind of being a lot lower for a lot of people. So we'll see how that actually turns out. So go ahead and check that out, if you haven't already checked it out.

Carrie Miller:

Okay, the next story is very important to know, and that is the returns window for Amazon is going to be extended for the 2024 holidays. So Amazon is actually extending its holiday returns window for 2024. Items purchased between November 1st and December 31st of 2024 can be returned until January 31st of 2025, except for Apple products, which have a return deadline of January 15th of 2025. This extended policy applies to all seller fulfilled FBA and Amazon retail orders. Now, while the returns window is longer, eligibility rules remain unchanged, and this extension is aiming to make holiday shopping more convenient for our customers. Okay, and the next piece of news there is a depreciation announcement reminder Sponsored display version two reporting endpoints will shut off October 31st 2024. So Amazon is set to depreciate its sponsored display version 2 reporting endpoints, with a complete shutdown planned for October 31st of 2024. Advertisers should transition to the new version 3 reporting endpoints to continue accessing sponsored display reports. Until then, expect increased throttling on the old version, and amazon encourages feedback on this change through its ads API support page on by October 15th of 2024. So for more details on all that, you can go to amazon's migration page.

Carrie Miller:

Okay, so all those news stories were very exciting, but I think we have even more exciting news within helium 10 with our new features now. This next feature is something that a lot of people have been asking for, and I am very, very excited to announce it, because I've been asked this question for years actually, and we've been working on it for a long time. So I'm going to go ahead and share my screen. So this is just a search of coffin shelf and what I'm going to do is I'm going to actually go ahead and I'm going to pull our x-ray extension. Okay, so what I want to show you, which is already kind of clearly here, is I basically take this is our Manny's Mysterious Oddities product and I'm just going to expand this down and it's basically going to show us the variation sales strength with a graph. Okay, so this is basically showing you which of the variations have the most sales. So, for example, variation sales strength for this black one is obviously the big seller for us, and then you can see that there's a very, very tiny sliver of the pie here for purple, and then also a very sliver piece of the pie, maybe a little bit more, for the pink. So we can see that the top seller is the black one, then the pink one and then the purple one. So this is some great news and it's really kind of actually a teaser. Really, this is going to be a teaser for something that we're even getting for you even more data. So stay tuned for the launch of that. But in the meantime now you can see which variation, or child variation ASINs have the most sales.

Carrie Miller:

This next feature announcement for Helium 10 is very exciting, and that is that Atomic is now included in the diamond plan. So now you don't have to pay separately for it, it's going to be all included with the diamond plan, and with that we've actually launched advertising AI. So you know, if you don't know a bunch about PPC or you don't feel very strongly about it, you can actually give Atomic your ASIN and your ACoS goals and that's it. And Helium 10 will create your campaigns and optimize them by itself. So I'm going to actually show you how this works by sharing my screen. Okay, so if you go into Atomic, you're going to click on Atomic and go down here to the bottom, where it's the AI advertising very bottom icon and all you would do is you would click on your product goal and you're going to select your ASIN, say, you're going to do this one, you're going to set your ACoS goal and your daily budget and, if you want to, you can add some keywords in there and then you're going to basically go ahead and launch that campaign. So we're going to go into detail on how sellers can use Adtomic and save time and money in a live workshop with expert Destiny with Sean on the 22nd of October, so mark your calendars for that. We're going to be doing an in-depth PPC webinar, you know, for beginners, to help you to understand and use ad atomic better and more efficiently.

Carrie Miller:

Next, we actually have an announcement. That is, our monthly freedom ticket training with Kevin King. So Kevin King is actually bringing on Mark Degrassi I'm not actually sure how you say his name, but Mark Degrassi, I think, is how you say it he's going to be actually talking about why branding has always been your biggest marketing problem and how AI is going to solve it. I actually did see him speak at one of Kevin's events and he's very, very good. So to register for this special training, you can go to the link below.

Carrie Miller:

Okay, and another announcement that we have which is very, very exciting is that our next Helium 10 Elite Workshop is going to be in Milan, Italy, on November 11th. Bradley is going to be speaking there, Mansour is going to be speaking, Jana, who also does kind of listing optimization in other languages, and a few more top level speakers are going to be in attendance and speaking at this event. Elite members actually can go for free. So elite members just need to check the Facebook group for their free code, but everyone else you can actually attend, still for a fee. So just go to h10.me forward slash Milan to get your tickets before it sells out Right now. We have it on an 80% of the regular price special right now. So if you want to buy those tickets. You can go ahead and get them for a reduced price.

Carrie Miller:

And, last but not least, I'm very excited to go into our training tip of the week, which is our inventory heat maps. Okay, so inventory heat maps are available in helium 10. I'm sharing my screen now and this is actually in profits, and what you would do is you go to the heat maps and you're going to click on inventory heat map. You can change what to whatever product you want. So this is our coffin shelf, so we have our coffin shelf selected and you can actually see where our inventory is located in every single part of the United States right here. So this is a really, really helpful tool, especially going into the holiday season, where you can actually, you know, see where your inventory is.

Carrie Miller:

And something else that we do have in conjunction with that is the sales heat map, so you can actually see where the majority of your sales are in this heat map and you can go back and say is my inventory kind of matching up with those areas? Or maybe there's some areas where your sales are kind of up or have been in the past, but maybe they are not stocked with inventory. So you can go ahead and stock them with inventory, but go ahead and check out this inventory heat maps. Maybe, if you need some more distribution, you can figure out ways to kind of push inventory to other areas of the US and so that you can expand your reach. That is basically all that we have for this week's episode of the Weekly Buzz.

Carrie Miller:

So what I would actually like for you to do if you have not done this, we do have a YouTube channel, and so we would love for you to go ahead and subscribe to our YouTube channel. We do lots of great updates, we do the Weekly Buzz on there, but we also have a lot of great training for helium 10 and just selling on Amazon in general. Lots of incredible information. So subscribe to our YouTube channel so that you can be the first to know the up-to-date information about selling on Amazon and other platforms. We look forward to seeing you next week again on the Weekly Buzz. I do believe Bradley will be back, so we'll see you again next week to see what's buzzing.