Serious Sellers Podcast: Learn How To Sell On Amazon FBA & Walmart Helium 10 Buzz 6/21/24: Amazon AI Updates | New Walmart Video Tool | SQP Updates
We’re back with another episode of the Weekly Buzz with Helium 10’s Chief Brand Evangelist, Bradley Sutton. Every week, we cover the latest breaking news in the Amazon, Walmart, and E-commerce space, talk about Helium 10’s newest features, and provide a training tip for the week for serious sellers of any level.
Amazon's new AI-powered tools
https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/innovation-at-amazon/amazon-ads-image-generator-adds-aspect-ratio-capability
Amazon Ditching Air Pillows
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/06/20/amazon-plastic-air-pillows-to-be-replaced-with-paper-filler.html
Imagine saving thousands annually on fulfillment costs by optimizing product dimensions. We explore the financial benefits of Helium 10’s size tier optimization feature and how reducing an item’s length by just one inch can lead to significant savings. Additionally, learn how Helium 10’s Listing Analyzer and media comparison tools can give you an edge over competitors by enhancing product listings. With actionable insights and practical examples, this episode is packed with strategies to help you stay ahead in the e-commerce landscape. Tune in for all these valuable strategies and stay ahead in the e-commerce game!
In this episode of the Weekly Buzz by Helium 10, Bradley covers:
- 00:45 - Amazon AI Power Tools
- 02:27 - Expansion of AI Tools in Europe
- 03:34 - Walmart+ Week
- 04:28 - Walmart Connect Video Module
- 05:22 - Amazon Air Pillows
- 06:35 - Affiliate Marketing Example
- 08:42 - SQP + BTP Updates
- 12:22 - Follow Serious Sellers Podcast
- 13:18 - New Feature Alert
- 16:34 - Training: Listing Analyzer
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Transcript
Bradley Sutton:
AI tool expansion from Amazon, a Walmart new video feature, recap of new features in search, career performance and brand tailored promotions this and more on this week's weekly buzz. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the 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's going on in the Amazon, Walmart, e-commerce world. We give you training tips of the week and we also let you know what new Helium 10 features were released. That'll give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Let's see what's buzzing Just a couple of news articles of the day, so let's go ahead and hop right in it.
Bradley Sutton:
The very first one is from Amazon. It's entitled Amazon's new AI powered tools help advertisers easily create engaging and vibrant images. All right, so this is, you know, been out for quite a while now in in sponsored ads how you can upload an image and then create different backgrounds for that image. And now there's a couple of new features. First of all, this kind of cool, this article that we have linked to, probably down below in the comments has some quotes from our very own Melissa, right here from Pacvue, and you know she talks a little bit about it. Now, one thing that's interesting is or a couple of things that I noticed new that they're releasing is, first of all, that I noticed. New that they're releasing is, first of all, instead of you just having to do the prompt in order to let Amazon's AI know what to do for the background, it's gonna start scanning your listing and maybe kind of add some of its own flavor, even without you having to specify every single thing. The other new thing is that you're now able, through Amazon's AI image generation, to do it in different formats. You know like not just one exact. You know 10, 80 by 720 or whatever the heck it is Right. But you can do different formats because obviously there's different ad types, different image sizes for different use cases inside of seller central for ads or other things. Now, obviously, if you've been using Helium 10, or you've been using it or not, you hopefully know that you have access to not only this image generator but also, in Listing, builder is another image generator that you can create images for Amazon post sizes, for different A plus content modules, et cetera. So a lot of new AI stuff that, um, you know can definitely help you from Amazon.
Bradley Sutton:
Speaking of AI from Amazon, one more update about this topic. Another article here is entitled Amazon announces expansion of generative AI listing tools to sellers across Europe. So you know, months and months ago, we reported how, in Amazon USA, there's like a listing content builder that they had and some other things that have been released to Amazon USA. But now, as of a few weeks ago and through today, they're fully announced or fully launched in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom for those AI listing building tools, amongst some other things. For those AI listing building tools, amongst some other things. Now, you know, the last time I used it, it's not as intuitive, maybe, as you need to really make a great listing because it's not going to include all of your main keywords that you're going to need. But it's a good way to kind of like see, hey, what does Amazon think is important for your listing to have? But to really make your listing, still definitely use the Helium 10 Listing Builder. Make sure you're using all of the keywords in your listing. But now some of those AI features that we, as US sellers have had for a while now it is available in Amazon Europe.
Bradley Sutton:
Next article not really an article, but just a reminder from Walmart. It's kind of like their version of Prime Day this week. All right, so that has been from June 17th and it's going to go for a couple more days. Walmart+ Week is what it's called, and so I'm just curious have you checked your Walmart sales, those of you selling on Walmart? What kind of bump did you see? And it did your Amazon sales? Maybe those of you who sell on Walmart and Amazon, did you see? Maybe Amazon get a little bit of a bump? I'm also wondering how did you manage now that Walmart+ week is in a different week than prime day? Um, you know, if your listings are tied together, you can't really discount on one site and not on the other. So those of you who did deals on Walmart+, did you go ahead and do those same deals on Amazon? Just curious as to what some of your strategies were. Let me know in the comments below.
Bradley Sutton:
Another announcement that actually comes from Walmart. This is an email that went out to Walmart sellers. Take a look here. It says Walmart Connect is pleased to announce the launch of a video module, an item and module reordering for brand shop via shop builder. All right. So it says here bring your brand to life like never before. Use the new video module to create an engaging narrative about your brand and educate customers on your unique offering. So there's a couple more things that they announced, but this is you know it's. It's a lot of stuff that you know maybe we take for granted on Amazon, but Walmart hasn't had these kind of things like being able to put videos on your brand page. I mean, Walmart hasn't even had a brand page for that long. So a lot of cool things coming to Walmart that you're probably used to on Amazon, but now hopefully that'll help you get a little bit more, maybe some better conversion, maybe some more sales on the Walmart platform.
Bradley Sutton:
Next news article is from CNBC and it's entitled Amazon is ditching the plastic air pillows in its boxes. How many of you have gotten Amazon packages or maybe even gotten samples of your own shipments and maybe Amazon used like a big box and it had those like bags filled with air, right, airbags, I guess you can maybe call it. They call it air pillows right here in this article. But that is going away, all right, because they want to use 15 billion fewer plastic pillows annually, and now they're going to be adding paper fillers that are made from recyclable materials. All right. Now, from a customer standpoint, what I'm worried about is, depending on what this, this paper fillers is, is. If it's what I think it is, it's like those stuff that almost looks like comes from a shredder. I'm just worried it's going to be like that and then customers are going to complain that all this stuff got all over their packaging and all over their house and it's a little bit messy. You know, those air bubbles, just like you know, explode it and for a bad or worse experience for the unboxing part of it Does it make a big mess. You know, might, might be worth looking into. Hopefully not.
Bradley Sutton:
Next article is not really an article, or it was an article. It's by in style, but I brought it up to kind of like show an example of what happens because of affiliate marketers out there for Amazon. So this is actually something that just came up in the news and it really uh. You know, sometimes when I, when I'm looking for e-commerce news, I type in just regular keywords like Amazon and stuff, and this has nothing to do with e-commerce sellers, but it's something that got a lot of views. All right, this is an article by in style and it's entitled Priyanka Chopra just unlocked my new go-to airport outfit and it's $15 at Amazon.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, so this is a person who just made this article, you know, a couple days ago, and then you know she doesn't know this actress, right, but she just like saw, she just took an image from this actress's Instagram, put it on here, and then what she did was she found different sets from Amazon and other websites that look like what this actress was wearing, and then the links I noticed here were like Amazon affiliate links. Now, the one that was $15, I went to that listing here on Amazon. All right, so this is a. It says B T, f, B M woman's pajama set. Right Now, take a look before the article came out yesterday or two days ago now, on this on the 19th, this pajama set or whatever the heck it is, um, had a BSR of 453,000. All right, now this article comes out on the 20th yesterday and the BSR goes from 450,000 down to 6,000. I think you can probably see that that's a big sales increase.
Bradley Sutton:
So, again, a cool strategy for you is. You know, can you make your own article. That gets picked up. You know, the show starts showing up in news. Can you get your products? You know, somehow that come out in some of these blogs and articles and it could drive tons and tons of traffic to your list. I thought that was just a cool example of something that literally was just released yesterday, and then you can see the effect that something like that has on an Amazon listing A couple of things that actually were released like a month, two months ago. But when I look on LinkedIn and other places, I don't see too many people who know about it, and a couple of people I talked to like hey, did you know that brand analytics and brand seller promotions has this and that? And they said no. So I wanted to just go ahead and highlight, even though it's not like brand new news. Like I said, this was probably released a month ago. But just a reminder to check those of you who have brand registry go into your search query performance and then go into your monthly view at the brand level. You know, choose a month. You know, maybe choose May. That's the most recent month. And now, when you go all the way over to the right hand side and you hit the generate download button over here you are going to get some new options that maybe you haven't seen. So the ones you've seen before is simple view, comprehensive view, but now you've got a couple other reports here that maybe you knew about these. If you did, great. If not, go ahead and check it out. One is called Amazon's Choice Badge Data. All right, so it's going to show you, hey, how did your catalog performance go when you had an Amazon's Choice Badge, as opposed to when you didn't have it? The other one is Search funnel outliers data and it says search funnel metrics that include your top and bottom performing queries or outliers, and this allows you to focus on specific search query performance without the need to review thousands of queries. This data is only available at the monthly reporting range, so go ahead and take a look at your search query performance at the monthly level and at the brand level If you have not taken a look at this before.
Bradley Sutton:
Another thing that was launched a couple months ago or about a month ago that I don't see too many people talking about. You know we talked months and months ago about brand tailored promotions, and now there's a few new audiences that are available in brand tailored promotion, the ones that there's a few here that you know Amazon has had for forever right, or at least since it launched. I forgot if it was like late last year or early this year, but you know you've got your at risk audience, which is customers who haven't purchased recently nor frequently, with varied spend. You've got what I think is one of the one of most powerful ones here the brand cart abandoners. You know people who added your product to the cart but didn't actually purchase. You've got your brand followers here, but now you know there there's some other ones here that maybe you haven't seen, depending on the last time you check this, but you're able to make. Remember, the whole point of this page is you're able to make special promotions that go directly to these audiences.
Bradley Sutton:
So one is declining, promising All right. You ever heard of that one. It says customers from your brand's promising audience who are predicted to spend less with your brand in the next year. Uh, declining top tier. This is customers from your brand's top tier audience who are predicted to spend less. You've got your high spend customers. That's always been there. You've got potential new customers. What is that made of? It says customers who have clicked on your brand or your storefront or products, added products to their cart but have not purchased from your brand in the last year. Okay, so they never even purchased from you. You've got promising. All right, these are customers who purchased recently. They buy occasionally and they spend above average. All right, they've you've got recent customers. This is just a five percent sampling of your brand's customers. You search group performance. Those of you who are brand registered, go in there, take a look, play around some of these things. Maybe there's some potential for you to make some more sales, either by looking at some different data points or by targeting a new group of buyers.
Bradley Sutton:
I just wanted to show you, if you're watching this on YouTube guys, you know maybe getting this a little bit late this version of the news, the news, always comes first, as well as all of our podcasts. It comes out first on your podcast player. So if you have an iPhone, go into the Apple podcast app right now. All right, and those of you who are already following, just scroll down a little bit and pass the first few episodes. You'll see this. Ratings and reviews Do me a solid. Why don't you go ahead and give a rating, and if you're listening to this on the podcast already, you're on the Apple podcast player hit this ratings and review, and make sure to go ahead and leave a review right here by clicking on that. Just hit the tap to rate and then put the stars that you like. I would really appreciate it. Now, if you have Spotify, it's actually the same exact thing. Just type in serious sellers podcast, make sure to hit the follow button and then you'll be subscribed. You'll be the first to get these news each week. All right, that's it for the news this week.
Bradley Sutton:
Now we're going to hop into the Helium 10 new feature alerts, and it is a doozy, guys. This is pretty cool. I guarantee that none of you even knew we had this. Maybe a couple of you might've seen it in your alerts, but basically, this is something that could save you tons and tons of money. So it's called the the size tier optimization suggestion. I think it's going to be called. But basically, what you guys want to do, I want everybody who's got Helium 10, go into your dashboard and then go to your alerts page and then look if you have a message that says products with size tier optimization suggestions and then hit this button with the number. Basically, in a nutshell, what this is is if you have a box or a package in your entire catalog that is super close to like, maybe going from one size tier to the next, like if you could just take away a half inch or an inch and then you go from large standard size to standard size or something like that. We're going to give you a notification because a lot of you might not realize you're right on the border and maybe you can go ahead and shave like a half inch on your box, your next production run.
Bradley Sutton:
Let me just illustrate how much money this could make you. All right, this is one of my Project 5k account. So I'm going to go ahead and click on this number three because it says I have three products. That has size to your optimization. So when I hit that it takes me to those products and then I put my mouse over this information. You can see, look at this. It says we've identified an opportunity to optimize your fulfillment costs. If you reduce the length by one inch, you could go from large bulky to large standard size, likely decreasing the FBA fulfillment costs from 1075 to $7 per unit. Guys, my computer, like mine, tells me that that is $3.75 difference if I just take one inch off of one side of my product. Now let's just say that, uh, actually I know what, what, what this product is. This product sells an average of about five units a day, all right, so it's not like a top seller, but that's five, five units a day for the entire year. So let's, let's just take five units a day and times that by $3.75. Okay, that's $18.75 a day extra I could be getting or less in fees right Now we times that by 365.
Bradley Sutton:
This one alert guys that Helium 10 just gave me, if I actually act on it and obviously if I am able to shave an inch off $7,000 for the year, is that a valuable enough alert for you guys? And this is an item that only sells five? This is not one of my top sellers, obviously, right? What if you guys, if this was your item and you sold 25 units a day, all right, instead of five, that means that this alert potentially just made you $35,000. Are you guys rushing to your alerts page yet? I hope so. So again, go to your alerts page. Take a look at the top left. Does it say, products with size tier optimization suggestion. If so, take a look. You can't always shave an inch off of your package. Sometimes you can, sometimes you can't, but I think you'd agree with me it's definitely worth a look.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, now let's go to our Helium 10 training tip of the week, something that will give you serious strategies for serious sellers. Let's say you're looking at X-Ray at your niche and you just want to kind of like really get a quick look at what's going on with the top competitors, because you're about to launch a new product I'm about to launch this new egg rack, or I am did launch this egg rack this week as a test on project X. And so, like I'm here in the Amazon search results and you guys maybe have selected different ASINs here. And what do you normally do when you select ASINs from X-Ray? You probably hit the run Cerebro button to go check on their keywords. That's great and all, but did you notice, right next to the run Cerebro button is a run listing analyzer button. So let me show you how this can be useful. So maybe let's just say these are all my direct competitors, these stackable egg racks.
Bradley Sutton:
Once I hit run with listing analyzer, it's going to take me to the listing analyzer tool and of course here in the middle I can see just some general stats about these other products and check their listing quality score and see you know who's ranking for the most important keywords and stuff like that. But there's a hidden button here that a lot of you do not look at. Now this is for those of you with a diamond plan, but it is called the media comparison button. So once you hit media comparison it takes you to a page where it shows all of the images that are in all of your competitors listings in a nice little format that you can download as a PDF. And first of all, I'm just going to look at this and see do I see common themes? This is this is nothing new. This strategy we've been talking about for years comes from Tomer Rabinovich. Shout out to Tomer. But it's like you should be looking at your competitors' images to see what common themes are working Like.
Bradley Sutton:
For example, I noticed that so many of these showed the stackability right. It showed how you put different egg racks and stack them up together. I see four out of the five. They've got human models in their listing. But basically you use this and kind of work, your photo shoot strategy, if you're using like a photography studio or maybe just somebody who's going to do 3D design or something like that just go ahead and print this, export this as a PDF and then now you've got all these images right here on one page instead of, you know, like trying to print off you know seven, eight different Amazon listings and then, you know, trying to coordinate that way with PowerPoint or something like that with your graphic designer.
Bradley Sutton:
So really cool tool that I think a lot of people are sleeping on right here in Listing Analyzer. But you can import listings directly from Xray in your Chrome extensions so that you can hit that media comparison button. All right, guys. That's it for the news this week. Thank you so much for tuning in. We'll see you next week to see what's buzzing.