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

Join the podcast with leading TikTok Shop expert Michelle Barnum-Smith as she delves into the platform's game-changing e-commerce potential. Explore the advantages over traditional platforms, the seamless customer journey, empowering creators through affiliate models, and leveraging TikTok's growing influence to boost sales. Get inspired by success stories and practical tips for setting up your TikTok Shop.

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 Launches New Program To Attract More UK Merchants https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/tiktok-launches-program-attract-more-uk-merchants/720798/ Temu Breaks With Direct-From-China Strategy In Threat to Amazon https://www.theinformation.com/articles/temu-breaks-with-direct-from-china-strategy-in-threat-to-amazon Amazon Price Matching Update: As we all know Amazon has been price-matching Target and Walmart for a few years now causing many issues for brands. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/brandonfishman_amazon-target-activity-7215821589546721280-2Rv_/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop Flip, The TikTok Shop Competitor, Expands Social Commerce By Acquiring Curated https://www.forbes.com/sites/pamdanziger/2024/07/09/flip-the-tiktok-shop-competitor-expands-social-commerce-by-acquiring-curated/ Amazon defeats US consumer lawsuit over ‘buy box’ product listings https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/amazon-defeats-us-consumer-lawsuit-over-buy-box-product-listings-2024-07-08/ Etsy loses its ‘handmade’ and ‘vintage’ labels as it takes on Temu and Amazon https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/9/24190843/etsy-handmade-vintage-policy-change Don't miss an exciting preview of the Amazon Accelerate event and how you can win free tickets from Helium 10. Lastly, Bradley talks about the latest update on Helium 10's Chrome extension, designed to give you the competitive edge you need in title optimization. In this episode of the Weekly Buzz by Helium 10, Bradley covers: 00:47 - $1M TikTok Shop Program 01:43 - Temu Becoming Amazon-ish? 03:27 - Target / Amazon Buy Box Blunder 05:12 - New TikTok Shop Clone 07:12 - Amazon Wins Lawsuit 08:24 - Big Etsy Change 10:38 - Walmart Connect Updates 11:15 - Amazon Accelerate Updates 12:00 - Follow Helium 10 On TikTok 12:54 - New Feature Alerts & Training ► 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: Temu's going after Amazon now. Big buy box issues. If you sell on Target and Amazon, is change coming to Etsy? These stories 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 am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that is our Helium 10 Weekly Buzz, where we give you a rundown of all the new stories that are going on the Amazon, Walmart, TikTok shop and e-commerce world. We give you training tips of the week and we let you know what new features from Helium 10 can give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Let's see what's buzzing. All right, we got a lot of articles, so let's go ahead and hop right into it Now. The first article that we're going to be talking about today is actually from social media today, and it's entitled TikTok launches new program to attract more UK merchants. All right, so this is basically called the 1 Million Pound Club Initiative and it says it aims to help UK retailers reach 1 million pounds, or about 1.28 million in US dollars, in revenue via the app. Now what is involved in this program? Well, it says they're going to offer special incentives, support offerings, 0% commission, free sales, free storage, free fulfillment by TikTok seller support priority service. Some of you all might be saying, hey, sign me up. So it's kind of crazy these benefits that they're going to do Now. If you're interested in getting more information on this program, if you're in the UK, there is actually a link in this article that you should be able to get to down below.   Bradley Sutton: Let's go talk about another platform and it's funny. A couple of weeks ago, when Carrie was doing the weekly buzz, there was a news article she had where it was entitled Is Amazon Becoming Temu-ish? You guys remember that story. It talked about how Amazon's opening up a kind of channel where it's kind of like Temu, where they have Chinese sellers, sell directly to US buyers and then they ship directly low-priced items and it gets to customers in like 10 days. This is funny. Now this is entitled Is Teemu Becoming Amazon-ish? So there's this article from theinformation.com and it's entitled Teemu Breaks with Direct from China Strategy in a Threat to Amazon. And basically what this article is talking about is how Timo is trying to kind of go away from just the direct from China to US model and they are actively trying to recruit US sellers, or at least sellers who have warehouses in the US, to ship and then potentially, you know, who knows, maybe Temu would have some um fulfillment now for the very first time ever. I started like downloading the Temu app and looking at it and I'm like, oh, my goodness, uh, they've got coffin shelves and other stuff on there for super, super cheap prices. I'm not sure how it would work in the U? S. Now I I'm going to be actually trying to reach out to Temu and maybe do like a little mini case study to see how in the world they expect to have US sellers selling on the platform. But who knows, maybe it's an opportunity, like if they have a whole bunch of incentives where you can make a profit, you know, due to maybe no selling fees and very, you know, no advertising, et cetera. So let's see, come back in maybe three or four weeks I'll let you know how my project X team is going.   Bradley Sutton: Next article is not really an article but just a LinkedIn post. In case you missed it, Jason, who comes here on the podcast sometimes, and he along with the CEO of VitaCup, Brandon, were reporting on something that's going on where you know how Amazon price matches, you know, with Walmart, Target and other websites. And now target had this circle, target circle prices like target, that target circles, kind of like their club where they get special discounts. But then what's happening is, on this target circle Now they're showing the target circle price over here with the regular price, with a line crossed out of it. Now you know you might be wondering, well, how is that an issue? You know that's pretty cool. But no, it's not cool because what's happening is Google, I guess, picked up on that new Target Circle price which only a few people have. It's not like, oh, everybody's a Target Circle member, like everybody's an Amazon Prime member, almost right. So what's happening now is that's a special price, a special discount that I believe Target even gives. It's not really the buyer or the seller who's giving all of that discount. Target, I think, is subsidizing it a little bit. And now what's going on is that Amazon's price matching that and so of course, your Amazon listings are priced higher than that Target circle price. And so what happens when Amazon detects that? No, buy box. So a lot of sellers out there it's not just VitaCup, I've heard this across the board that a lot of people are being affected by this where Amazon is removing the buy box because it thinks that they're price gouging, right. So if you're selling on Target and your Amazon sales have gone down, take a look at your Amazon listings. That could be the reason. I don't know offhand of a solution, but I'm sure Amazon will come up with something before Prime Day.   Bradley Sutton: Next article is from Forbes.com and it's entitled Flip, the TikTok shop competitor, expands social commerce by acquiring curated. Now, I have never heard of Flip. I have never heard of curated, but it's interesting. First of all, why should we care about this? This is like you know. We're talking about social commerce where there's social media blended with buying right in one. That's, that's the whole kind of like premise. You know, there was TikTok and then now there's TikTok shop. Now this is big overseas. You think it's already getting big in the US. Well, the social commerce market in China is going to grow from 350 billion back in 2021 to 900 billion next year. Now US social commerce was 37 billion in one and it's projected to get to 80 billion. But that's like China's like 10x the ceiling. If it really starts to take off in the US, you know, who knows how big it can actually get. So it's interesting to follow, hey, who are the new players in the game? We saw what happened with TikTok shop in the US and now it says hey, it has over 500,000 merchants in the affiliate program selling products via influencer produced shoppable videos, as we know, right, bloomberg reported that TikTok shop expects to reach 17.5 billion in sales by the end of this year.   Bradley Sutton: So now there's another social commerce player. It's called Flip and they're similar to TikTok shop, but it's significant differences, it says, could make it more appealing to customers. In the US it only has 5 million users, so this is not something that TikTok Shop is. Shaking their boots, oh, my goodness, this Flip company is coming after us, but they curate every brand. It features On TikTok Shop not anybody, but it's a little bit loose. But on TikTok or on Flip, it said pretty, a little bit loose, uh, but on Tik TOK or on flip it said 70% of the sellers that apply uh are actually rejected. Uh, giving customers more confidence. So, anyways, um, just another, maybe marketplace that you can maybe get in a little bit early on. Um, if you think it's going to get bigger, uh, take a look at flip.   Bradley Sutton: Next article is from Reuters and it's entitled Amazon defeats US Consumer Lawsuit Over Buy Box Product Listings. Now, at first when I saw this I was like, oh, did that crazy FTC lawsuit finally get thrown out? No, this was just like something that a couple of random Amazon customers wanted to do some class action lawsuit, saying that, oh, amazon is not rotating the buy box in a fair way. You know, it's actually showing some prices that were a few cents more expensive than other ones and we're all affected by it. So obviously the judge kind of like threw this one out because they're like all right, well, show us the receipts. Like literally like where's the receipts? And they're like well, we don't have any receipts. I guess is how it worked out. But you know, remember that other FTC lawsuit I haven't heard about that in a few months. You know, what I've said always from the beginning is like I don't understand why the FTC is going after certain things that Amazon is doing when there's so many other things that Amazon sellers are concerned about, like you know, the new fees and buy box matching and things like that. But here I guess anybody can file a lawsuit against Amazon. But hey, just because you do it, that doesn't mean you're going to win. Amazon won and these Amazon Prime customers zero on this one.   Bradley Sutton: Next article is kind of near and dear to my heart because a couple of weeks ago, literally two weeks ago, I got a whole bunch of my Etsy listings suspended. And I don't know about you guys who sell on Etsy, but when you sell on Etsy or you get suspended, like on a listing, there's like no way to contact customer support, no way to argue. It. It's like final, it's like this and that and my products, you know, like coffin shelf products on one account and on another account some other similar, uh, not mass produced products that I sell on Etsy. It absolutely falls within what Etsy is says. It's like the handmade policy. It's got to be handmade or made by a member of your shop, uh, or designed by you, like. I qualify for all three of those. You know pretty much. So it's ridiculous that Etsy was removing my listings but now this week the verge is reporting it. Etsy loses its handmade and vintage labels as it takes on Temu and Amazon. So what does that mean? Well, it says hey.   Bradley Sutton: A policy update announced today creates four new classifications for items for sale on Etsy Made by, designed by handpicked by and sourced by. All right, all products need to fall into just one of those four to be eligible. Vintage items will fall under handpicked by. But again, this is kind of crazy. I had to redo a whole bunch of my listings just because Etsy erroneously removed it. Couldn't they have waited two weeks? Their policy was about to change anyways. There's no way that. I mean, who knows, I was already not breaking the policy. So who knows? I mean Etsy probably still could remove my listings. But anyways, this is kind of big news, I think. You know Etsy wants to kind of like, you know, make sure they're competing a little bit more with Amazon, and you know websites like Teemu, I guess, and so this move you know, let's see might help them. You know, let's see might help them. Does this open up the possibility for you to sell on Etsy? Maybe before you didn't think you qualified. But do you qualify under one of those four things? I, technically, if you design your product, even if you're not the one making it, you absolutely should qualify if you take that at face value. So a little bit interesting for those of you. Maybe you can start considering Etsy as a marketplace.   Bradley Sutton: Speaking of different marketplaces, Walmart had a Walmart Connect few announcements that they sent out in email. They said they launched a couple of new things a video module, item and module reordering for brand shop. So brand shop is kind of like I guess you know the your brand store on Amazon, but now you can add a video module to that. You can also rearrange your modules on your brand narrative or brand shop page and do a couple other things. So I don't even have my brand store set up on Walmart. I better get on that and then I can go ahead and take advantage of some of these other features going to Amazon seller central they have.   Bradley Sutton: This is the last story of the day Amazon accelerate We've been talking about for a few weeks. They announced a couple of the special speakers Amazon Store CEO, Doug Harrington, and also Martha Stewart is going to be joining Amazon Accelerate 2024. So there's your chance to meet a couple of celebrities of the Amazon and pop culture world. I guess there that you can do if you go to Amazon Accelerate. Now Amazon Accelerate, if you go to h10.me forward slash accelerate, you'll be able to get a hundred dollars off your um tickets, which I believe is only four 99 right now. But do you guys want to go to Amazon accelerate for free?   Bradley Sutton: We have a contest going on right now. If you go to our Tik TOK channel right, helium 10 software. Right, helium 10 software follow us and then like one of our posts. All right, don't just software. Follow us and then like one of our posts. All right, don't just always just pick the first one I don't know why my face is all over this TikTok channel right now but pick one of the recent ones and like it and then comment something with the word accelerate. Don't say, hey, I'm entering the contest for Amazon Accelerate. Say something like Bradley, looks like your hair growth has been accelerated lately with your haircut, I don't know. Just trying to come up with a unique way of using the word accelerate. And then our social media person, Lailama, she's going to pick one of you to win a completely free ticket to go to Amazon Accelerate worth $600. So make sure to do that when you see this sometime this weekend, if you can. All right, that's it for the news this week.   Bradley Sutton: Now let's get into a couple new cool Helium 10 feature alerts. All right, we've got some new things that are coming to our Chrome extension. Actually, they have come to our Chrome extension and here's the background of it. As you know, when you take some of my listing optimization classes, or if you've learned from other people out there, like Tomer Rabinovich, he's always said, hey, try and find out what is the niche theme? Right, like what kind of images the competitors are using and like what kind of style they have. But one part of a niche theme is the length of title. All right, it's not like hey, every single category, every single product, you should have 200 characters in your title. Every single product, you should have 50 characters. No, some could be 50. Some could be 200. Different things work in different niches, and so now what sellers were looking for is hey, how can I just really quick, at a glance, get an idea of what the top 10, 20 products on a keyword page? What is the length of their titles? Well, watch this.   Bradley Sutton: If you go into the Chrome extension now, you are going to be able to hit Xray, for example, right here. This is a search that I have here for collagen peptides. And if I hit the search button now, as you can see, there is this new widget at the very top. It says average title character count 169. And then, if I put my mouse over the eye here and it says here at the bottom there's actually six that have 180 to 189 and there's seven, seven listings, 35%. So 65% of the listings on page one of collagen peptides have between 180 and 200 in the top 20. All right. So now compare that to another one. We go and search accordion on Amazon, all right. And then we run a Xray on this page remember the collagen peptides was 169. What's the average on accordion? It is only 116. All right, and if we put our mouse over right here we can see that, hey, 25% of the listings on page one actually have less than 100 characters, all right. And another maybe 50 percent or 40 percent have between 110 and 139. So completely different than what you were seeing for collagen peptides, right. So again, just because a list you know, even helium 10 has listing scores. It's just based on like kind of best practices overall. But this is something that is interesting, where now you can see what's going on at the individual product level. You can see the title character count of every single product on page one and on average. So pretty cool update for the Helium 10 Chrome extension.   Bradley Sutton: Now one more update here in the Chrome extension. Hopefully you guys have had a chance to maybe use the new tool that we launched a couple of months ago that uses AI to kind of aggregate and analyze and organize your product research maybe projects, right. Well now, let's say you're researching accordions and you ran Xray here and you want to add a few products, like, oh, I want to add this to my product research project right in product launchpad. Well, now what you can do in Xray is go ahead and select any of the ASINs you want and then you are going to hit the button right here save product idea. And once you hit the save product idea, it's going to open up a widget and now, if you actually have some projects open in product launchpad, you're going to be able to choose it from here and then just add it right there. Or if you're just like oh, wow, I'm just browsing Amazon, this is like actually a really interesting idea. These mini accordions for kids never thought of that. I want to start researching that, uh, without having to go and do all this research right now. Let me save this for later. So then you would hit new product idea and now it's going to go ahead and save in your new project. So super cool updates this week from the Chrome extension and hats off to Simon at Helium 10 for helping push those through.   Bradley Sutton: All right, now it's time for the Helium 10 training tip of the week, and this also has to do with the Chrome extension. Maybe a new way that you can see who is targeting your ASIN and start tracking it. All right, it's not available like in black box or in the Helium 10 tool. It's available right here in the Chrome extension. Just go to your product pages or go to your competitors product pages If you want to track. Hey, who is showing up on my competitors product page? Where am I showing up on my competitors product page? Or vice versa, who is showing up and who is bidding for the most on the Product Targeting Ads on my page? Who's putting sponsored brand ads on my page? Who is putting a Sponsor Display Ads on my page? Let me show you how you can do that. You go into Amazon and like, let's say, this is my product. Actually, this is one of the products I work on in motion hemp cream. You can see that there's plenty of ads all over the page. Here's products related to this item. There was a couple of sponsor display or some sponsored brand ads down here towards the bottom. There's even more products down here that are showing up.   Bradley Sutton: So what you can do, all you have to do now is hit Xray and then instantly all of the products on this page are going to show up. All right, so you can see here that there's actually um, let's see, it looks like 25 products are all appearing on the front of this page, from sponsor brand to sponsor products. Uh, maybe some sponsor display here, and I could just go ahead and just save this as an excel file and just start storing it to see. All right, hey, maybe you can have one of your VA’s do it. You know throughout the day, like, uh, or every once a day, it's like, all right, let. Hey, maybe you can have one of your VA’s do it. You know throughout the day, like, or every once a day, it's like, all right, let me just track who is showing up the most on my page. So again, that's just two clicks it takes to do that.   Bradley Sutton: Make sure to start looking at your competitors pages. Look at your pages. I like looking at competitors pages too, because it might give me ideas on different products that I can target in my Sponsored Product ASIN Targeting Campaign. So, uh, pretty cool feature. I think you guys maybe are sleeping on. You might not have known that it existed. Make sure to go to hop on any product page, run Xray and tell me who is advertising on your page. All right, guys. Thank you so much for joining us this week. We'll see you next week to see what's buzzing.

Join David Milstein, co-founder of SellCord, as he shares Walmart seller success strategies, including leveraging account managers and WFS to boost sales. Discover the benefits of virtual multi-packs, pricing strategies, and Walmart's promotional campaigns. Gain insights on ItemSpec 5.0, tips for seller success, and tools like Helium 10 and SellCord for keyword research and listing optimization.

Do you want to outperform your competition on Amazon Prime Day 2024? Join us as we explore cutting-edge Amazon PPC strategies with the esteemed Destaney Wishon of BTR Media, who shares her expert predictions and actionable insights to help you skyrocket your Amazon advertising game. With Prime Day 2023 setting a new benchmark at $12.7 billion in sales, we decode consumer behavior shifts and the unique opportunities presented by this mid-year retail extravaganza, differentiating it from Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Our discussion dives deep into the art of managing Amazon ads around Prime Day, emphasizing the importance of defining your primary goal—be it maximizing profit or driving sales. We also unpack the extended attribution window's impact on ad spend, conversion rates, and ACoS. From the advantages of increased pre-event ad spend to capture window-shopping customers to the phenomenal conversion rates during Prime Day itself, we provide a holistic view of how to capitalize on this massive sales event. Destaney’s insights reveal the significance of targeted ad strategies in enhancing your organic rank and BSR, alongside the long-term benefits of acquiring new customers. Get ready to maximize your Prime Day advertising efforts with practical advice on Adtomic Day Parting Schedules. Learn how to control CPCs and optimize conversion rates during peak traffic times, identify high-performing search terms, and strategically adjust bids. We also tackle the challenges of regaining momentum post-stockout, realistic budgeting, and leveraging coupons to boost conversion rates. As we navigate the new pricing rules and the competitive landscape with events like Walmart Plus Week, we arm you with strategies to ensure your brand is well-prepared. Whether you're a seasoned Amazon seller or a new brand, this episode is packed with invaluable tips to help you make the most of Prime Day 2024. In episode 576 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Destaney discuss: 01:22 - Amazon PPC Readiness for Prime Day 04:20 - Prime Day Impact on Shopping Habits 08:56 - Amazon Prime Day Advertising Strategies 13:23 - Maximizing Sales Opportunities Beyond Prime Day 19:29 - Prime Day PPC Optimization Strategies 21:00 - Optimizing PPC Strategy for Prime Day 27:18 - Maximizing Creative Impact in Ads 32:06 - Prime Day PPC Strategy and Sales 35:48 - Maximizing Sales Strategy for Prime Day 36:42 - Price Matching and Marketplace Strategies 39:15 - PPC Spend Strategy for Prime Day ► 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: We continue in our series and helping you guys get ready for Amazon Prime Day 2024 with a special Tacos Tuesday episode with best practices for advertising, not just on Prime Day, but before it and after it. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. If you're like me, maybe you were intimidated about learning how to do Amazon PPC, or maybe you think you just don't have the hours and hours that it takes to download and sort through all of those sponsored ads reports that Amazon produces for you. Adtomic for me allowed me to learn PPC for the first time, and now I'm managing over 150 PPC campaigns across all of my accounts in only two hours a week.Find out how Adtomic can help you level up your PPC game. Visit h10.me/adtomic for more information. That's h10.me/adtomic any level in the e-commerce world.   Bradley Sutton: Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that is completely bs free, unscripted and unrehearsed, organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in e-commerce world. Welcome to a very special edition of Tacos Tuesday. If you guys have noticed, for the last few weeks on, like the podcast and other live streams, we have been focusing on Prime Day readiness. We wanted to make sure that 2024 is your best Prime Day and today we wanted to go deep in specifically talking about Prime Day readiness for PPC. All right, because that’s one of the things that you can still kind of like control up until the day of Prime Day. So that's why we've invited the number one expert in the entire world on Amazon PPC Destaney Wishon here. Destiny, how's it going? Welcome back.   Destaney: Hello, hello. Thank you so much for having me very excited to be here, as always.   Bradley Sutton: Before we get into your training here, do you have any predictions for Prime Day. Like, are you expecting things to be just kind of like normal, business as usual? Are you expecting anything new and unusual this year?   Destaney: I am going to predict that this year is going to be even bigger than last year, which is saying something, because I distinctly remember being up at like 4 am having to adjust budgets last year because everyone was expecting it to be a little bit lower, just due to the state of economy and kind of where we were at with inflation. And it was 9 am and we're like out of budget across the board and conversion rates were double what they were the two weeks prior. So, I was like you know, we're driving a ton of sales, our ROAS looks fantastic, let's maximize this. So, I'm expecting it to kind of see a similar trend and be pretty big this year.   Bradley Sutton: Awesome. I hope that that prediction comes true. Share it. All right, I'm going to go off screen and let you go ahead and take it away. Destaney, that prediction comes true, share it. All right, I'm going to go off screen and let you go ahead and take it away, Destaney.   Destaney: I think when it comes to inventory and deals and content, it's a little bit more of a one size fits all solution. But when it comes to Amazon advertising and Prime Day, there are hundreds of different strategies that you can run depending on where your brand's at from a profitability perspective, from a cash flow and a lifestyle perspective when it comes to repurchasing, inventory and things like that. That's going to influence your Amazon advertising strategy. So, I've always been a big fan of not giving one size fits all solutions. I think everyone who follows me is very familiar with that, and this is no different. Some people are going to go online and say do not increase your budgets, do not change your bids. And some people are going to say, to maximize that opportunity, but it's going to be really dependent on where your brands at. So, kicking things off, let's talk about Prime Day 2023 and why these matters.   Destaney: $12.7 billion in sales. It was an absolute record for their largest annual event 375 million items sold. 37% of US households took part in Prime Day. That is really important. And also consider how many people share accounts you know grandparents, cousins, things like that so it's probably even higher. For being honest, the reason this matter is last year was the largest single sales day in all of Amazon history, and the reason I'm calling this out is because, as customers become more and more familiar with Prime Day, it's changing their shopping habits. For one, everyone knows that the first two to three weeks leading up to Prime Day you log into your app, it's the first thing you see. Right, they do a homepage takeover, letting you know it's Prime Day. They're also starting to drip out Prime Day deals. Now what this means is customers are going to stop their normal purchase habits. If I buy Tide Pods once a month on a Thursday, I'm probably going to hold off on buying my Tide Pods until Prime Day. If I have back to school items that I want to purchase, I'm going to hold off on buying those until Prime Day. Now the problem is customers are still shopping, they're still opening the app and they're clicking around, but they're not always purchasing. This is important to call out because the two weeks leading up to Prime Day and really the week before leading up to Prime Day, you're almost always going to see a drop-in conversion rate. Customers are still shopping, they're on the platform, they are clicking, they're adding to cart and they're building their list, but they're not checking out until Prime Day. So that's really important to consider.   Destaney: The second part to consider is think about Black Friday, Cyber Monday. Everybody knows what time of year Black Friday, Cyber Monday, is and everyone builds their baskets beforehand. You know they get the magazines for Walmart and for Target. They circle all of the items they want to buy. The difference is those items are holiday specific. The consumer habits are still similar, but the items are different. Prime day is smack dab in the middle of summer. People aren't necessarily buying their Christmas gifts yet. They're buying all kinds of gifts and they don't necessarily have specific items going into it. I, for example, will hop onto the Lightning Dill app and get caught up in all the excitement and the craze and just scroll until I find products that I want. So naturally, due to the flooding of customers on the platform, everyone is getting increased visibility. I think that's the biggest thing to consider. So, whether you have deals or whether you don't have deals, you're probably still going to see an increased visibility, but Prime Day is synonymous with savings. So, if you don't have a deal and you don't have a badge, you may not get that visibility.   Destaney: Now another small screenshot I added here is from one of our accounts. Last year we had 101 campaigns almost out of budget. This is not due to Amazon trying to spend more money on Prime Day. This is just due to the nature of how the auction works. When you have five times, 10 times as many customers on the platform clicking around, your ads are going to get clicked more, and the more clicks you get, the more you spend. So, the more your budget's going to be spent. This is why the first level of optimization is almost to increase your budgets, because we know there's going to be so many more customers on the platform. They're going to be clicking so much more because they're shopping around. So, increase your budgets and we're going to dive into that optimization later.   Destaney: But I thought it was really important to set that context and understanding just how many customers are on the platform during Prime Day and how that trickles down to your brand, whether or not you participate. Now there's kind of three important things to consider. You have lead-in Prime Day, lead-out, Prime Day either or. And why this matters is because the week before Prime Day is historically some of the worst performance you will ever see when it comes to Amazon advertising on the platform. Why? Well, as we mentioned, customers are still shopping. They may not be purchasing, but they are window shopping. Lead in period is really important because, again, people are logging onto a platform and they're starting to add to cart. They're starting to build their list for the products that they may want to purchase. This is important to understand because you can make your optimizations as early as 10 days prior or 14 days prior, and you need to optimize towards what you're wanting your outcome to be. So, if your only goal is profitability, then you should probably lower your budgets the week before. On the flip side, if your goal is maximizing sales and understanding consumer habits, you'll start to realize that those customers are adding to cart and clicking, so you probably still want to continue to run ads there, even though they're not purchasing.   Destaney: Yet we all know that attribution is extended on Amazon. The majority of the time, it's a 14-day attribution, sometimes longer. What's happening here is the customers are going to add to cart and click on your ads, but they may not purchase until later. So, your clicks and your spend are going to be much higher and your sales are going to be much lower. At its simplest, conversion rate is going to be down because people are clicking and not buying, and a cost is going to be up. People are clicking and not buying, so some people will just say you know, it's fine, let's continue running my ads full speed ahead, knowing it's going to pay off later. That's typically what we recommend our brands do, but some people who are only focused on profitability that is it. They don't necessarily care about the Prime Day customer because they know they're too price conscious. They're going to lower their bids and budgets the seven to 10 days before Prime Day because they don't want to attract the customer who's not going to convert until later on. So, keep that in mind. The second thing to keep in mind is that there is a lead out period, which pretty much means that a lot of shoppers are going to continue to stay on the platform after Prime Day. As we know, Prime Day has now been extended to almost Prime Week and when you have Walmart and Target and every other major retailer running these discounted days and deals, you're going to see a much longer timeframe. So, we've actually seen the week after Prime Day have some of the highest conversion rates because shoppers are still ready to buy, but some of the lower CPCs because most advertisers actually pull back on their budgets after Prime Day. So, lead-out's another really big opportunity for brands. So, keep these things in mind as you're building out your strategy.   Destaney: Here's just some kind of quick insights that I pulled from our personal accounts. As you can see the timeframe here impressions are definitely relatively high before Prime Day. Prime Day one last year was insane. It was one of the craziest days I've ever managed. Truly Before 9am we had blown through most of our budgets because there were that many people on the platform, I honestly kind of put the brakes on quite a few of our brands because I was worried that it was an attribution issue. But at the end of the day our conversion rate was about 2x 3x what it was on normal days during the beginning of Prime Day morning. You can also see the day after Prime Day there's definitely a drop off. This is influenced by the majority of our brands run deals, but impressions still stayed relatively high or back to average kind of a week afterwards, spend is the same thing.   Destaney: So again, our brands we recommend continuing to spend at a higher-than-average pace leading up to prime day, because we understand customers are window shopping, so we want to go ahead and catch their eyeballs before the day even hits. We want to stand out, so we personally increase our spend for the majority of our brands. Now, again, if a brand comes to us and says, hey, my only goal is a cost, my only goal is profit, then we're going to pull back on spend the week prior. But that is a decision that needs to be made at the brand level, not the agency or software level. So, knowing all of this, I think, before we dive into some really specific strategies around how you manage your ads, from an ad type, from a bid, from a budget perspective, you really need to decide is your goal on Prime Day to maximize profit? Is that your only focus, yes or no? The second thing is do you want to maximize sales? Now, a lot of people argue of you know a Prime Day audience isn't the best, it's, you know cheaper, it's discounted audience. They're not actually looking for your product, they just want a discount and save money. But at the end of the day.   Destaney: We've seen some two really strong effects from Prime Day. One, when ran appropriately, in an incredibly targeted way, you can take advantage of the heightened conversion rate on Prime Day and 100% improve your BSR and your organic rank on the page. We have run multiple tests with that. The second question I always get well, does your organic rank stick? Yes, if it's ran strategically in a very precise way. So, for us, we do like to maximize our presence on Prime Day because we know it's an opportunity to improve our presence on page one and improve our organic rank because our conversion rate is higher than our competitors. That's something really important to remember.   Destaney: The second part to remember is, as we saw earlier, around 40% of households are participating, so think of all of the new eyeballs you can get in front of. So, anyone who has a product that's purchased more than once whether it's a supplement that's repeat purchased, or whether it's a brand that has multiple products, like fitness gear Prime Day is a huge opportunity to get in front of a very warm audience that's ready to buy. So sometimes you can bring them into your brand and then they'll come back post Prime Day to purchase your other products. So those are things to consider when you're deciding. You know, is your goal to maximize product profit and just take advantage of the wave of traffic and do nothing, or do you want to maximize sales and build on all these other opportunities and make sure that you're investing in a much longer-term strategy than just Prime Day? Once you know those two, you can start optimizing beyond that. So, for all of those here that their main goal is maximizing profit, there's kind of a few things that we want to look at here.   Destaney: One bid management. We don't recommend making aggressive changes to your bids. In general, we see that brands who do not run any deals and are only focused on profitability will maintain around the same ACOS or ROAS. Sometimes it improves if they're in a category that does well during Prime Day. Sometimes it's worse because they didn't run any discounts and all their competitors did so. Now their conversion rates decreased. The traffic's going to your competitors and not you. If you're not running any deals, we do typically see a lower conversion rate. So, we sometimes recommend going ahead and lowering your bids a little bit, maybe 5% to 10% across the board, because customers are going to continue to click but not purchase, and again, this is because maybe your competitors are running heavy discounts and deals. If your competitors are running heavy discounts and deals and someone types in toothpaste and you're the only one not running a deal, you're not going to drive sales and you're going to have a lower conversion rate than everyone else. So, keep these things in mind. Lead-in is another strategy where maybe you need to lower your bids and budgets because your ads are not going to perform well leading up. Right, you can't sacrifice the increase in ACOS leading up because you're not going to drive sales on Prime Day without deals or discounts.   Destaney: Budget management's another really big one. At the end of the day, if you don't run deals or discounts and your category is known for deals and discounts, you're going to perform worse. So maybe it's worth decreasing your budget on everything that is not in line with your performance expectations. So the two easiest ways to do this are just go into Ad Console or Campaign Manager or, if you're using Adtomic, you can easily make adjustments throughout there and look at your targeting tab in Ad Console or the search term tab in Adtomic, which is the better tab to look at, and you can filter by everything that has an ACOS that is not in line with your expectations the last 30 days and go ahead and decrease that bid, knowing it's probably going to perform even worse on Prime Day, right, and it's not always a drastic difference, but it's usually enough to make a difference. Same thing with your budgets. Maybe you leave your budgets or you decrease your budget slightly on everything that has over 100% ACOS, right, Everything that's just out of line.   Destaney: Go ahead and decrease, and what's going to happen is you're going to optimize towards a little bit more profitability. You're going to get a lot more customers viewing your listing. Naturally, usually you know anywhere from 10% to 20% if you don't run deals or discounts. So, you're still going to drive more sales, but you're going to do it without advertising a ton. So, you're going to usually have a much higher profit on these days if you run this style of strategy. Again, the downside to this is, if all of your competitors are running deals and discounts, their conversion rate is going to be higher. They're going to drive three to four times the amount of sales as you and, as we know, the digital shelf is not unlimited. So, if they're doing much, much better and their organic ranks pushing up, yours is going to be pushing down on the page and that can be hard to make up for unless you're doing a ton externally or have other plans right outside of Prime Day. So, keep those things in mind.   Destaney: Now the second half of the strategy maximizing sales is where we're going to have a lot more very specific strategic recommendation. If you're not running deals, you can still expect a lower conversion rate, but across the board, what you really want to look at is increasing budget. That's the first and foremost way to maximize sales. Everything, all of your campaigns that have a ROAS or ACOS within your target, go ahead and increase your budget 20 to 30% and what's going to happen is, again, your organic sales are going to increase. So, if you're also increasing your ad sales and your ad spend with an increased budget, your tacos is typically going to stay close to the same, but you're seeing an overall sales increase. So, your overall profit's going to increase just due to economies of scale. So that's kind of the first thing that we look at is making sure everything converting really well, everything within a cost of a row, as we're increasing our budget on. The next thing we do is increase bids that are in a similar situation, but we're a little bit more strategic on this. Again, I'll open up my search term tab and I'll say, hey, my average conversion rate for my account is 12%, but these five keywords that are my most important keywords they're converting at a 20%. Let's go ahead and increase my bids on those, because I want to drive as much traffic as possible to those precise keywords that are going to improve my organic rank as well as improve my overall performance if my conversion rates higher. The next thing we're going to do is we're going to be very strategic with our campaign creation, and that's what we're going to get into in our next few slides. We're going to create campaigns that are specifically focused on maximizing visibility.   Destaney: A really quick pro tip and I'm only calling this out is because Prime Day traffic comes in waves. We typically see the morning of the first day of Prime Day as one of the highest. You can use Atomic Day Parting Schedules. So, if you're nervous to go in and just increase bids and budgets 24 hours because you don't know what performance is going to look like, you can use Adtomic Day Parting Schedules to choose those certain time frames where you can actually see your conversion rates higher and your CPCs are lower. So, we all know that your conversion rate does fluctuate throughout the day. You can use something like the day parting schedules to build out rules throughout the day if you want to balance that line of profitability and sales. So, keep that in mind, All right.   Destaney: So, leveraging the search term tab this is a really quick screenshot pulled directly from Atomic that I wanted to shout out because it's one of the best ways to have a lot of control. So, a lot of people will go to every single campaign and add a crazy placement modifier, increase sales or top of search by 100%, increase budgets. But that's not very strategic because you're going to have some search terms that don't do well, some that do well. So, if you pull Adtomic, you can leverage the search term tab. If you're an ad console, it's the targeting tab and you can filter top down by spend. I'm a really big believer of operational efficiency and 80-20. So, I almost always go top down by spend efficiency and 80-20. So, I almost always go top down by spend.   Destaney: What I am personally looking for are the terms where my conversion rate and click-through rate that's another good metric to look at is higher than average. So, as you know, we can pull our category average from insights and planning tab. More on that probably later when we hop into Q&A. But you can also pull it from your account average. So maybe your account average again is 8%. So, what I'm really looking for here are there any terms that have insane conversion rate that I know is better than the category? If so, you can assume that during Prime Day it's going to perform even better. So, I'm going to go control my bid and increase my bid on all of those terms, especially if my ACOS is lower than what my target is. This specific account does have a 30% average ACOS, as you can see here. That is our target. So, I'm probably going to increase performance on these terms. But if I see a term that's performing less than our average maybe it this 3% and 8% and it's not a strategy that the brand wants to run, I'm going to pull back my bids, right, Unless I'm running a dealer discount. This is a way that really helps improve your total sales and your organic rank while still maintaining some of that level of profitability. What you don't want to do is spend a ton of money on a term that has a terrible conversion rate. All that's going to do is hurt your organic rank because Amazon wants the products that are converting the best at the top of the page. So, keep that in mind when you're running your bid magic and be a little bit more strategic around these increases and decreases during Prime Day.   Destaney: The second thing we want to do is if we're running deals or discounts, this is even more so. We want to create a couple of campaigns focused on winning top of search. Now, Bradley and I have talked quite a bit about this area and whether or not to use high bids or whether or not to use placement modifiers, but for Prime Day specifically, especially if we have a deal badge on our ad, we create campaigns for the top of the page. The reason being is, as we know, customers are looking for deal badging and the best place to see that deal badging is the number one slot on the page. Now, most people can't afford to win this 100% of the time. It's just incredibly expensive. In the supplement space it would cost you around $90,000 in spend to win one keyword over 80% impression share $90,000. And this was last year. So, this is why we create separate campaigns is because we don't want to compete with all of our other campaigns that are focused on profitability.   Destaney: We create one to two campaigns for one to two top keywords that convert better than anything. Profitability we create one to two campaigns for one to two top keywords that convert better than anything else and our one to two keywords that we want to improve our organic rank on and we're going to set insanely high bids and probably put also a top of search modifier on it. And when I say insanely high bids, people always think it's three to four dollars. No, that is not going to compete during Prime Day, especially not in a competitive market. For some of our campaigns where we only want to win top of search, we don't care what the return on ad spend is during that timeframe, because people repeat purchase or because we have a good deal. I'm talking $10 to $15 bids or in the supplement space it's $40 to $50 bids. That is the kind of bid that is often needed in competitive categories on Amazon. And again, why we do this is because our conversion rate is so much higher with our deal. We drive so much traffic because of our deal badging that our organic performance will improve and stick for the next four to six to eight weeks. And if we continue to maintain that high and heightened level of traffic, organic rank will stick the whole time.   Destaney: So, we don't do this with all of our campaigns. We don't do this with every keyword. We cannot afford it, we would hemorrhage money. But we create one to two campaigns with one to two keywords and we set a budget that we can control in order to piggyback off of that conversion rate and those sales. So, think very strategically around this what keywords in your account are you converting better than everyone else? What keywords can you afford to win top of search on and create some of these campaigns so that way you can start improving your organic positioning on the page through PPC during Prime Day. Another quick thing to note is when you create your campaign, put top of search, put Prime Day in the campaign name or whatever you need to see, so that way when you see a poor ACOS or poor ROAS you don't pause it, because that's not the objective of the campaign. The campaign is to improve your BSR and to improve your organic positioning, not to drive profitability. So that's kind of a really quick tip and we'll probably talk more on that in the Q&A section.   Destaney: The next thing that's incredibly important is to consider how many people window shop on Prime Day. So more frequently than probably any other time of the year, customers are clicking around sponsored display almost always does really well during prime day because this positioning on the page is really valuable. So, what we do is we create really specific sponsored display product targeting ads where we only target all of our own products and we run these with the increased budget on prime day. And we run these with an increased budget on Prime Day because we know that customers are less loyal. Now it can be argued how much brand defense campaigns you should run throughout the year and I have some good data to kind of back into those areas but during Prime Day I'm of the opinion that customers are less brand loyal. They're looking for deals, they're looking for discounts. So, make sure to protect your listing, especially if you have a deal. If you have a deal, the last thing you want them to do is land on your page, see a better competitor ad and click out. So, we increase and run specific prime day targeting strategies for sponsored display. Don't throw in hundreds of products to target. Don't put expanded product targeting. Only target your own brand name to make sure you are defending your listing. Other sponsored display strategies we can talk about later whether or not it's audience targeting, category targeting or retargeting, but this is something that needs to be ran in almost every single account.   Destaney: Profitability or scalability focused. Maximizing your creatives is another big one. So almost all headline search ads are being forced to move to a custom image regardless, but even more so on Prime Day. It's needed to maximize your creatives because you need to stand out on the page, and when there are hundreds of deals, hundreds of discounts, you need to stand out on the page, and when there are hundreds of deals, hundreds of discounts, you have to stand out by how you've built your brand. So, look at the differences in these two ads. They're both selling the same product, but one of them is way more eye-catching. The bottom one also will typically drive a 200% increase in click-through rate, which is incredibly, incredibly important, because as you're running these ads, everyone's running deals right. Almost everyone in your category is gonna run some level of dealer discount, so if you're not, you have to stand out.   Destaney: Adding a lifestyle image is one of the number one way to improve the performance of your sponsor brand ad and your sponsor display ads. So go in there and get that done If you don't have the creative to make this happen, use Sponsored Brands AI Builder. Is it fantastic? No, not always. I said no really aggressively, but we actually have used it for a lot of brands. It's not always as fantastic as a professional shoot, but is it better than nothing? Yes, because even if it's a poor AI creative, you're not getting charged. A list of customer clicks. Sponsored brands ads are pay per click most of the time, right. So, get it up and running to bring eyeballs to your listing and then, if the customer is still interested, they will click on. So that is kind of the biggest thing that we recommend from a sponsored brand sponsored display ad perspective. Immediately get your lifestyle images uploaded.   Destaney: The other thing we're going to discuss is creating remarketing campaigns. So, one thing that you have to consider is, again, 40% of households are on the platform. This is your opportunity to get your brand in front of hundreds of hundreds of thousands of customers. Now, some of them may not purchase. Some of them may look but not buy, as we know. So how do you take advantage of that traffic? The 30, 45, 60, 90 days after prime day, you create remarketing campaigns. You can create remarketing campaigns directly with an ad console with sponsored display. As you can see, there's a target added section here. Remove all of those targets. Amazon auto-populates some of them. Remove them. All you want to do is create a remarketing campaign within the look back window that you would prefer. Why this is so important is because if a customer was looking at your product during Prime Day, they are interested in it probably throughout the year, right? So, you're able to capture that customer ID and then serve them an ad 45 days later when maybe they're ready to repeat, purchase or buy a new one, right? This is a really valuable way to take advantage of all the traffic you're getting on Prime Day and monetize it later on throughout the year. If you run this same campaign within DSP, you can also get even more targeted. Within DSP, you can say hey, I want to go ahead and serve everyone an ad. Who viewed my page on Prime Day but did not purchase. Or who viewed my competitors but did not purchase, right? If I'm selling TVs, you don't want to continue serving someone an ad. If they already bought a TV, they probably don't need another one, maybe.   Destaney: So, within DSP, you can set up and create that audience where you own that customer ID that viewed within your category and you can get really targeted of negating and or highlighting certain audiences. So, this is incredibly, incredibly important. If you're not a fan of DSP or if you have any concerns red flags you think it's terrible drop those concerns in the chat because I can answer them. Around. 90% of the time, DSP does not work because it's not ran appropriately or expectations weren't set or it was spent too much money without highlighting how granular you can get and, if that's the case, run sponsored display ads to dip your toes in and play around with getting really granular with your remarketing audience to take advantage of Prime Day traffic. Those are all the biggest things that we had here, so I wanted to leave it at that and then hopefully answer some of the follow-ups we had.   Bradley Sutton: That was good. The main takeaway guys. I mean, there's tons of takeaways you guys should have, but I hope one of the main takeaways that maybe opened some of your eyes is that when we're talking Prime Day, PPC readiness, it's not just July 16 and 17 that you have to keep in mind. There's stuff you have to do before Prime Day PPC readiness. It's not just July 16 and 17 that you have to keep in mind. There's stuff you have to do before Prime Day. There are things that you have to keep in mind, like this last slide about after Prime Day. Prime Day has a big impact and it's outside of just two days, so just keep that in mind. If there's one takeaway, make sure you remember them. One question of somebody made about 10 minutes or so ago not necessarily about prime day, but it's especially important because of prime day coming up is she's been sold out a month and I've actually talked to some sellers like this. They're worried. Like prime day is coming back. Um, how do I regain my momentum? As far as you with PPC to make sure I'm okay for Prime Day, so what would you say to Paula?   Destaney: Well, I think Prime Day is actually a fantastic time to launch if you can find out or carried away to stand out on the page. The biggest thing I would say is you almost need to restart your honeymoon period. I know this is more Bradley's area of expertise, but a lot of people will go out of stock and then come back into stock and expect to have the same BSR, same positioning on the page, same traffic as they did prior. That's almost never the case. From what we've seen, we see a huge drop in just organic positioning. So, the biggest thing is like setting expectations and making sure you're preparing your budget. When you come back into stocks, you're probably going to have to spend more money up front to make up for the sales volume that you did receive organically. Now, with it being Prime Day, I almost recommend at least having a coupon or something on your page to improve your conversion rate relative to your competitors and then just spending maybe a little bit heavier up front, knowing you're going to make up for that once your organic position goes back to normal.   Bradley Sutton: All right, what else we have here? We've got, Gianna from. She says if I've paused keywords in the past, I've not performed well. Is it worth reactivating them with low bids during prime to generate visibility and perhaps sales, or is it better to leave them paused? Oh, that's a nice and juicy one right there.   Destaney: I wouldn't say that they're gonna perform that much better on prime day, unless maybe you're a lot cheaper and you have a good you know deal badge or something along those lines. I would say why did you pause them instead of lowering your bids? Right, if they're absolutely converting terribly and you've got 50 clicks and no orders like, okay, that makes sense, pause it. But if they've driven any sales in the past, maybe you do start them with a really low bid just to see what can happen. But this is again drawing. If you're only focused on profitability, probably not. It's probably not conformed that much better out of the blue. But if you are focused on maximizing sales, maybe it is worth looking at. You know, last 90 days what keywords have driven an order, even if not profitably, and what should my bid be, knowing my conversion rate may be higher.   Bradley Sutton: One quick question I have for you before I go back is I think one of the things differently this year is Amazon's new rules on like sale prices and coupons and things like that, where, hey, you've got to be lower, you can't just artificially raise your price and then. And then you know, like some people do, and then people see, oh my goodness, it's 60% off, but it's just because they raised the price by 60%. Now, that being said, obviously there's going to be some people who still game the system, maybe from variation, abuse or some black hat stuff. But one thing that I've found now is, you know, like me personally, what I would do in the past is I would still have some kind of sales discount before prime day a little bit, just to get some momentum going and maybe increase on my organic. But now I'm all of a sudden, I’m trigger shy because I'm like, oh shoot, whatever discount I do now, that's setting my, my baseline price for this month, which means I'm going to have to do it even bigger. Uh, you know discounts, even getting a coupon approved. So, has that new rule changed any of your strategy at all? Or? Um, are you doing less pre? Uh, prime day discounts um, or what's your strategy there?   Destaney: Yeah, I would say, less pre-prime day discounts and or just being a lot more thoughtful around our overall pricing strategy. Because I think, like that's always, like the biggest complaint I see with Prime Day is some brands like, no, don't do anything, don't make any changes, it's not valuable. Everyone's looking for discounts and it's like, yeah, that is true, but also, as we discussed, you're getting in front of 40% of households in America. So, I think, just being a lot more strategic around the timing, also realizing that if you overlap high spend and PPC and steep discounts, you're not going to be making any money, so you better hope you make up for it with inflated conversion rate and improved organic rank. Another big factor I think is, as we're starting to see more with Walmart and other retailers and external influencers, is just price matching as well. It's making sure that you have price parity across all of your platforms and your discounts are lining up in a similar fashion.   Bradley Sutton: That's actually important, because last year Walmart Plus Week was the same week as Prime Day, but then this year Walmart has two of them and they're both not on Prime Day. One was already last month and one, I think, is this week or next week or something. So, yeah, definitely what Destaney just said Keep in mind, guys, because if you could lose the buy box on one or other marketplace, if you're running discounts on one but not the other, Sydney says, alright, during Prime Day she's going to have a deal badge. But she's asking would you run an ad on a keyword that you already have your product organically ranked on the first page, or would you target keywords based on the conversion rate, regardless of organic ranking?   Destaney: Great question. So, the line that I usually draw on my sand is if I'm ranked in the top four, then I'll pull back on PPC. That's kind of the line. Page one does not matter. In my opinion. 80% of click share goes to the number one carousel on the page, the top four, that's 80% of clicks go there. So even if you're ranked on page one but you're at the bottom of the page, you're not getting near as much visibility and you can be booted really quick. So, we typically say, hey, if we're in the top four, that's a great place to be. If I'm five through eight, sometimes that's okay as well. It really depends on the category. But you got to think as a customer. If you're shopping on mobile, you see a headline search ad, you see three sponsored product ads and then you see your four organically ranked, and then you have another sponsored ad carousel. So, a customer has to scroll quite a bit just to get to 10 to 50. So that's kind of the area that we see. Cannibalization starts happening when you're ranked in the top four and you're advertising in the top four. Other than that, you really don't need to worry about it too much. Maybe you lower your bids a little bit and you focus on that mid-point in the page. But yeah, good question.   Bradley Sutton: Johnny says sponsor display as CPC or VCPM for protecting your own listings.   Destaney: For protecting my own listings, I do recommend a CPC model. VCPM gets a little murky when it comes to attribution because it's quite a bit different, so I like just controlling my CPCs and only targeting the specific ASINs I want to target.   Bradley Sutton: Danica says in order to maximize the sales, what percentage uplift or down of the PPC spend will you do in two weeks ahead of Prime Day, a week ahead on Prime Day, after the Prime Day?   Destaney: Good question Really depends on ROAS and overall budget. If we're being honest, we have some brands that will do a 15% increase in spend for lead-in. So, we'll segment our campaigns that we want to increase. We know that performance is going to be terrible. We'll invest in DSP. We'll do a lot on the awareness side 15% to 20% heavy. Some brands that have a specific marketing budget will go even higher. But if it's like a traditional brand that's focused on tacos, ACOS, then we'll only increase 5% to 10% for lead-in. And then on Prime Day, again it really depends on budget because you can maximize your spend if you want to, but you got to make sure you're hitting sales targets. You spend if you want to, but you got to make sure you're hitting sales targets. Lead out, as mentioned, was stronger last year than we've ever seen it before. So, I believe our lift for lead out was around 12% the two weeks after.   Bradley Sutton: Another good one here from Dion. He's, or she, is still in launch phase, so it's only been a little over a month since they created their listing, so he's not profitable. He's still trying to get that traction. Should he or she stay away from doing you know, prime Day activities and just keep going with his launch, or what is your suggestion there?   Destaney: Honestly, as mentioned, I've seen multiple brands launch products on Prime Day and have an amazing head start because their traffic is so much better, even from a review positioning standpoint. If you can get 50 people to buy your product on Prime Day and 5% of them leave reviews, that's a really, really good start. If you don't have the money for it, then, yeah, probably stay away. But if you have enough reviews even in your launch phase to have a decent conversion rate, then it's a really big opportunity to get in front of a lot of customers. That's going to drive sales volume and increase your review count.   Bradley Sutton: All right. Last question of the day is any specific strategies for advertising listings with lightning deals.   Destaney: Nothing too specific. You can create specific sponsor brand ads and shout out the deals in your headline. You can also. Usually what we've seen historically they change this frequently is if you run additional auto campaigns not necessarily additional, but if you have auto campaigns on the ASINs with lightning deals, they typically do win unique inventory on the page, whether it's frequently bought together, the lightning deals page on Amazon or other segments of like sponsored deals. So just make sure you have the maximum exposure we discussed   Bradley Sutton: Okay, so now, what homework do you have for everybody from now until next week? Again, like I said, guys, this is like the third, fourth, fifth thing in a row that we've been doing about prime days. We want to make sure you guys have the best prime day. What do you want people to do from now until next week? Uh, and then report back to you on when you come on.   Destaney: I would say the biggest things are we released a prime day checklist which covers things outside of amazon advertising as well, so I would 100% check that out. The second thing I would do is really define is it that profitability or that scalability strategy? What are you trying to accomplish? And then go through the deck that I shared today I'm sure we'll send it out and just look for any of those low hanging fruit opportunities. Do you have your brand defense campaigns covered? Do you have your bids and budgets ready for lead-in, which starts really soon? Do you have the appropriate creative assets, custom imagery, video, lifestyle images, all of that? Do you have it ready to go? And then I think the reason we actually wanted to do a follow-up campaign is because a lot of the items that I mentioned are hands-on keyboard. You need to log in and make these adjustments. You need to look at your search terms tab in Atomic. So, we wanted to put a follow-up of like hey, here's everything we think you should do. Once you've identified what you want to accomplish, let's actually hop on and do a Q&A for everyone who maybe tries to launch a sponsored display ad and gets confused. You know, sponsored display is now overly complex. You have reach and sales and audiences, so we really wanted to give everyone the opportunity to then come in hot and ask questions. For hey, I tried to do this. It doesn't work, or this is what I'm seeing, this is what I'm not.   Bradley Sutton: Okay, all right. So, guys, I don't have the signup sheet yet for next week's live, but just if you're watching this on YouTube, make sure to hit the notification for when we go live and look out in your email, we'll send you a message to register for that uh workshop. You guys have got your homework uh cut out for you. I've got. I put the link that she referred to right there. There are some tips from Carrie, some tips from Destaney and others there. h10.me/primelist. h10.me/primelist. Destaney, thank you so much for coming on here and sharing your knowledge. I got to kick back for half the workshop here and chill. I just listen and learn like everybody else. So, thanks for that and we will see you back here next week. You, Destaney, and also everybody else out there as well. Thanks a lot, everybody.  

Will Shein and Temu lose the tariff loophole they take advantage of? TikTok Shop has its own version of Prime Day. Amazon Brand Tailor Promotions has an important update. These buzzing news stories and more in this episode! 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. EU plan to impose import duty on cheap goods could dent Shein and Temu https://www.theguardian.com/business/article/2024/jul/03/eu-plan-to-impose-import-duty-on-cheap-goods-could-dent-shein-and-temu TikTok Shop to discount ‘thousands’ of items during sales event https://www.retaildive.com/news/tiktok-shop-july-sales-event/720155/ Walmart+ Subscribers Break the 30% Mark https://www.pymnts.com/subscription-commerce/2024/walmart-subscribers-break-the-30-mark/ Amazon Discontinues Security Robot for Small Businesses After 8 Months https://www.pymnts.com/amazon/2024/amazon-discontinues-security-robot-for-small-businesses-after-8-months/ Virtual Stores are now showing up on some Amazon Storefronts. LinkedIn post by Liran Hirschkorn Save 25% on Amazon Warehousing and Distribution storage costs https://sell.amazon.com/blog/amazon-warehousing-and-distribution-promotion But that's not all! Take advantage of our tips on maximizing Prime Day sales using Helium 10's Insights Dashboard. Many sellers are sleeping on these features. This episode is packed with essential updates and strategies to keep you competitive in the ever-evolving e-commerce landscape. ► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast ► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension ► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup  (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life) ► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft ► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos   In this episode of the Weekly Buzz by Helium 10, Bradley covers: 01:03 - Temu & Shein Crackdown? 04:23 - FBA Shipment Feature 06:05 - TikTok Shop Prime Day? 07:58 - Walmart+ Milestone 08:42 - Brand Tailored Promotion Update 09:49 - Amazon South Africa PPC 10:24 - Amazon Robots 11:38 - Amazon VR Stores 13:06 - AWS Discounts 14:03 - Pro Training Tip: Helium 10 Features You Should Use This Prime Day Transcript Bradley Sutton: Will low-cost marketplaces like Sheen and Temu lose their tariff loophole they take advantage of? TikTok Shop has its own version of Prime Day. Amazon Brand Tailor Promotions has an important update. These news 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'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 the Amazon, Walmart, TikTok shop and e-commerce world. We also give you training tips of the week that will give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Let's see what's buzzing, all right, well, today is July 4th of July, national holiday in America, but you guys know me, I work 365 days a year, so I know no holidays. You guys need the news and I'm going to bring it to whether it is a holiday or not, so let's go ahead and hop right into it. Bradley Sutton: To start off, we actually have a news article that's not based on USA but actually based in Europe, and it's entitled. It was actually from the Guardian and it's entitled EU plans to impose import duty on cheap goods could dent Sheen and Temu All right, so they're making this move. Now, as you guys know, the reason why you know Temu and Sheen can offer such low prices, regardless of what country they're shipping to, is they take advantage of this kind of like loophole, as it were, like, for example, an EU. The threshold for this tariff is like 150 euros. In UK it's 135. And then there's also some other like threshold at 39 pounds or less. It doesn't involve VAT. So basically, what this means is that you know you can ship from China to the country uh, you know in EU or even America, uh, and the sender nor the recipient are charged like import duties and taxes, as opposed to if you're getting like a you know $200 item or something where you got to, you know fork over 20% or whatever it is, and in addition to that, you know to send from China that they take advantage of like these subsidies where they can get, they can ship things really, really cheap. But the one of the biggest advantages that the Chinese sellers have over European sellers or American sellers is that advantage of shipping things one at a time directly to customers so they can get around that import tax. Bradley Sutton: So what an EU Commission's spokesperson said is hey, what we have proposed is that there's now no exemption anymore for packages valued at below 150 euros. So this is not, like you know for sure, going to happen, but this impacts a lot in Europe, you know. It says imports from online retail retailers have more than doubled year on year to more than 350,000 items in April. Now this is like I said this is still in the preliminary stages. We don't know if this is going to pass or go through or not. But if you're in the US, you know this is impactful, I think, because you know Temo and Sheen are really attacking those low price kind of market there. Mainly it's been in the clothing like for Sheen and stuff like that. But I was just looking the other day on Temo there's coffin shelves all over the place and like a lot of the same products that amazon has and it's like super, super cheap. Now, thank goodness, not as many not nearly as many people shop on that platform as opposed to like TikTok shop or amazon and things. But you know this is something that maybe us sellers might want legislation on. I'm not sure you know like. Would you like the United States to crack down on these no-fee imports, because, remember, it's not just Temu and Shin anymore. What did Kerry talk about in the Weekly Buzz last week? Now Amazon has entered this game where they're going to offer these kind of direct shipments that'll get to buyers in like 11 days at a very low price. That's kind of like exclusively for those shipping from China. So this this will help, you know, maybe alleviate some of those imports if this loophole is kind of closed. So it'll be interesting to watch in the coming months what happens with this legislation. Bradley Sutton: Now the next news article is actually directly from Amazon Seller Central, a cool feature, something that you never see on Amazon. You guys know those announcements that we sometimes get news from, or you see it on your dashboard and you see how there's like a thumbs up or thumbs down. Have you guys ever seen one that had 66 thumbs up and only one thumbs down, like usually? It's like mostly thumbs down not usually, but a lot of times. A lot of sellers are not very happy with the updates that Amazon is giving, but this one is like 99% positive. Bradley Sutton: Now what is it? It's very simple, but it's. It's beneficial for sellers like myself who do similar shipments all the time. So if you've got your own 3PL and you're sending shipments in or you're sending shipments directly from out of the country, this feature is called a send it again feature, replicating previous FBA shipments with one click, all right. So basically, let's say you have this shipment you're selling, you're sending in 10 boxes of five coffin shelves each. Well, if that's usually what you do, like you just do that every two weeks or you do that every four weeks or whatever Now, instead of having to build that whole shipment over and over again from scratch, you can just hit this button and now it's going to duplicate that shipment. Now that doesn't mean you're locked into that SKU. It says you can still manually add or remove SKUs or modify the number of units, but at least you're not having to start from scratch again. So if you want to play around with this and see how it works, hit inventory in Seller Central, then hit FBA inventory, go to the shipments dropdown menu and then select manage shipments under the next steps column select send it again. If you want to see how it is to repeat a certain shipment, all right. The next article is repeat a certain shipment, all right. Bradley Sutton: The next article is from a retail dive. I'm not sure if I've ever quoted them before, but this is a article entitled TikTok shop to discount thousands of items during a sales event. So you know, we know, amazon has Prime Day, Walmart has Walmart plus day or deal or week, I think it's called, and then they actually have another one going on right now on Walmart before Prime Day. But now TikTok shop has its deals for you days that's coming this July it's actually going to be coming on July 9th and there's going to be exclusive discounts that I'll have with some major brands. Doesn't really say that everybody is has access to offer this. But what about you guys who are selling on TikTok shop? Did any of you guys get access to this deal for you days? Let me know in the comments below. Bradley Sutton: Regardless, it could be a way to boost traffic on Amazon. The deal for you days is a week before Amazon Prime, so there's a couple ways you can do it. If you're selling on TikTok shop, maybe you don't even have access to a deal for you days, but maybe you just go ahead and discount your products or do a big push on TikTok shop to influencers around that time. Well, that might boost some of your Amazon rankings before prime day, because you know, if you, the more outside traffic you get, you can get your ranks increase. Another strategy could be, during Amazon prime day, to run certain deals or run influencers on TikTok shop. And, you know, maybe your TikTok shop sales will have a boost, which you probably like, because there's a lot less fees on TikTok shop. But your Amazon sales might get a boost too, because people there's still people who might see something from an influencer on TikTok shop, but then they'll they prefer to go buy it from Amazon, right? So then again, during prime Day, you might be able to have some benefits there by getting that outside traffic from TikTok. So just something to keep in mind with Prime Day coming up. Bradley Sutton: Next article is from payments.com and it's entitled Walmart Plus Subscribers Break the 30% Mark. So they did a survey of about 8,000 different respondents and it said 30% of consumers had a subscription to Walmart Plus account. All right, Walmart+ is getting more market penetration, guys. And then, interestingly though this is the one I found fascinating is that among those subscribers, 87% also had an Amazon Prime account. So it's not just a matter of oh, they have to pick Walmart+ or they're going to pick Amazon Prime. A lot of people, myself included, have both Amazon Prime and Walmart+ accounts. Next article is back to Seller Central Dashboard, something that was announced this week Brand tailor promotions kind of a pretty good update, especially with prime day coming up. Bradley Sutton: All right, now there is an ASIN exclusion feature, all right. So before brand Taylor promotions, you can go to custom audiences. We announced this months ago when it first came out, and you know you can. You can like target all of your cart abandoners, but it's at the brand level. So maybe you have like 30 products in your brand but you don't want to everybody to get this discount that you're trying to do. You just want a few products or you don't want a few products in there. Well, now you know. Before you had no choice. You had to allow everybody who goes to any of your brands page to get access to this discount, but now you can exclude certain ASIN, so that it's almost as if you can just specify this promotion for a single ASIN. If you want to, so go into brand tailored promotions, check that out. Might be something to run during prime day If you have a lot of people who have abandoned the cart or you've got some repeat purchasers. You want to maybe drive some more conversion to keep brand tailored promotions in mind. Bradley Sutton: Next article is going to Amazon advertising and it's as you guys know. A few couple months ago we announced that Amazon is launched Amazon South Africa All right, but now Amazon ads is launched All right. So, believe it or not, there is a marketplace where there is no PVC until now. So now sponsored ads and brand stores have launched in South Africa. So if you're one of the very few I don't know anybody yet selling on the Amazon South Africa marketplace, go ahead and get your PPC up and running. Bradley Sutton: Going back to payments.com, this is kind of an off-topic thing, but I thought it was kind of interesting because I bet you a lot of you don't realize that Amazon made its own robot a few years ago. All right, now one of them they relaunched last year we talked about this in the Weekly Buzz, I think how it was for businesses, where it was kind of like a security guard of sorts, you know, for 24 hours, a 24 hour, uh, you know, like vigilance, like kind of like a ring camera if you were. But Amazon discontinued the robot for small businesses. This is kind of crazy. I'm showing a picture of this robot here for those who are watching on YouTube, but they're going to concentrate their efforts on the household robots. I mean, it's hard to believe there's robots in houses. Now it's called the Amazon Astro, all right. Now the reason I'm bringing this up is there is one person in the whole world who I know has one of this. Who do you guys think it is? Who's on cutting edge of different things? It's Kevin King. So I saw this in Kevin King's house when I went to his house there in Texas and I was like what in the world is this? So he didn't have it set up at the time. I wonder, Kevin, if you're watching out there, let me know how is your Amazon Astro? It's now maybe a collector's item, since Amazon is discontinuing it for the businesses. Bradley Sutton: Anyways, next up, not really an article, but something from LinkedIn. If you look at Liran Hirschkorn, last week he posted about how he saw that Lego had this virtual reality storefront in their Amazon store, where it's like a virtual store, where you can just go in there and walk around the. You can see shelves and you see the different Lego sets and you and it's. It's fake because it's like 3d, but it looks like you were in the Lego aisle in target or something like that, and then you can click on the actual products. It's actually quite wild. I tested it on my phone Um, my Amazon app. I have access to it too. So go to the Lego store. Just go to any Lego product on your phone in the Amazon app and then there'll be a button on there on the storefront that says Lego virtual store or something like that. Click that. It's kind of wild, and we've talked about here on the Weekly Buzz in the past that there's different companies that are moving towards this. Walmart is doing something in the meta, that there's different, you know companies that are moving towards this. Walmart is doing something in the metaverse, right? Who knows, maybe there'll be a day where you can go into the Manny's Mysterious Oddities you know our Helium 10 account, you know store it and then see all of our spooky stuff coffin shelves and bat-shaped bath mats and coffin bookshelves and things. I'm not sure if I would shop doing this Like I have virtual reality devices, but that just seems too weird to shop in that kind of environment. But who knows, maybe five, 10 years from now we'll be talking about this. It'll be like commonplace. Bradley Sutton: Last article of the day is again from Amazon, and they've got a special they announced just this week where you can save 25% on Amazon warehousing and distribution storage costs. On Amazon warehousing and distribution storage costs. That's AWD, all right. So from July 1st all the way to September 30th, anybody using AWD you get 25% off the base rate for storage costs and 15% off the base rate for processing and transportation costs. So this applies for people who are new to AWD or if you're already using it. You are going to get this discount. How many of you out there are using AWD? You know a lot of people well, not a lot, but I do know some people who switched to that, you know, a few months ago, you know to try and avoid some of those Amazon new fees that are coming for, like inventory placement and low inventory fee and things like that. For those of you who have done that, how is it working for you? Let me know in the comments below if you're watching this on YouTube. All right, that's it for the news this week. Bradley Sutton: Let's go ahead now and move into our training tip of the week. As you guys have been seeing the last couple of weeks we've been doing a long series on Prime Day. We've been trying to get everybody ready for Prime Day. We wanna make series on Prime Day. We've been trying to get everybody ready for Prime Day. We want to make sure you guys have the best Prime Day. I've got some strategies here that I have not talked about anywhere else, and none of our live broadcasts for Prime Day have we talked about. Bradley Sutton: It's a couple simple things that I think some Helium 10 members are sleeping on. So those of you who have the Insights dashboard in Helium 10, this is what I want you guys to do. All right, so go to your dashboard and then, on the left-hand side, I want you to hit insights. Okay, now, when you hit insights, there's a lot of insights that you know maybe have come up here. I want you to go to the settings and preferences for all the insights and then what I want you to do is look for the keyword based insights. All right, now there's a few that I think can help you this prime day. Bradley Sutton: It's kind of like for post prime day, but, as you know, you know you might start losing your keyword rank, your sponsored rank or your organic rank. You know, if everybody starts converting way way better than you, or if they're doing a higher bid, you want to get notified. Now, I'm sure what you guys are probably doing is, you know, maybe refreshing your search results or checking keyword track or something. But instead of that, add insight for that where it says hey, my, our increased sponsored keyword rank or increased organic keyword rank, all right. So then what you can set is like hey, you can say, Helium 10, if my keyword rank goes up or down by this much, please let me know. If my sponsor rank goes up or down by this much, please let me know. Bradley Sutton: Another thing that could happen in Prime Day, especially if you're going pretty heavy on some of your auto and broad campaigns, you might start getting sales on keywords that you didn't even know you were relevant for, and then what's going to happen if you're getting some organic sales on these keywords? Well, after Prime Day, your organic rank might go up, right. So another one that you can do is you know those other keywords. By the way, what I was mentioning, if organic rank is going up or down, sponsored keyword rank going up or down, those are keywords already on your radar, like the ones that you're tracking in Keyword Tracker right, but remember I said there could be new keywords. So what I want you to do is I want you to go to the my Product Keyword, suggested Insight or Alert, and then you hit Edit. Bradley Sutton: Right Now, what you're going to be able to do is like say, hey, if there's a keyword out there that has minimum whatever search volume and all of a sudden my organic rank gets to X or Y or Z right, and it has two words you know you can add a whole bunch of filters here Then give me an insight, in other words, give me alert. So a lot of people after prime day are like, looking at their PPC reports, are like, oh shoot, I didn't know I was getting a sales from this keyword and they weren't even tracking it. But this way, instead of having to look at all your search reports, just look, maybe all of a sudden you're going to get ranked for keywords that you didn't have on your radar. This is going to give you an alert. There's nothing like this out there in the industry. We're unique in offering this function. Another thing that we are unique in and it's important for Prime Day is we allow you to add competitors that you can track for Alerts. Bradley Sutton: Okay, so this was about your own products, right, but maybe you want to know, leading up to Prime Day, which one of your competitors is lowering their price. Is any of the competitors raising their price? Are any of your competitors adding coupons? What about after Prime Day? At what point do they take their coupon off? These are things that you might be tracking. Guess what? You don't have to track it. Helium 10 can do it for you instead of you going and refreshing pages and this and that. How can you do that? What I want you to do is again go to your Insights Dashboard. If you've got the Diamond plan, hit this like two swords crossing button. That's the icon that we have for competitors. All right, hit competitors and this is going to open up If you've got any competitors. If you don't have any competitors, guys, you need to add it. The way that you can add the competitors is by hitting the add competitors button, and then you have an option of hey, do you want to add just competitors individually? You can just track whatever products on Amazon Maybe it's not even something related to your product or you can link your competitors. Bradley Sutton: I highly recommend doing that, like if I have coffin shelves, I want to go ahead and add, like the other coffin shelf, so I can compare it directly to my coffin shelf. Like, for example, you can see here I'm tracking five different coffin shelf competitors. Now what do I mean when I say I'm tracking? I'm tracking? Hey, are their sales increasing or decreasing? Is their listing quality score changing? Like, maybe they updated their listing? Is their BSR changing? So what you guys can do for the competitor insights there's a lot of them. You can see when they added a coupon, when they removed a coupon, when their price has changed, when their price has gone down, if they changed their title or their main image or their category, if their BSR changes. Bradley Sutton: Basically, guys go into each and every one of these, hit the gear button and then set the alert. That what you want to be notified by. All right, I mean, I think that no brainer is like is my competitor running a coupon? Let me know if they start running a coupon. Maybe I'm going to start my coupon, but then you don't want to keep running your own coupon and they stop running their coupon. So set an alert to tell you when they stop running their coupon. They turn it off so you can turn off yours. Bradley Sutton: This is again something that nobody in the industry has. Guys, helium 10 has had this for over a year. I think a lot of you have been sleeping on this, but a lot of the work that you're doing or maybe you're not doing because you don't have time can be automated by this dashboard and setting these insights. All right, guys, so please go into your insights dashboard. Those of you with a diamond plan, I mean this is almost worth it just to have the diamond plan to be able to have this. But go in there If you've got the diamond plan set. Your competitors, set your alerts for your products or your insights. Set your alerts or insights for your competitors products, and then now going into prime day during prime day, going out of prime day, you are going to get the best data possible without having to go search 17,000 different places on Amazon every single day to try and track these things. All right, guys, that's it for this week's Weekly Buzz. Thank you for tuning in. We'll see you next week to see what's buzzing. Enjoy this episode? Be sure to check out our previous episodes for even more content to propel you to Amazon FBA Seller success! And don’t forget to “Like” our Facebook page and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to our podcast. Get snippets from all episodes by following us on Instagram at @SeriousSellersPodcast Want to absolutely start crushing it on Amazon? Here are few carefully curated resources to get you started: Freedom Ticket: Taught by Amazon thought leader Kevin King, get A-Z Amazon strategies and techniques for establishing and solidifying your business. Helium 10: 30+ software tools to boost your entire sales pipeline from product research to customer communication and Amazon refund automation. Make running a successful Amazon or Walmart business easier with better data and insights. See what our customers have to say. Helium 10 Chrome Extension: Verify your Amazon product idea and validate how lucrative it can be with over a dozen data metrics and profitability estimation. SellerTrademarks.com: Trademarks are vital for protecting your Amazon brand from hijackers, and sellertrademarks.com provides a streamlined process for helping you get one.  

Get ready for an insightful episode as we gear up for Amazon Prime Day with strategies from some of the most experienced sellers in the business. We kick things off with Abdul, a seasoned seller who shares his journey of nearly a decade on Amazon. Listen in as Abdul recounts his best and worst Prime Day moments, including how he achieved a 2-3X sales increase last year without relying on costly promotions. Instead, Abdul utilized coupon codes, price adjustments, and leveraged off-Amazon traffic through social media and email campaigns. He also shares his game plan for this year, including starting targeted broadcasts a week before Prime Day to maximize engagement and sales. Next, we shift gears to hear from Abe Chomali who has worked with multiple sellers, including a remarkable success story of a national electronics brand. This brand skyrocketed from $15,000 to $1 million in sales in a single day thanks to a premium deal position and massive advertising push. We also explore common pitfalls, such as internal miscommunications that can sabotage deals, and discuss the latest tactics for Prime Day 2024. Key strategies include leveraging new promotion types and recapturing potential sales from ad spend leading up to and during Prime Day. Finally, we share diverse seller experiences and strategies for Prime Day from Rolando Rosas, Gonzalo Zamora, Carrie Miller, and Huy Nguyen, highlighting both successes and challenges. From managing PPC budgets effectively to the potential pitfalls of overspending on ads, we cover it all. Sellers like Rolando found that turning off PPC on Prime Day didn’t negatively impact sales, saving significant costs. We also explore the use of Amazon Live for increased exposure without extra expenditure and the crucial role of Helium 10 tools in managing campaigns and tracking performance. By leveraging tools like Helium 10’s Cerebro and Market Tracker, sellers can optimize for Prime Day-specific keywords and ensure continued sales momentum. In episode 575 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley, Abdul, Abe, Gonzalo, Rolando, Carrie, and Huy discuss: 00:00 - Amazon Sellers Prime Day Strategy From Experienced Sellers 01:09 - Prime Day Strategy for New Sellers 02:54 - Improving Amazon Sales Strategies Over Time 08:15 - Maximizing Strategies for Prime Day 12:34 - New Strategies for Promotions and Sales 16:55 - Prime Day Sales Strategy Success 18:14 - Prime Day Strategies & Tools 27:19 - Successful Strategies for Prime Day Sales 35:20 - Optimizing Prime Day Sales Strategy ► 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: Prime Day is coming up, so to continue in our series of Prime Day readiness episodes, we've invited seasoned Amazon sellers who've sold millions of dollars on the platform to give some of their best and worst stories from previous Prime Days along with what they're planning to do this Prime Day. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Sellers have lost thousands of dollars by not knowing that they were hijacked, perhaps on their Amazon listing, or maybe somebody changed their main image, or Amazon changed their shipping dimensions so they had to pay extra money every order. Helium 10 can actually send you a text message or email if any of these things or other critical events happen to your Amazon account. For more information, go to h10.me forward slash alerts. Bradley Sutton: Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show. That's a completely BS-free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Prime day was just announced, although, of course, helium 10 serious sellers podcast listeners have been knowing when prime day was going to be since April, since we predicted it but we weren't sure. But now everybody's sure July 16 and 17 is the day, all right. Bradley Sutton: So, if you're a brand-new seller, by definition, this is going to be your first prime day, and so what I wanted to do is not just have me here give you guys a step-by-step tutorial. I wanted to bring different sellers on to ask them what their experience is, whether it's their own accounts or maybe, uh, they have a lot of clients who they've helped with their prime days, and it's funny, because the answer is not always oh, you've got to go all in the answer from some of these sellers. I'm not sure what they're going to say. Some of the sellers might say you know what I don't do extensive discounts on Prime Day, and that's fine too. We want to make sure that we give you guys a complete view of what people are doing and not doing on Prime Day, but just know that, hey, there's not just one size fits all, where there's one strategy and everybody's got to do it or else you're a failure on Prime Day. I think that's going to be, hopefully, the theme that you learn today that there's different strokes for different folks, and it's okay. So, the first seller I'm going to bring on the show with us today he's been on the podcast before is Abdul. Abdul, How's it going? Abdul: Hey, Bradley, good, good and yourself. Bradley Sutton: Pretty good, pretty good Now. You and I have hung out all over the world. You used to come to our Elite workshops and we had it in California. I know at that time you were living in New Jersey. We've also hung out in Lahore, Pakistan. Is that where you're at right now? Are you in Pakistan? Abdul: Yes, I am, and indeed. Bradley Sutton: So, what time is it over there? Abdul: So, we're like 12 hours ahead of you. It's like 11PM. Bradley Sutton: 11PM. Thank you for coming on so late. Now for people who maybe haven't heard your Serious Sellers podcast episodes. How long have you been selling on Amazon? Abdul: So, we're going up to eight, nine years, but the first few years were not so good. I did everything wrong, and just after that it's just been fixing things and it's been a roller coaster. Bradley Sutton: All right, now, eight, nine years you've been there for the prime days and so tell us let me just start off, this is going to be a similar question as what I'm going to ask others what was the best thing you've ever done on a prime day? Like, maybe it could have even been an accident, but what's the best Prime Day result you had where maybe sales were up 50%, sales were up 4X? Whatever the case, what can you remember was your best Prime Day? Abdul: I think 2X, 3X last year was good. Bradley Sutton: Was that coming from a certain strategy, like, did you run Prime exclusive discounts, a lightning deal, or was it just 100% organic extra traffic? Abdul: So, that's something we did not do last year. Last year we did not do exclusive discounts, flash sales, because I think correct me if I'm wrong those are usually 200, 300 per ASIN. They can get very pricey quickly, right, sure? So, we did not do that. Last year we did a lot of. We signed up for whatever free we could find and we ran coupon codes, discounts. We fixed our pricing beforehand to make sure that our prices were just right, leading a month, two months before the Prime Days. Bradley Sutton: Okay, so what was your strategy right before Prime Day? Did you have anything different that you did leading up to Prime Day? Abdul: No PPC ran as usual. We just kept an eye. If anything was running out of budget, we would put more juice into those PPC campaigns. Otherwise, we were just concentrating on coupon codes off Amazon advertisements. We have a large following now, so we send out messages on our social media, on our email distributions, so bringing a lot of off Amazon traffic to our store. Bradley Sutton: Okay, yeah, that's definitely good. And so, what are you doing in that regards for this year? Like, what's your plans leading up to this year's Prime Day? What kind of promotions are you doing for your off Amazon this year? Like, what's your plans leading up to this year's Prime Day? Are you what kind of promotions are you doing for your off-Amazon traffic? Are you like telling them, hey, we're going to have a Prime Day discount, or something like that? Abdul: So yeah, leading now that it's announced because people my customers don't like vague, it's going to happen in June, July. So as soon as it's announced, you start preparing for your broadcast. So roughly a week before anything you do a week before the dates, it's just prepping. You can't. People don't take that seriously. So, say, about seven to 10 days, you start, you hit them with the first message and you have a series of follow-ups A lot of many chats, if you have subscribers in many chats. A lot of emails. My social media if I have Facebook following or Instagram following you just start hitting them with what your deal is, what your products are, where to find them and to remind them. Don't go to my website, have the Amazon logo prominent. So usually, I don't like to drive people to Amazon store my Amazon products. I like them to go from social media to my own website. But this will be an exception. Bradley Sutton: Now, what are you telling them, like, what are you doing? Are you doing prime exclusive discount? Are you just going to have a clippable coupon? Are you just running a discount as a regular discount price offer? What are, what is your plans for this July 16, 17? Abdul: I think it's going to be a visible coupon code this year, clippable discounts or typical clippable coupons. People tend to forget, so if something is right in front of them for everyone to see, as soon as someone lands on my page on my product, I want them to see the discount and I want them to be able to just apply the coupon and you don't want to put any hurdles in front of them. Bradley Sutton: What's your projected sales this year? Just so people have an idea about your level. What do you think you're going to hit for overall Not for Prime Day, but for your year. We're about halfway through the year. What do you think you're going to end up at? Abdul: This year has been a challenge. I have a lot of hijackers Just before Prime Day. I would touch that. We do see a lot of activity where they're using that infamous. There's a new badge, often return badge I'm being hit with that with my best sellers, and there's every year we see that. So that's been a struggle. We have to keep an eye on that and honestly, I struggle with that every year, yeah, so it's hard to say. It's always a surprise. It's hard to put a number on what this year is going to be like. Bradley Sutton: Yeah, but what was your best year? Was it during COVID? Abdul: During COVID, yeah, we were hitting 60,000 sales, 60k a month, so that was our best time. But after that I had some family issues still dealing with sick parents, so I haven't been able to give it much time and attention like I used to. Bradley Sutton: Well, that's the beauty about Amazon. You can be at home in New Jersey pushing it. You can go home to Pakistan to take care of family and still be running your business. That's the beauty about our industry. Well, Abdul, I wish you the best of success for this year's Prime Day. Thank you for sharing your knowledge with us and yeah, we'll definitely connect after to see how it was all right. Abdul: You're welcome. Thank you, take care. Bradley Sutton: Next up, we've got Abe coming on. Your kind of a contrast with Abdul's just working with his own account, but you see many people's accounts because you work with a lot of sellers and so you've got some unique, unique viewpoints as far as selling on Prime Day and what you should do and what you shouldn't do. So, a similar question like amongst you know different accounts you've worked on previous Prime Day, is there something that was sticks out as like the best Prime Day for somebody? Like what's a cool anecdote you could provide us? Abe: Yeah. So, this anecdote is one which really stuck out by itself. It's one which is going to apply to very few sellers, but it was an eye popper. So, I work with a brand that has national distribution, so it's a recognized brand, and I work with them to sell a line of electronics like in the $200 plus price range. Now we were having trouble getting traction because in the electronics category there are lots of foreign competitors that sell the same thing for 40% less. So, the brand said we really want to make a push, we really want to see if it's possible to make Amazon pop. They were able to get a SAS core rep. They were able to work with the SAS core rep and say we want a premium deal position on prime day, something that's not in the dashboard, because there are spots that you can get that are not in the dashboard. When you have a SAS core rep, they vet you and they have to make sure that they think you can sell that amount. And that's part of the key, because they say this spot can sell $4 million for us. If you can't sell and you can't fulfill $4 million, we don't even want to talk to you. That's worth what the spot is. Abe: So, they were vetted, they were checked. They actually they couldn't even send enough inventory because Amazon could not process it. They had to share the information from their warehouses with Amazon and they accepted the information. Well, that day, prime Day, every single thing was turned all the way on. We launched 30 campaigns of every ad type, you know four different autos at different price points, high-priced ranking campaigns like every single type you've ever heard an experiment about. All launched on the same day and in 24 hours, they went from selling $15,000 a day on one on the hero skew. They sold a million dollars in one day of that skew, which is something like. Bradley Sutton: $15,000 to 1 million on that. So that means that there had to be a good number that was fulfilled by merchant too, because no way they had all that inventory in Amazon. Abe: Right yeah. three quarters of it was filled by merchant. yeah, so it can't be reproduced. A lot of people suggest very impressive things like it could be done if you flip the right switch. No, this is not. I would be surprised if I ever am part of a thing like this again. But I had the front row seat for it. Bradley Sutton: I love that. I love that. Now let's talk about the complete opposite. What was a disaster for somebody? Like somebody just did nothing, or maybe somebody screwed up on their discounts or they didn't realize it could stack, or have you ever what's the worst prime day you've ever heard of that happened to somebody? Abe: The worst prime day. It's a thing that keeps happening, but it's just as bad. Every single time it happens you have somebody who is not working with somebody else within the same company. They launch a coupon a week before. The new low price of 30 days is below the price of the submitted deal. Boom, your deal does not run. And every time it happens there's a meltdown because people count on prime day and all of a sudden it didn't work. They can't understand why. They tell me, Hey, why aren't we selling? Where's the volume? Why aren't we even showing for the deal? I said did anybody in your place run any kind of discount or coupon in the last couple of weeks? Cause we don't get a notification about everything they do in their account? And all of a sudden, you'll hear the yelling that Bob ran a coupon two weeks ago. What are we doing, Bob? He ruined everything! Bradley Sutton: Wow! Okay, so now what you know, things have changed in the last, in the last Prime Day. You know there's new rules as far as like discounts and coupons and plus there's new ways to. You know there's. I don't I don't know if brand Taylor promotions has been around for a full year yet, but I don't I'm not sure if that was around last year. Abe: They keep changing it, so yeah, and. Bradley Sutton: Yeah, and yeah, even the one. Even in itself, it's not what it was two months ago, you know. So, right. So, with that, all that in mind, we're now talking about 2024 Prime Day. What are some general things that that trying this year with some of these new changes in mind. Abe: So, the number one thing we're going to be trying is, like you mentioned, the brand tailor promotions. There's something like 10 different types of promotions in there and what we're doing with every brand we work with, we're actually setting aside an hour for time to work with them instead of our usual, you know, shorter amount of time. We say listen, we need to spend an hour to look at each one, read the terms of what each one applies to and think about if this applies to our brand and if it does, let's lean into it. And with Prime Day, a number of those discounts are for people who looked at your product but didn't buy, for people who put it in your cart but didn't buy. And we want to know. What we want to do is all of the ad spend that we spent leading up to Prime Day, all of the money that we spent on Prime Day that didn't turn into sales. We want to do anything we can to capture it in the days and 10 days or two weeks afterwards. Bradley Sutton: Prime Day already has a lot of, you know, better conversion rate than normal days because people are coming on Amazon with more intent to buy. But if you are targeting people who already had even intent to buy before, because they added to the cart but they abandoned it you know that's one of the brand cart or cart abandoners is one of the brand tailor promotions that's like should do even better for you if, like, they're already coming on Amazon and they're already somebody who almost pulled the trigger on buying your product before. So that's, I think that's a great strategy to target, to target them. Abe: Yeah, I mean these brand tailor promotions have. In some cases, they've been fantastic. They do what DSP promised to do, which is to chase people around after they originally looked at you. These promotions are doing it more effectively than DSP in a lot of cases, because it's really direct and a big thing which is key is that they gave us the ability to run these promos at an ASIN level, which was originally it was just for the brand overall and at that point it was really clumsy in terms of running deals plus stacking something that goes across your whole brand. Bradley Sutton: Are you doing anything differently in Helium 10 as far as for Prime Day, like doing some historical research or looking at search volumes, or is just kind of like saying you know keyword tracker, paying special attention, or it's kind of like business as usual for you? Abe: So, I'll tell you one of the features we love best and I'm not sure which level of Helium 10 you need for it is the historical rank tracker for keywords. In Cerebro we love to compare time periods and with the accounts that are connected long enough, we can see how Prime Day did last year and we can compare Prime Day to different peak periods and we use those to set budgets. The number one thing we do when managing Prime Day, we don't do much with bids. We don't have a special bidding program for Prime Day the number one thing is being visible to shoppers as long as possible during the day, which is budget management. And the budget management goes also along with inventory management. You have to have enough product to sell and then you have to show enough to sell all the product you have. That's where all the planning comes in and that's where all the holes fall apart. Usually, either people didn't plan enough inventory, either people didn't assess the impact of their discounts against their regular margins, and then nothing is left over to spend on an actual ad. There's all the different parts that work together. But going back to Helium 10, it gives us an idea of how much of a boost we need in order to get full coverage those days. Bradley Sutton: Thank you so much for joining us and giving us your insights and definitely want to keep us updated in the Elite Facebook group to let us know how some of these things worked out for you. Abe: Be happy too. Bradley Sutton: I'm going to invite three people on at the same time. We're just going to have kind of like a mini round table for the next few minutes and let's go ahead and invite the next group. We've got Gonzalo, we’ve got Rolando and we've got Carrie. So, we've got three experienced Amazon sellers of different of different levels, but experienced Amazon sellers of different levels, but all have multiple prime days under their belt. So, we're going to start with our two guests. Gonzalo, you've been on the Spanish podcast. I've never had you on the English podcast before, though right. Gonzalo: Right. Bradley Sutton: Okay, so give us some of your background. Where are you based and tell us how long you've been selling on Amazon. Gonzalo: I'm based in Chile in South America, in Santiago, and I have been a seller from 2019 before COVID. Bradley Sutton: Okay, so you've got about like you know, depending on if you're counting the prime deal days or the other one that comes up, you know you got at least three, four prime days under your belt. Now let's just stick with you for a second here. What was your best prime day results. Like where it was really a big increase over sales, and then if you can remember what contributed to that. Gonzalo: I have one that I X by three in one year. That was pretty amazing. Bradley Sutton: Was it by accident, or did you do something different that year that really worked? Gonzalo: Actually, it was the one that I set as basis for the next year and I replied the same strategy from them. And what I make is, on my top seller product, I actually decrease the bids and increase the budget, so I'm just waiting for the sales, basically, but just on the top seller. On the rest of the product, especially on the ones that I need to move, I do the opposite thing. I create one week before I create a retargeting campaign because it's shown that you need to be seen seven times before someone bought your product. You need to be seen seven times before someone bought your product. So, I tried to show to the same person seven times before Prime to push them to buy the product on Prime. Bradley Sutton: You got some buyer psychology going there. I like it. I like it, yeah, excellent. Gonzalo: So, for me Prime started one week before. Bradley Sutton: What was your most unsuccessful Prime Day? Where sales just stayed the same or even went down, or you made a mistake and something didn't happen. Do you remember? I remember any. Do you have any bad stories for us from Prime Day? Gonzalo: The only one is I think it was the first one that I didn't realize that I got out of budget on my campaigns. I was selling great. I get out of target. Obviously, my sales drops and I didn't realize until the next day. Bradley Sutton: All right, we'll call back to you, so stay here Next up, Rolando. Rolando was just on the podcast a few weeks ago and same question for you. We've been asking your best Prime Day and, if you can remember, what was the reason for that success? Rolando: We're one of those birds where Prime Day doesn't mean anything for us. Really, it hasn't moved the needle. Last year I would say it was probably our best, and that's because we turned off the PPC. And what we found the year before that so that'd be two years ago was, we were like, oh, let's do something for Prime Day and we'll crank up the juice with ads. We saw a lot of clicks, but we didn't move the needle any further than the previous year. It didn't move the needle further than our average daily sales. So last year we said no PPC and we didn't even see a huge drop in terms of our regular run rates or anything like that. It was right around the same, like in just another day. So, for us that's a victory in that we didn't waste thousands of dollars for people that are browsing and we just kept selling. So that was, I would say, a win for us to really see the difference one year go cranking out on PPC, one year not cranking out on PPC, and so we learned a lot by doing that. Bradley Sutton: And that's important for everybody here. Don't think that, hey, I have to do something bold and outrageous on prime day or else I'm a failure. You know like Rolando’s company has sold tens of millions of dollars on Amazon and you just heard from him. You know they've tried both and that when you're selling on Amazon for a while, you can try something one year and try something else. I myself haven't done. I don't I don't do too much on Prime Day outside of just managing my budgets and trying to, leading up to Prime Day, making sure I'm ranked organically where I want to. But that's super important to know that if you don't do anything special, that doesn't mean you're a complete failure. Rolando: You know what you could do. That doesn't cost any money and something that we are going to be doing this year. We did this three years ago and also for is that around Prime Day, we start going live. It's great because Amazon does have a lot of stuff going on their social media accounts saying come to our website. You know, check out the live. So being live. Are you talking about Amazon Live. Amazon Live. So, we'll go live those days. It'll run on our Amazon store. It'll actually replay later on the Amazon store. So, we have content. We have our faces on there. We show the product how to use it. We talk about different things. So, exposure wise, it gets people to see oh, these are the people behind the curtain that are part of this company. So, from that standpoint, we look at live as a great day to get new eyeballs without having to spend a ton of money. Bradley Sutton: Going back to Gonzalo, how does Helium 10 play a role in what your strategies are Like? What aspects are you using? You know, helium 10, obviously you're not using Helium 10 to create coupons and things like that or register for deals, because we don't have that. But on the research side, what are you doing? Or on the um or on the advertising side? Gonzalo: First of all, Helium 10 is crucial because I control my all my pay-per-click on Adtomic yeah, it's crucial for me healing time. And then I have two tools that I love. The first one is market tracker that I regularly is going to take how the sale is going and who are my competitors, and the second one is keyword tracking. Obviously, I'm watching always what is my ranking and what is, how do I doing and how it is impact the pay per click that I'm doing. Bradley Sutton: On keyword tracker, are you like putting boost on and then really checking, like your sponsored and organic, like on prime day, making sure you're not losing your sponsored rank and then, if you do, you  increase your bid? Or is that how you're using keyword tracker? Gonzalo: Yeah, that way, and I also, when I start, when I open a new campaign on a new keyword, I'm start tracking with that, with the rocket, to see if I'm doing some impact or not on that keyword. Bradley Sutton: All right, good. Rolando, what are you do? I mean prime day or Prime Day. What are your go-to Helium 10 tools? Rolando: I love, love the dashboard. I love the below the insights, where it tells you all you know, your competitor and all that Below. That is a row that's super customizable, where you can look at things with your by-product performance or by advertising. And it is for me the thing because we're really big in the last 18 months is focusing on profitability and we can go line by line, item by item. It's got everything in so you know your net profit per product and you can pick out the losers, cut them or be like we got to liquidate them or hey, we've got more margin on these, these group here. Let's add some more PPC and see what happens. And now you can work more intelligently than in the past, where maybe the PPC data was over there and the sales data was over here. This combines both of that, so you know immediately these are the losers. They got to do something on them right now. Bradley Sutton: Love it. Speaking of the dashboard, something I think a lot of people sleep on at least those with a diamond plan is add competitors to that dashboard, because it's not just about your product and then set up what we call them insights, that you can consider them alerts. But then it's especially good, like for Prime Day or around Prime Day, somebody goes out of stock, somebody’s changed their title one of the competitors. Somebody adds a coupon, starts a coupon. Somebody stops a coupon. There's little things that you can set alerts, that if you don't have Helium 10, fine, you still got to be looking for these things, but you just got to manually go to all these pages, start, you know, have somebody refresh a screen. But if you've got the diamond plan and you guys are using that dashboard that Rolando was talking about, add your competitors and look at, monitor their listings, you can't see their exact sales. Obviously, Helium 10 is not hacking people's accounts. But you'll see estimated sales and things, but you'll know when they change their image or when they change a coupon or have a sale price. So that's something important to look at. Last question we'll, we'll just stick with Rolando. Then we'll go back to Gonzalo. This year, prime day, same thing as last year. You're not going to do, anything special or are you going to do the lives or are you going to do any discounting or any off-amazon promotion? What's your strategy this year? Rolando: So, this year we're definitely going to do live. Then we're going to add something we've never done before. We've never done prime exclusive deals never. I hate giving money away if I have to, but in the, in the spirit of experimentation to see if prime exclusives work for us, we've got probably a dozen products that we will be doing some form. One of the things that we literally this morning was one of our meetings. We've found an opportunity where a multi-pack unit where we could sell 50 as well as a hundred. Nobody in our category has had anything like that and we know from what our amazon folks are telling us when we talk to them. They're telling us don't sleep on multi-packs. They keep telling us that they said that the man for multi packs is going up and up and up and up and up. So, a while back ago we tried just that not on a Prime Day. We added some more multi packs. Guess what? I'm kicking myself because we weren't doing it five years ago. So, we're gonna try some exclusives tied with some additional multi packs to see how that works with buyers that are looking for things in volume. Bradley Sutton: All right, same question for you, Gonzalo. What's the plan? What is the plan of attack this year? Gonzalo: It's the same one that I just mentioned. I just started for my main product I'm going to love it and stay calm on it and the one that I need to push a little bit. Actually, today I set the campaign with retargeting and increased bidding one week previous. Bradley Sutton: Awesome, all right, well, guys, thank you so much. Appreciate sharing your knowledge with us today. All right, Carrie, how many Prime days under your belt? Carrie: I've been selling since 2016. So, I guess eight. Bradley Sutton: Do you have? I know you've got a lot of horror stories, just in general crazy things, and I'm going to save some of those for future podcasts with you. Yeah, but do you have? Let's start on the opposite side. Do you have any horror stories that specifically are related to Prime Day? or at least just maybe a prime day that just didn't work out for you. Carrie: No, what's really cool about our sales is, over the years, they've just incrementally increased, and so every prime day has been better than the last, and so it's not been like, oh, one day we did like 200,000 in sales or something, but it's like we definitely did a substantial amount more than the year before and the year before. And so, year over year, we're increasing. Bradley Sutton: That's good. So, you never had one where you accidentally did too big of a discount or you thought you were qualified for a deal and you ended up not doing it. It's been pretty much as planned. Carrie: Yeah, for Prime Day. I mean, I have accidentally done a really big discount on a coupon where it was like something that was supposed to be $15 was like $1.99. And I was like, wow, it's selling really well. So off of prime day I've done that, you know. Bradley Sutton: But not for prime day. And then do you remember what year was your best prime day Last year? Have one that sticks out. Carrie: Last year was the biggest yeah cause every year it's gotten bigger. It was about 16,000. I remember our first one. It was like we were selling about $400 a day and I remember it went up to like a thousand dollars that day and we were like, oh my gosh, and so now we've gone quite a bit more for that day. Bradley Sutton: So, you did $16,000 on one day. Yeah, on Prime Day last year. And what would you attribute that to? Did you do something different or a special campaign just really worked out, or what happened? Carrie: We do coupons and so not only in the days leading up to Prime Day but also after, we still get a good amount of sales well over our normal average, and so I think that's a big part of it. But, yeah, we offer coupons and like the discounts, not Prime Day exclusive discounts or anything like that, we just do our normal discounts and that's how we do it and it works out really well. And you always have to make sure your listing is optimized and that you've got good product reviews, and so you know if you're, if your listing isn't optimized, you're going to want to turn off the ads on those particular products or if you have kind of bad reviews. But you're, you're heroes. You know if you do some, some discounts on there and you have it fully optimized, it's, it's definitely worth it. Bradley Sutton: Now speaking of Helium 10, we're going share her screen now and I want you to actually show, step-by-step, a couple strategies that you think are important for a seller to do leading up to Prime Days. Carrie: So, this is one of my favorite tools. I think Abe was mentioning this because I know he really likes this tool too. You can use this in a lot of different ways, but basically, you're going to do what I do is I just do a single ASIN search on a main competitor. In this situation, because I'm looking at Prime Day and I wanted to give you an example of you know some, a way to find some good Prime Day keywords. There's this, this vacuum mop that I have actually purchased and I know a lot of people have purchased this particular mop for Prime Day because it's usually a pretty good deal and so I wanted to just show you how you can find kind of Prime Day specific keywords. So, I took this ASIN and did a reverse ASIN search here, and what I love about this Cerebro tool is the show historical trend tool. Now, when you go to show historical trend, it's going to give you 24 months of data, so you can go all the way back 24 months and you can see where an ASIN was ranked organically and for their sponsored. You can also see the search volume history, and so it's really, really helpful so you can go back to the last prime day and the prime day before. It's just kind of just right there. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to click on this July 2023, because that was when our prime day was last year, and then I'm going to go down and click apply filters, because I want to just look at this month specifically, because I'm looking for prime day specific keywords. Okay, so, um, when, when I'm in this historical trend, if I go down here, you're going to see basically all of the keywords that this particular product was ranking for organically and sponsored. You can see their actual rank here. But I want to look for you can filter this down and I usually like to look at phrases containing. So, one of the phrases I like to look at is prime and if I hit apply filters, then if I go down here, I can see all of the kind of Prime Day keywords. Carrie: Now, this particular product they're ranking. They're one of the top sellers, I know, on Prime Day, but their organic rank on these major keywords is, you know, 230. They're in the 200s. They're way behind. So, they're not even really, they hadn't even advertised on these keywords, probably because they didn't really know they existed. So now, if you can go back, you can find the historical keywords. You can create campaigns with these specific keywords in them and you can start targeting those. I mean they've only they only look targeted this one. It was a Prime Day vacuums 1100 search volume, totally missing out on 8500 in search volume. You can also see here this is actually our up-to-date information. It's showing the trending of these keywords going up, up, up. Now a lot of times you'll see these keywords and it's like you know a month before it's going to be like oh there's, you know, 200 searches or whatever. So, this gives you the information of how much they're increasing and so you can even start these campaigns, you know, a month early, two months early, to just start getting yourself, you know, ranked on those keywords. And you can also leave these campaigns going all year round, kind of as an evergreen campaign, to just make sure that you're at the top of those searches and so that they have all their Christmas gifts you know a bunch of Christmas gifts for their family in December. You can you know search phrases containing gifts or anything that really pertains to your particular product. During Prime Day you can start searching for those terms you can look at. You know some of your biggest competitors, like the biggest competitor, and you can see what kind of keywords they're. You know they're ranking for but maybe not really capitalizing on, and so this is just a really, I think, amazing tool to get historical data and utilize it for this particular Prime Day. Bradley Sutton: Awesome, awesome. Thank you for sharing that with us. I mean, you can use this what she was talking about for almost any period of the year, but obviously we're talking about Prime Day now, so that's why it's especially beneficial for you guys to use that leading up into prime days. Carrie: We have a prime day checklist that we put together that has amazing information from. We have Destiny Wishon from Better Media. She gave some PPC tips. We have Emma from Marketing by Emma, and she gave a lot of really incredible tips for optimizing your listing. These things are it's not too late to do them. So, there's a lot of stuff on this list that you could really implement. Implement now, even if you feel like you're kind of like behind in the game. These are tips also you can use year-round, because it's really good optimization. So, make sure you download that, check it out, do as much as you can before Prime Day, and it's going to help your conversion, even if you're just doing a small discount it will help your conversion. Bradley Sutton: So h10.me/primelist, h10.me/primelist. And then we will go ahead and invite we up, Huy, how's it going? Huy: Hey, how's it going, Bradley. Bradley Sutton: Pretty good, pretty good. Now what about you, we? How many prime days do you think you've experienced in your lifetime, your amazon lifetime? Huy: Since the beginning, so kind of lost count, I don't know, probably plus five years. What year did it actually start, Bradley? Bradley Sutton: I don't even remember. It was before. And then, plus, there's two prime days a year. But let's just say you have a lot of prime days under your belt. Now, something I've been asking the different guests is what was the best prime day you had where, just like, sales were way more than normal and way more than other primaries? Do you remember what year that was or what the numbers were kind of? Huy: I don't remember the year, but it was definitely before COVID One of the things that it might've been the second year that prime day had been announced, right, and this was prior to them doing it only kind of like once a year, right, cause then they switched off to doing it twice a year, probably the biggest opportunity, the biggest win that we had. It wasn't intentional, it was actually when we got mentioned on. They used to do a live stream during Prime Day, right, Amazon did a live stream. They actually mentioned one of our products and we've never sold more products in one day than on that day. So, our product got mentioned in the live stream. We started seeing sales climb up. All the units we had allocated to that promotion were sold out pretty quick, but fortunately we were watching it and we were able to go in and adjust the quantities that we wanted to put in that promotion. So that's probably one of the things is like you definitely want to be making sure that you're looking at how many units you have available in that promotion and if you have the opportunity to adjust it just based on the demand. You know that was a huge win for us, I think. On the other end, though, Bradley Bradley Sutton: Disaster, any disasters or crazy things that happen. Huy: Not necessarily the disasters, but just to kind of put a point to that other one where it's like, if you put too many quantity in there, it's kind of like a psychological game as well, right? So, when there's a lot of deals that are going on, customers are looking and then they've got that progress bar where it says, hey, how many people have claimed this deal. So, if you put in too many units up in the beginning and then you're stuck between that below 10% claim number, people are not as excited to go out and claim those deals. So, I think that finding that balance of having it over 50% claimed people looking at it and then having that FOMO where they're going to go out and jump on it. So, I think, in terms of disasters, I'm going to be a hundred percent honest, we haven't been doing a lot of prime, uh, prime day, actual deals, lightning deals, and the reason why is the past couple of yeah, past couple of times it has not been effective. You know like, yeah, it's uh cost. What does it cost? $1,000 to run a deal, even if you have it on the day. What we used to do is we used to put all of our items available and put it into the promotion and then we, when they tell us the schedule, then we cancel the ones out that weren't actually on Prime Day or kind of you know, within that range, because they were putting some of us, like you know, the week before Prime Day or just a couple days after that was already not effective. But I think that because Amazon switched to allowing everybody to provide that Prime exclusive discount you know, like not having an actual deal but just kind of marking it off and then getting that Prime Day exclusive badge that has actually probably changed the most for us. We found that to be most effective. There's no cost to do it and I think that everybody's got that strategy where there's just too much inventory of Prime Day deals out there that when Amazon expanded it out beyond just those lightning deals, everybody just started looking outside as well. Bradley Sutton: I'm happy you mentioned that because I think that people need to understand that. Once I've said it five times today is that prime day success is not contingent on, he who does the most deals or he who spends the most money in in PPC, or you have to do prime exclusive discounts or you have to do lightning deals. No, you can have success on prime day in a lot of different ways. For some people, that is what’s needed, or for some people, other people, it's doing everything like. Like Abe mentioned that crazy experience of somebody who went from $15,000 to $1 million on one product on Prime Day because they went all in on something that probably is not duplicatable. But again, there's different ways to have success on Prime Day. Again, Gonzalo, Rolando, Huy, and then Abe and Abdul, thank you, and Carrie, of course. Thank you so much for joining us and we'll see you guys’ next week. Bye-bye now.

Join us as we bring together a group of innovative Amazon sellers from South Korea who share their unique insights and strategies in e-commerce. We introduce James Park, making his debut on an English podcast, who takes us through his fascinating journey from studying food science engineering in Korea and biology in Germany to working in the cosmetics industry. His story unfolds with a transition from traditional employment to launching his own e-commerce business, inspired by watching our other guest, Bopyo Park, on YouTube. Our conversation continues with an exploration of the Seller Kingdom community, a dedicated space for Korean Amazon sellers. We dive into current trends among Korean sellers, such as the increasing preference for sourcing K-beauty and K-food products from Korea. Additionally, we highlight the Korean e-commerce landscape, mentioning platforms like Coupang and Naver Smart Store, which offer promising opportunities for third-party sellers. We also consider the potential and challenges for foreign sellers looking to enter the Korean market, emphasizing cultural differences and pricing strategies. Finally, we explore advanced marketing strategies for Amazon sellers, focusing on optimizing PPC campaigns and enhancing product listings. We discuss the importance of auditing accounts, understanding market trends, and leveraging tools like Helium 10 for deeper insights. Unique approaches such as using search term reports and Google trends to inform listing updates are highlighted. We also introduce the Seller Kingdom Seoul Conference, an event aimed at connecting Amazon service providers with Korean sellers. The episode wraps up with a casual conversation about favorite Korean dramas and recommendations, providing a light-hearted end to a content-rich discussion.   In episode 574 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley, Bopyo, and James discuss: 00:00 - Amazon Sellers From South Korea 00:12 - Helium 10 Chrome Extension Demand Analyzer 04:41 - Career Aspirations and Education Paths 07:44 - Korean Amazon Sellers and E-Commerce Growth 13:41 - Finding Korean Amazon Seller Partners 16:54 - Innovative Marketing Strategies for Amazon Sellers 19:11 - Utilizing Trends for Business Growth 24:39 - Amazon PPC and AI Strategies for Amazon Sellers  30:13 - Korean Ramen and Silicone Manufacturing 35:54 - K-Drama Discussion with Bradley and Guests Transcript Bradley Sutton: Today we've got a couple sellers from Korea who are going to talk about a wide range of topics, including what you can look at manufacturing in Korea, Korean marketplaces that you can sell on, and some general PPC and AI strategies for Amazon sellers. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Are you browsing a Shopify, Walmart, ETSY, Alibaba or Pinterest page and maybe you see a cool product that you want to get some more data on. Well, while you're on those pages. You can actually use the Helium 10 Chrome extension demand analyzer to get instant data about what's happening on Amazon for those keywords on these other websites. Or maybe you want to then follow up and get an actual supplier quote from a company on Alibaba.com in order to see if you can get this product produced. You can do that also with the Helium 10 Demand Analyzer. Both of these are part of the Helium 10 Chrome extension, which you can download for free at h10.me/extension. 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 are going to a couple parts of the world. I believe one of our guests is in New York and then we've got another guest in six o'clock in the morning on the other side of the world in Korea, Bopyo James. It's been a while. Bopyo: What’s up Bradley? Bradley Sutton: Hello, welcome, welcome. Now, this is James'. First ever English podcast and he's a little bit nervous, so I like to pick on our guests who are nervous, but there's no reason to be nervous, James. Your English is great and I know you have a lot of knowledge to share with us as well, so it's good to have you both on. Now Bopyo has been on our podcast before. If anybody wants to get a little bit more of his background, go back to episode 429 and you can learn a little bit about Bopyo's background, and he talked a lot about ChatGPT and it's actually funny in that episode some of the things that he mentioned. He would like Helium 10 to have for leveraging AI we actually already have now. So that was kind of a cool episode, so make sure to check that out now. Let's keep with James first, since this is James first time we need to get your background, James, so what city were you born and raised in Korea? James: My city is located in the Uiwang city. And then my town is two hours far from Seoul. Bradley Sutton: Where did you go to university? James: University is Kyunggi University. It's located in Suwon. And then I had experience in living in Germany, had to exchange student and then came back to South Korea and then got a job. Bradley Sutton: What were you studying, both in Korea in Suwon there and also Germany? What was your main focus of study? James: My focus. In South Korea I focused on this. My major was food science engineering, and in Germany I took a lecture regarding biology. Bradley Sutton: Interesting and now you're in the e-commerce world, so almost completely different than what you studied. Now, as Bopyo knows, and you know too about me, I watch just tons of Korean drama. You know, I'm even wearing my reply 1988 shirt right here, I'm wearing my kimchi hat here. But anyways, in Korean drama something that I learn a lot about Korean culture, in Korean drama, sometimes I'm not sure how much is fake and how much is real, but one thing I've learned is it seems like for high school or whatever you call your secondary school parents really like there's a lot of pressure to try and go to like really prestigious universities, and then the parents make you go to like the after-school studies and just like everything is about making a high score so you can qualify. Is that what happened to you, James? Or do you just do whatever you wanted? James: Actually, I did whatever I want. However, in high school. So, I studied like other high school students. I woke up like at six in the morning, I went to high school like half past seven and then did a self-study until like half past eight, and then did self-study until like half past eight, and then from half past eight to 6 pm we got a lecture and then we had a dinner and then come back to the class and then self-study until 11 pm or 12 pm. Bradley Sutton: Oh my goodness gracious. James: Yeah, that was my life. Bradley Sutton: That's exactly what I see in Korean drama. Was that the same for you Bopyo? Did you have to do something like that too? Bopyo: Yes, my parents, they always push to me you have to go good college, you have to get a good job, blah, blah, blah. A lot of things, yeah. Bradley Sutton: So, what is it called the Sky University, where it's the Seoul. Bopyo: Sky University. Yeah right, James. James: Everyone's goals is that in high school well. Bradley Sutton: That's why you know there's a lot of very great Amazon sellers there because they have such amazing education. I guess so, but I want to find the gap. So, James, when you graduated, did you work in biology or in food or anything, or what did you do after graduating university? James: Just after graduated my university. I got it and I got a job regard in the cosmetic field and that I work in a cosmetic manufacturer, so in the global business department. Bradley Sutton: So, you were working in manufacturing and then how in the world do you go from there to the e-commerce world? James: At the time I wanted to do my own business, however. So, you know, I wanted to have a my own brand and then my own product things, and then somehow, I watched the YouTube and the time and then, okay, this Amazon business I could do somehow. So, okay, I let's search my own product and then I use a Helium 10 actually at the time, and then I found something, and then at the time, I create a new design about sculpture and then that sculpture has a function of the photo frame, so this kind of a new thing in the world. However, the problem was the product doesn't have a name, and then my customer couldn't find my product, my own product, in Amazon. So, I had to spend a lot of, a lot of Amazon advertisement fee at the time. So I studied by myself like a one or two years and I spent a lot of money at the time. So I got a lot of know-how. I built up my knowledge at the time by myself, and then many CEOs in company asked me to deliver a PPC lecture in Seoul. So I did it actually for two years and then there were a lot of companies which wanted to give me an offer and I took an offer, so I became somehow PPC agency as well. Bradley Sutton: All because you first learned about the opportunity from Bopyo, and so was it called Seller Kingdom in those days when you found it. Or you just found him just from his YouTube. James: YouTube. Bradley Sutton: Okay. So then, Bopyo, at what point did you start the Seller Kingdom kind of community? Bopyo: Okay, I want to introduce myself a little bit about just a little bit.  You know, maybe some people just know me. Bradley Sutton: For those who didn't hear your first episode. Please, please. Bopyo: Yeah, yeah. Hello, my name is Bopyo Park. Yeah, nice to see you guys. Yeah, I started selling on Amazon in 2019 and have been doing so ever since. I've achieved seven figures since and I'm currently preparing for launching a new product. Throughout this journey, I've been sharing my Amazon selling experience on my YouTube channel, so reading to the creation of the Seller Kingdom community, dedicated to helping Korean Amazon sellers. Yeah, that's why Seller Kingdom are today. Yeah, yeah. Bradley Sutton: Okay, so you started selling on Amazon first, and then you're like, hey, let me make some videos about it. And then like, hey, this community is growing bigger. And then that's how Seller Kingdom started. It's kind of similar to how Helium 10 started. You know the founder of Helium 10, Manny Coats. He started selling on Amazon. He started a podcast so not YouTube, but podcast first and then he's like, hey, let's go ahead and start Helium 10 after that. How many people are in your community? Bopyo: I think I just count before I enter this podcast, right? So over 5,000 members in Seller Kingdom right now, yeah. Bradley Sutton: And how much? How many are based in Korea compared to maybe just you know Korean Americans or based in outside of Korea? Bopyo: Maybe 70% people. They are living in South Korea and maybe 30% people, maybe 25% people living in United States and 5% people living in maybe Europe and Japan and different all over the world. Bradley Sutton: Okay, now you know, as many people know and you guys know, you know I've worked with Korean companies for over 20 years and even in the Amazon world, even be way before I was in Helium 10, you know I was working with. You know Korean beauty companies like Innisfree, and skin food and things like that. You know, helping them get their Amazon started. But my partners, who have always been Korean, you know their specialty was not necessarily private label but helping like Korean brands get started in USA. Now for your community. Are most people just doing the traditional method of, hey, let me manufacture a product, maybe China or India, and just private label product? Or are there a lot of also people bringing existing Korean brands to the US and European markets? Bopyo: I think maybe three years ago maybe many people want to sourcing from China to selling United States. But right now the Korean people, they now know Korean K-beauty product is a really good product and that also K-food, a lot of K-food product. I mean grocery product like a Tteokbokki and Kimchi. A lot of things right.  Bradley Sutton: You know what, I started wholesaling before Kopiko. Those little coffee candies. Yeah, yeah, yeah, but yeah, it was even wholesale. It's so popular in America now. Bopyo: Yes, so I think that's why a lot of Korean people Korean Amazon sellers right now are trying to sourcing from Korea and to sell United States. So maybe they want to create a new brand, or they just sourcing from some brand to introduce to United Market.  Bradley Sutton: Yeah, okay cool. Now, one time I actually last year went out to dinner with you. Guys weren't there, I don't think, but I went with some other people out to some Samgyeopsal restaurant and some of the sellers were there. They sell in US, but then some of them they were also talking about selling in Korean marketplaces, because you know there is no Amazon in Korea as far as Amazon marketplace. So, James, What are some of the top nowadays in 2024? What are some of the top Korean marketplaces that are maybe similar to like Amazon style that are that are in Korea right now?  James: That would be definitely Coupang. Bradley Sutton: And can just any buddy sell. Is it like a third-party marketplace where they know or maybe coupon has their own products but then other people can ever can sell on that platform, kind of like third-party sellers, or how does it work? James: The system is really, really similar to Amazon Marketplace. So Coupang has their own product, private brand. However, their Coupang sellers can sell their own brand product as well, and then some of them they buy this cosmetic from, for example, like a Skinfood Innisfree. They bought this kind of product and then they sell like wholesale. Bradley Sutton: Now me as an American citizen, can I sell on Coupang or some of these other marketplaces in Korea? James: As far as I remember. Yeah. I heard that there are many Chinese sellers in Coupang as well.  Bradley Sutton: Bopyo, what do a lot of your community, do they sell both on Amazon and in Korean marketplaces like Coupang, or are they mainly just Amazon? Bopyo: I think a lot of people now trying to sell Amazon and then Coupang and then they have a different marketplace also I think they call Naver Smart Store. I think Smart Store is more focused on private label product, for example, like their own brand right, and then Coupang is a more open market. So, if I'm Korean Amazon seller, if I'm making you know good product, maybe they want to trying to sell three different way, like Smart Store and then Coupang. Trying to sell three different ways like Smart Store and then Coupang and then Amazon United States market or Japan, Amazon Japan, because Japan and Korea is so close right now. Bradley Sutton: Is it something that you would suggest that foreign sellers, be it American sellers, European sellers, look into more to be selling in Korean marketplaces, or do you think it's not much of an opportunity due to exchange rate, or what's your thoughts on that? Bopyo: I think the Korean market, e-commerce market, is a really big market. So, if they want to sell some kind of product on the Korean market, I think it's going to be a good idea, but also a little bit difficult to enter the Korean market. Because they think it's going to be a good idea, but also a little bit difficult to into Korean market because they have their own culture and Korean market price is so different than United States or Europe, different world. So if you are not living in South Korea, this is a little bit harder but market price is really good. So, looking for some partner, maybe Korean partner? We have so many Korean sellers. So if you guys want to sell something in Korea, maybe looking for some kind of a Korean Amazon seller partner I can introduce to, if anybody looking for it. Bradley Sutton: That might be something interesting. But just you know, obviously you know maybe my coffin shelf is not very good market or a very good product for Korea, but it's the same like selling in Amazon Japan. Not every product in Amazon USA or Europe works in Japan, usually the products that are good for that market, or maybe some popular American brands, because sometimes Japanese people like some American brands. Maybe some Korean people might like some European or American brands. But definitely something I think that people should look into. Now we have a lot of Korean Amazon sellers who listen to this podcast, yeah, and maybe some just Korean people who aren't selling on Amazon. So what would you say to them? As like, what kind of advantages does somebody in Korea have to start selling on Amazon? Why do you think so many Korean sellers are successful on the platform? Bopyo: Yeah, in Korea there are many beauty brands and health focus on Korean food. I think this product is highly competitive in the global market. So, as you know, Korean country is globally very popular. Korean content and K-pop is a big hit in the world, right? So if you're a Korean Amazon seller looking for, you know, big opportunity, of course, North America is a big opportunity market. So, find some kind of product, maybe from Korea and then trying to niche market and then selling to United States. Bradley Sutton: Let's go to some general questions for James. So like, how many brands are you managing for PPC now, other than your own? Are you still managing other companies' brands and other sellers' brands? James: Yes, Actually there are a lot of small sellers who want to have a conversation with me and then sometimes I had a conversation with them. However, I don't take like a small brand seller because if they hire higher PPC agency, they should expend a lot of money. And then I advise them to spend this money on their PPC instead of hiring me. And then there are a lot of PPC lectures and then advice and then books on Seller Kingdom and then I told them to learn by themselves and then if they make their brand bigger and they could think about hiring PPC agency. And currently, since years, I handle more than five brands. However, I'm cutting down the number of the brand because I'm working for the Seller Kingdom Conference and I'm traveling around the world. So yeah, maybe I was one more company would be enough for me. Bradley Sutton: Well, what's some you know, like, when you take on a new brand, you can you know, I'm sure you like audit their account and see what they've been doing in PPC and that's how you know how you can help them. But what's some unique strategies that you have as far as advertising goes that that, like most of the people when they come to you, like they're impressed or like, wow, I didn't think about that or maybe they were doing it wrong Like what's something you see that people are doing wrong that you think that you have a unique strategy on Maybe it's a certain kind of video advertising or maybe it's something that people are not doing with optimizing their listing. But what's some nice strategies you can give for PPC that you know? You know, don't give me a super simple one like, hey, try to lower your ACoS. You know, give me something good, what you can help with this day. James: I'm focusing on actually said TACoS, and then the market trend. And then I told them to learn competitor's product more and deeply. And then I told my customer to learn their customer's idea thoughts, what kind of keyword they were searching and what kind of relevant phrase they are typing when they buy their product. Many customers don't care about search term and, as I always tell them to check their search term, like every weekend or every listed twice a month, because the search term is the exact keyword customer type in that can't Google it. Google with the keyword and then they can see some of the image or the trend, something like that. And then I also told them to check Helium 10. Several and then especially MarkNet. Bradley Sutton: So let me go back to that Google one that's kind of interesting. So, let's say somebody sees a keyword that they're converting for, you know, from their search term report or if they're using Helium 10 Adtomic, they can see, oh, I got some sales or um on this. And then they look on Google what are they looking for? And then, based on what they see, what is the action you're suggesting for them to do? After what they see on google? James: There are many news or so trend on the recently, and then there are some events about events and news or some kind of a blog, something like that recently released. And then I tell them so why don't you check this kind of opinion, things from US or, for example, like from LA, from New York or from Texas? They have their own idea and then their own trend. So maybe, for example, so Father's Day is just on right corner, so people type in or people type some keywords regarding Father's Day, and then there are a lot of opinion and the news regarding Father's Day, and then there are a lot of opinion and the news regarding Father's Day, and then this kind of new trend this day. Bradley Sutton: So is that for like having new product idea? Or now you tell them, hey, maybe change something in their listing or something based on what or how are they using that information? Then, after they find those trends. James: After they find a trend. I recommend them to take a new video or new photos, yeah, and then uh with the trend, and they can make a new photo for example, for a product collection or as a video sponsored brand, like that, and then they can renovate their stores. So, like, my main computer company is also the big company, but the big company all the time unloads new photos, new videos, and then they decorate their store with the new photos. And then I think this is a really good idea, because whenever I visit the competitor's company store and they are doing something new and new, and then they I can see they are really care about their customer and then they want to give them more value to their customer. So even I'm not their customer, I can see how hardly they work. Bradley Sutton: All right Now before we get into some of Bopyo strategies. You know James referenced that. You know one of the reasons he's having to do less on the PPC side he's going to be working on organizing the second annual Sellers Kingdom event, the first one I went to. I had some good Korean drama moments there. I reenacted some scenes and I'm going to be going there again this year and maybe trying to pick some new dramas like Queen of Tears or something that I'm going to reenact with your staff dramas like Queen of Tears or something that I'm going to reenact with your staff. But, Bopyo, talk about this conference. Why did you start it and what are the plans for this year? How big do you think it is and give us the details when, where, et cetera. Bopyo: Okay, I want to explain a little bit about our conference. The Seller Kingdom Seoul Conference was the first internationally hosted Amazon seller event in Korea. This is maybe the first one. I wanted to connect Amazon service providers from North America or Europe service provider to connect Korean Amazon seller because I believe that understanding and utilizing this company effectively can significantly enhance seller competitiveness. So that's why I made this conference, and so last year we did one time and this year, James, when is it going to be this year? I just want to make it clear. James: 28th and 29th September 2024. Bopyo: So, two days event. So, if anybody, if there are service provider listening to this podcast who are interested in expanding into Korea market, if you guys are looking for Korean Amazon seller customer, please feel free to contact me. Yeah, and then we can discuss. You know conference, yeah, and one good thing is you know conferences. Bradley Sutton: Yeah, and one good thing is you know even sellers, if you're in Korea, whether you speak Korean or not. If you speak English, you speak Chinese. Like you have the simultaneous translation. So some presentations, like you know, when I gave a presentation, it was in English but everybody could understand because they had the you know simultaneous Korean translation. But then you had some Korean speakers, but I could a presentation. It was in English but everybody could understand because they had the you know simultaneous Korean translation. But then you had some Korean speakers but I could understand everything. Not because I speak Korean unfortunately, I need to learn more but I had the translations. So if anybody out there wants to get more information on this conference or to maybe even purchase tickets, go to h10.me/sellerkingdom, h10.me/sellerkingdom, and you're going to see some you know pictures of the event and you could see some of the what I was talking about before, where we were reenacting scenes over here. There's some great pictures. There's Savannah right there and so we had some great speakers last year, like from Gatita and Avask. I'm sure there'll be some great speakers last year, like from Gatita and Avast. I'm sure there'll be some great speakers this year, but I highly recommend. I'm flying there just for this event and plus, I need to do some Korean beauty procedures from Gangnam on my face, but I'm definitely going for this event, so I hope to see as many people as possible there. So now you know, like the last time or the only time you were on the podcast before, you talked a lot about AI and how Amazon sellers could use it. Now we're over a year later. Beyond that, obviously, AI has come along. What are some new things that you are doing for you and your Amazon business and your community as far as leveraging AI in it? Bopyo: Yeah, thank you for asking. I think that's going to be very good question in this day. Right now, I think in my opinion not officially, but in my opinion I think FAQ is more important than before. Such result if you put a lot of FAQ maybe ChatGPT or cloud AI, but different AI they catch FAQ because usually in the chat they asking something, they came out the result right. So I think FAQ is more important than before. So how do we put in good FAQ? How do we create good FAQ? If you guys have a Helium 10 Chrome extension, you can go your listing or your competitive listing, go to the listing and then, using Helium 10 Chrome extension, leave it inside and then you can download it like a ton of review, like 1,000, 2,000 review you can download easily. And then you can download the CSV file or Excel file, right, and then you can download all review and then copy all review and then put it in ChatGPT or Cloud AI and then put in the prompt oh hey, I'm selling this product. This is a custom review. You know, try review all you all. I passed the review right. Try review all review. And then give me a good FAQ customer, always curious things. Give me a top 10 FAQ things, top 20 FAQ thing. In my opinion, I think more than 10 is good, maybe 20. If you have like a after that, you got like a good FAQ Sometime. Result is very surprising. You never know, right, so, and then put it in you know, premium, a plus content, you can make your own FAQ. And also, if you have a brand owner, you have on your website, right, I think this is going to be very important things too. So put it in FAQ your own website page Shopify or WooCommerce, whatever your page put it in your FAQ session. I think this is a more important thing. So I think that's my first thing in this day using FAQ. Bradley Sutton: Yeah, James mentioned. You know some of the products he's made pretty unique, you know, based on sculptures and things like that. What about you Bopyo, what kind of products have you sold or are you selling on Amazon that you've had good success with? Bopyo: Yeah, I was lucky when I was selling the 2019, my product, actually home decor product is kind of, you know, like a small sign or like a tray home and kitchen product. And then 2020, the pandemic situation is coming right and then, you know, home decor cat always boom, so my selling is very well and then I expanding my SKU. After that, you know, pandemic is going back to just right now. It's just normal situation and selling is a little bit down. So I'm trying to find out right now new product, also selling, you know, home decor product, but in this year I'm going to launch a new product sourcing from Korea. Bradley Sutton:  It's kind of like everything has not been Korea so far. This is your first Korean made product.  Bopyo: Yeah, this is actually first from Korea. This is a private label product. Before I'm sourcing from. Maybe they already have a brand name, but this is my first time private label in Korea, so it's kind of, you know, hangover relief. Jelly stick mango flavor I'm trying to launch, you know, mango flavor. Jelly stick mango flavor I'm trying to launch, you know mango flavor jelly stick. Bradley Sutton: Yeah, that that's something I noticed too, like again from Korean dramas. There's always product placements and in Korea, like supplements and things. It's usually not like capsules, but it's like these jellies, yeah, like either a, like a small bag or like the stick and then that's probably. I mean, it's way more convenient and a lot of people don't like to swallow the, the, the capsules or pills, and so I think that's that might be good. Now me, I try not to drink too much alcohol anymore because of my foot, so maybe I don't need that product, but otherwise I would have tried out. I heard James needs that a lot, but we won't talk about it. Back to you James, obviously, what Bopyo just mentioned, that that's a good product to make in in Korea, because you know, Korea specializes in jelly products and things, and different countries have different specialties. You know, like some textiles, maybe it's good to make in Pakistan and maybe some wood products is good for certain parts of China. But if I'm a foreign seller, is there any products other than like jelly products or Korean beauty products? Is there anything that maybe I should consider manufacturing in Korea, where it's like hey, you know, the quality and price is very competitive compared to China or others. Anything other than that, James, would you say, other than beauty products? James: So I would say it's a K food because Korean manufacturers are specialized in using a very good ingredient in the food and cosmetics. And then if I were a foreign seller, I would think about like a food, about food in Korea. And then Korea has a big specialized in the rice, and then Kim many foreigners call it black paper. There's a really boom in the US right now and then Kimbap things and ramen. It's a fried noodle and the ramen is one of the common food in South Korea and the Koreans really love that and the manufacturers keep developing their ramen quality. And if you want to develop your own ramen brand, you can make just simply contact a small company and then you can create your just simply contact to a small company and then you can create your own ramen with a low MOQ.  Bopyo: And then silicon manufacturer. I know so many American seller. They sourcing from china and silicon product. But in Korea they have a good silicon manufacturer. This quality is much higher than you know different. You know manufacturer. But only problem is a little bit you know price. You know little bit price than other manufacturers. So if you are looking for good silicone product, I think Korea they have a good manufacturer. Only one issue thing is price. So you can maybe making you know high quality product you know selling to a little bit you know expensive than regular price. Bradley Sutton: Yeah, James talked about ramen, I think you know, or ramyeon, I guess you say in Korean, but just you know. Another note I learned from Korean drama out there be careful about asking a woman, you know, like you know ramyeon mogwale, like that actually means something else. So don't ask if you want to eat ramen to somebody at the Korean conference because they might slap you in the face. I'm not sure, but anyways, it's just another. You see, you can learn a lot from Korean dramas, but basically that's like their version of Netflix. And anyways, what? Some more amazon strategy? Maybe not ai related, but yeah, you know, not everybody can reach seven figures while still juggling. You know managing a full community. So obviously you've got some, some good strategies that you're incorporating that that allow you to have this kind of success. So what other strategies can you share with the audience out there? Bopyo: Yeah, that's a really good question. Well, I don't know of any quick way to get rich with an Amazon business. A lot of people are looking for, you know, quick way to get rich, right, but in my opinion, amazon business is not like that. So the truth is there's nothing particularly special about Amazon in this regard. It's an open market place, so we're selling product in just part of e-commerce. So therefore, we all need to approach the Amazon business with a mindset of brand owners and entrepreneur thinking, long-term mindset. I think we need long-term mindset. If you're sourcing from China or other place, you can selling, maybe you can make a little bit money, maybe $10,000, $20,000 per month. But if you constantly making that money, it's different story. Long-term strategy long-term is very different story. So I think if you're looking for a quick way to get rich, Amazon can be a harsh market, I think, for you. On the other hand, if you focus on building successful brand with a long-term perspective, then Amazon can offer great opportunities for you. So, since brands are being sold on Amazon, you know can be quite encouraging for individual sellers. So yeah in my opinion, looking for long-term, yeah, my understanding, yeah, long-term yeah. Bradley Sutton: Yeah, instead of trying to make the quick buck there, yeah, yeah.  So again, everybody, I hope to see you at the Seller Kingdom event in September. H10.me/Seller Kingdom. But first, Bopyo, like, if people want to reach out to you directly or find your YouTube channel or things like that, how can they find you out there? Bopyo: Okay, just Google it Seller Kingdom and you can find our website. Our website is contact section. If you go to the contact section, you can email it to me or just email it to me, bopyo@amgbreakers.com. Email it to me. Discuss anything like you know conference or Korean Amazon, stellar things, any Amazon you know launch strategy I always offer.  Bradley Sutton: And James, how can people find you out there? James: There is also my email address in Seller Kingdom website and then my email address james@amgbreakerscom. . Bradley Sutton: Excellent, excellent. All right. Last, most important question 2024, you and your wife Bopio, favorite Korean drama of 2024 so far. Do you even have time to watch drama anymore? Bopyo: Wow, I think this question is very difficult to answer, actually, honestly, I cannot lie. Honestly, I don't watch Korean drama but my wife watches Korean drama. Bradley Sutton: Which one does she like? I trust her taste. Bopyo: Oh, okay. I don't remember the exact name, but one guy and I think he's living in some kind of nearby sea, okay, some kind of love story, but I don't even remember the exact name, but I think that drama on Netflix, yeah. Bradley Sutton: Okay, I think, I know, I think maybe that is Welcome to Samdal-ri. Bopyo: Oh yeah, welcome to Samdalri. Bradley Sutton: There we go. Just from that description I knew what he was talking about how about you, James? Do you have time to watch Korean drama, or you're also too busy, like both of you, no. James: I'm not that busy as both of you, so I have some time to watch Netflix or Disney, and I can recommend you one K-drama, 2024 release name is A Killer Paradox. Bradley Sutton: Ah, I haven't watched that one yet, so I know which one that is, but I'll try and watch. My favorite this year so far is called it's also on Netflix Atypical Family. Atypical Family like kind of like superhero kind of show but yeah, anyways, all right. So I have to start planning my presentation for Seller Kingdom to be doing some reenactments of some Korean drama. Bopyo and James, thank you so much for coming on appreciate your time and look forward to seeing you in Korea in a couple of months.

lk about Helium 10’s newest features, and provide a training tip for the week for serious sellers of any level. Amazon’s 10th Prime Day Event Returns July 16 & 17, With Millions of Exclusive Deals for Prime Members https://press.aboutamazon.com/2024/6/amazons-10th-prime-day-event-returns-july-16-17-with-millions-of-exclusive-deals-for-prime-members Walmart's 'largest deals event ever' to rival Amazon Prime Day https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/walmarts-largest-deals-event-ever-to-rival-amazon-prime-day--plus-sales-to-shop-now-215140714.html Amazon to launch discount section with direct shipping from China, the Information reports https://www.reuters.com/technology/amazon-launch-discount-section-with-direct-shipping-china-information-reports-2024-06-26/ Target and Shopify Partner to Help Consumers Discover and Shop an Expanded Assortment on Target.com https://corporate.target.com/press/release/2024/06/target-and-shopify-partner-to-help-consumers-discover-and-shop-an-expanded-assortment-on-target-com Buy with Prime is helping this rapid hydration brand not only increase shopper conversion, but also bring in new customers. https://buywithprime.amazon.com/customer-stories/case-study-hydralyte Amazon is working on a ChatGPT competitor https://qz.com/amazon-generative-ai-chatbot-chatgpt-metis-1851558879 Stay ahead of the curve with insights on the latest updates within Adtomic, especially the game-changing brand performance dashboard that offers critical data for making savvy pay-per-click advertising decisions. Our training tip of the week emphasizes the importance of leveraging historical data to boost profits during Prime Day, illustrated vividly with a real-world example of a Tyneco vacuum. Tune in to gain actionable advice that will help you optimize your advertising efforts and dominate search results as Prime Day approaches. In this episode of the Weekly Buzz by Helium 10, Carrie talks about: 00:49 - Prime Day Dates Announced 01:35 - Walmart Summer Deals 02:20 - Amazon Temu-ish Service? 04:49 - Target and Shopify Partner 05:45 - Buy with Prime on Homepage 07:32 - Amazon Version of ChatGPT? 08:48 - Helium 10 New Feature Alerts 09:46 - Pro Training Tip: Leveraging Historical Data to Boost Prime Day Sales ► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast ► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension ► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup  (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life) ► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft ► Watch The Podcasts On YouTube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos Transcript Carrie Miller: Prime Day Dates announced. Is Amazon trying to be like Temu and Amazon's new version of ChatGPT? 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'll give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Now, today, our host is going to be Keri Miller. So, Keri, take it away and let us know what's buzzing. Carrie Miller: Okay, let's go ahead and get into it. The first thing I want to talk about is the Prime Day dates were just announced. So Amazon officially announced Prime Day 2024 dates, which is going to be July 16th and 17th. And now something interesting about these dates is that Bradley Sutton actually on this very show, he actually predicted that Prime Day would be on these exact dates way back in April. So let's go ahead and go back to that clip and show Bradley's predictions for Prime Day. Bradley Sutton: Amazon hasn't necessarily announced the new Prime Day, but I'm like 95% sure I was able to figure out when it's going to be All right, so bear with me. Here's why I think that and by the way, spoiler alert, I that's just my rough guess. Carrie Miller: So there you have it. Bradley predicted these exact dates for Prime Day, so how cool is that? All right up next we have Walmart. Okay, so Walmart announced their largest deals ever, which is going to be from July 8th to July 11th. Now this is coming off of Walmart Plus week. That was last week, so during these days you can actually expect discounts on pretty much everything. Walmart Plus members are actually going to have early access to shop the best deals of the season by beginning at noon Eastern on July 8th, which is actually five hours before the rest of the public actually gets access, and this, I believe, is probably in competition with Amazon's prime day. So they're doing a lot of great deals over at Walmart. So not only as a consumer, that's gonna be helpful, but for sellers, it helps to attract a lot of people to the site, so really good for everyone all around. Carrie Miller: Okay, next, now this one. This next piece of news is a doozy. Okay, so Amazon plans to launch a section on its shopping site featuring cheap items that ship directly to overseas consumers from warehouses in China. Okay, so this seems to be a response to sites like Temu and Shein, and I actually asked some sellers what they thought about this move and they said they believe that Amazon is being more of a follower and not innovating and creating their own path. So they're basically trying to maybe catch up with Temu and Shein. I'm not really sure. Some other. Some other sellers also said that they think there will be an initial negative reaction, but buyers will probably try it out. So I'm curious to know what you think. Do you think buyers are going to be excited about this? I'm not really sure. Someone else mentioned that they think this could be what puts dollar stores kind of fully out of business. We've seen some of the dollar stores going out of business recently and they think that this would be a kind of a direct competition to more of the dollar store quality, so that that is another interesting perspective. Carrie Miller: The products in this program will be delivered from China directly from China to the consumer between nine and 11 days. So a big question in my mind would be will Amazon allow American third party sellers to drop ship from warehouses in China as well? Some sellers already store their products in China in warehouses, like with SKU Drop, and it's definitely something that they could do. Amazon said they are going to start signing up Chinese sellers in this summer and they're going to begin accepting inventory in the fall. This article also highlights that sellers in this program will be able to produce small batches to test the demand for any new products that they launch. So that's something else that we know that we have questions about. You know, a lot of third party sellers like to do the same thing. Will third party sellers have the same luxuries to be able to do this without losing rank, things like that? So really a lot of questions in my mind with this new development. Carrie Miller: This article also questions if these packages that are coming directly to a consumer from China, if they will be exempt from US customs, since there is a provision that exempts individual packages that are valued at less than $800 from taxation. Now, third-party sellers, you know, if they're not allowed to do this, they still have to pay the taxes that are coming in. You know, when we ship goods in from China. So that kind of defeats the whole purpose of the taxation there. It really is going to hinder, maybe, third party American sellers. So that's something to really think about too. All right, so I'm really curious to know what you all think. What do you think? This is a good thing? This is a bad thing. Are you enraged? Are you happy about it? What do you think? Please let us know in the comments. Carrie Miller: Okay, so that leads me to my next piece of news, and that is that Target and Shopify are partnering to offer a selection of targets Popular merchants, such as their true classic and caden lane, to offer their products on target plus. The new partnership with Shopify will expand target plus and will give consumers more options to purchase from these selected brands. Target will also be the first mass retailer to work with Shopify to bring select merchants products into their physical stores in the months to come. If you want to apply to sell online and target, you can actually go and apply on target plus through the marketplace connect app. I really do believe that, with everything that's happening, all the changes that are going on, I do think it's really important to diversify. So you know, getting on target and starting to sell on target might be a really good option for a lot of third party sellers. So check it out, if you haven't already done that, because it's potentially a good opportunity to not only sell on target but to get in target stores. All right. Carrie Miller: So the next piece of news is a case study out of Amazon and this is for buy with prime. Now, this is a company called Hydralight, and Buy with Prime showed how they actually helped this particular brand increase shopper conversion and bring in new customers. The study highlights and they have it down here a little bit it's highlighting 16% increase in conversion rate, 37% of new customers purchased through Buy with Prime and 90% of the Buy with Prime customers are new orders. So that's not even the most interesting part, though. I know if you haven't added this button to your site, it's probably a good idea to do so. But the most interesting thing is I actually saw a post from Destiny Wishun from Better Media on LinkedIn and she actually showed a screenshot of these buy with prime merchants and their ads on the homepage actually directing straight to their actual site. So they're direct to customer site, which is really interesting. So I think they might be testing this out and I'm not sure if it was actually an ad or if, what the whole situation was, but there is. If you're interested, you can look on her LinkedIn. There is a whole clip of it and she shows how these actual little icons on the homepage are leading customers to the direct to consumer sites. So that could be a really good motivation and reason to participate in Buy with Prime, if you haven't already done it. I think there's a lot of evidence to show that Buy with Prime is really helpful for your conversion rate on your own site. But then if Amazon is going to start promoting your products on actual Amazon and directing them to your website, that is something that could be really amazing. So my question is what do you all think about this, and have you added the Buy With Prime button to your website? Leave comments below on that. Carrie Miller: All right, so let's get into the last piece of news, and that is that Amazon is working on an AI chatbot, internally called Metis, to rival OpenAI's ChatGPT. Okay, the chatbot is going to be accessible through a web browser and it's going to be powered by one of the company's internal AI models called Olympus. Olympus is supposedly even more powerful than Amazon's publicly available AI model, which is called Titan. Now Metis can generate conversational texts and image-based answers, provide source links, suggest follow-up questions and generate images. Amazon also reportedly wants to use retrieval, augmented generation or the RAG method for Metis, meaning the chatbot would be able to reference knowledge outside of its original training data and therefore could provide more up-to-date answers. Metis is reportedly also meant to be an AI agent, I guess, kind of your like personal agent, I guess, capable of completing tasks such as turning on lights and booking flights. Carrie Miller: So the question I have for all of you is with this change, do you think that more people are going to be doing voice search through Alexa? Do you think this kind of AI integration is going to change the way shoppers find products on Amazon and other websites? I do believe it is going to kind of change the context and way people are searching for products, but I'm really curious to know what you all think out there. All right, in our next segment, we are going to be talking about the latest rollout within Atomic and this is really important. Going to be located in Atomic and you're going to go to the dashboard and then scroll all the way to the bottom where it says brand performance. So what is being shown here is brand performance data and what you're going to be able to see is you can see the number of brand searches, you can see the detail page views and you can see the customer conversion rate. You can see the new percent of new to brand customers. You can see the shopper engagement rate. You can see all this great information all in one place and it's just really giving sellers more information that they need to make better data-driven decisions in their pay-per-click advertising. So it's going to allow you to see category comparisons how many clicks are within your category, how many detail page views are within that category and how you actually compare to the average. So I think this is huge in helping you to make better data-driven decisions in your pay-per-click advertising. Carrie Miller: Okay, so let's go ahead and get into this week's training tip of the week Now. I think this is one of the coolest things for Prime Day that you could utilize to help you make lots and lots of money this Prime Day, and it's going into historical data. So what I'm going to do, I'm just gonna go ahead and I'm gonna share my screen and show you how this strategy works and how it can help you to make tons of money this next Prime Day. Okay, so I did an example and I took an ASIN from Amazon and this is the Tyneco vacuum, because I know it does pretty well on Prime Day every year. I know I've purchased one and many people I know have purchased one, so I wanted to use this one as an example, and what we're going to do is I just did a reverse ASIN search on it and then what we're going to do is we're going to go into historical trend. Carrie Miller: Now, once I click on historical trend, you can see all of these months. This goes back 24 months of data and what I want to do is I want to go back to the month of July of 2023, which is last year's prime day. So I'm going to click on that pillar right there with July of 2023. And then I'm going to click on apply filters. Now this is going to show basically all of the keywords that this ASIN was ranking for organic and sponsored and you can also see the search volume. So if we look through here, you can see their organic rank in here for a lot of these different words. Now, one thing that I like to do is okay, I can see these great keywords and where they were ranked and all of that, but I want to look at Prime Day specific keywords. So I look at, I go into the filter phrases containing and I put in Prime and I hit apply filters. Carrie Miller: Now this is going to show you all of the kind of Prime Day related terms that you're going to be able to utilize and maybe do pay-per-click advertising on, and you could even do an evergreen cap campaign on this, maybe even throughout the next year, to make sure that you can kind of start ranking and stay on top of these. But we've got Prime Day vacuum here and that they are organically ranked 230. Okay, they're not even doing any sponsored ads. This has an 8,500 search volume. That definitely looks like it's wide open. If you hover over this you can actually see who is ranked in the top for that keyword. But if you go down you can see all of these different keywords where this main competitor is not even ranking organically in the first page for these keywords and they're not even doing many sponsored ads. They've got one sponsored ad here, one there as well, so they're kind of probably just guessing. Carrie Miller: But you can utilize this historical search volume, historical searches, to do some exact campaigns and start, you know, making sure to capitalize on these keyword searches, cause it looks like a lot of people are doing even just stick vacuum cleaner, cordless, prime day deals got 1800 searches. So you know really good opportunities to do some exact campaigns to really win all of this where lots and lots of traffic is going to be. So if you haven't already checked out the historical trend, go ahead and check it out. It is an incredible tool and I do believe it can make you lots of money. Right now, some of those keywords are very, very low search volume, and so if you start advertising now, you could potentially get to the top of the search and start ranking for those before prime day. You still have some time, so go ahead and start trying to dominate those incredible prime day keywords. All right, and that is all that we have for this week's episode of the Weekly Buzz, and we will see you again next week to see what's buzzing. Bye everyone.

Want to crush Prime Day 2024? We reveal game-changing strategies to maximize your sales! From prepping your inventory to harnessing the power of influencers and email lists, this episode is packed with actionable strategies. Discover how to optimize your pay-per-click ads by tweaking budgets, targeting your own ASINs, and leveraging the Cerebro Historical Trend Tool to stay ahead of the competition. We'll also guide you on adding last-minute coupons, and provide a Prime Day checklist to ensure your success.  Learn how to launch new ASINs effectively, set up a brand website, and improve conversion rates through split-testing. We discuss the importance of fast delivery and the advantages of using FBA and the "Buy with Prime" button for seamless order fulfillment. You'll also get tips on building an email list for future events, and hear recommendations for resources like Bradley Sutton's Maldives Honeymoon podcasts for comprehensive product launch strategies. Tune in now to make Prime Day your biggest sales event ever! In episode 573 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Carrie talks about: 00:00 - Prime Day 2024 Strategies and Tips 03:15 - Driving Traffic for Prime Day 09:33 - Cerebro Historical Trend Tool Overview 14:00 -  Download The Checklist Here 14:21 - Building an Email List Strategies 17:12 - Split Testing A+ Content Conversion Factors  17:40 - Launching Strategies and Fulfillment Tips 20:50 - Expanding Into Walmart From Australia ► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast ► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension ► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup  (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life) ► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft ► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos Transcript Carrie Miller: Did you know that you can make Prime Day 2024 your biggest Prime Day ever by implementing a few different strategies? That's right. Today, I'm going to be talking about some incredible strategies that can help you to make Prime Day 2024 your biggest Prime Day ever. I'm also going to be doing a live AMA. So stay tuned. 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 monthly special training with Ask Me Anything session. And today's host is going to be Carrie and she's going to be going over some Prime Day strategies for you guys like, you know, we got Prime Day coming up, but even if you catch this on the replay, guys, guess what? Prime Day is something that comes kind of like twice a year because there's like a usually special other deal day. So still pay attention to this episode, even if you're watching this or listening to it after Prime Day, she's going to give some good strategies. And then also, you guys came in and gave some pretty good questions for her after that. That we're also airing live. So don't forget to join these sessions every month. These ask me anything sessions. I highly recommend it. Usually, I'm the one on there, sometimes Carrie will be on there, sometimes Shivali will be on there, but get your questions ready for us. It could be about any episode you've had or your Amazon business, and we'll get to those questions live. Bradley Sutton: One more thing, if you want more personalized help and don't want to air out your questions in public, don't forget there's a way to have one-on-ones with the Evangelism Team myself, Carrie, Shivali. Make sure to sign up for Helium 10 Elite h10.me/elite, h10.me/elite. If you've got the Diamond Plan, it's only $99 extra per month. You'll get special trains with Kevin King. You'll get a special trains with me and Carrie, and even one-on-ones once a month you can sign up for. So make sure to do that. But without further ado, let's go ahead and get into Carrie's training. Carrie, take it away. Carrie Miller: All right, thank you all for joining, and today we're gonna talk about Prime Day, and this is our monthly training, where we allow everyone into this, and it's about Prime Day. And Prime Day is coming up, and this could potentially be your biggest day of the year, and I wanna just give you some tactics and some strategies that are gonna help you to basically make it your biggest Prime Day ever. So, before I get started though, I wanted to make sure that you all know that you can put your questions in the comments, and I'm going to do my best to answer all of your questions for Prime Day because I want to make sure that, you know, you guys are all completely prepared for this. Okay, so this is my Prime Day prep strategies. Okay, so I'm going to go through you slowly, but again, if you have any questions, make sure that you drop them into the chat because I'm going to be answering questions at the end as well. If I see something, though, that relates over in the chat box then I'll make sure to answer that as I go. Carrie Miller: But okay, so here are some to do things now. In two days, your inventory should be at the Amazon warehouses, so hopefully you all have kind of prepared extra inventory and you've sent those in to the Amazon warehouses. If not, maybe you can just still try to get them in but it's going to be a lot harder. But just wanted to remind you. That's two days from now, so hopefully that's all done. And here's just some things to kind of think about ways that you can drive more traffic and have this to be a big Prime Day. You can create a discount code within Amazon and you can actually send that to your email list. So if you do have an email list that you want to give a special Prime Day discount to encourage them to purchase your products, then this is a good way to do it to kind of help keep traffic going. It can help with some outside traffic. Another thing is I personally always do this. I actually haven't done Prime Day deals, so Prime Day deals you already had to submit those, but I always add a coupon if I don't have a Prime Day deal going on, and they do very well. So I always make sure to have some sort of discount and coupons on there, on the actual listing itself. Carrie Miller: You can also utilize influencers. If you do work with some influencers, a lot of them really like to showcase products. So if you do have connections like that, then this is a really perfect time to start utilizing influencers. Here's some strategies for your pay-per-click ads. Okay, the first thing is you're going to want to increase your ads budget for the high performing campaigns. Carrie Miller: Now, obviously, if you're not really running any deals, you're not going to really want to do this for those products. This is for products that you're running deals that you know not going to really want to do this for those products. This is for products that you're running deals that, you know, are going to have deals like coupons or a prime day deal on. You want to increase to make sure that you don't run out of budget. And another thing is you want to run Product Targeting Ads against your own ASINS for defense. So you don't want to spend all this money for the clicks to get onto your listing, for then somebody just easily click away. So whatever you can do to kind of, you know, make sure that you are kind of defending your territory with those Product Targeting Ads against your own ASINs is a really good idea. And then you're going to also want to increase your bids for high converting products and then with deals, and then decrease your bids for those that don't have any deals because people are looking for deals on this day. So you don't want to waste a lot of PPC spend for products that you don't have any deals on. So just keep that in mind for just making sure that you stay in budget for Prime Day. Carrie Miller: Another thing is you're going to want to turn on the Sponsored Display Retargeting Campaigns to capture traffic that doesn't actually convert during Prime Day because you can retarget them. You can maybe continue some of your coupons or discounts going on for a few more days and then see if you can capture those sales. And then also you can update your headline copy to, you know, mention deals or you can add different photos based on whatever it is that you want to do for Prime Day. So, you know, I think headline definitely, you know, just headlining that you, you are running a deal is a good idea for your ads. Definitely you know just headlining that you, you are running a deal is a good idea for your ads, okay, so then make sure also that your listing is retail ready. So that means like when you're running all these ads, you want to make sure that it's done so that it's gonna convert. Carrie Miller: And there's a lot of things that you can do to make sure that you do optimize your listing and the first thing is you know if your brand registered, you want to make sure you have you’re A-plus content added with a brand story. I actually did this, I think, like when it came when brand story came out, I started adding my other products in the brand story and I started noticing people buying products that they don't normally buy together and that was pretty amazing. I really think that it's a really good opportunity to make sure that you have, you know those that brand story in there so that you can get those kind of like bundle deals, I guess you could say, without actually doing a virtual bundle. So I think if you aren't doing that, then you're really missing out. So when you do your brand story, you can write, you know, a little blurb about your brand and then you can actually add your products and people can scroll to the right, or is it to the left? They basically can scroll to see the other products that are available within your brand. You can also, once you've got brand, your brand story on all your A-plus content. Then you have access, you unlock access to premium A-plus content and so you can add a comparison chart on there and the comparison chart also allows you another placement to add more products from your line as well. So you can kind of cross sell and make sure to kind of like increase your cart value. Especially, you know, on Prime Day you're spending more on ads and you're spending, you're giving discounts, so you want to kind of increase those, those cart values. Carrie Miller: Also, add virtual bundles. Now I talked before about, you know, making sure that that you're doing those Product Targeting Ads to the ASIN Targeting Ads, to make sure that you're doing those product targeting ads to the ASIN targeting ads, to make sure that you're defending your products. But adding virtual bundles can also really help defend your listing because it takes up a whole row of where advertisements could be. So this is another way to defend your listing. So if you haven't had virtual bundles, definitely put them on. Some people are always like I put a virtual bundles and they didn't really sell. Well, honestly, for this purpose, the purpose is really to take up space and make sure that you're defending your position and your whole page from competitors advertising and getting those clicks away from your actual listing. Also, you're going to want to update your images, if needed. Carrie Miller: This is one of the most incredible tools for optimizing your images. I love that you can actually go on here to this little media comparison tool. So what I did was I put in a bunch of ASINs. You can put your ASIN in there. First, we put my ASIN in here first this is our Mania's Mysterious Oddities and then we put our competitors in here and you can see a bunch of things that are going on. You can even see if they're running coupons. So this is good to kind of keep track of them. Carrie Miller: But my favorite thing is, since you're preparing, is media comparison. So you're going to be able to see where what images your competitors are doing that maybe you're not. So you can see all the images all stacked on top of each other. So maybe some of your competitors have, you know, dimensions and you're like, oh, I didn't even do a dimensions photo, or they have a cool infographic that you want to kind of do a similar one like that, or lifestyle images that you hadn't thought of. That is a great way to kind of continue to optimize your images and you can also see, you know, which listings have videos. It'll show you this one has one video, so you can see okay, my competitors aren't even, they don't even have a video, and you can put up a video. That's another thing. If you haven't added a video to your listing, this actually unlocks for Amazon influencers to be able to post up in the upper carousel actual video reviews of your product and this can really help with your sales. So if you open up this by just adding a video in, I think that can really people that are doing the influencing program can kind of find you a little bit easier and then they can place their products or their review videos on your actual listing. So it's another great way to get more videos for free, basically. Carrie Miller: So the next thing I want to go back to my presentation here. I went all the way back to the beginning here. You want to update your keywords? Okay, so I'm going to show you a little bit about our Cerebro Historical Trend Tool, and I absolutely love the Historical Trend Tool. It's one of the coolest tools that I think we've come out with. You can go back in time and you can find where any, basically, you can go back at 24 months, okay. You can find out where any ASIN was ranking in the organic and the sponsored positions. You can also see the search volume history of any keywords so it’s really, really an amazing tool to, basically, you know, get ahead of the competition. So I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to show you that tool. Okay, so I already I already went into Cerebro and I actually took a product that I know sells super, super well on Prime Day and I put in the ace in here. Carrie Miller: And this is just a single search. When you're doing the Historical Trend, and what you're going to do is you're going to click on the show Historical Trend Tool and I think this is kind of hidden some people don't know where it is. It's literally right in the middle here and you click on this. You click on show historical trend. Last year, Prime Day was July, I believe, of 2023. So I'm gonna click on this July of 2023. You can see that it's highlighted here. So we're gonna click on July 2023 and then I'm gonna click apply filters and this is going to give me all of the keywords that this particular product was ranking for and sponsored and organic positioning. So one thing you could do is you could say, hey, I want to, like, I want to see where they were ranked between you know, in the sponsored position, between one and 20. And you can apply those filters, you can see where their, you know, main targets were for their sponsored ads, so you can kind of get some new keywords that way. Another thing is, once you're in here you can also kind of sort and filter for particular keywords and one of the ones I like to do for Prime Day is just prime. Okay, so I'm just going to see what keyword phrases have prime in it and I'm going to go down here and look okay, so this is kind of incredible because this vacuum literally I think is one of the top sellers for Prime Day and their organic rank for Prime Day vacuum is 230. Carrie Miller: So not even ranking. They're not even really Sponsored Rank. They have some Sponsored Rank, I do believe, on the Prime, Prime Day. Let's see if we can sort here. I think I saw them before on some sponsored. They have some some keywords. So they're ranking in the sponsored for Prime Day vacuums or they were cordless vacuum, Prime Day, but those are kind of, you know, smaller keywords. So this one actually is kind of incredible because Prime Day vacuum, you know, there's just a wide open opportunity to beat this particular competitor. You can usually see the top clicked and top converted keyword or products in there. So you can also kind of look, take a look at your other competitors and see what potential Prime Day keywords you have. So you can literally come up with a whole list. Maybe some people are shopping for gifts so you can see like gifts I don't know if this is really a gift item, but you could see if there'sany gifts. Okay, so you've got some gift keywords in here so you can do that for any ASIN and people are sometimes looking for gifts, you know. Even you know on Prime Day, for people start shopping early. So you can sort for gifts and see if there's any gift keywords that maybe you can target in your pay-per-click advertising. Carrie Miller: I was actually looking at some other, another historical search for our coffin shelf and there was a search that I did for May and I was like there must be something wrong with this. Witchy gifts for women had this huge spike and it went up to like from like 700 to 12,000. I went up to Bradley I was like there's got to be something wrong with this or something sort of glitch, but it's. He's like well, maybe this is for Mother's Day that people are searching which witchy gifts for women. So I thought that was kind of crazy, that like that's a crazy opportunity keyword for you know, this random month I not really random because it's Mother's Day but like I would have never thought Mother's Day would be kind of a gothic type search term. Carrie Miller: But you can, you know, look and find these types of keywords when you do these historical searches, and you can do that by filtering the different phrases. You can even just download the whole list and kind of take a look where they were ranking in the top 50 sponsored spots or the top 100 or whatever. You can look at all their sponsored rankings and you can see, okay, what keywords am I missing and that have a good search volume that maybe nobody else is really targeting. So I think it's a really, really incredible tool that if you have not started utilizing it, then it's really, really a great tool to use. I'm also going to share the. There's a link here that is for the Prime Day checklist that we actually made so you can download that and you can go through it again. There's actually some more details in there for Prime Day and we put it together. There's stuff with Helium 10 tools, there's stuff without Helium 10 tools. It really is geared towards giving you as much information as possible to help make Prime Day a really big day for you. Carrie Miller: So, all righty, I'm going to go back and I'm going to start answering questions. How do you build an email list? So this is something that takes a little bit of time and this is something that maybe you, if you want to do this for the next Prime Day or next holiday season, you can start now. But we do have a way. You can put QR codes into your products. Basically, you can create these little QR codes where people can kind of maybe register for a freebie, something or a warranty of your product or something like that, and basically that's kind of how you can start collecting email addresses in there, and that's a great way to do it. So that's one way or you can have a pop up at your website. I know you know, if you have like a Shopify site, make sure you have a pop up that goes up and then it can save a list of emails if you create that Shopify site now and I know not everyone has that but if you're selling just on Amazon, then these inserts are really the best way to do it. We do have different YouTube trainings that you can actually go and kind of search for our inserts trainings on our YouTube channel but that is a great way. We also, I think, did a freedom ticket extra episode on that. It would be in our freedom ticket 4.0. So that is another way that you can, you know, learn more about how to build an email list. But it's really, I think, a great tool. Carrie Miller: Somebody said I missed about the A-plus content and can you give me some more information? Yeah, so on the A-plus content, what I was mentioning was that you want to make sure that you add a brand story in you’re A-plus content because you can add more products on your carousel there so you can do a little blurb about your brandster, but there's a space where you can actually add products that are in your line. So I noticed that when I added a brand story, that more people were buying more of my products together when they're actually kind of different types of products, but they were kind of buying more like together. So it increased the cart order value and that was a really great thing for the brand story to help just kind of increase the cart value. But also, once you do a brand story for all of your A-plus content, then you can actually get access to the premium A-plus content and you can do a chart comparison and in there you can also add more products that you sell. So really good places to add, you know help to you know increase your cart order values, especially, like I said, you're paying more for ads. You know help to you know, increase your cart order values, especially, like I said, you're paying more for ads. You're doing some discounts. You want to kind of get some more bang for your buck. Carrie Miller: Does it make sense to adjust daytime parties short before and during Prime Day? So in terms of some people kind of stop running as many ads during the week before, but I actually don't and I've actually seen, you know, continuous sales. So I guess it really depends on your strategy. In terms of day parting, that's usually when you kind of like turn things off during certain times where you're maybe not converting as well and maybe increase it as when you are. But I think Prime Day may be different but it really is probably dependent on your product. Carrie Miller: Shivali says do you recommend split testing A-plus while we're still a few weeks out from the speculated day? Yes, there is actually a way that you can split test you’re A-plus content in Seller Central. So I would suggest, if we do have some time before, I think we have like probably four weeks so you can start split to see. It usually takes about four weeks to kind of give you some good information. So if you were to start, you know, you’re A-plus content today and get it all up, you could start doing two different versions and split testing. Carrie Miller: Helium 10 Serious Sellers Podcast and Freedom Ticket have been such a great partner in our journey best ever, awesome. I'm really glad to hear it. That's awesome. Okay, let's see here. Our ASIN has the fastest delivery of five to six days compared to others of one day. Not sure if this is affecting conversion, because we are getting tons of clicks but not converting or it has to be images and A+, so there's a lot of things that could be affecting your conversion, but definitely the speed of delivery is going to affect you. So you're going to see a lot less sales for sure in terms of that kind of a delivery. And then you also need to probably split test your images to see if there is a better image for your main image and maybe some of your copy. You can do that split testing within Seller Central. Carrie Miller: Somebody asked what are the best strategies for launching a new ASIN, I would recommend going to listen to the Maldives Honeymoon Podcasts from Bradley Sutton. Those are the podcasts where you can really learn how to launch a product that gives you tons and tons of information. When do you suggest to create a .com website for my brand on Amazon? My sister and I are about to launch our first product soon. I actually would say you could do it right away. Shopify is really cool because they have these templates. You can literally buy a website address and you can connect it to Shopify, and Shopify has templates that you can kind of click and drag and add photos. Carrie Miller: Personally, I created my own site myself. I took photos of my friends using my products and I went and just did the templates. I looked at all the templates that they had available and I purchased one that I thought was really cool and would work well for my product, and then you can also, you know, purchase stock images too if you needed to. There are places you can buy stock images for your website, but I would suggest just putting something together. You can do a very basic one there and that way you have kind of some brand recognition people looking for you. They can find you on that site. I think, you know, if you have some time to do it, you can do it right away. Bradley wants me to announce what is going on with Freedom Ticket as far as Walmart, we are actually working on our Walmart Freedom Ticket right now, so we're in the process of starting to film that and put it together, and it's going to be full of incredible Walmart content. So you're going to get everything you need to know to sell on Walmart and be successful.  Carrie Miller: Okay, can you fulfill Shopify orders via Amazon? You can use FBA to fulfill your orders. So you can. There's a little plugin that you can use to connect your FBA account to Shopify and so you can fulfill it. Just basically, you'll pay for the fulfillment fees. Another way you can do is there's a button you can get on your website. It's a little bit more challenging to get this, but it's called buy with Prime and people can literally just buy. It's really an easy click and they can just use their prime account to buy on your website. So that's another way that you can do it. I actually have that on my site and it works pretty well. I think it's also good for people you know if it's your site and they're like I don't know if I trust this site yet, but if you have one of those buy with prime buttons, they're like oh, I could just easily use my Amazon account and it's easy for them to do. And they don’t have to fill in anything. It’s a good way to go. Carrie Miller: Andy says is there any news on Walmart for  off shore entities. Actually, I have helped some Australian sellers I know you're in Australia get onto Walmart recently. What you have to have is an EIN and you have to have a business address in the US. So those are the main things that you need to have. They are expanding the country, so some countries that are not officially allowed to sell, you do need to have an EIN and a business address and they have to match. So, whatever your EIN, the business address there has to match the US business address in order to get accepted. So yeah, Andy says he knows that's my specialty. Yes, it is. Also Amazon. I mean Amazon, I've been an Amazon seller since 2016. So definitely Amazon is a specialty as well. Carrie Miller: With buy with prime, does it capture customer info to add things like an email list. They capture it too, but you can see it. You can see your customer information. That business address cannot be virtual. Some people use the 3PL, but there are some kind of like, you can pay for addresses and different companies allow you to do that. So that's another way to do that to get on to Walmart,. Carrie Miller: Someone said how should we launch a product with 50% off price offer coupons? There's a lot of different ways that you can do this. You can do a discount and then kind of gradually raise the price. But some people are saying now that you should do you know full price items. It really is kind of saying now that you should do you know full price items. It really is kind of depending on what you want to do but the discount does help you to convert more, especially if you don't have any reviews. So I would say you know, that is a good way to do. You know, to start off is to give a discount and then you can start getting those reviews coming in and you're obviously going to have to run pay-per-click advertising. You can run coupons and all of that stuff and all of that is going to be helpful for you to convert higher. Carrie Miller: If we need help from Walmart, how do we reach out to you? Is it possible to use Amazon to fulfill Walmart through Amazon? These are good questions. If you need help with Walmart, I do have a Walmart group you can tag me on Facebook. It's called Winning with Walmart, or Helium 10 Winning with Walmart. You can join that group. You can tag me with the questions there. I do go live every month in that group too and I answer questions. Carrie Miller: But you can just tag me there. But then also never fulfill Walmart orders with Amazon. They will shut you down. They're competing against each other. They do not want you to, you know, fulfill with Amazon, even if you do the MCF and it's like a plain box. Sometimes they make a mistake and it might be delivered in a Prime Box and it could be a problem. So I would suggest that you get a 3PL if you're going to do Walmart, or you can use Walmart fulfillment services. Walmart fulfillment services are, you know, pretty much the same thing as FBA.  You ship in some inventory to them and they will pick, pack and ship for you. So that is, I think, the best way to do that. Carrie Miller: Someone asked, I guess we have another one, is it wise to give away coupons to Amazon visitors for Amazon ASINs, in terms of listing a coupon on your site? Yes, I do believe that's a great thing to help with conversion. Carrie Miller: All right, everyone. Thank you all so much for joining this live about Prime Day and just ask me anything as well, and we will have this again live for everyone in a month again. Otherwise, if you're in the Serious Sellers Club, you can join every week. So thanks again, everyone, for joining and we will see you all again later. Bye everyone, bye, bye.

Join us as we explore crucial importing and inventory management strategies with Afolabi Oyerokun, a seasoned Amazon seller with over 20 years of experience. Afolabi takes us through his remarkable journey from Nigeria to the United States, where he transitioned from fashion design to computer animation before making his mark in e-commerce. Discover his insights on avoiding costly pitfalls when importing products from overseas, managing inventory effectively, and ensuring you don't run out or overstock. In this engaging episode, Afolabi shares essential tips on navigating U.S. customs seizures and maintaining effective communication with overseas factories. Learn about the common reasons for customs stopping a container and the importance of accurate documentation to avoid severe penalties. He also highlights the risks of using email for factory communications and suggests using platforms like WeChat to prevent scams. Plus, get the lowdown on labeling requirements for imported goods to ensure compliance with U.S. and Amazon regulations. Listen in as we discuss the critical role of third-party logistics (3PLs) in maintaining a diverse and efficient supply chain, despite Amazon's introduction of its AWD. Afolabi outlines the strategic advantages of using 3PLs for fulfilling orders across multiple marketplaces and offers practical tips for optimizing shipping. Additionally, we emphasize the importance of compliance with Customs and Border Protection (CBP) regulations and introduce a new tool to help track and ensure compliance with U.S. government regulations. Finally, get to know Afolabi a little better as we share contact information for his services and enjoy a light-hearted exchange about Nigerian cuisine. In episode 572 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Afolabi discuss: 00:00 - Importing Products From Overseas 03:54 - From Fashion to Tech  10:17 - Avoiding Customs Seizures in Online Selling  11:20 - Customs Seizure, Communication, and Mold Ownership 22:45 - Factory Confiscates Mold During Dispute 25:27 - Supply Chain Visibility and Customs Compliance 28:52 - Importance of Taking CBP Seriously 31:06 - Online Contact Information for Tariff Services3 ► 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's guest has got tons of strategies to help you avoid potential pitfalls that would be extremely costly when importing products from overseas, but he's also got a wealth of experience since he started selling on Amazon over 20 years ago. 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's completely BS-free, unscripted and unrehearsed. Organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And it's funny for the first time in like 570 episodes, I was recording an episode last week and then noticed that the recording wasn't working, so we're having to start all over again. So thanks to our guests for being accommodating, but at the same time, thanks to my terrible memory, I think I already forgot most of what we had talked about already. So it's going to be still new for me, just as it is for the audience right here. So, Afolabi, welcome to the show. How's it going this morning? Thank you again for coming on for a second time.   Afolabi: I'm good. Thank you, Bradley, for having me over. Thanks a lot, I'm excited.   Bradley Sutton: Awesome! Now we were talking about where I'm from right before this call, where I'm at right now. Where are you in the United States right now?   Afolabi: I'm in Pennsylvania. I'm sitting at a 3PL here in Eastern PA.   Bradley Sutton: Ah, so this is not your home, this is like where you work, your office.   Afolabi: Correct. This is our office.   Bradley Sutton: And where were you born and raised?   Afolabi: Born in Nigeria, West Africa. I came into the US this January of 97.   Bradley Sutton: Ah, okay, now hold on. This is something new already we didn't talk about last time, because this weekend I was at a church event and I met somebody from Nigeria and maybe I'll throw a picture up of that. But I asked him I'm a foodie, so I ask him if I find a good Nigerian restaurant here, what should I order? And he said something let's see if this is what you suggest too. He said fish, pepper soup. So is that a great cuisine that I should try for Nigerian food?   Afolabi: Fish pepper soup is good, beef pepper soup is good and then you can. If you like rice, you can eat jollof rice. I love rice. It's spelled j-o-l-l-o-f. It's a traditional, uh, very nice, uh tasting rice. But I have to caution you on the fish pepper soup. If you don't like hot, spicy food, don't.   Bradley Sutton: That's no problem. All right, the rest of the audience, you guys, beware. Me, I don't have to worry about that I love hot spicy food. So that makes it even more. That makes it even more exciting for me to taste it.   Afolabi: Good.   Bradley Sutton: All right, excellent. Anyways, we're not here to uh to talk about food. Otherwise, yeah, my diet is day one today and I'm already going to lose out on that if I get too hungry here. But let's talk about, let's go back more to your origin story. So did you attend university in the United States or back in Nigeria?   Afolabi: Yes, so I had some university in Nigeria and then I transferred and came here to New York at the Fashion Institute of Technology, F.I.T. as everybody knew it, and I majored in fashion design for my first two years and then the final two years was in computer animation and interactive media. Weird right?   Bradley Sutton: Yeah, that's a big contrast. Some people say oh, what's your major? Oh, I'm majoring in business and I minor in management or something like that or maybe a language, but your double major was IT and also fashion. So how did you end up like, what was your first dabble in e-commerce and what year, and what did you do?   Afolabi: I did some little freelance work here and there, and then I came up with the shoe designs while I was doing freelance for a company in New York.   Bradley Sutton: And there's your fashion design coming in already. I like it.   Afolabi: Now, bear in mind, I did not do shoe designs, I didn't do footwear designs when I was doing fashion, but I just liked all these Nike shoes and all these really cool shoes. I was just inspired. So, I started designing my own shoes. And now, when I had a computer full of shoe designs, now the next stage is how do I make these shoes? So, I was looking all over. I couldn't find any shoe manufacturer, and then I sent inquiries out. Those were the days Alibaba was just coming up. It wasn't very popular at all. Anyway, I found some Mr. Johnson somewhere in Taiwan that replied to my email and it's like no, you have to come here. We can make your shoes, but you got to come here. I'm like okay, whatever.   Afolabi: So I went to Taiwan with the last dollar in my hands. I didn't even have money for the hotel. My host had to pay for my hotel. So I went to and they didn't know I didn't have the hotel. They were just being, you know good host. So I went to Taiwan, met with Mr. Johnston and that was the beginning of me making my shoes. And after I made the shoes, I you know my wife reached out one way or the other. She reached out to Amazon that you know Amazon was just getting out of selling books, only to start it. They just opened up the platform for.   Bradley Sutton: When was this? Early 2000s?   Afolabi: 2002.   Bradley Sutton: 2002.   Afolabi: Yes, so that was 2002. And Amazon. You know, some rep in Amazon said oh wow, we like these shoes. You want, would you like, to come on board our platform? Like, yeah, I don't have any other choice. You know how come? You know? So I, uh, I started selling those shoes there and they were doing really good until we realized that they were made too small, they were like a size smaller and uh, by the way, these are some of the things, things I shared in the model, you know, in the Freedom Ticket. For people that are listening, you know, I would say for them to go get that and listen to my full story there.   Bradley Sutton: Okay, interesting, all right, so now was that? So then Amazon kind of became your main income in the early two thousands? Or were you also selling online, or how? How did you end up, you know? Cause you're down to your last dollar when, when you got started here. So what happened?   Afolabi: So, I was selling on Amazon but it wasn’t, there was no FBA right, so we were fulfilling it by ourselves. It was so hard and I had a side gig which I was doing, you know, graphics and web for people on the side, and I went to a footwear show in New York. It’s called Fanny, F-F-A-N-Y. And I met some people and they were like “How did you make these shoes?” And I told them and they said, oh, can you make us shoes too? So I started doing consulting for other individuals that want to make their own shoes. So that's how I kept on keeping the body and soul together while I was building the brand on Amazon and when the shoes were made small, so we started getting a lot of returns, people saying, oh, I have to return this and buy a higher size. So people were returning it, they'll buy a size eight, They'll return it and buy a size nine. And it was just a nightmare and I couldn't take it. So I found a liquidator or some guy out of Florida and he bought all my inventory and that's how I ended that part to sell off all my inventory.   Bradley Sutton: So then, but now you kind of found out that, hey, I've got a thing for this, you know design, I've got a thing for importing. This is maybe something I can help out with.   Afolabi: Correct.   Bradley Sutton: And then, was that the kind of start of your consulting company?   Afolabi: Yes.   Bradley Sutton: That you've been doing ever since.   Afolabi: Yes, so that's how sourcing and logistics started for me. I started sourcing for a lot of companies providing logistical support and then somehow, in 2014, my friend you know came to me and said, hey, let's sell on Amazon. I'm like I've done that before. You know, it was too hard. He's like no, no, no, it's different now. You know they have something called FBA. I said what's that? He's like no, they'll fulfill the order for you. You just ship it to their warehouse. They'll do the pick and pack and ship them. Oh, that's easy. So we came up. He came up with some cool designs and signs and banners and school supplies. So that's how we went back into Amazon. We were selling craft vinyl, we were selling anything we could lay our hands on. It was so easy to rank, it was so easy to launch. Those were the days that viral launch was also, you know, getting started and stuff. And so we were. We were growing really fast because, you know there was there were no competition. You know people hadn't woken up to Amazon. So selling on Amazon became our main income at that time.   Bradley Sutton: OK, all right, interesting. Now you reference that you're in in Freedom Ticket. So, yes, anybody who has a Helium 10 and has a Starter plan, Platinum plan or above has full access to our full Freedom Ticket course, which is more than 20 hour course with every aspect of selling online that you would need and Afolabi 's module is under compliance and risk management. It's called mistakes to avoid when importing products. We're not going to do the whole thing today, but I want to give some highlights from here, just so that people can understand some of your expertise and you can go ahead and help people out with some things. But my first question is one of the things that you mentioned in your module was about custom seizures and how people can avoid that. So, first of all, what is a custom seizure? Sounds very dramatic. And then how can people avoid? Or, you know, nobody can 100% fully make themselves foolproof, but what are the things that people can do to make that less likely of happening?   Afolabi: Yes, correct, thanks. So custom seizure is when the US customs just flags your container or flags a container containing your product for examination because they're suspecting something. It could be randomly done, or it might be that your freight forwarder or your broker has been under their watch list and they want to start looking deeper into all the imports that this cheaper or freight forwarder has been doing. So they would stop your container for examination, so they'll bring it to a yard and they will open it up and see what's in it. Now you cannot really protect yourself from being, you know, spotted or from your container being stopped, but when it gets stopped, that's what you can protect. What happens after it gets stopped is what you can protect. You can, you know, can help yourself out. Some of the things that make customs stop a container could be you're importing from a factory that has a forced child laborer. You are importing products under the anti-dumping laws or countervailing laws, whereby it's almost like you're smuggling those products because the quota for those products is already filled out and you're still bringing in those products. They don't want you coming to flood the US market with those products. Above all, the most annoying one is the False Claims Act, which is you're not paying the right duty. You are falsifying your duty classification of your product so that you can pay the lower duty. You are bringing in a pencil and then you're lying in your. It may not be you. Actually it would be your shipper. Unknowingly to you, your shipper may be falsifying your customs form to declare a lower value, or you're declaring a lower value than the amount you ordered the product for. So these are all the things.   Afolabi: For me one time that my container was stopped and it was actually destroyed. The problem was that I had been ordering this giant industrial product for a long time and one time it was stopped at the port of Jacksonville and they looked at it. They said there was the power cable. Can you imagine the power cable that has the UL logo on it. They wanted me to prove that the cable came out of a UL certified factory. And then there's another capacitor in that product that has the logo CMA on it, which is a big association. And I went to my factory. I said, hey, you know my container was stopped. Can you send me certification and proof that your factory is a member or is approved by UL and you are also authorized to use the CMA logo and they ran away. They disappeared.   Afolabi: So I told the customs can I come and just stick all these things out and I can cut out the cable. I can do this. They're like nope, it's going in the trash. So the whole container about who knows 50,000 worth of product was trashed. On top of all the penalties, examination, demurrage, all manner of fees climbed on top of it. So if I had falsified the document and say, oh, I'm bringing something else that is duty-free, the penalty would have been a lot severe. So those are some of the things you should watch out for as an importer. Make sure that you're using the right HTS code, the right tariff code, to correctly declare your goods, so that they will not penalize you under the False Claims Act.   Bradley Sutton: Now, another thing you mentioned was that you do not suggest that anybody communicate with their factories using email and instead another means. So why is that? And then what? How do you think people should be doing 100% of their communication with their factories?   Afolabi: Great, well, I learned that from experience. So I was using my Gmail account to talk to my factory. I didn't know that there was a scammer that intercepted my factory's email as acting to my factory's email, as acting to my factory's email address and hijacked our conversation. So all the while I was talking to the scammer, I didn't realize it was the scammer, because he was impersonating my factory through email and I was able to send money to the scammer. The scammer changed the bank account on the invoice and everything and I sent the money to him, not realizing that it was a scam. If I had been communicating with my factory through WeChat, I wouldn't have fallen for that, because from the very beginning of my conversation now when I'm talking to factories, I take it out of Alibaba, I take it out of every platform and I put it in my WeChat. That way, before I even start talking about sending money or whatever, I already have a communication directly with the factory from my WeChat. So if anybody hijacks that, I would know I will double check through WeChat. I can double check through both emails and WeChat and I also secure the transaction with the Alibaba trade assurance.   Bradley Sutton: All right. Yeah, that's crazy. Your email might have been secure but not the uh. You know not the uh, not the suppliers there, okay. So, yeah, we chat is the way, uh, to go. Now, another thing that sometimes I struggle with and then you talk about in your module, is knowing which labels is a requirement of the country and then also what's requirement of Amazon. So, for example, united states at what? What kind of bags need that? No suffocation like, is it only a bag that has an opening, but if it's fully vacuum sealed bag, it doesn't. Or explain when I need to have that, that, those child warnings on my bagged products coming from China.   Afolabi: Well, uh, for safety, I just put it in, uh, all kinds of anything. Anytime I'm bringing a product that has bags in general. Uh, I know for Amazon it has to have an opening that you put the product in. It's not like those uh uh bubble bags, but it is a bag you open and put a product in. But me, just for the sake of sanity and safety, I just put it on anytime. Anytime I'm bringing the product.   Bradley Sutton: What does it say? What exactly does the label say that you're putting on these bags?   Afolabi: Yeah the suffocation. It's a generic suffocation warning which you can find the text anywhere online.   Bradley Sutton: All right, so that's important too. Another thing that was new to me that you talked about was mold ownership. Now, me, I don't have any molds, or actually I do for a couple of accounts. But obviously, project X, we know, we're doing egg trays, we're doing, we're doing, you know, coffin shelves and things like that Wooden products. It didn't require a mold like for plastic product. But a lot of people, when they're making original designs or you know, brand new product, that requires tooling and molds. Hey, this is a kind of a big investment at the beginning. What are some things that that sellers should avoid? Because one thing that you know some people might think is logical is well, maybe we can split costs or with the supplier on this mold, but you actually said that's not a good idea, right?   Afolabi: Yes, correct. So when your, when your product involves or requires a mold and the supplier says, well, you know, we can share the mold cost with you, you know, so that we can make it easy and cheaper for you to get into production, it's a no-no, because the moment they share the mold cost with you, they jointly own that mold and you're bind and married to that factory forever. If you try to move that mold, they'll say no, it's our mold too. We paid for it together. Another thing is to always have a mold ownership agreement when mold comes into play, have it in writing, both in Mandarin and English or Cantonese and English, and say I own this mold and I can take it anytime I want. I can move it to any factory. Okay, what if this factory gets into trouble? Or what if they run out of capacity and they can't even? They don't even have the capacity to fulfill your production anymore. What are you going to do your stuck? So it's better to always have that clause in your mold that you own your mold 100% and you can take it anywhere you want.   Afolabi: Another thing I tell importers or product innovators is that when you're doing mold, make sure you don't ask your factory for their input on your design, you say, hey, what do you think? This is the way I want to make this product. What do you think? The moment your factory contributes to your designs, then by Chinese law they are co-inventors with you. If they're co-inventors, they have legal claims on your idea and they can sell it to whoever they want. They can make that product for anybody they want because you jointly developed it together with them. So you got to be very careful on contribution or collaboration. You don't collaborate with your factory. Hire your own industrial engineering or structural engineer or whoever, and you guys talk about it, come up with your product and then you give it to the mold maker. Sometimes people use their factory to negotiate the mold. I don't do that, honestly. I take my molds to the mold maker. I go to a mold maker to make my mold and then I bring it from the mold maker and I bring it to the factory. Many factory will want to say, oh, this is our mold. It's $2,000 for the mold. You don't know where they made the mold from. And if you don't have the connection to the mold, how would you retrieve the mold. If something falls apart between you and the factory, right, they would tell you where the mold came from.   Afolabi: I actually had a situation and this is one out of a million whereby we made a mold and we stopped production of that product and the factory thought we were going to move the production to another factory, but that was not the case. But he's like no, I'm not going to release this mold. We were like but we paid for it, it's ours. He says I know, but I'm not giving it back. Why? Because this mold was made from a mold maker that we don't even have a contact of, so we don't even know how to reach this mold maker. Only the factory knows how to get to them. And they said nope, we're not telling you nothing, we're not releasing the mold. We went back and forth. They said okay, we can pay you for the fraction of the mold. I'm like why would you want to pay us for the mold? We don't want you making it for anybody else. They said nope, we will pay you $600 and we'll take the mold. We're not making it for anybody, but we need to safeguard it, we need to make sure it doesn't go. I'm like that doesn't even make any sense. Yeah, we, we, unfortunately, we had to abandon the factory, abandon the mold and just get out. But the, the, the confiscated the mold. They did not release it.   Bradley Sutton: Wow. Okay, so that's definitely something to keep in mind as well. Let's switch gears and talk about stuff that's not in your Freedom Ticket module. For the rest of what you're talking about there, the Freedom Ticket students definitely can and should go check it out, but I didn't even know until today, for some reason, that you also did the 3PL services. Now, since you said that you're in a 3PL right now you know, in 2024, obviously the biggest change you know you've been selling on Amazon for 20 years, but, uh, probably you'd agree that one of the bigger changes that Amazon sellers are worried about this year is the new um fees. You know, like, of course, we've got a high return product rate fee and there's also uh, but now there's inventory fee, low inventory fee, and then the big, the big one that affects literally everybody using FBA is the inbound cost when you are inbound placement fee. So, as a 3PL, what you know more than just one seller who only has their situation, you're dealing with many, many sellers and who are all navigating these things differently. Yes, what's the consensus Like? What are your clients doing? What are you suggesting to them to do in order to help alleviate the cost of these new fees? What are they doing differently than they did before these fees?   Afolabi: Well, we have different customers that have unique situations. Many people think that when Amazon came out with the AWD, which is the warehouse distribution, that they go ahead and fire their 3PL. We don't need 3PLs anymore and stuff like that. But they're learning more and more that I think it's Amazon's way of controlling and maintaining visibility and shutting you out of visibility, where they kind of control your whole entire supply chain. So if you're selling in other marketplaces, I still feel that you need your 3PL for you to be able to diversify, sell at Walmart, Ebay, whatever anywhere else, Shopify your own store to be able to fulfill from all those places. I know Amazon wants to fulfill those places so that you can get access to your customer data, but I want to maintain visibility. But in terms of fees placement fees I know even the AWD is not for all products, it's only for a certain small number of you know product catalog I still believe that if you can be sending your product, if you time it really well and you're watching all your inventory very well, I think you can be. If you're on top of it, you send, you know, maybe case basis or pilot basis or using freight like here we use a lot of freight for our customers and it saves them a lot of money and the products get there on time, because we have UPS freight truck come here every time and when they come here they take it straight to the depot. When they take it straight to depot, it ends up in Amazon within a day or two, so they're able to save.   Afolabi: Also, if you want to use Amazon Freight from your 3PL, that's also advisable. What do I mean by that? So if you're shipping sometimes more than 10 or 12 pallets of goods, it may be better to just request for Amazon to send you an empty truck from their freight service. So you go to freightAmazoncom, they will send you an empty truck and you pay for everything you fill that truck with. So the truck rate could be 750 bucks or 600 bucks, depending on where it's going to, but they send you that truck. You could fill it with either 15 pallets or up to maybe up to 26 pallets or something. It's the same 750 bucks, which saves you a lot of money when you're, you know, shipping your products to all the fulfillment warehouses. So that's what, uh, that's my number one way. I would, you know, number one thing that I'll tell uh uh sellers to make sure they're able to consolidate and sell box shipments in chunks like that. If you're not that big, you can just be sending. SPD is still okay, whereby you send a few boxes today, keep watching your inventory and then send another few boxes next week or two weeks time, based on your velocity.   Bradley Sutton: What's your 30 or 60 second tip? We call this that 60 second tip of the day that you can give. You know you've been giving strategies throughout this whole episode, but if you were to have a quick hitting one that you think people should be following, what is it?   Afolabi: What I would think would be good now is it's not sexy, but it's very important and is to start taking the CBP, which is Customs and Border Protection, to start taking them seriously, because they have started to check all these cargos, especially coming from China. They already know that people are rerouting their products. They already know that people are falsifying their documents and stuff like that. They're clamping on forced child labor a lot. I was just talking to somebody last week and his product had been stopped since December because one component in his product was made out of a region in China that was known for forced child labor and for that they sent his container back to China after detaining it for many months. They had to send it back and I see that popping up in Mexico as well.   Afolabi: So start taking CBP seriously in terms of check with your broker. Check that your products are compliant to US government regulations. We're actually rolling out a product this end of this month that can actually help you track all your products and cross check it across all governmental agencies. If your supplier or if your product has something that the US government doesn't like, it will flag it so that can be found on a tariff terminator website. Very soon, like end of this month, you will start being able to track and monitor your ASINs to make sure that your risk of being stopped or your product being destroyed or being prohibited from coming into the US. You would be better prepared and know ahead of time to know all the watch lists, to be aware of the watch lists of all the people and factories and things that the government doesn't like, because it's not pretty for them to stop your goods and don't let it come in.   Bradley Sutton: All right, Good to know. Good to know. Now, if people want to get more information from you or reach out to find out more about your services. How can people find you on the interwebs out there?   Afolabi: So they can find us at honuworldwide.com or tariftaminator.com Tariff as in T-A-R-I-F-F-T-E-R-M-I-A-N-A-T-O-R. Tarifterminator.com, or Honu Worldwide as H-O-N-U Worldwide.com, or you can send us an email at savings at HonuWorldwide.com.   Bradley Sutton: All right, Afolabi, thank you so much for coming on the show. I'll let you know what I think of the fish pepper soup and maybe we'll reach out to you next year to see what's new in your world. Knowing you, you'll probably be on five different things already in this short year. So thank you so much for sharing your knowledge with us.   Afolabi: You're welcome. Let me know how the fish pepper soup tastes. I always want to. I'm curious.   Bradley Sutton: All right, All right, I'll let you know. I'll let you know.