Helium 10 Buzz 2/8/23: Amazon Q4 Report | Creative Builder Update | Package Dimensions Check

We’re back with another episode of the Weekly Buzz with Helium 10’s Chief Brand Evangelist, Bradley Sutton. Every week, we cover the latest breaking news in the Amazon, Walmart, and E-commerce space, interview someone you need to hear from, and provide a training tip for the week.

Amazon announced financial results for its fourth quarter ended on December 31, 2022.
https://ir.aboutamazon.com/news-release/news-release-details/2023/Amazon.com-Announces-Fourth-Quarter-Results/default.aspx

New step-by-step controls make creative building more seamless and organized
https://advertising.amazon.com/en-us/resources/whats-new/multi-level-panels-feature-sponsored-brands-creative-builder/

‘We’re buying great assets at 20% to 30% lower prices’: How Amazon aggregators have evolved in 2023
https://www.modernretail.co/technology/were-buying-great-assets-at-20-to-30-lower-prices-how-amazon-aggregators-have-evolved-in-2023/

Don’t forget to follow us on Instagram at @SeriousSellersPodcast

In this episode, we also share a clip from our TACoS Tuesday Q&A session with Shivali Patel and Amazon PPC expert from BetterAMS, Destaney Wishon. Make sure to tune in to next week’s Serious Sellers Podcast episode. To close out this episode, Bradley shares the Pro Training Tip of this week which talks about how to potentially get more money back from Amazon. Spoiler Alert: It’s not using Helium 10’s Refund Genie tool, but we will use another tool!

In this episode of the Weekly Buzz, Bradley talks about:

• 01:15 – Amazon Q4 Report
• 03:45 – Creative Builder Update
• 05:25 – Aggregators in 2023
• 08:15 – Follow The Serious Sellers Podcast On Instagram
• 09:20 – TACoS Tuesday Q&A Clip with Destaney Wishon
• 11:00 – Pro Training Tip: How To Potentially Get More Money Back From Amazon

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Series Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is a show that is our Helium 10 Weekly Buzz, where we give you a rundown on the latest news articles that are going on in the Amazon, Walmart, and e-commerce world. And we give you interviews of the week and also training tips that will help give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Let’s go ahead and see what’s buzzing now. We’ve got a just a couple news stories today. One some snippets from the Amazon Q4 report from last week. We also have an update to Amazons sponsored brand ads. A little different interface on how you can do the creative display portion of it. We also have a interesting article where they interviewed some aggregators to see what is the state of the aggregator’s business in 2023.

Bradley Sutton:

We’ve got a special snippet from a interview from Destaney about PPC and we have also got a training tip of the week that will help you potentially put money back in your pocket with the help of Helium 10. It’s not even about the normal tool you might think, which is Refund Genie. It’s about another tool. So we’ll get to that. But let’s go ahead and hop first of all into the news. The first article we have today is actually just a press release from Amazon and it’s their quarterly report. Now the interesting thing here you know, there there’s a lot of business stuff that you might think is not very relevant to Amazon sellers, and there’s some interesting things just overall Amazon said that their net sales increased 9% to 149 billion in Q4.

Bradley Sutton:

International segment sales actually decreased 8%. So kind of interesting on that, but the some interesting parts here that I wanted to highlight. I mean, obviously you, you guys could check out this whole article, this whole release to see a lot of the, the numbers was over here where talked about black Friday and Cyber Monday, that whole weekend it talk, it said they had a record breaking holiday season with customers purchasing nearly half a billion items from small businesses in the US. That’s from you guys right out there, right? It had Amazon’s biggest Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday holiday shopping weekend. It says customers around the world purchase hundreds of millions of products and small businesses in the US. So this is not like Amazon’s own branded sales. They generated more than 1 billion of sales over the five day period.

Bradley Sutton:

So some interesting facts and figures coming out of the cyber weekend, the same day delivery is getting even faster. They said last year they really focused on certain metropolitan areas such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, Phoenix, Sacramento, and even Portland. You know, it’s kind of like that’s not considered that huge of a city over there where there’s hundreds of thousands of items available within hours. So that would be something that I would use our Helium 10 Profits tool, which is our Inventory Heat Maps and Sales Heat Maps. I’d maybe check around those cities. Is Amazon storing my product in those cities? Do I see any concentration of sales in some of those cities? And then if so, you can kind of like take from this that, hey, as Amazon expands, same day delivery, it’s definitely helping perhaps my keyword rank in those areas and customers buying my products in those areas.

Bradley Sutton:

They had a bunch of other facts and figures in this article talking about the Lord of the Rings show that, that they came out with and Thursday night football and things like that, maybe, or maybe not very you know, important to you, but, but just check this out there. There’ll be a link to the article in the description below. The next article is about also from Amazon, and it’s about Sponsored Brands Creative Builder. That might not be something that you’re familiar with, but basically it’s something that’s was launched last year. We actually talked about it here in this show where you can like do your creatives for like sponsored brand video ads, and Amazon just want to let everybody know that there’s like an update with how it is displayed. And you can actually see this in a lot of your accounts.

Bradley Sutton:

You can already see this new UI. And so where this is like in your managed campaigns. If you’re to create a campaign or manage an existing campaign, and let’s say it’s a sponsored video campaign, well, once you scroll down to the part where you can create the creative, there’s this new UI that it has. And it allows you to like one by one manipulate different aspects of it. You know, be like when this first launch, all you could do is like, throw your video up in there, but now you’re able to edit things like the logo, the brand name, the headline, the video itself the product. There’s all these different little kind of mini widgets. If you guys are looking at my screen on YouTube, you can see this. And so definitely check this out in your seller central if this has been released to you, a little bit cleaner way that you can manage your sponsored video campaigns and, and customize it a little bit more.

Bradley Sutton:

Whereas perhaps maybe before, if you did this, like when it first launched, all you did was throw a video in there, but now make sure that you’re really getting the most out of your sponsored video campaigns and sponsored brand campaigns. And this is across the board whether you’re doing advertising, Europe, USA, Asia, this is now released across the board. Next article is from Modern Retail, and it was actually an article where they interviewed a whole bunch of different aggregators in 2023, and it was entitled, we’re Buying Great Assets at 20 to 30% lower prices, how Amazon Aggregators have evolved in 2023. And I found this interesting because there’s just different snippets where it talks about how a lot of these aggregators are getting more data driven. You know, a lot of those aggregators are getting data obviously from, from he companies like Helium 10 and, and trying to be a little bit more mindful of who they’re investing in.

Bradley Sutton:

You know, there, there was a lot of articles last year that talked about large layoffs by some of the big aggregators. And so like, people might be wondering like, are aggregators even buying companies? And something that I found interesting one of them said, Hey, they’re looking a little bit more at categories that are more gated or regulated because of barriers to entry. So like if you are selling in a category where maybe there’s some chemicals involved and there’s a long process to even get approved to sell in that category, you might have yourself be a little bit more attractive to some of these aggregators. Another quote from another aggregator said, Hey, we’re looking more at keyword opportunities. It helps to both growth characteristics at the category level and the listing level. And to be able to integrate all of that into a technology platform.

Bradley Sutton:

Again people are using Helium 10 for this. You don’t have to be an aggregator to be using this kind of strategy. You know, whether you’re a newer seller, the regular Helium 10 tools will be just fine for doing this. You’d be doing the same thing at these huge billion dollar companies are doing. Or if you’re a larger company, you know tools like Helium Tens Market Tracker 360, which is actually used by a lot of aggregators as well, is helping people get this kind of data. Another aggregator that I hadn’t heard of, they said, Hey, we’re aiming to concentrate on acquiring brands with patents and intellectual property in a bid to build a strong and defensible brand. So this is definitely different than the old days of aggregators where it seemed like they were just buying any and every company.

Bradley Sutton:

I they still are buying a lot of companies, but now if you are really wanting to make yourself down the road more attractive to aggregators you know, if it sounds like, hey, if you’re in a gated category if you’ve got a patent before I would say most Amazon sellers don’t even bother getting patents. If you have a patent or some kind of intellectual property that really protects your idea more, this could potentially make you a little bit more attractive to aggregators out there. And for those of you who are just interested in making your company a little bit more attractive down the road to any buyer, whether they’re aggregate or not if you’re a Diamond member of Helium 10, don’t forget to take the Exit Ticket course. You can activate that right where you see Freedom Ticket.

Bradley Sutton:

We have a full course with northbound where they really show you exactly what to do in order to get your company ready for an exit. All right, that’s it for the news this week. I wanted to give you guys a quick link to our Serious Sellers podcast Instagram here. All right, so just go to @SeriousSellersPodcast on Instagram, and you’ll be able to see snippets of this. Like maybe you don’t have time to watch every podcast out there. You know, these are usually 30 to 40 minute episodes, but at Sirius Sellers podcast on Instagram, we have like 90-second clips of every single episode. So I highly recommend checking it out and giving to subs subscribe, giving to subscribe. Is that even the right word, guys? Giving a follow, I should say to this so that you could get a quick taste of each episode, then maybe if you find something that’s really interesting to you, then you can go ahead and give it a full follow. So @SeriousSellersPodcasts on Instagram, guys, make sure to give that a follow. Alright, next up, we before our tip of the week, we have a clip from our TACoS Tuesday of the month where we bring in a different PPC expert to answer all of your questions. And so here is a clip on one of the questions. You guys will be able to see this episode coming next week.

Shivali:

Now, based of one of the last questions that we talked about, I have this other question that says, off that answer before going all in on a ranking campaign, would you run them at mid bids to gather data on the CVR before TOS or I’m guessing if you have the budget, you can go for TOS from start?

Destaney:

That’s a great question. So typically I will go ahead and set up a rank campaign for my top three keywords and I will set a really high bid, like really, really high. And then after this campaign’s running, like within 10 to 20 minutes, I’ll go to Amazon and see if my adss showing up on the very top of the page, if it is my bid’s high enough, and then I’ll wait like 24 hours because I wanna see how expensive that placement is and how well I’m converting. Cuz a a lot of people always ask like, well, how do I know if I’m converting well on organic placements? And it’s not easy to tell. You have to dig into search query performance report. You have that answer with ads. So I will test 24 hours and then I’ll go look at my campaign and say, Hey, for red marker, my conversion rate’s 30% on the ads, that’s really good, let’s go all in on it.

Destaney:

If I see my conversion rates 5% for red marker, I shouldn’t go all in cuz Amazon’s not gonna rank me Well cuz customers don’t like that product. So I typically run a quick test with high bids because then I can also see how expensive that placement is. I can say, Hey, in order for me to be the number one placement on the page for red marker, it’s gonna cost me $8 and I’m gonna convert at a 30%. And if I can afford that, I’ll continue running the traffic and go all in. If I can’t, I’ll look at more long tail terms or lower my bid.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, thank you for that Shivali and Destaney. Last tip of the week, this is just something that I actually just used in order to get $300 on my project 5K account. So I just did a quick browse of some of my products where my product is the size of my product is packaged as is inside the outside package. All right, so this is for products like a coffin shelf or an egg tray where really the outside package should be just like maybe decimal points of the original dimensions, right? So where this wouldn’t be the case is like, let’s say I have this cloth, this cloth might have a certain dimensions, right? But this is not how it’s packaged, all right? A cloth is, is gonna be folded and it’s gonna be a a completely different, a different size, right?

Bradley Sutton:

But if you’ve got packages that or products that, that fit in a, a box of almost the same size, here’s a quick thing that you should have your employees do if you have not been using like Helium 10 Alerts from day one. All right? So what you want to do is you just tell your employees to go to the listings and then scroll down to underneath the BSR chart that comes from Helium 10. There’s this place called calculators, and then there’s this little section that comes up where it has information like ASIN and the brand name and things like that takes like five seconds to do. And it’s a place where you can see item dimensions and package dimensions right next to each other. The item dimensions, you guys should have entered that when you first made your listing the package dimensions. This is what changes sometime what Amazon changes.

Bradley Sutton:

So like for example, I’m looking at this coffin shelf and I can see, hey, the item dimensions 14 by 3.5 by 7.5 inches, right? Without even looking at what my package is, I know that it should be just slightly bigger than each of those numbers. Sure enough, I look right here and I see package dimensions 14.8 by 4.2 by eight. So I know on this one it’s okay, right? What I saw on one of my project 5K was it was something similar to this, but then instead of 14.8, it was like 16, and on the other side was like, instead of 7.05 or eight, it was like 10. So I knew it was a little bit off. Sure enough, I checked my files and I saw that Amazon had the wrong dimension. So II told Amazon, Hey, please check the remeasure this package.

Bradley Sutton:

Sure enough, they were like, yep, yeah, this is the wrong one. And then they’re giving me a refund on all of my orders of the last couple of months where they were charging me at the wrong rate. So per product guys, this will take you like 30 seconds to do. Really easy to just look at this and then be able to know if Amazon changed your dimensions. Now, of course, the best thing you do then would be to make sure Helium 10 Alerts is turned on this product going forward. And you’ll never have to do this again. But if you never had Alerts on or you’re not sure if you didn’t have alerts on from day one of your product, you’re going to want to check that out. One more quick tip guys, if you’re on that page, have your employees do this.

Bradley Sutton:

It’s the same Chrome extension, same exact product page at the very top of the product on the product page. They’re right where the listing health score is. There’s a view more button, hit that view more button and then hit the button marketplace. And that is gonna show you where all of other international hijackers are selling your product. Like we only sell this coffin shelf in North America, but look, here somebody is selling this coffin shelf in Germany, France, India, Japan, Australia, Netherlands even. And I could see how much left they have in stock and you know, so it might be something to get me to, Hey, I need to go on onto these other marketplaces to clean up these listings or to see who’s selling my product. So something that you just assign your employee to go to each of your product images or your product listings, and you can get both of these information. You can find something that could either save you money or make you a little bit more money. All right guys, that’s all for the news and tips for the week. We will see you guys next week to see what’s buzzing.

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• Freedom Ticket: Taught by Amazon thought leader Kevin King, get A-Z Amazon strategies and techniques for establishing and solidifying your business.
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