Helium 10 Buzz 3/27/24: Temu Taking Amazon Customers? | FBA Donations | Walmart Beauty Updates

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

Down By 2.6 Million Users, Amazon Could Keep Losing Customers To Temu
https://www.forbes.com/sites/petercohan/2024/03/21/down-by-26-million-users-amazon-could-keep-losing-customers-to-temu/

Sellers who use FBA Donations now have access to donation certificates
https://sell.amazon.com/blog/announcements/fba-donation-certificate

Walmart’s Beauty Aisle Blooms With New Products, Bigger Savings
https://corporate.walmart.com/news/2024/03/27/walmarts-beauty-aisle-blooms-with-new-products-bigger-savings

Amazon’s latest Brand Protection Report: How we’re cracking down on counterfeit products
https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/policy-news-views/amazon-brand-protection-report-2023-counterfeit-products

Amazon will have to publish an ads library in EU after all
https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/27/amazon-dsa-ads-library-cjeu/

If you’re wondering about details on the Amazon Remote Fulfillment with FBA program, I should say formally the program formerly known as NARF. Let’s dive into the details on how you can be selling in the Amazon US marketplace and then, with a click of a button, start selling in Canada, Mexico and now even Brazil. Make sure to check this episode out.

For savvy Amazon sellers looking to stay ahead of the curve, this episode is packed with insights on the latest features from Helium 10. Discover how ‘most clicked’ labels and the X-Ray Chrome extension can enhance your competitive analysis and advertising strategy. Plus, Carrie shares the good news for Helium 10 Platinum members who now have access to the ABA top search terms tool. Whether you’re a new listener or a seasoned veteran seller, this episode promises to arm you with the knowledge and tools to refine your product strategies and make informed decisions in the bustling marketplace of Amazon and Walmart.

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

• 00:52 – Temu Up Amazon Down?
• 03:06 – FBA Donations
• 05:25 – Walmart Beauty
• 07:07 – Amazon Brand Protection
• 08:51 – Amazon Ads Library
• 09:48 – SSP #547 – Amazon Remote Fulfillment with FBA Program
• 10:50 – New Feature Alerts
• 15:24 – Pro Training Tip: ABA Top Search Terms For Platinum

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Is Amazon losing customers to Temu? Bet you didn’t know that you were auto-enrolled into this Amazon FBA program. Walmart is investing in the beauty category. These stories and more on today’s episode of the 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 goings on in the Amazon, Walmart e-commerce world new stories that affect you as sellers. We also give you training tips of the week and we let you know what new features that Helium 10 has so that you can have serious strategies for serious sellers at any level in the e-commerce world. Let’s see what’s buzzing.

Bradley Sutton:

A couple new stories that are interesting. The first one didn’t really like too much so I wanted to call it out. It was by Forbes and this article to me is like clickbait and irresponsible article. That’s just my nitpickiness here, but it was entitled Down by 2.6 million users. Amazon could keep losing customers to Temu. Now you guys know me. I’ve been saying for like a year now I don’t see Temu or Sheen as a threat. But if you look at this news article headline at least, it seems like oh my goodness, amazon’s down and they’re going to keep losing customers to Temu, meaning that Amazon must be already losing customers to Temu. But if you look at the details of this article kind of like sets the record straight it was basing it off of daily active user growth when Temu went up 51 million from the time that it launched. I guess. Zero to 51 million, all right. Amazon, it says, daily active users has gone down supposedly by 2.6 million, down to 67 million now. Does this mean that amazon has lost business? Not necessarily, just this is just something. That is daily active users right now. Then this article goes on to show yeah, you know what amazon and Temu are targeting different kinds of customers, which we all know. You know Temu is more like the lower end of this, but but in that sense it’s not even really competing with Amazon. And then it even acknowledges that Amazon replied to them and an Amazon spokesperson says we have not seen a decline in usage. So that is like literally goes against the headline of this article here.

Bradley Sutton:

But a couple of interesting things. This article is on a show is that like hey, Temu is never going to reach the Amazon fulfillment network. One article or one quote said here hey, amazon logistics are unapproachable, it says. And the bottom line is that right now you know Temu is going for lower end customers and there really is no signs per se that, oh my goodness, Temu is just stealing customers left and right from Amazon or anything like that. So I still will maintain that, as of now, there’s nothing much to worry about for Amazon sellers. Should you be looking into that platform if they open it up? I say you should look into any platform that opens up if you can sell on it and actually make profit. But should you be scared about websites like Temu taking away business? I personally do not think so at this time.

Bradley Sutton:

Next, amazon news here is actually from Amazon itself. And this was a program maybe you didn’t know you were enrolled in. All right, this is called the FBA donations program, all right, did you guys know that you’re auto enrolled into this? So FBA donations you should look on into it. There’s some links in the description below about how to find out information about this. So, FBA donations you should look on into it. There’s some links in the description below about how to find out information about this, but now you are going to be able to have this donation certificate from good three 60, which reports the inventory you donated in the previous year. I’m assuming this is for, you know, like tax. You know, maybe some tax purposes, um, or write-off purposes, right?

Bradley Sutton:

So this article says what is the FBA donations program? It says the FBA donations program helps you donate eligible products to Amazon’s charity partners. The program is part of our mission to provide sellers with a range of value recovery channels to save costs and effort in managing overstock and return products. When you have products in FBA that need to be returned to you or sold at a lower price through refurbishment or liquidation, you can create a removal order to have the problems or have the products handled however you see fit. However, you also have the opportunity to donate your products to charity. So maybe a lot of you, you know, just create removal orders, but the other option is to donate the products to charity.

Bradley Sutton:

Now here’s the kicker by default, all US sellers who use FBA are enrolled in the FBA donations program. All right, to get the most benefit, you have to manually elect, though, to donate additional product that otherwise might sit in fulfillment and accrue charges. It says here. How you can see this is on the removal page in Seller Central. You can set up a standard cadence for donating your product, such as twice a month, how it says in seller central right now. It’ll currently say either dispose or donate, slash, recycle and that refers to the donations and it says here since sellers are automatically opted into this program, any product that’s returned and it’s ineligible for resale may automatically be donated. So if you don’t know if you have donated or not, check your enrollment status by going to Fulfillment by Amazon Settings page and scroll down to the FBA Donations program. I’m curious Is there anybody out there who actually donated and you didn’t realize you donated? Go check it out and let me know in the comments below how much you have donated to the Amazon charities.

Bradley Sutton:

Next article is from Walmart itself. It says Walmart’s beauty aisle blooms with new products and bigger savings. You might not think that Walmart is that concerned about, maybe, the beauty category. It might not be its demographic, but no, they’re trying to invest a little bit more. They have this program called Walmart Start, where it’s like a beauty. They actually have a beauty brand accelerator program where they help new brands. You know, get started with Walmart and they talk about they have some new companies that they just launched. For that I love some of the some of the names of these companies. One was the Hair Lab by Strands, and this one I would definitely buy from Pardon my Fro is one of the brands that they launched as well.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, earlier this month, it talks about how they added something called Walmart’s Beauty Virtual Try-On Technology. All right, so that’s part of their mobile app. There’s now 500 hair color products that can be quote unquote tried on with the Walmart Apple app. So you could be like, hey, I want to buy this hair dye and I guess you hold it up to yourself and then you can try the different colors and it’ll like change the color of your hair right on there. All right, so so you know we we’ve seen Amazon come out with this kind of technology before with um. I don’t know if I want to call it virtual reality, uh, but you know where you can kind of like see stuff in your room. You can try on shoes and stuff. Well, now Walmart is doing something similar too. But the general gist that I get here is hey, if you’re in the beauty category, maybe you’re concentrating on beauty websites or Amazon, because Amazon’s strong in beauty. Don’t sleep on Walmart, because they definitely are trying to make sure to show that there are players in the beauty category.

Bradley Sutton:

Going back to Amazon, next news article is from them and this was about their fourth annual report about how they’re protecting brands and some interesting things right there. You know, I know sometimes we think that, oh, amazon is doing nothing to protect sellers from other bad players in the industry. But it says here in 2023, amazon invested more than a billion dollars and had 15,000 people who are dedicated to protecting customers, brands, selling partners from counterfeit, fraud and other forms of abuse. So a few of these reports are a few of the highlights from this report. Of these reports, or a few of the highlights from this report and, by the way, in the comments below you should be able to see the you know the link to see the full, the full report is that they they are trying to deter bad actors from creating new selling accounts. Right, so they have something that can detect document forgery detection, advanced image and video verification. You know, back in the day you didn’t have to like have video interviews, go and launch 10 more accounts, you know, using some forged documents. Well, they’re trying to to crack down on that. Actually, last year, they stopped more than 700,000 bad actor attempts to create new selling accounts. It’s kind of scary when you think about it. There are 700,000 people trying to create, uh, bad accounts. How many weren’t they able to? To catch total numbers, probably over a million dollars. Uh, it says the last. Even though the number of products obviously is increasing on Amazon, the number of infringement notices actually decreased. All right, so it shows that, hey, their efforts are working.

Bradley Sutton:

So make sure to check the article in the link below so you can see more information on what Amazon has been doing. Last article is just coming out of Europe, from TechCrunch, and says Amazon will have to publish an ads library in EU after all. Now I’m not 100% sure what this is referring to, but I think it’s kind of like you know how, on Facebook, you can view all the history of any Facebook business or pages ads that they’ve been running. Well, it seems like you know that’s some requirement in EU and Amazon was trying to not have to do that, but they are going to have to do that, and this is based on the Digital Services Act over there in Europe. So this would be interesting to see. Like you know, you already kind of can see where Amazon sellers have been advertising for using Cerebro, right, but maybe there will be now like an ad library where you can see all their creatives too, or something like that. And who knows, maybe that can be something that Helium 10 can integrate into our database that customers can search for, at least in Europe. All right, that’s it for the news today.

Bradley Sutton:

Just one quick thing I wanted to give a heads up on on a special podcast episode that you might have missed a few days ago, and this is episode 547. If you’re wondering about details on the Amazon remote fulfillment program with FBA, or Amazon remote fulfillment with FBA program, I should say formally the artist formerly known as NARF, north American remote fulfillment, but how you can be selling in the U? S and then, with a click of a button, start selling in Canada, mexico and now even Brazil. Make sure to check this episode out. We actually had Amazon on the episode answering all the questions. I guarantee there’s some things that you might not have known about or you were curious about. Like, all right, if there’s a product sold in one of those other marketplaces, is your profit margin different? Are you paying extra taxes? Is the customer paying taxes? We go through a lot of those things. Episode 547. So to go there, just whatever you’re listening to this on, just you should be able to find it above or below, or go to h10.me forward slash 547 to get to this episode. All right.

Bradley Sutton:

Next up, let’s go to the Helium 10 new feature alerts. All right, we’ve got a couple of cool ones Now. This first one, I think, is like I’m almost hesitant to use the word game changer, but it’s a game changer in the sense that if you weren’t doing this, it now should be part of your game, part of your strategy, right? So in that sense, I guess it is a game changer and it’s the addition of some things in search results, all right. So let’s say you are on Amazon, all right, and you searched for coffin shelf, all right. Now, as you scroll in the search results of coffin shelf, in those little helium 10 widgets that come up, you are now going to see something that says most clicked number one, number two and number three. What this is is if in brand analytics for the previous week, the products that were number one, number two and number three. What this is is if in brand analytics for the previous week, the products that were the one, two and three most clicked products based on Amazon, you are now going to see that in the search result page. How cool is that, guys? All right, so you can see. Last week this new test launch I was doing on this coffin shelf my coffin shelf was the number one click product on the search results of the coffin shelf and this other one that has actually the Amazon’s choice badge that you can see over here, they were the number two clicked. You’ll be able to see that here in the x-ray results where you can see if it’s ABA number one or ABA number two, aba number three, what are the top three clicks. So something I think that is super cool for the search results. Definitely something you should be looking at when you’re browsing Amazon. Hey, what was the most clicked product from the search results? Other x-ray enhancements really, really cool.

Bradley Sutton:

If you go to any product page on Amazon, when you run x-ray on the page, watch what happens. What I want you to do is hit filters okay, hit filters in X-Ray and then turn off the hide sponsored products from results, and when you do that you are going to get tons of products that’s on this product page. Now, where are these coming from? These are all the sponsored ads that are running on the page in the different widgets, like, for example, you can see here at the bottom there’s a you might also like there’s a based on your recent reviews. Those are sponsored. Those are people running sponsored product ads. Or on your listing there are a compare with similar items, products related to this item, similar brands. On Amazon, there’s sponsored display ads that are right here at the bottom there. Here’s two sponsored display ads right here underneath the product bullet points. Here’s one at the very top of the page, another sponsored display ad.

Bradley Sutton:

So now, if you want to kind of like get an idea who is advertising on your page, make sure to use this, okay, because now you can just go ahead and download all of these ASINs and make this part of your like. Maybe you know weekly task or daily task, even for your team. Hey, I want to know who’s showing up on my page because, remember what you know, what you should be doing, hopefully, is doing defensive targeting ads, meaning that you’re cross promoting your own brands, that they show up in a lot of these spots. Well, this is a way that you can start tracking who’s advertising on your page and where are your brand’s other products showing up. So, based on if it’s a sponsor display ad or something else showing here, you’re going to see that right here in X-Ray. So super, super cool updates to the X-Ray Chrome extension.

Bradley Sutton:

Next update here is in profits and is available for all Helium 10 members, regardless of what plan you have. But now you will be able to set kind of like look back periods as far as comparison of date ranges. So, for example, let’s say that you’re in your profits view, you’d be looking at today, you could be looking at last year. You know, before you could just choose different date ranges. But now if you scroll down here on the right hand side, you’ll see a button that says comparison period. So by default it might say none, but maybe I want to compare it to the previous year, for example.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, so here I was looking at one date range and it was 140,000. So I could see now that my last year sales in this particular account, $143,000, was $18,000 down from the previous year. Maybe I wanted to look at last month and I wanted to compare that to the previous month. So it gives you a quick glance with just a couple of clicks of the button in order to be able to see all right, how am I doing in this time period versus another time period? So cool new feature alerts this week. All right, let’s go on into our training tip of the week. Something cool for Helium 10 Platinum members Carrie’s going to be talking about next.

Carrie Miller:

Hello everyone, I’m so excited to let you know that our ABA top search terms is now available for Platinum Now. Previously it was only available for Diamond and above, but now it’s available for anyone who has brand registry in their Seller Central account and you your seller central account connected to your helium 10 account. So if you have all that, then you will have access to this incredible tool. Now, what does aba stand for? Aba stands for amazon brand analytics and what it was. It was actually released a few years ago and at the time it was just like the most exciting information ever. A lot of people were, you know, trying to figure out how to download all of this information and you would get literally a million lines on your Excel sheet. It would show you know search volumes and it would show the top three clicked and top converted products for any keyword and it was really really great information. But it was really really hard to sift through and I remember in some of our masterminds people were getting developers to help them figure out how to sift through this information. And now you have access to this through our Amazon brand analytics tool, which is an incredible value. So it’s a great tool for looking at your competitors. You can look for new product ideas. So there’s a variety of things that you can do with this tool.

Carrie Miller:

So I will go ahead and show you exactly what this tool looks like. So it’s called ABA top search terms. So what you can do and what I’ve already done in here is actually you can search either ASINs or keywords, and I just decided, because we have our coffin shelf for our case study I wanted to just see you know what kind of product ideas we could get from just putting in coffin and you can do a bunch of filtration in here. You can, you know, look for you know phrases containing. You can exclude phrases. You can look for you know products that have a certain percentage of the top click share and conversion share. You can look for title density. So we’re basically combining Helium 10 with Amazon brand analytics. So it’s an incredibly powerful tool here.

Carrie Miller:

You can look for, you know, things that are trending. So if you see, you can look for, you know, products that have a certain you know minimum search volume and then say, hey, I want to see something that’s increased, you know a thousand percent to see things that are trending. So there’s a lot of great things that you can do, but let’s take a look at some of the results that we have down here. So when we look through here, you can see that it shows all of the different keywords that are related to Coffin and you can see over the top clicked and top converted keywords. So it shows top click share and top conversion share. Now you could see this before in our Srebro tool, but this is even more detailed in terms of weeks because you’re going to search by week, so you can even do historical research. You can scroll down here and you can see all the different weeks so you can go do historical research and click on each week, so you’re going to get different information every week. But you can look through here and you can find some really incredible product ideas. I know one of the keywords that we found here is coffin cat tree and this is something that could potentially be a good idea, although it is looking like it’s trending down. There’s a coffin purse. There’s all kinds of really cool ideas in here and if you keep looking through, you can find some great keywords and you can do some more filtration up here.

Carrie Miller:

Like you want to see something with a minimum search volume, you want to see a minimum. You know conversion share and things like that. So there is so much you can do to really narrow down all of these keywords. Every week, find trending keywords, like you can even see the top three clicked ASINs monthly average age. So you can look for you know the top ASINs that are clicked and maybe they’re just like a new listing, so it’s a new trending product. So you can use this filter right here the top three clicked ASINs, monthly average age to see you know. Hey, I want to see something that’s top clicked, but it’s only been on the market for a maximum of three months, so you could put three months in there. So much you can do here. So another thing that I like to do is take a look at my competitors. Okay, so your competitors are going to help you to find some good keywords. So I put you know you can basically put in as many ASINs. You can put a ton of ASINs in here. You can put up to a hundred.

Carrie Miller:

So I put our competitors in here and I wanted to see you know each keyword who has the top click share and top conversion share. So what you can do is you can take that information and say, okay, they’re, they’ve got the top click share, conversion share. What are they doing different? Is their listing better? Are there keywords in here where there’s some of my competitors where they’ve got the top click and conversion share and I’m not even ranked for them or their keywords I’ve just never even thought of to write into my listing. They are very relevant, but I never saw them. So you can find those kinds of keywords by doing that and you can also just compare yourself with your competitors here as well. So this is absolutely incredible information for anyone doing product research or just competitor analysis or really you can do a ton of things with this. Now it’s just made it we’ve made it so much easier for you to take that Amazon brand analytics data and just find these product ideas or finding where your competitors are beating you out. It’s incredible. So if you are in platinum and you’ve never used this and you have brand registry, what I would say is go right now, if you have the time, go ahead and start playing around with it, put in those keywords, put in your competitors and you’re going to find so many cool product ideas. You’re going to find some really good information on how you compare to your competitors. So check it out and let us know what you think, and we’ll see you next time.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. So, guys, make sure whether you’re Diamond, platinum, elite, you are using Magnet and Cerebro, checking those top clicked and top purchased products, and there’s a lot of different ways to use it. Carrie just showed one of her ways to use it, but I’m sure you guys might have some different strategies as well. Well, that’s it for the news this week, guys, we’ll see you next week to see what’s buzzing.

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