#260 – Project 5K Update: $300K on Amazon in Q2!

In his role as Helium 10’s Director of Training and Chief Evangelist, Bradley Sutton wears many different hats. One very important “hat” that he wears doesn’t show up anywhere in his job description. I’m speaking of the time that Bradley spends every week, researching, optimizing, selling, and fulfilling Amazon products for customers around the world.

Sound familiar? Yep, I’m sure a lot of you out there are doing the exact same thing every single day. As Bradley says, if he’s going to preach the Amazon selling lifestyle, he needs to have boots on the ground and understand first-hand the struggles and successes that e-commerce sellers experience.

In this, the first of a two-part series, Bradley walks you through the case studies that he’s developed and executed in order to explore the leading edge of Amazon strategy. In the next episode, to be published tomorrow, he’ll talk about the different experiments that he ran within those case studies.

Who doesn’t love a deep dive into Amazon strategy?

In episode 260 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley discusses:

• 03:00 – Bradley’s Case Studies
• 04:30 – Q2 Final Totals
• 08:00 – Stock Problems Slow a Strong Amazon Product
• 10:00 – A Test Listing Runs into Bad Reviews
• 13:30 – How to Sell a Wickless Candle
• 16:30 – Trying to Rank with Virtual Bundles
• 19:00 – Using Brand Analytics to Check for Searchability
• 21:30 – Splinters Doom an Amazon Product
• 25:30 – Black Box Helps Mirror the Influence of “Frequently Bought Together”
• 29:00 – The Pink Coffin Shelf Saga
• 33:45 – The Helium 10 Microphone Goes to Page One

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, Google Podcast or wherever you listen to our podcast.

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.
• Ultimate Resource Guide: Discover the best tools and services to help you dominate on Amazon.
• Helium 10: 20+ software tools to boost your entire sales pipeline from product research to customer communication and Amazon refund automation. Make running a successful Amazon 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. 
• SellerTradmarks.com: Trademarks are vital for protecting your Amazon brand from hijackers, and sellertrademarks.com provides a streamlined process for helping you get one.

Transcript

Bradley Sutton: Today and tomorrow guys, you’re going to be in for a treat with back to back episodes because I had so much cool info for you guys. I had to split it into two episodes. In this one, we’re going to be talking about how I grossed over $300,000 in Q2 selling on Amazon, as well as some wins and losses that you can learn from. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.

Bradley Sutton: 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’s a completely BS-free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the Amazon world. And I like to consider myself a serious Amazon seller. And as you guys know, I’ve been running a lot of case studies on actual Amazon accounts. And when I say case study, that means that these are actual Amazon products that, you know, I’m putting up on Amazon, I’m doing the listing, I’m doing the PPC, I’m doing everything from A to Z on these accounts and managing it, just like all of you guys out there are. I think that’s a very important, uh, part of, of being in a, you know, educational kind of position that I’m in. I have to stay in the game and keep my knowledge fresh. And so I spend about 10 hours a week managing a lot of products on Amazon. And so this is the results from Q2. All right. So in this episode, we’re going to go over just some of the raw numbers of how much we sold on Amazon in Q2, and then do a little deep dive into some of the products we launched. And a few of the failures. We’ve had some failures on both Project X and Project 5k that I want to share with you guys because, Hey, it’s real. It doesn’t matter. What kind of knowledge level somebody said I’m not the smartest person in the Amazon world, but Hey, I have obviously been around the block and even I can have failures and it’s not something that’s going to be like, oh my goodness, I got to stop selling it.

Bradley Sutton: So I’m going to keep it real and let you guys know of the failures and maybe what I could have done to have avoided them. And then we’re going to do something a little bit different, and I’m going to try and do this, like every couple of months here on the podcast or on the blog, or I want to give you guys all of my experiments. I am constantly running experiments, guys. That’s one of the reasons why I’m not making that much money on these accounts, because I’m just constantly running a lot of tests, either on PPC or ranking or trying to work that CPR number. So I figured, Hey, let me share my results with you guys. Some of these experiments worked, some nothing much came of it, but either way, I want to share my results with you. So we’re going to have like a Bradley’s laboratory session here on what all I was able to concoct in a laboratory. And so some of it is pretty interesting and I hope you guys will be able to use it in your Amazon selling journey. So, let’s hop right into it.

Bradley Sutton: First of all, what are these case studies that I’m writing? There’s three main accounts I run, but there’s a lot of products and other accounts as well. I think the one that you guys probably know the most is Project X, right? So, that was the case study we did with a coffin shelf and egg trays a couple of years ago. And I’ve still been trying to maintain that account and, and expand it out a little bit. I’ve got some fun products on the way there, but that’s the first account that I’m running. We also have another case study account that we call Project 5k. The very first iteration of that is I launched 13 different products or 12 different products, something crazy like that, or $5,000 all in. And then after that, I just launched standalone products for $5,000 budget each, right? So $5,000, including their products landed and initial marketing costs, just to be able to prove that, Hey, you don’t need a lot of money to get started on Amazon. And then the last one is the hemp cream case study that I’ve been working on as a friend’s product, Nick, he was on this podcast a while back talking about cryptocurrency and a whole bunch of stuff. Well, that’s another account that I’ve been managing. So let’s just look at the numbers right now. All right, Q2, what kind of numbers did we do? First, let’s do project X. We actually had a pretty slower Q2. It was down from Q1, down by $15,000 actually. So in Q2 for Project X, the total gross sales were $51,000. $51,000. During this time we were doing tons and tons and tons of testing on the PPC. Adtomic, we were testing and I was just running a whole bunch of experiments. I’m still not done with those experiments, so I’m not going to share the details of that. Maybe that’ll be the next time, but because of that, the profit went way down. All right. So like this one, the profit was only 8% on Q2 due to all these experiments and just a bunch of crazy stuff that was going on. So, I mean, it’s just shocking to me like how we still even made profit after spending literally a few thousand dollars on these PPC.

Bradley Sutton: But even with all that, we still were able to clear 8% profit and the gross sales again was $51,000. I’ll get into the details of that in a little bit. The other account I said was the hemp cream case study. So, how was our Q2 there? It was actually up, all right. It was up from Q1 a little bit different. It was up by $23,000 and the hemp cream case study, which mainly consists of just two products. There’s two products that are taking the bulk of the sales here. And that came out to a $60,000, $60,000 gross revenue on the hemp cream account. And I don’t have the profit numbers there because I don’t even know the cost. So I don’t have, I can’t give you the profit numbers, but I’m assuming my friend is making a profit– some decent profit there.

Bradley Sutton: Lastly, it’s the Project 5k case study. I told you guys what that was. And on that account, there’s some private label brands, obviously that I’m running on there, but I also do wholesale. I like doing wholesale at smaller profits, about five to 10% profit that can generate a lot of cash because I like buying stuff with my credit cards and being able to fly to the Maldives in business class for free, that’s my travel hacking that I do. So, I like running a wholesale account on this account and it allows me to be able to spend a lot on my credit card each month, which gets me tons of points. So anyways, overall, the total sales on this account of Project 5k was $227,000. It was a little bit down from Q1. Q1 was $11,000 more. So, it’s right on pace with Q1 pretty much. So again, $227,000 on the Project 5k case study that we did. All right. Now let’s just dive a little bit into the numbers, the very first brand on the Project 5k account, it’s a similar brand to Manny’s mysterious oddities, the coffin shelf. There’s nothing coffin related there, but it’s just kind of like a home decor kind of brand with shelving and a lot of different things, like that. There’s a total of 15 products on that brand that we’ve launched over the last year. And so a lot of them were, we’re doing pretty well. There’s one, this particular brand did $36,000 of revenue in Q2. And like I said, it had 15 different products. There was one product that grossed $7,000. Now, one of the products in Q1 had sold a lot more. Let me just look at my data right here. I’m actually in Helium 10 Profits. Let me see if I can find it. There it is right there. In Q1, well this one product by itself sold $14,000. All right. But in Q2, only 3000, why? We were out of stock. All right. So we had, this was a variation listing and it was a kind of new product. I didn’t have a great idea on which one was going to, which variation of the four was going to sell the most. And this one just like sold out super fast. And so we were out of stock for quite a while on that product, two months, especially with all the shipping delays that we’ve had.

Bradley Sutton: And so we kind of took a hit. This $36,000 for this brand easily could have been like 45 or $50,000 had I stayed in stock of all of these products. Now in this brand, guess what guys? I actually had a product that I’m not quite sure I’m going to classify it as a failure, but this is something that did not work out well. So it was a product. I did a PPC test listing. And when I sold like only two or three units, it seemed to do well. I sold it for like 60 bucks. It was a product that I want to sell for 40. So I put a PPC test listing like we teach them Project X for 60 bucks, and it’s sold like immediately, nobody left any reviews or anything. It was only two or three. And I remember Tim Jordan has said, Hey, try and do 10 units. It’s more safe to do a PPC test listings for 10 units. And by the way, guys, if you have no idea what the heck I’m talking about PPC test listing, go back in this Serious Sellers Podcast. I did an episode all about how to do PPC test listing. And it’s also in episodes three and four of Project X. But anyways, that’s what I did. And everything was like super great. And I was like, this is going to be amazing product. I sold out right away at $60 with a terrible listing. And this is going to be awesome. So we launched this product like beginning of Q2, and I was all excited. I put it up for this like crazy price of $40. My cost on it was like less than $10.

Bradley Sutton: And it was, it was smaller. So it didn’t cost that much to ship. And the profit margins were out of this world was going to be my number one profit product, and then bad reviews started coming. And I was like, what? Why am I getting bad reviews? And what everybody was saying was, Hey, it’s too small. We wanted something bigger. And I’m like, well, you can clearly see from the images, I have a diagram, an infographic that says exactly what the size is. I don’t Photoshop my images. These are actual pictures. You can see it to scale, but still people were complaining that it was too small and returning it non-stop like, I think in Q, let me just look here. In Q2, we had how many refunds? 32 refunds, ridiculous. And that is out of how many sales, 193, that guys, that is terrible. One out of every seven orders is being returned. And a lot of them are saying it’s too small. So I’m like, oh, this product is a disaster. So, what I kept doing to try and just like pump up the sales, I really changed the title. I really made sure that people knew this is a small product, right. I put the dimensions in there. It’s still people return and I’m like, dang, it what’s going on. But the review started to turn around and actually I’m shocked. It’s actually a four-star product now. Still, I like all of my products before and a half stars or five, but the sales are on the up. And what I did was I just started every like 20 days, right? Every like 20 days, I lowered the price by like $3. All right. And why do I do that? I did that to be able to get that red badge that sometimes shows up. This doesn’t always work, but sometimes you’ll get a red, big red badge on your product and in the search results that says 10% off or 15% off lowest price in 30 days, something like that. It only lasts for like a few weeks. So that’s why every like two or three weeks, I kept lowering the price by $3. So constantly I got that big red thing. And so I could sell some products. And so, yeah, it worked. And now, it’s down to like $30, and surprisingly, I’m still actually profitable. All right. Because I love these smaller products where the shipping is not much, and I have a lot more wiggle room, so I’m still not a hundred percent sure am I going to discontinue this product? I’m about to run out of stock and maybe like a month, I haven’t reordered it. I’m going to see how this next few weeks goes and how much I have to lower the price.

Bradley Sutton: But right now that product was supposed to be one of my stars for Q2. And it kind of bombed, I still made money. So I wouldn’t call it a complete failure, but yeah, I’m not happy. Interesting love the sales did pick up a tiny bit. Amazon went and decided to give me one of those virtual reality images, those 360 things that you can twist around. You can’t really do that unless you have a vendor account, but Amazon picks random products sometimes to give that 360 degree image, you can see that on the Project X coffin shelf, the Manny’s mysterious oddities coffin shelf. They gave us one of those 360 images, but, but that kind of helped it a little bit, surprisingly. Anyways, what else about this brand? Oh yeah. I launched a product just four weeks ago on the brand and it was very similar to that other one. And it’s not doing that. Great. And here’s the thing, a lesson. This might be a failure. I’m not sure it’s too early. This product’s only like a few weeks old. However, what happened was this product has candles, okay. Now, candles have wicks, right. But I don’t know what happened. A lot of these candles don’t have wicks and I just shipped it to Amazon because I got an inspection in China. And I don’t know how they missed it, or it just was maybe there’s just like one or two boxes where a lot of the products didn’t have wicks. And if you’re going to buy a candle, obviously has to have a wick. So, I got bad reviews right off the bat in this new product. So there was like the last two products launched on this brand were just not great. All right. Bad experiences. It’s too early to call either of them a hundred percent failure so far, but yeah, sometimes you really have to make sure that the inspections are really taking a wide sample, because I don’t know what happened because I paid $200 for a detailed inspection of the shipment before it shipped from China. And I didn’t see this problem. There was other problems that it had, but they all had wicks. So, I don’t know what the heck happened to these dang candles. So, right now I’m battling that, and I’ve got bad reviews. And so, who wants to buy a product with bad reviews. But anyways, that is the first brand under Project 5k. Like I said, $36,000 in Q2. By the way, that wholesale, I think I did about $120,000 wholesale on that account. We’re not going to go into detail on that because there’s not much I can teach you guys there.

Bradley Sutton: That’s a very unique thing I’m doing for wholesale right there. And like, literally nobody can do what I’m doing. So I’m not even going to talk about that because I only want to talk about this stuff that hopefully you guys can learn from and actually duplicate. Anyways, another brand. This was my second brand on Product 5k. This one only has three products. Three products. I discontinued one in Q1 because I had issues. I think I talked about that last time I talked about Project 5k. But anyways, this brand here did $42,000 in gross revenue in Q2. And that was literally, almost the same as what I did in Q1. It was off by $300. Crazy. So what do I have to report on this? Again, the shipping killed me, so I was out of stock on one of these for a while, because as everybody knows, people have been dealing with some major shipping issues. So, I was out of stock for like a couple of weeks and then kind of lost my juice on there has been hard to get it back another product. I had some damages. And so I got some bad reviews, but still all the products that remain on this account had a pretty high star rating, still almost five stars. Even though I had a kind of a wave of bad reviews. I love this brand or this brand brought me over 20% margin. And again, this is with all the experiments I’m doing. It’s still brought 20% margin. So, this is pretty cool. Like if I didn’t do so many experiments, I mean, this could easily be 30% or more profit, but anyways, this niche is going strong. I did some experimentations. I did a virtual bundle, or I did a virtual bundle on this. If you guys want to know about virtual bundles, just go to the Helium 10 blog and type in Amazon virtual bundles to see what that’s about. And something interesting I learned when I did this test, this is going already now to my experimentation Bradley’s lab here, or, well, I know what I’m going to call it. I’m going to call that Bradley’s laboratory. Let’s call it Bradley’s laboratory or something. But anyways, in my testing that I did on the virtual bundle, I could not get it to rank. I could not get the virtual bundle to rank on the keywords that I was doing search find buy for. And I was doing that with AZ Rank. And as I was talking to Alina from azrank.com, um, I was like, what do you think? Why can’t I get this ranking in the top seven pages?

Bradley Sutton: It’s definitely indexed. And her theory, which I think I’m almost ready to confirm is that it’s kind of like a variation listing. And as you guys know in variation listings, only one child item can rank for a certain keyword. So I did a virtual bundle of two products. And what I was trying to rank for the virtual bundle were keywords that the individual products were already ranking for. So by definition, it did not let me rank for it. So I thought that was very interesting. I did a couple of experiments later with that and see, so far I can kind of confirm that I still would like to do some more testing, but there you have it, guys, if you’re going to try and rank your virtual bundle, you’ve got to do it on keywords that the products that make up that bundle are not ranking for in the top seven pages currently, right? So that was a good takeaway. Another cool experiment that I did on one of these products, one of these products here, again, I’m not spending near enough time because Helium 10 takes up all my time. I only have like 10 hours a week to spend on this stuff, but I noticed that at the beginning of Q2, I was selling on this product, like 7, 8, 9 units a day, nothing great, but it was pretty good. And then there was like, sometimes two, three days I didn’t get one sale. And in a week I would only get like five sales. And I was like, what is going on here?

Bradley Sutton: So what I did, here’s Bradley’s 30-second tip. The BTS of the week. If you have brand registry and you have a product that was selling well, and then for a while, you’re getting consistent, not good sales. All right. There are definitely ways in Helium 10 to go find that. Okay. But I know there’s people out there who maybe don’t have Helium 10, they don’t have Keyword Tracker. All right. So you might not be able to do this. Here’s a way you can do it with brand registry if you don’t have Helium 10. And obviously if you guys have Helium 10, you can do this with Keyword Tracker, or you can still do with brand registry by using brand analytics. So I went to brand analytics and I went to the days and the weeks where I was crushing it at the beginning of Q2. And I put in the ASIN of this product and I wanted to see, all right, where was I? Like one of the top three clicked and was getting inversions for. Brand analytics will tell you that. And I saw those keywords. And then I looked, and then sure enough, I wasn’t showing up in sponsored ads anymore for that keyword. And I wasn’t organically ranking at all for that keyword, for whatever reason, I was still indexed. I don’t know what the heck happened. It might have happened during the Amazon search glitch, the ASG, we talked a– there’s a big blog I wrote about the Amazon search glitch. So you guys should check that out. But anyways, I was like, wait a minute. I’m not showing up in sponsored ads. I’m not organically ranking for this, but I am indexed. So what I did, I only had about like 75 units left in stock because again, stupid shipment from China is taking months to get here.

Bradley Sutton: So I’m like, well, I’m about to run out anyways, let me figure out how can I increase the sales or I did was I added a targeted keyword on my Adtomic performance campaign. That’s our Helium 10’s PPC tool. And what I did was I made a high bid for those two keywords. There’s one or two keywords that I showed that I was converting for with brand analytics a couple months ago, but just wasn’t now. And sure enough, that got me on the map. Boom. Within one week I sold out of the rest of the units. What one tiny tweak by upping the bids. I was able to go ahead and sell out of the products because of looking at brand analytics. So guys, if your sales are down, there is a great step for you. Take a look at brand analytics, take a look at Keyword Tracker. During those peak days of sales, look where you were ranking for really highly on. Look where you were one of the top three to get clicks in brand analytics, and you’ll get some insights there. So anyways, but there’s another brand here that I’m doing in Project 5k. Another brand I was doing in Project 5k. And here is an absolute bona fide failure. All right. And I talked to you guys about this. The last time I gave you an update on Project 5k, there was a product that I was just getting tons of bad reviews for, because people were saying there were splinters in the product. It was a product is made out of bamboo. And they’re like, Hey, there’s splinters here. I cut my finger on it. And this was a product I never got an inspection for. It was like a long time ago. So I was like, it sucked. But like one out of five customers were asking for refunds and I’m just like, oh, how do I get rid of this inventory? But I kept lowering the price to way below my costs. Original price was 30 bucks. I had it down to like 15 bucks. In three times, the product got suspended on Amazon because of negative customer review rate or whatever it’s called. And I would always just relist it, not always realistic. And I’m like, just please let me sell out. I got down to like 60 products. Uh, and then I got permanently banned on that. My account didn’t get permanently bad, but that product got permanently banned. Now I can’t put it back. So that’s a hundred percent failure of a product due to me not doing an inspection on it.

Bradley Sutton: And people were just leaving bad reviews and returning it because of a splinters. Yeah. That was a big disaster. And actually, that product is on its way back to me from Amazon, because I had to do a removal order on it. And I’m going to try and like, I don’t know, I’m going to try and sell it for like $3 or something on Etsy. I’ve done things like that before. Another product did really well. One product, it sold $16,000 by itself, by the way, this entire brand overall sold $20,000 in Q2. This brand that I have here. So another product on this brands was almost all of those sales. It was about $16,000 and that product is going really strong. It was a great Q4 product. And in Q2, it’s great. Five stars. That’s my signature product on this brand. So there’s that brand.

Bradley Sutton: What else do I have here? Oh yeah. The last one– remember I told you guys, I had a brand, the very first Project 5k was a whole bunch of straws and other kind of like different party supplies, really cheap products. Like almost every product on this brand is less than $10. Now I launched a couple of products in the last couple of months on this brand. And most of them were straws and they did well. And these are like, I always tell you guys don’t do products that retail for like six and seven and $8, but I’m like, Hey, let me try it because it costs me like literally pennies for the straws. So, even though Amazon is taking their $3 and their $1 commission and stuff, and the shipping and everything that happens. I’m still making pretty decent profit margin. So anyways, all of these straws and different party products, the original Project 5k member that I launched for a total of 5,000, it grossed $13,700 in Q2. $13,700 is still pretty good because a lot of Q2 you’re still weren’t, you don’t supposed to have a lot of parties and things like that. Now, the world is opening up. So, this brand has been suffering for a while, but Hey, $13,000 on a bunch of products that only retail for like five, $6 is pretty good actually at the number of units sold was 1,500 units. That’s a lot of units to sell over three months. It’s 500 units a month. We’re selling these things. And I launched a couple of products and they did well. One just kind of went viral. One of these new straws that I barely launched earlier, like at the end of Q1, it’s sold 500 units in about a month and a half.

Bradley Sutton: Now, here’s my trick here. Here’s another strategy. All right. So, these were some straws, now picture that I don’t know, let’s just say they’re orange straws. All right. They’re not orange straws. I don’t sell orange straws, but let’s just pretend that they’re orange straws. All right. So, the typical Amazon seller is going to just try and look for all of the keywords that have to do with orange straws. Right. And they would just look at the competitors and all these orange straw and orange paper straw, and paper straw orange, and things like that. And that’s what they would focus on it. Sure. For this one, I did that a little bit. I wanted to make sure I was dominating the orange straw keywords. However, what I did on this was there was one seller that I noticed and he was out of stock a while back when I was watching him, like months ago, before I launched this product, I was like, he started getting frequently bought together a lot with, I don’t know how I’m going to say this again. This is not real. I’m just like making this up because I don’t want to give away the product here, but let’s just pretend it was like Halloween pumpkin stand, right. So, you’re like what Halloween pumpkin stand. Well, let’s just pretend that there’s people who have a stand and they have these pumpkins that they give drinks in. And so people would have straws. All right. So Halloween pumpkin stand, you might think that has nothing to do with orange straws. I mean, like that keyword is completely different and like, what does that even have to do with each other? But because I was using Black Box by Helium 10 and I use the product targeting tab in Black box, I was able to see that, of this other orange straws that was selling like gangbusters back in the day, they were getting frequently bought together with a lot of products that were on page one for that keyword let’s just call it again, Halloween pumpkin stand or something like that, right.

Bradley Sutton: So that got me thinking, I was like, you know what, I’m going to put that keyword in my title, or we’re talking about the little Maldives honeymoon methodology here, right, in the title. And I’m going to do my search find buy, and rank, try and rank for that keyword. There was no other straws on the first page. I mean, if you go to the– again guys, don’t go to this keyword. This is not real. I just made this up right now. But if you were to go to this keyword that I have, we’re calling it Halloween pumpkin stand. It was all Halloween pumpkin stand products, like tables and tablecloths and fake pumpkins and things like that, right. So, I was going to take a chance. I was taking a chance, but I got to page one and I was killing it. It was crazy. I even raised the price by $2 on these straws. All right. I raised the price by $2 and I still kept my sales velocity because the demand was so high. All these people who are searching for Halloween pumpkin stand supplies, they really needed straws that went with that decor. And so instead of like, just trying to do a straw search after they got their supplies, they just were like, oh, okay, I’m going to go ahead and buy these straws right there. So, guys there’s a tip for you. Don’t just get laser-focused on the keywords that describe your exact product. If you know that people in a certain niche like need that product, when they’re searching for something else, you potentially could make a killing if you’re the only competitor smart enough to advertise heavily or to get on page one for those other keywords.

Bradley Sutton: So that was a great lesson that I learned in Q2. And unfortunately that product completely went out of stock because I had no idea it was going to go viral like that. But yeah, really, really happy about that random straw product that’s sold 500 units in just a couple of months. All right. That’s pretty much it for the detailed sales on Project 5k. Project X, if you guys are wondering which were the sellers there, the coffin shelf sold, we just cleared by the way, the 1000 review, what do you call it? Threshold, I guess you can say. It sold $35,000. Sales are down. Sales are down. Coffin shelves are maybe not as popular as it used to be. Sales were down by $12,000 in Q2. So I’m going to try and see about revitalizing that I went through a crazy thing. I’m going to write a blog about the pink coffin shelf was removed from Amazon. Like banned from Amazon. Dog page when you go there. And I’m like, why did it get removed? And Amazon was like, oh yeah, this has been flagged because it does not comply with our racist or derogatory bans. I’m like, what? This is a coffin shelf. How is it racist or derogatory? And so it took me a month and a half to get that unblocked. It was crazy. I’m going to have to, I can’t talk about it here. Otherwise, we’ll talk about the rest of time. But I mean, the pink coffin shelf, we were only selling like barely one year of the day anyways, but it was just an interesting process to go through. Like, why did I get banned in the first place? I mean, a coffin shelf is not derogatory. I mean, it’s like a shelf shaped like a coffin and it was so funny trying to debate with seller support to get this unbanned. But eventually I did. So I’ll talk about that.

Bradley Sutton: We launched another product in Q2. Guys, here we have another failure. All right, here, we have another failure. I was on a live webinar like six months ago and I told you guys, wow, look at this product. I just found an Etsy. You know what, I’m going to launch it on Project X, because I think it could be some and sure enough, I did, and I knew this before they shipped it, they screwed up. All right, this was an egg rack, right. It was an egg rack. And I had the coffin shelf factory make this egg rack. And I shouldn’t have, because I guess they don’t know eggs, right. And they put the hole, they made the holes too small and together, it wasn’t my fault. I sent them a prototype and they didn’t completely follow the prototype. And so the problem was with this egg rack that we did, you couldn’t put two eggs next to each other. Like, unless they’re tiny, tiny eggs, you just couldn’t. There’s not enough space. You have to skip a hole. Right. So instead of 36 eggs, or I’m sorry, 24 eggs, like this thing was supposed to be able to have, you could only put like 12 eggs, regular sized eggs. So I told him, I was like, I don’t want this product. I’m like, you guys screwed this up. But my sourcing agent over there, it was like, please, please, can you do this? I don’t want to lose all the money. I had already approved this, so I was like, fine. You gave me like 50% off, send them over here and I’ll give it a try. Let me see if I can sell them. All right. I was really disappointed with this because I did a PPC test listing. And again, the numbers looked great on what I could do. So anyways, I put it up on Amazon a couple of months ago. Sure enough, first two reviews, a hundred percent negative. And everybody’s like, this is so ridiculous. I can’t put the eggs on here. And I tried to be funny about it. I was very clear on the listing. You guys can even see it as that. I’m like, Hey, this is for small eggs only, right? And I say, Hey, if you have regular eggs, I was even funny.

Bradley Sutton: I was like, this is right in the bullet points. I think, Hey, if you have regular sized eggs, you can still use this, but they have to be socially distanced, all right. Socially distant eggs. And you have to have a hole between it. I thought I was going to be slick like that. Nope. People don’t care about my humor, so bad reviews and it’s not selling almost at all. So I’m doing an experiment now where I’m trying to just unload them almost at for just for shipping on Etsy. And I’ll let you guys know how that goes, but that was kind of a disaster for Project X there. I had really high hopes of that product, but that just shows you got to really be careful with what your factories are doing now. The Helium 10 didn’t lose money on this because like I said, they gave us a discount and I’m going to ask for like replacements on all this, but this is why you do inspections. All right. Why do you inspection guys? Because things like this can happen. Another issue, another bad thing that happened on Project X. So what happens is for Project X, a lot of people have access on the customer service team here and on the affiliate team and other teams like there’s like 50 employees here at Helium 10 who have access to the Helium 10 account for Project X because they use it for demos and to just try and troubleshoot things and stuff. And now somebody accidentally messed up something in my inventory tracker. And it said that I had enough egg trays. Nope. I didn’t have enough egg tray. So I was out of the 18 whole egg trays for two and a half months thinks that issue. And again, obviously it didn’t help anything that shipping delays have been just ridiculous lately.

Bradley Sutton: So, we lost a lot of money. We lost thousands of dollars of what I could have sold on those egg trays. Now my keyword ranking is all gone and more. So I’ll try again. We launched another product that really wasn’t for sale to be sold on Amazon. We produced an expensive Helium 10 branded podcast microphone. All right. Podcast microphone. It’s called the Helium 10 HX10 podcast microphone. All right. Originally we wanted it just for all the employees, but their minimum order quantity was 500, so we only have like 200 and something employees. So I’m like, all right, let me send these all to Amazon. Just so I can use multi-channel fulfillment. That was another test I did is using an Amazon multi-channel fulfillment. And so yeah, I sent it to all 200 employees by like, you know what? This is sitting there in Amazon. Let’s just go ahead and make it and throw it up. And who knows, maybe there’s some Helium 10 fans out there who want to have a $70 podcast microphone. I mean, it’s very high quality kind of like those Yeti microphones that cost a hundred bucks. So we threw it up there, made a listing on it and got it to page one for keywords. And I’ll talk about that in a little bit, but yeah, that’s something that’s on the Project 5k count and surprisingly enough, we actually sold other than the search find buys that we did. We’ve sold like 15 units over the last few weeks organically, which is just shocking to me that this is a listing that doesn’t even have any reviews or anything. All right. So, that is kind of like a recap of the products.

Bradley Sutton: All right, you know what guys, this episode is going so long. I’m only about halfway through what I wanted to get through. So we’re actually going to go ahead and stop this episode right now. Go back and rewind it and re-listen to it if you want to listen to it again, but tomorrow come back tomorrow and we’re going to have part two where I’m going to go a little bit deeper into these experiments that I’ve been running. We’re going to talk about more of those keyword ranks that I’ve done. We’re going to talk about a new way that you can actually find out how many orders that you have that come from search. There’s going to be a lot of really cool information in tomorrow’s episode. So make sure to come back for this second part series, I’m going to actually call Bradley’s laboratory. I’ll see you guys tomorrow.