#582 – From Teacher to 7-Figure Amazon & Walmart Seller

Join us on an incredible journey as we welcome Carrie Miller, a familiar voice on the Serious Sellers Podcast, who shares her remarkable transition from teaching to becoming a multi-seven-figure seller on Amazon and Walmart. Born in Florida and raised in San Diego, Carrie attended Pepperdine University with aspirations of becoming a teacher, only to find herself navigating a challenging job market. Despite the odds, she secured a position teaching high school Spanish and even coached basketball, showcasing her dedication and versatility. Carrie’s global experiences in Argentina and China add a unique flavor to her story, making her insights into the e-commerce world all the more compelling.

Listen in as we explore her journey working for another e-commerce software company and shifting from customer interactions to creating content and masterclasses for their Academy. Her extensive experience with Helium 10 since 2017 played a pivotal role in her freelance work for various clients. Discover the impressive growth of their skateboard and apparel businesses, which saw significant milestones in 2020 and 2022, respectively. The discussion also touches on their successful foray into Walmart’s marketplace and their upcoming venture into TikTok Shop, offering listeners valuable insights into e-commerce business growth and strategies.

This episode also uncovers the lessons learned in product inspections and the importance of targeting niche markets. Hear firsthand about the challenges of receiving a large batch of smeared skateboard decks and dealing with quality issues that impacted product reviews. We emphasize the critical role of thorough factory inspections and having reliable on-the-ground sourcing experts. Additionally, we tackle security risks and challenges on Amazon, including account hacks and listing issues, and share effective strategies for optimizing e-commerce operations. From managing supply chain fees to utilizing AI-powered tools for competitor analysis, this episode is packed with practical advice to help you succeed in the competitive e-commerce landscape.

In episode 582 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Carrie discuss:

• 00:00 – E-Commerce Strategies With Carrie Miller
• 04:07 – Global Teaching and Living Experiences
• 09:35 – E-Commerce Business Growth and Strategies
• 10:04 – Helium 10 Essential Tool for Agencies
• 13:52 – Success in a Competitive Apparel Market
• 18:44 – Learning From Mistakes in Product Inspections
• 19:38 – Security Risks and E-Commerce Challenges
• 24:41 – Success Through Consistency and Growth
• 28:13 – Unique Amazon & Walmart Strategies
• 32:09 – Optimizing Listing SEO Strategy With AI

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

You’ve seen her as a host on the podcast before, but now get to know Carrie Miller’s full backstory about how she went from teaching to sales to the whole Amazon world, where she’s now a multiple seven-figure seller who’s giving us all the ups and downs of her Amazon and Walmart journey. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Black Box by Helium 10 House is the largest database of Amazon products and keywords in the world outside of Amazon itself. We have over 2 billion products and many millions more keywords from different Amazon marketplaces from USA to Australia to Germany, and more. Use our powerful filters to search through this database for pockets of opportunity that you might want to get into with your first or next product to sell on Amazon. For more information, go to h10.me/black box. Don’t forget you can save 10% off for life on Helium 10 by using our special code SSP10. 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 e-commerce world. And we’ve got a guest today who is no stranger to the show I mean, she hosts probably 25% of our podcast here now but we haven’t had her as a just 100% guest, where she’s going to be in the hot seat and learning about her Amazon, Walmart, TikTok e-commerce journey, and that is our own Carrie Miller. Carrie, how’s it going?

Carrie:

Hey, it’s going great. How are you doing?

Bradley Sutton:

Pretty good. How does it feel to be on the other side of the microphone? More pressure or less pressure?

Carrie:

Way less pressure, way less. It’s way easier on this side.

Bradley Sutton:

I don’t know if I feel different. Like sometimes I just get on here and just ask a question, I’ll just like kick back and the guests will talk for like five minutes straight off to worry about anything. But anyways, we are here because you know I think probably everybody in the Helium 10 and Serious Seller Podcast audience obviously knows who you are. But we don’t know your background. So first of all were you born and raised in San Diego?

Carrie:

I was born in Florida and then we moved to San Diego when I was about 11.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, so you were in Florida for a while.

Carrie:

Yeah, yeah. So middle school and high school was San Diego.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, so I’m wearing my Helium 10 my old school San Diego Jersey before they distance and moved to LA. A lot of guests I don’t know anything about them before they come on, but you, I do know something, so I know you went to high school in like here in San Diego County, and then you went to a Pepperdine, was it right?

Carrie:

Yes, the waves, yep.

Bradley Sutton:

What was your major there?

Carrie:

I was. I majored in Liberal Arts and Spanish. I wanted to be a teacher and that’s basically the major for being a teacher. It was kind of like a general ed, and so I did Spanish because I liked it. I wasn’t necessarily learning Spanish to teach it, but then I ended up teaching Spanish for five years after that.

Bradley Sutton:

So was it right after you graduated you got into teaching?

Carrie:

Right after it. It was kind of crazy, because I was focused on becoming an elementary teacher, but when I graduated, there were literally no elementary positions. Even LA Unified focused on becoming an elementary teacher, but when I graduated there were literally no elementary positions. Even LA unified, who usually begs people to go in the inner city. They had zero contracts that year. So there were a bunch of people who you know, didn’t get jobs by because I had Spanish. I got offers at three different schools and so I was able to get a job right away.

Bradley Sutton:

At high school or what level.

Carrie:

So actually my first year was high school.

Bradley Sutton:

So hold on, you look the way you do now. I’m not going to say your age, but let’s just say that was quite a long time ago. And then you’re saying at 22, I can only imagine what you look like and you were teaching at. You probably like, look like a high school student.

Carrie:

Okay. So I got in trouble, they I got asked for hall passes cause they were like 150 teachers at that school. It’s a big high school. And they I asked me the hall pass one time I was meeting with the vice principal, and I walked. She said, oh, just come to my office and walk behind the counter. And I was just walking into her office and the secretary started yelling at me and there were some students of mine and they started laughing so hard because they’re like she’s a teacher.

Bradley Sutton:

That’s hilarious. So you were teaching Spanish at the time.

Carrie:

Yeah, Spanish then. Yeah, I definitely looked really young and it was kind of a funny awkward time because I literally looked like I was, you know, 14.

Bradley Sutton:

Now I know other things you did was you started teaching a local school and you were even a basketball coach, but then you also moved to like South America.

Carrie:

Which came first. South America was during my time at Pepperdine. It was my sophomore year.

Bradley Sutton:

It was during while you were in university. You went down and were teaching in.

Carrie:

I didn’t teach in Argentina, I just lived there for a year. I taught in China as well for a summer, so I’ve taught. You know, I did teach there.

Bradley Sutton:

Where in China? I didn’t remember that.

Carrie:

Shenzhen. yeah, all that time I had no idea I could have been sourcing products.

Bradley Sutton:

Right, wow, so you’ve been all over the world okay.

Carrie:

Yeah, 2010.

Bradley Sutton:

So, Argentina um, did you have a lot of like steak with chimichurri sauce?

Carrie:

You know I did have steak. I honestly love American steak better. I know everyone talks about the steak there, but I love American steaks. I like them. You know, ribeye with a lot of like the marbleization. I think their cows were too skinny. I always looked at them. I’m like they’re not as fat as our cows. So I guess I like American steak. Maybe it’s because I’m fully American.

Bradley Sutton:

So Okay, all right. Well then you spent some time there, went back, and then now you went back to San Diego, near your roots, and started teaching. You were a basketball coach too, right.

Carrie:

Yeah, it was basketball. And then they had me teaching or coaching volleyball, which I knew nothing about, so I did my best with that and then said, hey, yeah, hit it over the net, so yeah. But basketball is way more up my alley, because I played in high school too.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, so now, overall, though, like from the time you graduated, until the time you stopped, how many years were you teaching?

Carrie:

Five years.

Bradley Sutton:

Five years only. Okay, so it wasn’t that long. And then what happened? What was it now into e-commerce, or

Carrie:

No, I went and I started working for one of my students’ moms. She had a skincare company and so I was doing sales for her and I started kind of training people. So the products were in spas all over the country, so I would travel around the country and train people how to use the products, how to sell the products. So that was kind of a fun part of it. But then I also had sales quotas as well and did a lot of inside sales. 

Bradley Sutton:

Okay All right. So how many? How long do you do that?

Carrie:

I did that for about five years.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, so it’s like you sticking stuff for about five, five years and then, and then are we talking to e-commerce or there’s still another.

Carrie:

No. Then I went in and I worked at clear channel. I got a job at clear channel selling outdoor advertising and

Bradley Sutton:

That’s a local, like radio stations. Okay

Carrie:

Yeah, yeah. So, I got some great concert tickets like free concert tickets, free event tickets, constantly. But I was selling billboards and there’s only a certain number of billboards in San Diego County and so most of them were usually booked for national, like Coca-Cola and things like that, and I was supposed to only do local business and at that time, digital marketing was coming up and coming and so it wasn’t really a good thing for people to do when they realized they could be doing digital marketing and advertising on Facebook. So, every I realized you know it wasn’t as good of an opportunity as I thought you know, whereas you know, more digital would have probably been a better opportunity. So, I was actually kind of miserable working on that, doing lots of cold calling, and then had another kind of short-term job helping people with student loans, and I didn’t like that at all and it was so bad I actually quit that and that’s when I started learning my e-commerce stuff. So basically, I was house sitting in Rancho, Santa Fe, which I don’t know if anyone knows that area, but it’s very, very rich area, so they had an actual theater and so what I was doing was I was watching on YouTube how to sell on Amazon and I was literally watching hours and hours and hours and taking notes because my dad had taken over a skateboard company. It was our neighbor’s skate, our neighbor’s son’s skateboard company. It was kind of failing. And so he was like, oh, we, you know, we can help out. And he had asked because my dad has a business background. And so I was like you know what? I sold way more than they’re selling in a month, like over the phone, in like a half an hour. So I can easily figure this out. So then I started just optimizing the listings. It was all in vendor and that was really tough to navigate, so I switched everything over to Seller Central.

Bradley Sutton:

What year are we talking about?

Carrie:

And this is 2015, 2016 timeframe Okay, so I switched it all over. It was 2016. Yeah, I switched it all over to Seller Central and started optimizing listings and from there I was like, well, I don’t want to go back and get a job and be miserable. So I started freelancing on FreeUp and I did pretty well on FreeUp and I got tons and tons of work just optimizing listings, and people were wanting to pay me, you know, so much money to figure out what I was doing. But literally what I was doing was fighting keywords on Helium 10 and I was writing them into the, into the actual listings I was doing. I was doing very, very good keyword research, though I would do very in-depth keyword research and I would write these listings. And I was doing nutritional supplements as well, which are really, really difficult and just tons of, tons of listings. And so I did freelancing for about, you know, two more years and that was a really cool job for me to really understand how to, you know, optimize and promote your products on Amazon.

Bradley Sutton:

And then around that time you started working for a Jungle Scout.

Carrie:

I did yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Was it like how did that happen?

Carrie:

I actually applied to the freelancer section of Jungle Scout and so that was kind of up my alley because I had been a freelancer. So what I did was I recruited. You know, if anyone did the jungle market, it was called the jungle market and I worked with a product manager named Joel. He was amazing and we basically built that market together. We built, I started learning how to recruit people all over the country. I put ads up all over the country on Indeed and other recruitment sites and found freelancers, and then we also promoted to Amazon sellers the actual services. Also had to kind of mediate a lot on that market, and so I was doing a lot of customer service. I really was. I was kind of hired to do customer service there mostly, but ended up doing a whole bunch more than I ended up, um, doing the content for their Academy and creating different kinds of masterclasses that that we did while I was there. So, yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

I remember seeing you in some videos. You know, back in those days. But then still for your side business, you were still using Helium 10.

Carrie:

I was a hundred percent. I’ve been using Helium 10 since 2017 and it’s always been the best tool. I actually learned about it because when I was freelancing, I would work for agencies and they all were like we need to be using Helium 10, so they would give me access to their accounts and at that time you had only a certain amount of uses, you know. So you had to, like make sure you didn’t use. And there was actually another tool that you literally had to pay like $2 for every reverse ASIN search.

Bradley Sutton:

Are you one of those ones who, like, would open up a whole bunch of accounts or something in different email addresses, so you could, you could take advantage of that I did.

Carrie:

I did that when I was on my own, but when I was working for these agencies, they paid for it. So, I just used their uses, but yeah, when I was on my own, yeah. I did. But yeah, there were other companies that it was like $2, I think, for 1 ASIN search. So we never used those. But we always use Helium 10. And all the agencies that I worked under, and they were doing big brands, all of them used Helium 10, all of them. So that says something you know from the beginning.

Bradley Sutton:

At what point did you and your dad open up your other? You know, like you had said, the skateboard company was kind of like you just took it over, but then you guys open up your own store from scratch right, also.

Carrie:

Skateboards aren’t really like we’re not really skaters and staff. Although we really do like that business as well. We started selling a pair of in 2018 and it was literally my dad says “Hey, why don’t we just sell these?” And I was like, okay, and that’s what we did. We got samples and started selling them. They started doing really well. We thought we were going to sell them to skaters, but then we just put them out and realized like everybody liked what we were selling. So we kind of expanded different styles and we’ve continued on with that business since then and that’s actually grown way bigger than our skateboard business.

Bradley Sutton:

Just kind of what was the peak year for just the skateboards? I don’t need to know the exact year, but like what was the gross sales, like what was the peak of that business?

Carrie:

2020 was huge for us. Like we sold out. We were sending out pallets every day of skateboards and so my dad would put together most of them. I was doing a lot of boxing and like kind of pulling stuff off the shelves to box and package, and I don’t even remember how much that, that was a big year.

Bradley Sutton:

Like $500,000, You know a million.

Carrie:

I mean, we had like 400,000 just in profit on that year. 

Bradley Sutton:

So, definitely probably over a million dollars across the platforms. Okay, what about for the apparel? What year was the best? And about how much do you do?

Carrie:

Last year I don’t know the exact number, it was over two and a half million. So yeah, we’re headed towards 3, that’s our goal.

Bradley Sutton:

Is last year was the peak year then.

Carrie:

And we had 68 year-over-year growth last year.

Bradley Sutton:

Wow now obviously you work full-time for Helium 10, and you just work on the side for that. Like is your dad doing this full-time? Is it just you two? Do you have other employees? What’s the structure like?

Carrie:

So it’s us, but we also have some freelance people helping us with different things on the business. So, but yeah, it’s mostly just me and him, we have some ideas on growing in different ways.

Bradley Sutton:

The other thing. Obviously you’re known in the world as one of the leading experts on Walmart. Approximately when did you start selling on Walmart and then what has been your peak sales on Walmart only?

Carrie:

So last year we did 98,000 in sales on Walmart. We started in 2021.

Bradley Sutton:

And did you have a SKU? Even that sold better than Amazon for a while?

Carrie:

Yeah. Still selling, the competition’s way higher on amazon. So just more visibility on Walmart, I think.

Bradley Sutton:

And then now I know you know we don’t have enough information yet, but you’re just about to get started on TikTok shop and so it’ll be interesting to see how you guys do there. Now you know, going into apparel it’s not the easiest of categories, you know. Especially, considering all the variations and the competition and you know you’ve got companies from China, Pakistan and other places you know competing, how have you guys been able to have such success in such a competitive market?

Carrie:

I well, we have. We were kind of in a niche market within apparel. But also, what I like to do is I like to even teach people how to do this and that is to look for low-hanging fruit keywords, because a lot of you know, especially in a competitive market, people are going for the same keywords and they’re going for the 100,000 search volume, 200,000 search volume or whatever it is. I like to go for the low hanging fruit and focus on specific relevant keywords, and that’s been the best for us, I think. And not only that I do every now and then I’ll still do some keyword research and I’ll find new opportunities on how to expand, because people are searching something that isn’t available. So, there’s that and then, yeah, so I think, I think that’s the main thing is just finding a niche within a competitive market that makes you stand out, and then also finding those low hanging fruit keywords.

Bradley Sutton:

Let’s flip. We’ve been talking about rainbows and unicorns here. You’ve had a few horror stories. That brings you to tears and stress you out, I know. So tell me a couple of the craziest things that have happened to you in your e-commerce journey and then how you got over it like maybe in retrospect was there anything you could have done differently to avoid that that maybe our listeners can learn from

Carrie:

I think I might have shared this one before, but it’s when we because we order skateboards and we also have wholesale orders through for skateboards, so there’s different skateboard companies that we just basically source everything for them and one year all the printed decks that we got for skateboards, they were all smeared, like the majority of them. So what we had to do was we had to take a thousand skateboard decks, sand them down by hand and then reprint with the transfers. And that was crazy, I mean, and literally like it would take 20 minutes per board to sand it down, and this is right before Christmas time, so it was 20 minutes per deck. And then also we had to go to a specialty place to do print the transverse and it like takes a certain type of person to be able to do those and that one person was not always available. That was rough.

Bradley Sutton:

What did you not have an inspection done?

Carrie:

We didn’t have an inspection done. That’s the big thing there’s the learning from that, so huge learning, because we had been working with them since, like the company, since 2007. And so we thought we kind of had it down. But now we actually have a sourcing guy, because one of our best-selling stocks went from 4.8 to 4.4.

Bradley Sutton:

Wait, what does that mean?

Carrie:

Our reviews sorry, oh, your review. Okay, 4.8 to 4.4 and we’re like, okay, this is not good. So, I used ChatGPT, I downloaded from Helium 10 all the reviews and I asked ChatGPT what was going on, sent it to the manufacturer and then we have this new sourcing guy who literally um, is there on the ground for us at the factory and um while the packaging is happening. He is basically inspecting each one as they go in, and he had a 12 defect rate on this last order, so we threw out 12 and then for our next doors. We actually have found a different factory, a better factory that’s going to do even better quality for us, and we have engineered them in a different way to kind of deal with the issues that we had. 

Bradley Sutton:

Is that in turkey that you moved it to?

Carrie:

Some are going to be in Turkey, but this guys in China.

Bradley Sutton:

Are you still going to have, like, somebody doing that level of inspection, or now you’re just going to do the regular inspection at the end of production?

Carrie:

No, we’re going to continue that kind of level.  

Bradley Sutton:

How much does that cost? I never heard that somebody doing production line inspections like that.

Carrie:

It’s about $200 a day. You can literally pay them to do even all like all parts of the whole process and have somebody there at the factory inspecting everything.

Bradley Sutton:

So then, What are they actually finding that like that 12% like what was qualifying as bad?

Carrie:

You know, just different seams were off, Like the logo was off, just the way that it was, it was there they looked wonky.

Bradley Sutton:

Interesting, interesting, okay, so there’s one nightmare of what happens when you don’t do inspection, as you guys just see. I mean, you know inspections can be from a hundred for just the final one, or it could be a little bit more, but even what she’s talking about is $200. Wouldn’t you guys like to pay that much more than having to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars on the flip side for having to throw away stuff or for having to do special runs?

Carrie:

Another thing I can tell you that they found too is we were told by the manufacturer we were getting Grade A yarn. Okay, so we were paying for and expecting to get Grade A yarn. Now he went in and did an inspection, took photos and it was Grade C yarn that they were using. So that was another kind of call out that like they basically were lying to us about the quality that we were paying for. So that’s the good thing about having somebody on the ground and making sure that things are what they should be.

Bradley Sutton:

What was another terrible experience that you had? We’re not trying to scare people but hey, we keep it real here. And the fact is that you guys heard what she’s accomplished, and that last year was her biggest year yet, so it’s obviously these aren’t things that completely broke their company. You know, she was still able to persevere, but it’s still important that we know what are some of the dangers out there. So what’s another crazy thing that happened to you?

Carrie:

Another product that was like shipped over here and we didn’t do the inspection, then it was completely, completely wrong. So inspections are probably the biggest learning.

Bradley Sutton:

It took you two times to learn the rest of you guys out there. Hopefully it takes you zero times. We’ll be just listening to this and learn the importance.

Carrie:

I think the hard part is what, for us, was like, okay, they’ve already. We did actually have an inspection, but it was only like on a portion of it and it was like, okay, well, what do we do with an entire order? That is wrong and we’ve already paid for all the materials and everything. So I don’t know. I think having somebody all of the whole process is the best idea.

Bradley Sutton:

Didn’t your account get hacked or something like that?

Carrie:

Oh yeah, I forgot about that one, oh man.

Bradley Sutton:

She’s like I’m bringing up bad memories where she had blocked that memory you know it’s like that didn’t even happen, but now I’m resurrecting some buried memories here. What happened there?

Carrie:

There was somebody who basically was able to hack into our account. And they were into Seller Central, and they basically stole our entire payout. So, they changed, they were able to change the bank account information without us knowing or getting a notice, and they were able to steal our entire payout. And we knew that because we’re on payout day, we’re like what’s? We don’t see a deposit, and so it was pretty tragic.

Bradley Sutton:

Like five figures right Definitely.

Carrie:

Yeah, Five figures it was. We didn’t get it back.

Bradley Sutton:

And so did you ever find out how that even happened? Did you not have, like, was it a two-step that you didn’t have two-step on, or was it a VA, or like what?

Carrie:

Well, we don’t know exactly how it happened, but one of the ways it could potentially happen is, if you actually say you click on a link on your phone through an email or a text, they can basically see everything on your phone, so they could have potentially seen the two-step URL for, or two-step sorry code for, using your phone number. So, we actually have it on an app now, so you can actually use an app for your two-step, and that seems to be working okay. I know, like they, I’m hoping Amazon does a bit more for security, like there’s these things called YubiKeys that you can actually buy, that you have to have a physical key with you in order to like get access to any logins, and so that is actually an extra layer of protection, but they don’t offer that, and I’m hoping they do soon, because that that’s pretty bad. So what you can do now to avoid that, though, is you can get paid daily. You can you basically go in and just say pay me now and you can just basically get your payouts on the daily instead of every two weeks, so that, if something like that were to happen, it wouldn’t be as painful, as you know, as maybe a two week period?

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, did you have something where, like Amazon screwed up all your variations, or something like that?

Carrie:

Oh yeah, that happens all the time.

Bradley Sutton:

So, first of all explain what it is and then how you fix it?

Carrie:

So, this this year oh man, this is another painful one.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, she’s gonna be depressed the rest of the day. She’s not gonna do any work for Helium for the rest of the day, because all these memories come back. She’s, I can’t do anything, Bradley, anymore. I’m sorry, go ahead.

Carrie:

So, there is a word that is technically, they kind of flag it, and it’s not an illegal word, but it’s one that they flag because you have to have it paired with something else. However, our brand name has this word in it, and so we’ve gotten approval for this particular phrase that we use. Axnd so what happened is there is AI, there’s AI machines, right, that they basically are bots that go in and flag your listing based on this word, and so we had a majority of our listings get taken down and we couldn’t figure out, like, how to get things back up, and we ended up having to delete all of the A plus content and having to redo all of that, re-upload all the listings over again, like just constantly re-upload them with new content, and we ended up having to pay thousands of dollars for some help from a service that is going you know that basically gave us a contact information of somebody that could help us to figure out what was going on, and then, after that, we got everything back up, and then they went back down again, and then it was like I’m talking like a two month period, so we did lose a lot of sales this year for that reason. So, it was like back down again. And then we still have some that kind of go down every now and then but we’re able to get it up. And then actually one guy that works there, he says he actually warned us about one, so we were able to like fix that one pretty quickly. But it’s been kind of rough on that, on that.

Bradley Sutton:

So for that. For that thing, unlike the other stuff that you mentioned, there’s almost no preventative measure measures, because it’s just a random thing that happens with Amazon and you just I guess maybe the learning from this is you got to know how to do flat files pretty fast because that’s kind of like the only way to get to get it fixed right.   

Carrie:

Yeah, flat files, but then even the flat files didn’t work. So, we had to pay for help and the right contact. So sometimes you have to do that um. And then I know the other one was like the one that came was plants, we got all those flags and then we were just like this product is not a plant, please remove this. You know, and it was a very simple message we wrote and then it was fine and obviously I think they lifted it for everyone. But yeah, so there it’s not. I always say to people that it’s not easy, but it’s worth it. So, nothing really cool that you ever do in life, or really big, is ever going to be easy. I think if it’s that’s just the way life is, and so you’re going to have to kind of pivot, especially when you’re doing entrepreneurship you’ve got to roll with the punches, you’ve got to figure it out. I’m lucky cause I work with my dad, and so when I’m freaking out, he’s more calm and works on the solutions, whereas I might panic a bit. So, yeah, he’s very, very good to work with.

Bradley Sutton:

Cool Now, all right. Enough negative stories here. What was like a pleasant surprise or so, like super successful Prime Day, or like you guys did something new and it just like went amazing. Or amazing Black Friday. Like what’s a cool story about one of your businesses that you can share

Carrie:

I mean obviously 2020 was probably our biggest because everybody was wanting to do outdoor sports and so that was a big, big year for us in terms of outdoor. But I think what I always like to tell people is that the consistency is where you win, and it’s not necessarily on the big, big days like we have big days like I think, like 16 000 has been our highest like Prime Day and the win for us is being consistent and consistently growing sales and it’s not. I know I know people are like, oh, I saw this person. They started selling it in three months they sold, you know, five million dollars and that’s, that’s not the, the normal story, and so maybe I’m kind of representative of the majority of people that it’s like it’s. There’s nothing really exciting other than consistency and growth by consistency. It’s like the habits that book adtomic, adtomic habits where it says you know you just get go one percent off, then you’re gonna go. If you get away from your habits, you’re gonna go way off, but if you can say, going here and there and here and there. You know those consistent habits of making sure that everything’s going well and continuing to add more products, being innovative, making sure that your product is high, the highest quality possible. All those things.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. So, those are some broad, important strategies I think everybody should benefit from. Now you had referenced, like there might be some specific strategies that you’re doing either on Amazon and or Walmart that especially have helped you get ahead. Go ahead and let’s take a couple of minutes and talk about some of those unique strategies that you think you might have.

Carrie:

Well, a strategy I don’t know, this isn’t one on there, but something we want to do in the next year or so, or we’re working on it now, trying to figure out how to do it is doing our own manufacturing here in the US, so that will help us with the quality control, and I think that would be. That’ll be really a cool thing, especially with things going on in the world. You know, I always kind of get anxious if there’s something going on politically in the world, like what about our order? We got to like keep our orders flowing, and so we were looking at Turkey as well to kind of diversify. But then we just ultimately think that having our own manufacturing here is going to be the best way to have the best quality, the best of everything, and to kind of be able to continue doing our business no matter what happens.

Bradley Sutton:

Controlling the supply chain, and especially now with all the fees and things like that, which let me just ask you, before you get back to your own strategies, is what are you doing differently, if anything, since the new fees came along, like inbound fees and low inventory fees? Is it just a hundred percent business as usual, or you find yourself doing different strategies now to try and avoid some of those fees?

Carrie:

My dad really does a good job of maintaining the right amount of inventory like the perfect amount of inventory has calculations within a spreadsheet, so he basically its color codes when it gets to a certain level, and so then he can send in more and make sure that we don’t get too low. However, we have some styles that are very popular and so we’ve actually run out. So we have to do more orders for those and it just kind of the way it is and there’s nothing we can do about it. And so, we’re just kind of rolling with it with that. But in terms of maintaining the inventory, my dad has it all in a system, in a spreadsheet, where he basically has the formulas to make sure that we don’t go too low.

Bradley Sutton:

What are some other either Helium 10 or just general Amazon or Walmart strategies that are somewhat unique to you guys, you think.

Carrie:

I know its funny because I think some of my stuff isn’t unique, but everyone’s like oh, that’s, that’s a great strategy. When I say it, I’m like I thought everyone did that. So I have to kind of think about this. But I think one of the things that sets us apart is that I, when I’ve created our listings, or whenever I create our photos, I think about what are the main benefits of the product, the main selling points of it, and I realized this isn’t something that everyone can easily do, and so the way I kind of have been teaching it is that you can take your competitors listing, download their reviews, download their best reviews there’s 5-star reviews and say ask ChatGPT, like, what do people like most about this product? What are the benefits of this product according to reviews? What do people you know like basically ask a bunch of questions to ChatGPT and you’ll get a bunch of kind of selling points and you’ll kind of see a trend of like the top selling points or top benefits of your product. And that’s what you want to focus on is like you know, What’s in it for the customer? You’ve got to kind of appeal to their emotions. How’s it going to make their life better, easier? Are they going to be more beautiful? Are they going to you know? It sounds pretty basic but I’ve actually been doing some looking at different listings. People have been asking me hey, can you take a look at my listing? And when I look at the listing I’m like, well, these aren’t. These are not actually selling points or benefits. Like, these are features of the product. Right, you can always put the features in right later on, but how are you appealing to the person when you were? If you’re telling somebody about your product, are you being like oh hey, the dimensions are 14 by 14. Like that’s, that’s like an afterthought, right? However, you would even just sell to a person, like talking face to face. That’s how you’re going to do that. Your first image shouldn’t be a dimension photo. It should be a selling point, your main, like best selling point, main benefit in that first image. So, I think that’s a huge thing that a lot of people are kind of missing, and I only noticed that because I’ve been doing just a lot of just searching even big brands. Like I was looking at an espresso machine and it was, like you know, I think one of the benefits was like or it was one of the one of the one of the bullet points was like, uh, steady stream of water, and I’m like I don’t care about. Like, what does that even mean? You know? Like you have to put it in layman’s terms, what is the person? What does that mean to the person? Like, is it going to be a more even flavored coffee? Is it going to be the perfect blend of coffee and water? What? What is? What is it that’s in it for the customer? Not like, you know, oh, it has this temperature and  does it steam the milk for you? Is it? Does it make a perfect foam for you? Like, all these kinds of things even big brands aren’t doing, and I, I see it all over the place, and I actually, now that I’m shopping, I’ll always look and be like trying to see what the seller actually is trying to portray. And then I look at the reviews and kind of see what actually customers are saying, cause I usually look at the reviews mostly when I buy something, but I think that’s a big thing and I didn’t realize that maybe I have that because I was in sales for so long, and so when you’re in sales, you’ve got to within the first few seconds you catch their attention and you know that’s the same thing. You got to within that first image, first bullet. You’ve got to say what is in it for that customer. How are you appealing to them? Even a video, like a video ad, bang, hit them with the first selling point, even if it’s a slideshow, like your first slide should be the best, best thing about your product. And so, just like our YouTube videos, when we do our YouTube videos, we can see the actual data. People will not continue watching our videos if it’s like not, if we don’t catch their attention within the first six, six seconds. Right, is that kind of the data? So, we’ve got to think about that, and so I think that sets me up, sets us apart. So that’s a big strategy that you know, I think is important. And then also just kind of keeping up to date with things that are important, like I know AI, like Rufus, is coming out with different ways to search. So how are we pivoting and answering those questions? So, maybe going to things like answer the public and asking about your product. Like what are people searching for in regard to your product? You can see, when you go to answer the public, like a whole list of questions that people are asking about your product. Make sure that a lot of the main ones are answered in your actual listing, because those are going to be questions that people are going to ask when they’re doing, you know, some searches. Maybe think about the Q and a section a little bit differently answering with videos, answering with more details that you can understand. That maybe would teach the AI more about what your product is, but I think that’s a big one. I also I’m not spending tons and tons of money on things that are not important Like, for example, video ads. I literally made slideshows with Canva and Biteable are the two that I used. These two just basically Canva to kind of make the slide and then I put together in a slideshow with Biteable. But our video ads convert very well and there’s they’re the most basic. Like people would laugh if they saw them. They’re like what is this Cause? You see all these other brands putting on these productions and we did have a you know somebody do like it was like $1,500 for one video and that’s just not sustainable and you’ve got to kind of AB test. So think of ways that you can do things that are going to make an impact, that you can kind of AB test quickly and and kind of go that way. That’s that’s what I think. I think obviously you’re going to want to spend your money in important ways, like making sure the quality is the best, but then other ways you can save money by not, you know, spending thousands of dollars on videos when you can literally make a slideshow. That’s going to be potentially even more impactful.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, and the last couple of minutes here. Favorite Helium 10 tool, since you’ve been using it even longer than me.

Carrie:

Everyone says Cerebro and I’m also probably going to say Cerebro, but there’s a specific spot in Cerebro that I love, and you know which one of this is that it’s my favorite and it’s the historical trend, because I always was like, oh man, it would be so cool if I go back, like last Christmas, and see what people were searching for my products, so we can kind of capitalize on those keywords. So that’s another kind of strategy. I think that’s really a good, helpful one is, even if your product isn’t seasonal, you’re going to find seasonal keywords for your product. By going back in history, you can look at your competitors, see where they were ranking for a different seasonal keywords. You can look at yourself where you were ranking and you can see the search volume. You can see certain search volumes, like there may be 800 or less in august and they spiked to 70 000 in december. So you can see all that detail with historical trend. And I’ve talked to a lot of people too and they’re like that is the biggest money maker for us. Is that that tool? It’s, it’s worth so much gold. And if you haven’t tried it out, you’re missing out, because I think that’s the best one. I mean there’s other things like I really like the media comparison in our listing analyzer because it shows you all in one spot where you can compare your images to all your competitors. It’ll be like basically stacked on top of each other, whereas I used to literally go listing by listing and look at my competitors, what they were doing with their images, and now you can just literally see it all in one. And then another thing that I love too, that I find is really exciting, is our Amazon Brand Analytics top search terms in Black Box. So basically, you know, before I remember I was a Billion Dollar Seller, so I mean everyone was like, oh, we can pull our money together and get developers that we can download all these search terms every week and then filter through it. I mean it’s like it’s like 2 million lines on an Excel spreadsheet, so you, it’s really hard to filter through that, that data. So now Helium 10 literally, just you can, you can connect If you have brand analytics through an API. You can basically filter through the brand analytics data on Helium 10, easily sort through and find trending keywords. You can see the top clicked and top converted for those keywords, and I think that’s another really cool tool cause I’ll look at that to see. I kind of look at my competitors a bit more with that to see what’s going on with like any keywords there. I also look at Cerebro to see where I’m. I’m kind of behind with specific competitors but I would say yeah, I would say those are my favorite. I know you said one, but those like that’s, I love pretty much all of them. But you know I could keep going. But yeah, those are some of my favorites.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. Well, Carrie, thank you so much for joining us, sharing us your your highs and your lows throughout your e-commerce career. It’s a pleasure working with you and hopefully we’ll be here co-workers for a long time. Yes, and thank you for making it so I don’t have to host every podcast in the old days, as well. 

Carrie:

Yes. I’m happy.

Bradley Sutton:

Maybe we’ll catch up with you and get you on the other side of the camera and microphone here, maybe next year, and see how your TikTok shop or other e-commerce journeys are going.

Carrie:

Yes, that sounds awesome.

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