Helium 10 Buzz 4/13/22: Etsy Seller Strike, The New Market Tracker 360, And Learning About Product Inserts

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

Walmart has changed its ads, serving criteria for sponsored product campaigns. All ads will now qualify for in-grid placements based on the advertised items, contextual relevancy, customer intent, historical performance, and other factors.

The fight between sellers and Etsy has gone public, The Wall Street Journal reported on April 11, as sellers are frustrated by the fees charged by the eCommerce company.
https://www.pymnts.com/news/ecommerce/2022/etsy-sellers-strike-as-craft-ecommerce-site-raises-fees/

Effective April 11th, 2022, Amazon made a signature confirmation recommendation for orders with a high risk of being reported as no not received or lost. This service helps sellers reduce the number of refunds and claims for lost orders.

We also speak with Helium 10’s product manager, Alex Czechowski, to talk about an upcoming new tool, Market Tracker 360. How is it different from the current Market Tracker tool? The said tool is an Amazon marketplace market analytics tool that allows you to understand better how your products or brands are performing against your competitor’s products or brand and figure out what actions you can take to perform better than your competitors.

Helium 10’s Brand Evangelist, Lem Turner, closes out the episode with the Pro Training tip of the week to talk all about product inserts inside Helium 10’s Portals tool

In this week’s episode of the Helium 10 Weekly Buzz, Carrie Talks about:

• 01:00 – Updates To Walmart PPC
• 01:50 – Etsy Sellers Strike As Etsy Raises Fees
• 02:30 – Amazon Introduces Signature Confirmation
• 03:30 – Introducing Market Tracker 360
• 07:30 – Pro Training Tip: Introduction To Product Inserts
• 12:15 – Join The Winning With Walmart Group

Transcript

Carrie Miller:

Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of Helium 10’s Weekly Buzz. My name is Carrie Miller, and this is the show where you get familiar with the latest news in the Amazon and e-commerce space, interview people in the industry that you need to hear from, and provide a training tip of the week that will give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the Amazon, Walmart and e-commerce world. So let’s go ahead and see what’s buzzing this week today. We’re gonna talk about some amazing updates to Walmart PPC that are definitely a game changer for any Walmart seller. We’ll also talk about how Etsy sellers have gone on strike, as a result of some higher fees. And we’ll finally talk about Amazon implementing signatures for high value orders to prevent fraudulent return. So let’s go ahead and get into our first story.

Carrie Miller:

Walmart has changed their ads, serving criteria for sponsored product campaigns. All ads will now qualify for in-grid placements based on the advertised items, contextual relevancy, customer intent, historical performance, and other factors. So previously items were only eligible to serve ads iff they were actually organically ranked in spots, one to 28 for a certain keywords ads previous were also only allowed to appear in a slot equal to higher than its organic rank. So if you were ranked 50, you could only advertise as high as the spot of 50. So now a product’s ad can appear in a slot equal to higher than or lower than its organic ranking spot. And as a result of these changes, you also can now see your product in a sponsored slot and an organic slot. Previously you could only see one or the other, so that’s pretty exciting news.

Carrie Miller:

And in our next headline, Etsy sellers are currently on strike. So thousands of sellers organized in Reddit forums to go on strike over transaction fee increases that went from 5% to 6.5%. Sellers are striking by either putting their shop on vacation mode for the week or posting images in their storefront saying that they oppose these fees. Sellers on strike are asking for the fee increase to be canceled and for sellers to be able to opt-out of offsite ads. So the offsite ads fee is actually an extra 12% for any sellers who sell more than 10,000 to dollars a year on Etsy. They don’t have any say where these ads are placed or anything like that. And they want the option to opt-out of that as well. So we’ll have to keep an eye on that. Finally effective April 11th, 2022, Amazon made a signature confirmation recommendation for orders with high risk of being reported as no not received or lost. This service helps sellers reduce the number of refunds and claims for lost orders.

Carrie Miller:

Signature confirmation actually can reduce reported lost orders by an estimated 35%. And the way that this service works is the system actually identifies high risk orders and it’ll flag these orders under the order status. So they’re basically fulfilled by merchant orders on the managed orders page, and it will say signature confirmation recommended. So if a seller opts for the signature confirmation, it will be an additional cost to the seller of around three to $6 per order. So any refunds or claims granted by Amazon without the seller’s involvement who also have the signature confirmation will actually be eligible for appeals. So that’s definitely some really good news for sellers. If you have any issues with packages constantly being flagged as lost by customers. And up next, we have a very special guest who is a Product Manager here at Helium 10, and his name is Alex Czechowski. So I’m gonna go ahead and welcome Alex to the show. Hey Alex.

Alex:

Hey Carrie.

Carrie Miller:

Welcome. Thanks for coming back on the show and we have some exciting things to talk about today. So I wanted to just ask you some questions about our Market Tracker 360. So first of all, what is our Market Tracker 360?

Alex:

Yeah, so Market Tracker 360 is an Amazon marketplace market analytics tool that allows you to better understand how your products or brands are performing against your competitor’s products or brand and figure out what actions you can take to then beat out those competitors.

Carrie Miller:

Awesome. That sounds a little bit similar to the Market Tracker tool that we actually have in helium 10. So how is Market Tracker 360 different from that tool?

Alex:

So it is similar in some sense and not only just in the name Market Tracker was the existing tool Market Tracker 360 is, is the next phase of that. But there’s a lot of nuanced differences that we are creating in Market Tracker 360. So we’ll start with the market creation. So if, if you’re familiar with Market Tracker you’ll understand what I’m talking about. If you, if you’re not going check out and see what kind of things what kind of value you can get from Market Tracker, but in the creation process, typically you use ASINs or keywords to create and define what your market should look like. And what we do in Market Tracker 360 is actually help you identify what those keywords should be, or even the ASINs as well. So we, we pull different data from Helium 10.

Alex:

If you’re familiar with magnet and Cerebra, we can suggest different keywords. We can pull from your list of products or your list of keywords and, and actually help you create the right market that you want to view for your products. And then we also give you a market composition that we preview in the market creation and in your market that actually gives you a breakdown of what your market’s going to look like in terms of categories, subcategories, products, brands, things of that nature as well. So it gives you a better feedback loop to understand, am I creating the right market and am I viewing it the right way?

Carrie Miller:

Oh, wow. That’s extremely exciting. I am excited to use that. And I think a lot of sellers probably are very excited too because it’ll give you just a good view of all the different holes and ways that you can increase your sales. So if someone’s interested, how can they get more information? What, what should they do next?

Alex:

Yeah, so we are currently running a closed beta for the product. We’ve selected 25 expert sellers or companies that are trying out the product. And we’ll be doing that for a few months so that we can perfect the Market Tracker 360, make sure it checks all the boxes, does all the things that you would like to do for when it is ready for you to use. So if you are interested in getting involved and you wanna learn more, talk to someone at helium 10 about how you can get access to the tool. We’ll put a link on the screen there and we’ll put it in the show notes too. You can follow that and get in touch with someone at Helium 10 and then hopefully within the next few months, we’ll have it available for you to actually get your hands on it. Start using the tool, and start getting value from Market Tracker 360.

Carrie Miller:

That’s awesome. Yeah. So go ahead and just go to that link, if you’re interested in it, definitely gonna be a game changer, I think for a lot of sellers. So thank you so much for coming on to talk about Market Tracker 360. We appreciate it and we’ll see you later. All right. So now it’s time actually for our tip of the week, which is actually about Product Inserts, and Product Inserts, I think are actually overlooked by a lot of seller. And I think that a lot of people could be leaving money on the table by just not doing Product Inserts. So let’s go over to Lem who is gonna talk more into detail about how to create and use Product Inserts.

Lem:

This video we’re gonna be getting into a quick overview of Product Inserts. We’re gonna be going into our templates tab here within portals. You can see on the left side of our screen, we’re gonna click on templates here. And what we’re doing in this video is just to go over a quick overview of what our Product Inserts and why are they important in the next video, we’re gonna get into how you go about creating a Product Insert and the strategies behind it. But right now we’re just trying to get into purely the question of what is a Product Insert well, to speak broadly, a proc insert. Let’s go into this one. Let’s look at the preview here. A proc insert is exactly as it, as it sounds. It’s an insert that you put into your packaging for a product. So when a customer receives a product, you’re gonna get a hundred percent open rate in terms of delivering a message to your customers when putting a Product Insert in there.

Lem:

So with that, there’s a ton of strategies that you can utilize in order to increase reviews in order to have better customer service and just provide a overall better experience for your customers, their strategies to grow your social media or off of Amazon platform presences, there’s all sorts of strategies that are present within this proc insert strategy. So that’s what essentially a Product Insert is here. So we have tons of templates available for you, but let’s get into some of the standard ones. We have claim coupon, code, social media, engagement, warranty, activation, and instructions for the sake of this video, working into warranty activation, cause that’s the most common of them all. So why would I want to want to offer a warranty for a customer? Well, the purpose of this is because you’re trying to get information. You’re gonna have a QR code here probably that you can link to if you wanna get into more QR codes and understand that we have separate QR codes, videos for you to look at.

Lem:

So be sure to check those out. But really if, when you’re putting in a Product Insert, if you’re offering a warranty, you’re trying to just get their email information, which is super helpful for when you have upcoming product launches or things of that nature. The second most popular one is instructions. Okay. If you have a complicated product, you don’t want to have higher return rates or higher refund rates because the consumer doesn’t understand how to utilize the product. You wanna make sure that they understand how to use the product. So here we have an example of instructions that you put imagery in there. And Amazon completely allows this. Now, one of the big questions around Product Inserts is, is this against Amazon’s terms of service? Absolutely not. It is not against Amazon’s terms of service. It’s a misleading question. People often assume that it is, but here’s the big kicker is of what is against Amazon’s terms of service is ensuring that your language is improper, right?

Lem:

Cause we wanna make sure that you don’t have any improper language of we’ll give you a free gift, if you give us five star review. No, that’s not it at all. And that’s one of the main purposes with pros inserts is to increase reviews, right? Of saying, Hey, thank you so much for opening this product. Like let’s even look at one right now let’s. So while this is something that’s specifically for social media, you can put in different orientations or different sizes and things of that nature, depending on the size of your Product Insert. One of the biggest things that you can do with your Product Insert is put a request for reviews, right? You can have the QR code linked to a portal that will go directly to them, be able to leave you a product review or any seller feedback.

Lem:

But one of the biggest things that we need to make sure of and where customers do get in trouble for being against Amazon’s terms service is saying specific language that looks like they are trying to manipulate reviews by saying things of like, if you had a positive experience, please leave us a review. If you had a negative experience, please contact us. Cuz you’re essentially diverting people who have had a negative experience to contact you rather than leave your review. Best things you want to do. If you want to stay with an Amazon’s terms to service is to just be straightforward and say, please leave us your honest opinion about our product. And we’d really appreciate it. That’s it? Leave it that simple. Leave it that quick, straight to the point, link to your product review. You can even do the same type of language for seller feedback.

Lem:

You can put that in your product, insert along with any social media tags or anything like that, or even have the Product Insert, just be solely for developing reviews and dollar feedback, and you’re gonna see massive growth and be within Amazon’s terms of service, cuz it will be not be a problem whatsoever, but you do wanna keep in mind that you wanna put it in your packaging, cuz Amazon’s not gonna do it on your behalf. So that’s one, one thing to go, but that’s it for this video of an overview of what Product Inserts are and what they can do for your business.

Carrie Miller:

All right. So if you haven’t started utilizing Product Inserts, I highly recommend going into Helium 10 and finding, and basically setting up a Product Insert. You can do that. It is available in Helium 10, so don’t delay on that because it’s definitely something that could help increase your business and your customer base. Also, before we end, I wanted to invite you all to join our Winning with Walmart group. So I actually go live every Wednesday in the Winning with Walmart group on Facebook. And I answer any questions that you have. So if you are interested in selling on Walmart or you are already selling on Walmart, it’s a great community where you can ask questions or help support each other in the Walmart selling journey. So definitely go and check out that Facebook group, if you haven’t, and join it and I’ll see you on the live later on today. But that is all we have today on the Weekly Buzz. So thank you so much for joining and we’ll see you on the next buzz. Bye.

Enjoy this episode? Be sure to check out our previous episodes for even more content to propel you to Amazon FBA Seller success! And don’t forget to “Like” our Facebook page and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to our podcast.

Get snippets from all episodes by following Bradley on Instagram at @SeriousSellersPodcast

Want to absolutely start crushing it on Amazon? Here are few carefully curated resources to get you started:

• Freedom Ticket: Taught by Amazon thought leader Kevin King, get A-Z Amazon strategies and techniques for establishing and solidifying your business.
• Helium 10: 30+ software tools to boost your entire sales pipeline from product research to customer communication and Amazon refund automation. Make running a successful Amazon or Walmart business easier with better data and insights. See what our customers have to say.
• Helium 10 Chrome Extension: Verify your Amazon product idea and validate how lucrative it can be with over a dozen data metrics and profitability estimation.
• SellerTrademarks.com: Trademarks are vital for protecting your Amazon brand from hijackers, and sellertrademarks.com provides a streamlined process for helping you get one.