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#259 – The Unsexy Tasks of Amazon – Flat Files, Reserve Inventory, and Climate Badges

When you start to think about what it takes to make it in e-commerce, it’s easy to forget the little, decidedly unglamorous aspects of business. Filling out seemingly endless spreadsheets and flat files are just one of those necessary (yet effective) evils. 

Today on the Serious Sellers Podcast, Helium 10’s Director of Training and Chief Evangelist, Bradley Sutton welcomes Vanessa Hung, an Amazon seller, E-Commerce Manager, and Consultant. Vanessa is here today to make sure that you don’t overlook one of the very best ways to make yourself profitable. Vanessa says that when it comes to the (sometimes frightening) world of spread sheets and Amazon flat files, there’s nothing to be afraid of.

In this episode, Vanessa shows how to use Amazon flat files to get a leg up on the competition and set your product apart. She also talks about how to avoid falling into the Amazon “pesticide” trap and why the Climate Friendly Badge might just be a good idea.

Who doesn’t want a head start on the competition?

In episode 259 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Vanessa discuss:

  • 02:30 – Vanessa’s E-Commerce Journey
  • 05:10 – Selling on Amazon Gives Vanessa a True Sense of the Process 
  • 08:00 – The Benefits of Flat Files
  • 12:30 – Customizing Flat Files
  • 14:30 – How to Properly Upload a Flat File
  • 17:30 – Flat File First Steps
  • 22:00 – Amazon, Pesticides, and Keywords
  • 28:20 – Are There Real Benefits to Amazon’s Climate Friendly Initiative?
  • 31:00 – How to Get the Amazon Climate Friendly Badge
  • 33:00 – Freeing Up Your “Amazon Reserve Inventory”
  • 34:45 – The Un-Sexy Side of Amazon
  • 36:00 – How to Find Out More About Vanessa 

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 iTunesGoogle 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: On today’s episode, we’re going to talk about a lot of the unsexy parts of Amazon. However, these shouldn’t be overlooked since they can impact your business in a big way. Things such as your IPI score, flat files, reserve inventory, and more. 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 or serious sellers of any level in the Amazon world. We’ve got a serious seller here from Florida. Vanessa, how’s it going?

Vanessa: Hi, Bradley. Good. How about you? Thank you for inviting me.

Bradley Sutton: Thank you for coming on. We’ve known each other on Clubhouse and some of these other apps and I met you for the first time, I believe in person when I saw you there in Florida a few weeks ago. And so, [speaks in Spanish]. You’re from Venezuela?

Vanessa: Yeah. I’m from Venezuela.

Bradley Sutton: Now your last name, is that of Venezuelan last name?

Vanessa: No, that’s a Chinese last name.

Bradley Sutton: So, are you like half or?

Vanessa: Well, my great-granddad was Chinese.

Bradley Sutton: Cool. Okay. So, is there a Chinese community there in Venezuela?

Vanessa: Yeah, when my dad came to Venezuela, it was like a huge migration from China when they were and stuff like that. But recently, because Venezuela is between a lot of deals with China, the population of Chinese people just grew because of that. You see like Chinese town and places like that.

Bradley Sutton: Yeah. Okay, cool. Did you ever learn any Chinese growing up at all?

Vanessa: No. No, in my house we didn’t speak Chinese. Like my grandfather didn’t learn from his dad, so yeah. It didn’t pass on.

Bradley Sutton: Similar to me. I mean even less. My great grandfather, being half Filipino, I never really learned Tagalog growing up, but anyways, what we’re here to talk about is kind of like your Amazon journey. So did you ever like, just start selling on Amazon yourself or were you kind of like me and you started off almost as a consultant?

Vanessa: I’m selling right now, but I started as an e-commerce manager for our company that had retail stores.

Bradley Sutton: How long ago was this?

Vanessa: Three years.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. So, recently.

Vanessa: Yes. So, that was late 2017.

Bradley Sutton: They had a company and then you were hired to help with e-commerce and then part of the e-commerce was, Hey, you need to know what’s going on on Amazon.

Vanessa: Yeah. So, basically they didn’t have any presence on e-commerce and they chose to go to Amazon. They sell branded products. So they’re all like a retail store. They don’t have their own brands. So they all of a sudden saw the opportunity to go and they didn’t know anything about it. I may have said that I know something, so they were like, okay, you’re hired. I started that way. We started from scratch, like from day zero from opening the account to lease the first product and then growing the catalog to like thousands of SKUs and yeah, that’s how I learned everything. And I was with them full time, their e-commerce manager for a year and a half. And then after that I started consulting other sellers, like, but just like a side hustle, kind of helping friends and stuff like that. But my agency now, online seller solutions became like a real thing on something completely separate from the other job that I had just last year.

Bradley Sutton: Cool. So, your journey into Amazon is somewhat similar to mine. I was working for a company that was just selling on Amazon, but I learned a little bit there, but mainly learned on my own as well, and then started my own thing actually later. So how long have you just yourself been selling your own products on Amazon?

Vanessa: In 2019? I launched a PL brand with a partner and that was a complete failure. We did everything wrong from a PL’s perspective, there were a lot of issues with production and manufacturing, which is not my strong suit. So yeah, after that, we recovered from the loss and launched again in October last year with a different brand, a different product. And we’re selling that. It’s not at this moment, it’s not my main focus. That’s just running and it’s growing organically very slowly. But yes, what I’m doing now. It’s more like the agency part on consulting other stuff.

Bradley Sutton: Yeah. But I mean, I’m sure you could see the advantage of doing it yourself? I mean, like for me, that’s why I actually started later, I was a consultant obviously, but as a consultant, I was actually doing things for people. So like I was still in the game, even though I wasn’t necessarily selling for myself. But then, when I came here to Helium 10, I’m like I had to stop consulting because I was kind of full-time helium 10. And I was like, wait a minute, like mine, if I just stop and I’m not in the game, my Amazon knowledge is going to get out of date really fast because of how fast things changed. That’s when I actually started. So like, I’m sure you can see the advantage of as you’re, for the agency, like being in the game herself, it probably helps you because you’re going to come across things that they’re going to come across eventually, your clients, right?

Vanessa: Yeah, totally. Actually, I can say that I’m not that interested in my account because I don’t have enough problems there. So what I love is solving problems for sellers. So, I get clients that have problems for every thing that you can imagine, like different stuff. So when you get to consult people and you get to see many different accounts, different problems, different categories, you really get to know what Amazon is.

Bradley Sutton: Today, I wanted to talk a lot about, you know, strategy and things, but I think I saw it in your Instagram once or something, how you described some of your specialties as the unsexy parts of Amazon or something like that, right?

Vanessa: Yes.

Bradley Sutton: So, the very first thing it seems like, I think it might be your favorite thing to ever talk about. And it’s funny because that’s the one thing that I absolutely hate and I don’t really want to have to deal with. Do you know what I’m about to say?

Vanessa: Flat files.

Bradley Sutton: Flat files, yes. I hate flat files. I’ve never, I’ve used it a couple of times, like for–I mean, I guess you can consider a flat file, not the flat file for a listing, but like on the ones where I have to do it, like where I’m activating a subscribe and save, or I am uploading a whole list of orders to do for multi-channel fulfillment, like a hundred different orders. I’m not going to go one by one. Okay. I can download a CSV file and follow the instructions. But then the one thing I have just avoided, like COVID is the old phrases avoided, like the plague. But I think we can say avoided, like COVID is the flat files for like listings. But if you were to say, I know there’s a lot of reasons to use it, but what would you say is the number one reason or advantage of using flat files when you’re uploading a new or editing an existing listing?

Vanessa: It’s the control that flat files give you. It’s not only that you can change stuff, but when you make changes with a flat file, those changes tend to be more powerful in a sense. So, see it this way then, and I just explained this to somebody like, a seller that doesn’t know how flat files it’s like when a kid doesn’t want to eat broccoli when they are little, but then when they grow up, they see like, oh, broccoli is healthy. So I’m going to be healthy. I’m going to eat broccoli and they start eating greens, right? So it’s the same way. Once you start using a kind of understanding of the way flat files work, that completely changed the game for catalog management. Honestly, like I can say that in the catalog side of Amazon, every single problem can be solved with a flat file and you cannot solve it. At least having the flat file will help seller support to solve it faster. So, it’s extremely powerful. It’s a tool that is available to anybody. You don’t– you honestly don’t need to do a course or anything really special, just like common sense and following the instructions. Yes, it has problems, but solving problems through flat files gives you a much broader perspective on what is the catalog? And when people tell me like, oh, I have never heard of templates. I have never heard of flat files, they’re leaving an opportunity there in the table to put more information in their listings and prevent and protect themselves from hijackers to come in and change stuff. And that’s where I see flat files play a huge role.

Bradley Sutton: How is that? How does doing a flat file protect you from hijackers more than if you’re just editing your listing in Seller central?

Vanessa: Okay. So look, a category flat file. It has a huge XL file with a lot of columns, with a lot of fields with which you need to input information. So, you see there, and there are maybe a hundred different fields that you need to input for one product. When you go to Seller central, you only see their required fields that you need to input. Like, for example, in the vinyl leaf, of course, that’s required every time. And maybe in compliance, you have something there. In the keywords, you have some fields, but what is cool about flat files is that what we see in the backend of a listing, that you can multiply times 10, and you see all the fields that a flat file has. So, imagine if in the backend of Seller central, you only see one line to write the style of a product, maybe in the flat file, there are five different sales or columns to fill the information there. So that’s a space to put keywords. That’s space to put information. And one thing that happens when sellers don’t input anything in those fields. And they say, oh, this doesn’t apply to me. Or this is not relevant for my customers. I’m not going to put anything there. Somebody else can come and put a forbidden keyword in that space. Why? Because there is no contribution. The owner of the listing didn’t put anything. So Amazon sees that as okay, the seller wants to come in and contribute to this listing to make it better. But in reality, they just want it to hurt you, or it’s your competition that wants to change stuff.

Bradley Sutton: Have you ever tested, for always meaning to test this, especially when so many listings started getting their subject matter taken away, like, are you still able to upload subject matter in a flat file? Even if it’s in Seller central, you don’t have it anymore, or if you don’t have it in Seller central, that means you pretty much can’t do it in a flat file either.

Vanessa: Well, that’s an interesting question. And I don’t know, lately, I work with flat files, they can be customized. Okay. So when you download a category template, for example, you’re selling food, a food item. You don’t allow the category, the template for that category where you have all these fields specifically for that category. But if you ever wanted to add a column, you could do it. And this is the interesting part. And this is where I play with flat files a lot. I just go there and say like, okay, maybe here in this flat file, I want to add something like subject matter in case it’s not there. I see it there. Like I see it now in recent flat files, I always see subject matter. I don’t know if something changed in some category, but imagine that I just wanted to put subject matter. I know what’s the name of the column that I want to create. So, it’s called subject matter. And they also have a special coat below that, which is, I don’t know, a specific keywords there. So the system can read it. And then I just created that column and input it. When I do that, that information goes to at least even when we don’t really necessarily see it in Seller central, but it changes stuffing the front end. So that’s why they’re so powerful because it’s cost customizable and you can add things where flat files. Don’t have it. You can just add it. If you see that that is needed.

Bradley Sutton: That brings me to my next question about flat files. I think a lot of people, when they’re worried about flat files, are like, they’ve already got a listing and then seller central. Sometimes we’ll tell them if something doesn’t work like, all right, we’ll try a flat file. And then what a lot of sellers are worried about is, wait a minute, I just need to change this one thing. If I upload this flat file without filling everything out, like, is it going to overwrite the listing? And now, like what do you say? I’m sure people have told you that, like, Hey, isn’t this going to overwrite my entire listing if I don’t put the whole thing in here?

Vanessa: Of course. Yes. And that’s the question that people still me. Like, if I blow the flat file, shall I do it in a full update or partial update, but when we don’t allow any flat file of any category, we can in Seller central choose what fields we want to input or what sections. So imagine that you want to just change the images of your product, right? Just the pictures. So you can customize that your flat file would only have obviously, they require once that that’s not an option, you always need to input that the require fields are like the UPC, or they see the title of the brand, the SKU. That’s just for Amazon to know what’s the product that you’re talking about, or you want to change. And then you can select the section that is called images, which is normally yellow. So you just choose that flat file with the require, their buyer fields and the images, and that’s it. And you don’t have all the rest of the other fields to input. So when you input only that, and you upload that, nothing will change because you just put the right information. Of course, you still need to put the title, still need to put the run, the ASIN on those required fields, but upload just the section that you want to change. That’s the vest.

Bradley Sutton: All right, guys, quick break from this episode for the BTS, Bradley’s 30 seconds. Here’s my 30-second tip. We’ve been talking a little bit in this episode about subject matter, and that’s in the back end of your search terms. And so regardless if you have the subject matter or not almost every listing, at least here in the United States has searched terms. So the search terms and the subject matter, or what’s considered the backend of your listing, right? So if you do have either one and you have some keywords that you just can’t get index, you’ve put it in your bullet points, maybe even in your title, and you’ve put it in your description and just, you use Helium 10 index checker. And it says, you’re not indexed. Try putting the keyword into search terms as subject matter. If it’s not a forbidding keyword in about 10, 15 minutes, it’s actually going to upload, whether you’re doing it in Seller central or using a flat file, and you’ll be able to index usually. If it’s not a forbidding keyword, you’ll index in like 10 or 15 minutes, if it’s in the subject matter or search terms. And if it’s still on index, that means unknowingly. It’s probably a forbidding keyword. Like it may be a branded word or a trademark, or that you didn’t even realize. So just open up a case with seller central and ask them, Hey, why can’t I get searchable for this keyword that I have in my search terms and they’ll usually let you know, but again, subject matter search terms, guys have great way to get almost immediately indexed for words that you normally wouldn’t get indexed perhaps in your description.

Bradley Sutton: So let’s say I’m a seller out there right now. I’m getting a little bit interested. I want to go ahead and test out, check some of these extra fields that we have and do this. I’ve already got a listing on Amazon. What’s the step like, where do I download the template from for my product? And then, what’s the best way to upload it?

Vanessa: Okay. So you’re going to go to Seller central and you’re going to tap the inventory, tap, and then inventory reports. On inventory reports. You may see– in the dropdown menu, you may see something that’s called the category listing report. If you don’t see it, you need to call seller support or open a case by emailing them. It’s really fast, really quick. You just call them or email them and tell them like, Hey, I need the category listing report. And they will allow you to download that report. They will make it available in your Seller central. And you will be able to download that. What is the category listing report is the flat file with all the information for your whole catalog. So you will see all your listings and all information that you have input to those listings. So there, you even see fields that are not applicable to your specific category and you will see them in gray. So, if they don’t apply, you just see them in gray and you don’t need to change anything there. But if you want to change something or see what you have there, what you have in the backend, because sometimes, and that’s another thing that can happen. You are testing a new product and you’re launching a new strategy and you changed the keywords, right? So in the keywords, in other attributes or in the subject matter, when you create a listing, you put ABC, but now you already gathered some data and you want to change that ABC to X, Y, and Z. So, when you don’t allow the flat file or the category listing report, that will tell you what is exactly there. So what is in the back end of Amazon catalog? So you may see that ABC is still there when it happened that you already changed it to X, Y, and Z.

Vanessa: So those things, that information is what makes the category listing report so valuable because you can see what you have input. And if the changes went through Amazon’s catalog, and in case it didn’t change. You can just upload it again as a full update. A flat file can– once you do it and this is when we pretend that this seller already has ASINs in their catalog. So, they have a bunch of faces. They can download the category listing report and see the whole catalog, and they want to change something. They change it there and upload it. And you upload it in the inventory section at products via upload, and there, there are three tabs. The second tab is upload the file, and you’re just going to select your file and use category templates from the dropdown menu and just upload it there. After you upload it, the system will automatically send you to the status report where you see if your flat file went through or not. So, the system will tell you, Hey, your flat file got some errors, and these are their errors. You can download the report with all the errors that you have, or it will tell you success. And if it says success, that means that you’re good to go on the changes that were made and it can take up to 24 hours to reflect on amazon.com with flat files I see that is super fast. So, if you use a flat file and you don’t see the changes in five hours, there is something there. There’s something wrong because they normally don’t take that long. Versus in Seller central, a change in Seller central can actually take more than 24 hours.

Bradley Sutton: I think that I think it has been around, I’ve seen this come on sometimes like, two, three years ago, and then I didn’t hear about it for a while. And then again, I would hear about it in Facebook groups and things like that when people get hit with like the pesticide notification, or sometimes their product even gets suspended or something, and they say, Hey, this is a pesticide and you got to do this. Or like, what’s going on with that? Now, like, I remember a couple years ago, it was more of like, okay, you get this, and then you got to fill out some kind of a training or something like that. And then you got approved, but then a lot of sellers that don’t even have a product that has pesticides is like, because they get flagged for certain keywords or what’s going on out there with the pesticide thing?

Vanessa: Sure. Well, the regulation has always existed. Like that’s a national thing, like the EPA on the FIFRA. But what happened is like for some reason, maybe Amazon got sued about a pesticide thing or a violation was raised to court or something. So they implemented and they started enforcing very hard the pesticide on an EPA regulation, how do they do it, which is not really efficient or real accurate is that they roll the system on an algorithm that triggers, that gets triggers when somebody puts up pesticide keyword in their listing. So it can be something as you put in your product, like the skills bacteria, which is a very heavy pesticide claim, or something as, I don’t know, Bac-free, or something that can be interpret in some way as a pesticide claim. So, one of the huge ones that I really couldn’t understand: sun proof. Those that protects you from the sun. So it says like UPF 50 or ups plus whatever, those, that keyword got triggered as a pesticide. And you say, why this is ridiculous on the system, because he saw automatic, they just trigger those keywords and they suppress the listings, or they, you get a notification in the account hill dashboard saying that you have unrestricted policy product violation. And they tell you like, yeah, this is a pesticide. You may get an email saying, this is a pesticide. Or we think this is a pesticide and what is at the end is that you are using a pesticide keyword.

Vanessa: So that’s very sad and hard for sellers that use, or kind of use those claims to drive traffic, because it’s hard to explain sometimes something that you want to say, maybe you’re sending a cup and you want to say like, this is antimicrobial, but is it really on to claim that in legal terms, like by the law, you really need to prove that. And to prove that you need to have the EPA registration on all the regulations and compliant too, with all the, yeah. All the documents on compliance that they require. So you don’t get to make those claims unless you have the EPA, And this is really Amazon watching their back. It’s not something that makes sense because I’ve seen products that are like a spatula that got triggered off the pesticide on your– obviously it’s not what we need to do as sellers to prevent that, and fight it and fix it. So to prevent it, just not use that. Like, don’t use those keywords. I feel that in this situation, it makes us clever about how we can target or how we can market our products. So putting better copy and better keywords for more specific stuff, try to avoid any kind of pesticide keywording. To fix it, in case you got the suppress listing because of this. First of all, of course, you need to go inside the listing and see if you’re using any keyword that can be interpreted as a pesticide, but after that, if you don’t see anything and some, and I see this sometimes where with brothers that don’t have anything related with pesticides, and for some reason they got trigger. You just need to go to the compliance stop in the edit page of your listing and go to the very, very bottom of the page.

Speaker 3:                          There, you see three fields, the EPA fields. So in the first one, you will ask you for the type of EPA document. So, it can be a registration number or an establishment number. In the second one, it gives you three options. So to tell Amazon, what is your product? So the first option, it says something like this is a pesticide or a pesticide device. The second option is this is not a pesticide or a pesticide device. And the third option is like, this product applies for an exemption. Okay. So, what I recommend is using the first one using the EPA registration number, I mean, the second field is saying, this is not a pesticide or pesticide device, and then clicking save and finish normally would do that, and not having any keywording that can trigger the pesticide algorithm. You’re good to go. The listings will go immediately available on the account notification will go away.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. Cool. All right. One more thing I’ve seen you talk about before. I mean, there’s plenty of things we can just go on and on, but we have a time limit here as you talked before about the climate pledge, friendly badge. Like, have you ever checked, like somebody who didn’t have it and then they did, and then like conversion rate went up 1%, or anything like, have you ever studied, like if it actually helps or we just assume that it kind of helps?

Vanessa: Yeah. No, I haven’t. The clients that I work with, they already had it when, when I just went in. The ones that I know are that it’s not that easy to get them because it’s not something that Amazon just gives to you because you apply. You actually need to go to a special organization. There are more than 10 organizations that are climate friendly like organizations. So you can get like Energy Star. So Energy Star, I don’t know if you have any of your computers have it like my PC. And I see like the stickers of Energy Star, and they apparently are climate friendly. And if your product is part of the energy star like organization, or has their certification, you can apply for the climate pledge friendly badge. And you can have it. It’s easy once you have the documentation. The issue is then to get the certification from one of these organizations. Some of them cost you a lot of money. Some of these issues apply. And we see if you’re good at it or not. There are some, like, for example, the carbon-free certification, that’s a very extensive process and you need to provide a lot of things because that’s like, all your supply chain needs to be carbon free and stuff like that.

Bradley Sutton: It’d be interesting. I mean, I think a lot of these, we don’t really know, but then like, I’ve talked before about getting the minority owned business badge or the small business certification, like any of these things, I think yeah, sure. Maybe we could do some before and after tests, but I think it just makes sense that it’s not going to hurt you to like, oh, this listing is climate friendly. I don’t want to buy this one. So it can only help. And so anything that you guys can do to give you a leg up over the competition might as well do it. So then you get, if you have one of those, like you said, energy star or those different ones, then you just go into Seller central. And then how do you tell them that you’re certified so that you can get that badge?

Vanessa: If you go on Google and type climate pledge friendly program Amazon, it gives you redirects you to the page format, friendly page on amazon.com. And over there at the very bottom, you can click apply here on, I’m seeing here that they ask you for the certification name, the certification organization, what is your website on your email address? And you can put there the information of your product and that’s the way we apply. It’s easy once you get the certification, like once you have that, it’s super easy to do. And Amazon is actually automatic because once they’re going to– if their organization is backed up by Amazon and you have a certification from them almost immediately. That doesn’t take a lot of time because who bets the product, it’s their organization, not Amazon.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. All right. Makes sense. All right, cool. Now you’ve been giving us a lot of different strategies and tips here, but we do something on the show called the TST or the TST, 30-second tip. So what is something we haven’t talked about today that maybe you can give as a strategy in 30 seconds or less, but highly valuable, highly actionable for the Amazon sellers who are listening out there.

Vanessa: Now, with the climate that we have with the restock limits on all the limitations that Amazon is given to us to send more products. I really do recommend you guys to go and check your reserve inventory. So, there is a report on Amazon in the fulfillment reports called reserve inventory, where you can download and see all the units, all the ASINs and FNSKUs that have been reserved, and you can open cases and ask Amazon to release them. So what happened with the reserve inventory is that they just cited it in the warehouse. And for some reason, the process is not really automatic where they just fix it. For example, they just reweighted or they measure it again and they put it back available. No, it takes time and the reserve inventory is taking space from our limits. So if that’s an action that you can just do today, and if you open a case and you find out that you have a hundred units just in reserve and you open the case and tell them like, Hey, this has been in reserve inventory for a long time. Can you see what’s happening? They can come and tell you like, no, it’s okay, Vanessa, that’s the process. It can take up to 30 days or they can tell you, oh, you’re right. That’s available now. So, that changed an impact dramatically, your limits, because it’s something that is in your inventory. So they think it’s taking space, but it’s actually not available to be sold. So, clients or customers can not just buy that because his reserve is like a stranded inventory, but from a, from a ghost perspective side. So that’s how an actionable tip I can give you that you can do like today. Open the case today and see what changes are like happening in your limits, because it will make a lot of units available.

Bradley Sutton: Okay, cool. You know what, I’m going to ask you something right here while we’re live on the air. A lot of this stuff, like we just said, is how you describe it as the unsexy parts of Amazon, but they can have a big impact on you. A lot of these things that we talked about. So, we have tens of thousands of listeners here on the podcast. And we got them some of your information, we have tens of thousands of readers on our blog. Like, what would you say about maybe coming on as a writer? Like every couple of months or something, just a little, a small piece on one of these things about the unsexy side of Amazon. Can you commit to doing that here in front of everybody so they can look forward to that?

Vanessa: Sure. I’ll love to.

Bradley Sutton: I love it. Awesome.

Vanessa: Actually, I mean, I don’t know if you’re going to get to read it all because it’s very boring, but I write it like that. That’s content that I put everyday in my Instagram, or I made a solo piece internally for my team, so that content already exists. Just people don’t really care about it. So I just saved it.

Bradley Sutton: Cool. Hey, I mean, there’s a lot of stuff– there’s a lot of the sexy parts of Amazon, like, Hey, search, find, buy.

Vanessa: Yeah. Like ACoS, ROI.

Bradley Sutton: PPC and this and that, but success on Amazon has to do with everything. So, it’s a full plan of attack you guys need to have, including these unsexy things. So I think it’s important that we go over it. So thank you for that. But in the meantime, before you start writing that, how can people find you on the inter webs if they want to reach out to you to get some help on something with their accounts, or to find out more information about this? {speaks in Spanish]

Vanessa: So the fastest way to reach out to me, it’s on Instagram @fulltimeamazon. That’s my channel of communication in English. [speaks in Spanish] So, I’m pretty active on Instagram. I’m actually using the same handle for Facebook. So, fulltime Amazon. And the website for the agency is Online Seller Solutions. If you have something really long and don’t want to do a DM on Instagram, you can always email me to [email protected] and yeah, those are the ways you can contact me or my team.

Bradley Sutton: Perfect. Perfect. Well, [speaks in Spanish]. Thank you so much for coming on here, Vanessa, and talking about these things. Are you going to be at the Prosper show in Vegas?

Vanessa: Yes, yes.

Bradley Sutton: Okay, cool. Well, I’ll see you there. And are you coming to our social?

Vanessa: I don’t know. How can I come? Like I feel–

Bradley Sutton: I’ll contact you to get you the invite, but everybody, I’ll tell you right now, she’s going to be at our social, even though she didn’t know about it until three seconds ago, she’ll be at the social. So, you guys look out for Vanessa there and you can ask her some of these questions too. So, Vanessa, thank you so much for joining us and we’ll be looking forward to your blog contributions to us.

Vanessa: Thank you, Bradley.

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The Helium 10 Software Suite will allow you to gain an unfair advantage over your competitors as it was designed and battle-tested by Amazon's top sellers. So if you want more sales, more time, lower PPC costs, and if you want to discover hidden keywords your competitors don’t use then start using Helium 10 -- the same tools top Amazon sellers use on a daily basis.

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Published in: Serious Sellers Podcast

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