Helium 10 Buzz 3/30/22: Amazon Mobile App Data Reports, Serious Sellers Club Member Interview, And Creating Custom Barcode Labels

We’re back with another episode of the Weekly Buzz with Helium 10’s Brand Evangelist, Lem Turner.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.

Mobile App data is now available in the Business Reports tool. Effective March 29, 2022, Amazon will expand the available information in the Business Reports tool to include Amazon Mobile App data.

Some sellers are feeling the pain of an increase in Etsy marketing thanks to Offsite Ad fees levied against sellers for certain sales, and some of the ways sellers are responding may hurt selection on the marketplace.

Amazon’s advertising ambitions are increasingly expanding into the physical world. Last month, Business Insider reported that Amazon was planning on selling in-store digital advertising inventory to sell to brands in its Amazon Fresh stores. And I spoke with some people with direct knowledge of the program and how Amazon is pitching it to brands.

We also speak with one of our Serious Sellers Club Member, Kevin Weaver! Where he shares his Amazon journey, gives us his best tips for aspiring million-dollar Amazon entrepreneurs, and provides us with an insight on what are the goals of a multi-figure Amazon seller.

Helium 10’s Brand Evangelist, Lem Turner, closes out the episode with the Pro Training tip of the week on how to use Helium 10’s Portals tool to easily create custom barcode labels for your products.

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

• 00:55 – Mobile Vs Desktop Amazon Reporting
• 01:30 – Etsy Sellers Are Hurting
• 02:30 – Amazon Ads Go Physical
• 03:30 – Bonus Announcement: Helium 10 Elite Membership Open For A Limited Time
• 04:20 – Serious Sellers Club Member Interview: Kevin Weaver
• 10:50 – How To Join The Serious Sellers Club
• 11:00 – ProTraining Tip Of The Week: Creating Custom Barcode Labels
• 18:00 – Early Bird Tickets For Sell + Scale Summit
• 18:15 – Announcing The Musical Guest For The Event

Transcript

Lem:

Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Helium 10 Weekly Buzz. My name is Lem Turner, and this is the show where we get you familiar with the latest news in that 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 see, what’s buzzing this week. Today. We’re gonna be going over some of the top news of the week, including new insights into mobile versus desktop traffic on Amazon. Learn about custom barcode labels, as well as speak to a Helium 10 Serious Sellers Club Member. Also stay tuned for a bonus announcement about Helium 10 elite. That’s right, I said, Helium 10 elite stay tuned for that announcement, but now let’s get started first with our news of the week.

Lem:

So our first article is mobile versus desktop reporting. So this comes directly from Amazon Seller Central News piece about being able to get insights on traffic driven from the mobile Amazon shopping app. This is wild information that just was made available to us within our business reports tool effective March 29th, 2022. This is gonna be mass for Amazon sellers. As we will now have more visibility and access to additional traffic data that will allow us to make data-driven decisions to improve conversions, discoverability, and drive more traffic depending on if you’re looking to drive more mobile or desktop traffic. Moving on to our second news piece of the week. Etsy Sellers are Hurting. So in this case, we get into some qualms that some Etsy sellers have been experiencing with their platform due to Etsy’s recent $200 million investment into their platform, which then required fees to be hiked up, especially for offsite ads, which are not optional to opt-out of if you’re at a certain level of sales.

Lem:

These have been increased drastically due to this offsite ads incur an 18.5% fee. If you do higher than $10,000 in revenue per year and 21.5%, if you do less than $10,000 per year, this is a drastic hike from going from 12% that used to be last year to the 18.5% and 15%. That used to be last year to the 21.5% perspectively from last year. So that’s a pretty decent margin hit. And so for all you Etsy sellers out there, how have you responded to this fee increase? How are you handling in this and how do you feel about it?

Lem:

Moving on to our third news piece of the week, Amazon ads Go Physical. So Amazon is planning on selling ad placements on digital signage for its physical grocery stores beginning in Q2 this year, like in only in like a couple of days, right? Digital signage availability will range from smart shopping carts to check out booths and digital smoke screens are refrigerator doors. I think that’s pretty neat, right? So currently this is only available to selected brands, unfortunately, that are already physically stocked within Amazon stores with fresh ASINs available. Now, I think that regardless of this, not being available to all brands, this is definitely a sign of the changes that come moving forward into 2022 and 2023 of the increased advertising placements that Amazon will provide sellers through their own reach and availabilities that they have within their stores and other technologies and apps that they own. Moving on our bonus announcement talked about for Helium 10 Elite, our last news piece about Helium 10 Elite is opening back up.

Lem:

Yes, that’s right. A lot of Helium 10 members out there have asked when the Elite program would be opened up again for new people to sign up. And it has been opened back up as of yesterday, but only for a limited time. The Elite, as a reminder, the Elite program is for advanced sellers who wanna be part of a private mastermind group and get specialized training from Kevin King, other experts and have exclusive access to tools such as Elite Analytics. You’ll be able to come to in-person workshops, you’ll meet myself and plenty other people at Helium 10 headquarters and have expanded use of tools for more info and to sign up, you can go to helium10.com/elite. Again, that’s helium10.com/elite. Okay. That marks the end of our news for the week. So now we’re gonna transition into an interview with one of our Serious Sellers Club Members, Kevin Weaver. Now, as a reminder for everyone out there, our Serious Club Member is a exclusive group limited to six, seven, and eight figure sellers that also provides you with discounts, bonuses, and networking opportunities. Kevin, how are you doing today?

Kevin:

Good. See you, Lem. Thanks for having me.

Lem:

Of course. We’d love to have you on and to see that you’re a Serious Club Member. That’s awesome for us to see. So let’s just start off, let’s get right into it. Tell us a little bit about your Amazon journey and how you got to where you are now.

Kevin:

Sure. our journey’s a little different than I think many others. We actually started our company in 2000 business partner and I had to develop some products. We eventually built that into our own e-commerce website, grew that to about seven figures. And then in 2014, as Amazon was starting to its span their business to business offering and got ’em just pure consumer products, they approached us about potentially selling some of our products on there. We were very skeptical. We actually turned them down a couple of times. And finally, we said, well, we’ve got some surplus inventory. Let’s see if we can unload it on this Amazon thing and see if it’s gonna work. And we were very pleasantly surprised at how quickly that went, and we’ve just been adding one product after another you know, after about a year and a half, we had our entire product line about a hundred SKUs now on Amazon. And it’s grown to where Amazon represents about 80% of our revenue right now.

Lem:

Wow. That is incredible. Only 2014, you could see you now. I can only imagine that’s an amazing growth.

Kevin:

Didn’t have as much gray hair.

Lem:

I bet. I bet. And it’s funny even to hear that you initially turned them down, right. Because you didn’t see the value in it, which–,

Kevin:

We didn’t think at the time that the customer, we sell a more technical product. We didn’t think the customers were there, cuz we thought, oh, Amazon customers buy music and books and, and you know, and that’s changed dramatically. I would say about 35% of our customers right now are Amazon business accounts. So that’s, that’s pretty impressive. I think

Lem:

That’s awesome. Well, seeing how you’ve had, you’ve seen the growth of Amazon from 2014 to even to now and seeing all the new things that have come about. What are some of the most common mistakes that you see new sellers doing?

Kevin:

I think if you’re new to e-commerce you can very quickly get overwhelmed with the amount of data. Unlike traditional bricks-and-mortar. We have so much data about customers and products and advertising effectiveness. And when you cool tools like Helium 10 that make it easy to manage that and analyze it and slice it and dice it. Sometimes you fall into the trap of either analysis paralysis or focus on just a few metrics and you lose sight of the big picture, which is what you’re trying to do, which is convince the buyer to part with their money and to take your product. And so we try to get help sellers to focus on what we sometimes call the three P’s, which are the deliverers that you have control over in an e-commerce environment, which is the photos seeing product before.

Kevin:

So you’ve gotta give them that sort of visceral feel of what it’s like to have it in their hands and give them as high quality of photographs. And that’s the number one thing to spend your energy on. But secondly, we see a lot of mistakes made with the words. There’s a tendency to want to keyword stuff and maybe write a technical product description and not focus on what the customer wants. The customer’s trying to get comfortable and you’re gonna make them comfortable. They have to feel like they already own the product and how it’s gonna help them, how it’s gonna change their life or improve their situation or whatever the case for your product might be. And you gotta use the whole listing to do that too. It’s the title? It’s the bullet video A+ Contents are great ways to really tell a story. Really your listening should tell a story from top to bottom of why the customer will be better off with your product.

Lem:

Yeah. I think that’s an amazing perspective to kind of remind ourselves up and then like, it may sound obvious of, Hey, you’re writing this listing for the customer is not, you’re not writing it for Amazon. You’re not trying to get the most search volume or anything, ultimately it’s for the customer. And we kind of have to remind ourselves

Kevin:

Of that good products and good listings will come to the top on their own. You can play all kinds of games, and you should optimize where you can do those things, but no one’s buying your product because you happen to have their search term in your title. That’s not it. The last point is price. We see a lot of new sellers underpricing, a product, not calculating enough margin either because they’re afraid to undersell or afraid price over the low price guy, or they’re just not experienced enough to realize why you need a very healthy margin. Things will go wrong as they have the last couple years. And if you wanna survive, you gotta have some cushion there to be able to maneuver when those things happen. So we always say, if you’ve got a product that’s better than the competitor’s product, it should cost more because you’re providing a more value. And that also is a signal to customers. Price helps them decide, you know, you get what you pay for. So if you’re the cheap guy, their expectations are lower than if you’re a mid-priced or higher priced, their expectations are different. And so that’s a signal to the customer.

Lem:

Absolutely. I love that sentiment. If your product is genuinely better and higher quality, it should cost more to that makes sense. You get what you pay for. So I love that perspective. So move moving forward for the rest of 2022, what’s on the horizon for yourself, for your business.

Kevin:

We’re in the midst of a technological change. Our products need to be refreshed with some additional technology to take advantage of what’s coming on. We’re in the cellular telephone space. So we started that last year. We’re gonna continue that we’re taking that opportunity to redo and repolish the listings, cuz again, you can always make those a little bit better. And then interestingly in the last few months, we’ve been approached by a number of outside firms looking to acquire or invest with us to sort of supercharge this market. There’s a lot of opportunity there and you gotta inject some resources to capture that. So we’re considering if that’s an option for us.

Lem:

Wow. It sounds like you got a lot in your hands, but they all sound like good problems ahead.

Kevin:

It’s been busy.

Lem:

Of course. Well, thank you again for so much. We really appreciate that. Does it with our questions. If you’re interested in being part of the Serious Sellers Club, then check us out at helium10.com/serious-sellers-club. So now let’s get into our tip of the week in the form of a video that shows us all about how you can Customize your Barcode Labels for your products through Helium 10. We’re gonna be getting into how to Create Barcode Labels. So let’s get started first things first, we’re gonna get into our Portals tab here. We can click on Portals right here and then click on the left side of our screen. Go to our dashboard here. We’re gonna click on Barcode Labels. Boom. There we go. We’re in the system from there. We’re gonna click on New Barcode. Now we’re gonna click on New Barcode, but overall let’s first discuss what are Barcode Labels and what’s the purpose of this tool? Well, it’s really all about making sure that you can create a custom barcode label for your own product. Now that’s really nice because we can make sure that we create a custom barcode label for our product. So we’re gonna do the Manny’s Mysterious Oddities shelf here, our coffin shelf here. We’re gonna copy this URL.

Lem:

And right here, we’re gonna put in like a random UPC code here. We’re gonna do 123412341234, random UPC code, but we can copy and paste our URL into here. And it’ll populate that information for us. Well, one thing we definitely wanna note here is when you do put in a barcode, whether it’s, I mean, it’s whether it’s barcode, UPC, FNSKU, whatever it is, you want to make sure you test this out. And the way you test it out is by downloading an app. There’s several apps out there where you can use QR reader, QR scanner, any barcode scanner really, and use that to scan the barcode on your screen and use your smartphone. If when you do that, it should populate the proper figures, whether it’s the FNSKU, the UPC, whatever is, and it should show you the proper figures. We highly highly recommend you do this before moving forward in the process.

Lem:

But once you do get that going, you’re gonna have the product immature. For some reason, it’s just delayed there, but you’re gonna have the product immature. You can put in your SKU here as well. You have your ASIN, you have condition where it’s made from. You can click on save and continue you actually, before we even do that before you get into product details, here’s where we can edit the product name, if we want to. Right. We can make sure that we want to make sure that whatever the product name is here, that’s all it says in our barcode label. So that’s, what’s really important is that’s what’s nice about us being able to edit this stuff. So like, let’s say let’s just leave it as is, but we can go back and show you what it looks like if we were to edit it, right?

Lem:

So let’s look at say, if we continue, we can choose, we have the preview here, what it would look like. We have the dimensions. We can do 3×2, depending on your packaging or your custom packaging, whatever it looks like. You can have it be as small as two inches by one inch, but we’re gonna stick with like, just like go 5×3. We’re gonna look at in portrait mode, you can show centimeters, millimeters, however, you do your packaging. It’s totally customizable and totally up to you and how you want to run your business. So let’s go ahead and save and continue. We can choose from all these different templates here. We can choose from the modern template. This is what it looks like. Just we have the fancy template. Look at that sunset. Ooh, have this. This is literally called sunset.

Lem:

So that’s like aesthetic sunset. That’s like the actual sunset. Love it. So let’s choose this one. I like this one. This one looked good. Let’s choose this one. We’re gonna choose that one here. We have our logo in here. You can upload your logo all within your settings tab right here. We’ll definitely get into that in a separate video if you’ll check that out. But here we have our logo here. We have the UPC that we put in here. We have our title, but Hey, let’s say I don’t like this. I don’t like that. Truncates here. I can go ahead and change that right here. So let me go ahead. I don’t want it to say new. I just wanted to say, or actually no, I wanted to say Manny’s Mysterious, but I just wanted to say maybe I wanted to say just Manny’s coffin self. I just wanted to say Manny’s coffin self, Go ahead and edit that information. I can do it here, which you can see is taking me a little bit. Cause I gotta delete information, or I can go back to the product details and edit it here. So let’s say, I just wanted to say Manny’s coffin shelf.

Lem:

Black. Let’s say Manny’s black coffin shelf. Boom. There we go. Just wanted to delete all that rest of that information. I click on save and continue. I go with that. I go with that stick with that boom Manny’s Black coffin shelf. We see that’s all it says right there made in China. We have our barcode right there. We have Manny’s Mysterious Oddities. We can edit this information or edit to however we think fits our branding. We can choose our if we have a specific color tone, that’s specific for our brand. Like, let’s say for some reason that’s the color for our brand. We can change it to that point. We can change the transparency. If we want that to be, we can do color. We can do gradient. So you can do have it be grad for horizontal or vertical, totally up to you. Whatever your vibe is. You can have a image that you contribute or you can have, or image you contribute here.

Lem:

And you can, when we populate a listing, it takes the images from our listing. So we have these images here. It totally, it depends on your product. If it makes sense, it’s not gonna make sense to put that in our label, but let’s like, pretend that it does make sense. This is what it would look like. It’d be in the background there. So of course, obviously in this scenario, it doesn’t make sense, but it might make sense for your product. Right? Then we have the images that pretty much anybody can use that has access to this tool. You can see that this is showing a preview of the image. You can have this there totally up to you, but we’re just gonna go with a stick with the color. Probably gonna keep it. Let’s stick with the white vibe there. Boom, I like that. So that, yeah, that’s all there is to it. You can go ahead, save and finish. And once you do save and finish that, you can go ahead and look at that. You can download that image. This is where we could give you another recommendation that you want to test out your barcode before you make sure that it is. But once you have it ready and you’re ready to download it, you can click on download. It’ll be ready for you. You can open it up.

Lem:

Boom. There it is opened up looking good and fresh. You can send that to your manufacturer or your supplier. Whoever takes care of your packaging for you. And they can manage that process for you right there and put that onto your packaging. So boom, there it is. That’s how you create a custom barcode label that can look clean, pristine, and all about your business. Awesome. Well, before we sign off, hopefully, you guys will check out that Custom Barcode Label and see what that can do for your business. But before we sign off, I wanna let you know all that. The Sell and Scale Summit early bird pricing has been extended to April 7th. Yes, that’s right. You still have now have an extra week to take advantage of that early bird pricing.

Lem:

Also bonus announcement. We got, we just got announcements left and right here today I’m like Oprah, just handing him out. We got an amazing musical guest that will be performing at our welcome party. And now, excuse me, as I read from a script because he is so extensive in terms of his accomplishments, introducing Diamond Selling, Multi-platinum Grammy Award-Winning rap superstar, entrepreneur, philanthropist, and actor. Okay. That was a mouthful, Nelly. Nelly will be entertaining attendees with a special performance at Sell and Scale. So be excited for that as well. Well, that does it. I’m all out of announcements here this week. That’s it for our Weekly Buzz this week. We’ll see you next week.

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