Helium 10 Buzz 7/27/22: Oakland Port Update, Amazon Account Health, & Product Differentiation Strategy

We’re back with another episode of the Weekly Buzz with Helium 10’s Chief Brand Evangelist, Bradley Sutton. Every week, we cover the latest breaking news in the Amazon, Walmart, and E-commerce space, Bradley shares a unique story, and provide a training tip for the week.

Marine terminals at California’s Port of Oakland opened for normal operations on Monday after port leaders and police ended a week-long independent truck driver protest of the state’s new “gig worker” law, which stranded cargo on ships, docks, and warehouses and worsened U.S. supply chain snarls.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/terminals-californias-third-busiest-port-resume-regular-hours-monday-2022-07-25/

In the coming months, you will start to see new features on your Account Health page. The first of these is that your Account Health Rating (AHR) will be displayed as a point value based on a scale of 0-1,000, enabling you to see how close you are to the various thresholds that move your AHR from green (Healthy) to yellow (At Risk) to red (Unhealthy, where your account is at risk of deactivation).

Amazon is raising prices for its Prime subscription service in the U.K. and across Europe as the e-commerce giant grapples with the effects of rising inflation.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/26/amazon-prime-membership-prices-increased-in-europe-as-inflation-bites.html

Amazon introduced its Seller Wallet which is a new tool to simplify the Amazon global selling experience. This secure payment solution makes it easy and hassle-free to hold, view, and disburse any amount of sales proceeds directly to your local bank account on your schedule, all within Seller Central.

Helium 10 Brand Evangelist, Lem Turner, shares this week’s Freedom Ticket Training clip of the week wherein Kevin King talks about the many ways on how you can differentiate your product.

Helium 10 Brand Evangelist, Carrie Miller, goes over a Helium 10 Magnet feature that you might want to start using in our Pro Training tip of the week.

Lastly, you can get a 1-on-1 consultation call with Bradley Sutton if you signup for the Sell and Scale Summit using his code S3BS100 for $100 off your ticket to the event.

In this episode of the Weekly Buzz, Bradley talks about:

• 01:24 – Oakland Port Reopens
• 02:40 – New Account Health Page
• 03:54 – Prime Price Hike
• 05:35 – Amazon Seller Wallet
• 07:00 – Freedom Ticket Clip: How To Differentiate Your Product
• 12:13 – Bradley’s Story Time
• 15:50 – Pro Training Tip Of The Week: Using A Less Used Magnet Feature
• 20:00 – Watch The Bigger.Better.Launch Webinar Replay On YouTube
• 20:20 – Get A Bonus From Bradley When You Sign Up For The Sell And Scale Summit

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Helium 10 Weekly Buzz. My name is Bradley Sutton, and this is the show where we get you familiar with the latest news in the Amazon and e-commerce space. We interview people in the industry you need to hear from and provide training tips of the week that will give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Let’s go ahead and see what’s buzzing this week. Today. We’re gonna go over the news and we’ve got some articles that have to do with shipping. We’ve got some articles that have to do with an Amazon prime price hike in other parts of the world. Then we’re gonna have a freedom ticket tip of the week that has to do with differentiating your product. We’re gonna have not an interview, but like a kind of like a story time with Bradley, just a little lighter side, gonna make fun of myself a little bit with my most embarrassing moment ever at Helium 10.

Bradley Sutton:

I’m gonna tell you guys about it, and then we’ll get back and talk about some serious strategies where we’re gonna show you how in Magnet you can use a certain tool that a lot of people don’t use or a certain actual feature of Magnet where you can get kind of like the total search volume in a niche and make sure to stay to the end cuz I’m gonna give you guys a chance in order to get a one-on-one consultation with me for your brand or for anything you guys wanna talk about for 30 minutes, I’m gonna show you guys exactly how to do that. All right, let’s go ahead and get right into the news first. Now, the first news article we have of the day is actually from Reuters and it’s entitled ” Terminals at California’s third-busiest port resume regular hours on Monday”.

Bradley Sutton:

So what had happened, a lot of sellers were actually messaging me on this is they had for the last week and they were worried about it, their containers that came from you know, India and also China stuck in the Oakland port. All right, this is California’s third busiest port because there was kind of like a truck driver protest, which was blocking it off so that the container trucks couldn’t go pick up the containers. And so pretty much everything was at a standstill there. Well, they were able to open that back up the protest, kind of like move to another location. So it’s going to start back now. It’s not all gonna be in one day. I mean, that’s a weeks now worth of containers that got backed up. So they’re gonna try and get caught up there.

Bradley Sutton:

But just as of yesterday, somebody on one of our Freedom Ticket Xtra calls was saying, “hell man, my container might be stuck for weeks there,” but thankfully it just opened up this a couple of days ago. So if you had one of your containers stuck there, hopefully, it’ll get unloaded in the next couple of days. Next article we have here is actually from Amazon and it was entitled “New Features to Help You Monitor Your Account Health.” So as you guys know in seller central, there’s a place where you can monitor your Seller Central account health. And before it was done by colors, it was like green all the way to like red. And if you would get some kind of violation or some of your metrics went down, it would change in that color spectrum.

Bradley Sutton:

But what they’re moving to is kind of like this 1000 point scale. So before it was just kind of like, I think it was like four different colors and actually that’s how it still is in my account. I’m curious how it is in your accounts if it’s moved to the new metrics yet, but you’re gonna have a little bit better insight into what is affecting negatively and positively your account health, instead of just looking that it, or just seeing that it’s somewhere along the color spectrum because if you hit a couple of the colors, you’re gonna start getting some restrictions on your account. So they said they’re gonna start rolling out. So take a look at your Seller Central, go to your main Seller Central page, and click on Account Health. Have you guys moved to that 1000 point scale or is it still just showing those colors?

Bradley Sutton:

Next article in the news was from CNBC and it says “Amazon hikes Prime membership prices by up to 43% in Europe.” And this was interesting as you guys know, in America for Amazon USA, they already had an increase in the Prime price. But now for example, in the UK, it used to be 95 pounds or actually it used to be 79 pounds. And now it’s up to 95 pounds which is about $114 membership to Prime. And in other countries it’s going up as well. For example, in France, Amazon France, if you are a member of Amazon Prime, the price has gone up to 70 euros from 49 euros. That’s actually a little bit bigger increase there, and in Germany, it’s going up to 89 euros up from 69 euros. As you know, in America in February, it was announced that it went to $139 from $119.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, you know, my personal opinion is that this is not gonna make much of a difference. You know, like right now, like kind of Amazon Prime is one of the few things available. That’s anything like it. And especially in those countries, I think it’s not gonna cause too much issues where all of a sudden you’re gonna see less sales because now people are not gonna buy on Amazon or they’re gonna cancel their Prime membership in America. I didn’t see, you know, less sales when, when that, that change happened. And there actually are more alternatives now that Walmart+ is out there which I don’t believe is as robust in Europe. So what do you guys think, you know, do you think that this price hike is going to cause you to lose some customers?

Bradley Sutton:

My personal opinion is no. All right. The last article is also from Amazon Seller Central, and it was an announcement this week that they’re having a new way to manage and transfer funds from Seller Central its called Amazon Seller Wallet. And there wasn’t too much detail on it, but from what I understand from this article, it almost seems like you’re gonna be able to like, get your disbursements, anytime you want, instead of having to wait two weeks and also kind of transfer your funds and take your funds in US dollars and transfer to your other currencies, if you’re from another country and do a lot. What do you call that? It says a transfers. I can’t think of what the word is, but when you transfer currency from one currency to another currency they’re going to have that available to you.

Bradley Sutton:

So this is something that’s in beta right now. And it said it’s only available to a handful of users. None of my accounts have access to this new Amazon Seller Wallet, but be on the lookout for that because it might help a lot of sellers. If you can’t wait at all to be able to get your money every day from Amazon, don’t forget that Helium 10 has an option for that Alta. So just go to growwithalta.com or if you’re in your Helium 10 account hit the Alta button there and you’ll be able to apply for that. And you will be able to get your disbursements every day if you so choose. All right, well, that’s it for the news today. Let’s go ahead and get into our Freedom Ticket tip of the week. And for this one Lem has something for us. So go ahead, Lem.

Lem:

In this snippet from Freedom Ticket, Kevin King is going to go over what it really means to differentiate your product. Maybe you’re in a creativity rut, or maybe you’re just really stuck. And you’re trying to see, how can I make this product stand out? Kevin King is gonna go into a bunch of strategies of how you can do that. And some of them are really simple versus other ones are pretty advanced. So be sure and go ahead and check this out.

Kevin:

Differentiation is what’s gonna set you up for long term success. If you don’t do differentiation and just come out with another me-too product, you might have success for a short amount of time, but it’s gonna be shortlived and you’re not gonna have long term longevity, and it’s gonna be very, very difficult to actually sell that product. You can’t just slap your logo on a product that you find on Alibaba or just create something that’s almost identical to what everybody else is doing. Like you used to be able to do and actually have a good chance of success. You’ve got to stand out from the crowd. You’ve got to do something different when people type in a search term on Amazon and the results show up, you have to be the one that just shines on that page. The one that just pops off of that page, it doesn’t look like everybody else.

Kevin:

Otherwise, you’re just gonna be competing on price. You’re gonna be competing on reviews and that’s not the way to go to have a good chance of long term success. So, when you’re doing differentiation though, what is it that makes your product unique? What is your unique selling proposition? What, and there’s a, there’s a lot of things you could do and consider, and that’s what we’re gonna talk about right now. Now, whatever changes you do make it has to be important to the buyer. So it just can’t be just making a change just for the sake of making a change and a color variation is not differentiation, just to be clear on that, but there are several things that you can do. So let’s talk about some of those that you might be able to do to actually make your product different.

Kevin:

One is the packaging. Sometimes you can actually completely change the packaging. It can be the exact same product inside a plastic bag and the exact same product inside a really nice box, and that box might cost you a couple of extra dollars to have manufactured, but you can charge 10 to $20 more because of perceived value. People eat with their eyes first, so you always want to, to present something in a very positive manner and make it look exclusive and unique, and packaging is one of the easiest ways to do that. I mean, I’ve done that with some of my products you’ll see in one of the interludes where I show you some of my bully sticks and I did it that exact same thing where everybody else was selling things in a plastic bag. I put mine in a cigar box.

Kevin:

I was able to charge three times as much for 9% less product and it worked really, really well. Packaging is a great way to stand out. Another way is bundling. If you could put two products together. So maybe you’re seeing that one product is selling really well. And you’re seeing in the frequently bought together. People are often buying another product with it. Maybe if you bundle those two things together, you could make it stand out. One of the things I’ve done in the past is I was selling makeup of selling a 3d lash fiber lash mascara for women and everybody had the same 3d fiber lash mascara. But what I did is I saw in a lot of the reviews that people were complaining about, they wish they had small little brushes to mess with their eyelashes.

Kevin:

So I had a separate factory make a small little brush, and I included that in the box. That’s an example of bundling and that made it stand out and made it different. So that’s an idea of bundling. Another thing you can do is like a secret sauce, sometimes this is actually a secret sauce. Like maybe it’s a special ingredient. Your skin mask is from the dead sea and it has a special salt that nobody else has in all their ingredients. That’s only from this one little, little bay of the dead sea that everybody else is just pulling out from the main ocean there and you’re pulling yours from this special little bay where there’s this secret lost cave or something like that. You know, some sort of special little ingredient that you can emphasize can make you stand out or even just name your product in a certain way.

Kevin:

Another thing is materials. The materials that you make the product out of can be a differentiator. I have another product that’s in the that you’ll see in on one of the interludes that’s a life jacket for dogs and this life of dogs, we’re making it out recycled ocean waste, you know, the large size it’s eight plastic bottles that go into this product. So that differentiates it from everything else it’s made out of recycled plastic. 80% of the jackets are made out recycled plastic. That’s important to a lot of people. Remember I said, it has to be important to the buyers. That’s important to a lot of people, so that helps it stand out and can justify even a little bit higher price because people will pay for that because it’s special.

Lem:

Believe it or not, Kevin King gets into so much more in the rest of that video. So if you want to check out the rest of that clip, go to module 4.04 in our Freedom Ticket course, go ahead and check it out and let us know what you think.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. Thank you for that Lem. Don’t forget guys, make sure to get into your Freedom Ticket so you can, can get other tips. We have over 70 hours of strategy just like that in our Freedom Ticket program. Now we also have even now Freedom Ticket for Walmart there in a bonus week. So make sure to go in and, and start taking the Walmart training as well. Usually, around this time, we have the interview of the week, you know, we’ll interview somebody at Helium 10 or we’ll interview somebody from our Seller Solutions Hub or one of you Helium 10 users out there. But now I just wanted to go ahead and have a little lighter side here before we get back to the strategy and tell you about my most embarrassing moment at Helium 10. This was like in the first year that I was working at Helium 10, and this was back in 2018, and this was before we were Assembly, you know, we were just Helium 10, but we were in a small WeWork in Irvine.

Bradley Sutton:

That was at one of our first offices there, there was only about 15 of us in the office and we just got an HR person. I remember we have Natalie, we didn’t have an HR before that, cuz we were just so small, you know, Manny and Gui, founders of Helium 10 used to take care of everything. And anyway, my first few months there, I got taken to the HR office, which was like a small side room and they’re like, Bradley, you know, Natalie was like, Bradley needs to talk to you. And I was like, what did I do? I was like, I didn’t think I did anything wrong. She’s like, okay. You know, Bradley, we like what you’re doing here, but we’ve been getting some complaints and it’s because you have bad breath. And I’m like, what? I have bad breath.

Bradley Sutton:

I was like, I have breath men. And, and I’m always chewing gum. Like how is this possible? I was like, this is like so embarrassing. I was like, okay, I’m so sorry. Like, you know, that won’t happen anymore. You know, my bad I’ll work on that. And then, so that was that. And then like a month later or two months later again, she called me to the office like Bradley, we had a talk about this, but I’m still hearing, you know, the breath is kicking a little bit. And I’m like, oh my goodness, I don’t understand what is happening here, and it was last super embarrassing. I mean like, you know, it’s gotta be bad if you get taken to HR usually people don’t say anything. They’ll be like, okay, we’ll, we’ll put up with this. But for the life of me, I couldn’t figure it out.

Bradley Sutton:

I’m like, I don’t have bad breath, you know, like what is going on? So what happened as it turns out, what I found out was later on when we were filming Project X, I’ve told you guys this story before how I had medical emergency, where like my cyst on my back, like exploded and it’s the worst smell ever. But what was happening was I didn’t have bad breath. Thank goodness. But the cyst on my back, this is gross guys. Sorry, this is like beyond PG 13 here, but would sometimes leak and it’s just like gross. Anything that comes out of a cyst is just nasty. It’s just whatever that’s just been sitting there. And when it would leak, it would cause a bad smell. But I had had that cyst for like years and without getting it removed.

Bradley Sutton:

And so what was happening was it was leaking out sometimes. And I was just kind of used to the smell, I guess, but then everybody else would just like die of this terrible smell that was coming outta my back and they would just assume rightfully so, you know that I had bad breath because you know, like who knows about cyst leaking? I mean, that’s not something you just assume that’s bad breath. So anyway, I had to deal with that for two or three years. So I apologize to all of my Helium 10 companions, who I’ve had to put up with my leaking cyst, please let me know guys. I took care of it surgically, so hopefully, it’s not happening much anymore. But if it is, let me know because I need to know. But anyways, what about you guys? What’s your most embarrassing moment that it has ever happened to you in your Amazon career or just in your other companies? Cuz that’s gotta be one of the worst things that can happen to somebody being taken to HR and having the whole company think you have got terrible breath. All right. Let’s get back to more serious things. Now, Carrie has got a strategy for us on a tool that we’ve used many times Magnet that maybe you guys have not used lately. So Carrie, what do you have for us?

Carrie:

Today? I’m gonna show you a tool that maybe you’ve seen before, or maybe you haven’t that’s within Magnet. Now we have so many different tools with so many little different tricks and tips that we have that can help really majorly improve your business. And I think this is one of ’em. So I utilize smaller search term keywords to create campaigns and target to go kind of after the low hanging fruits. So what I do is I’ll usually search for keywords with maybe 500 to a thousand searches a month, or sometimes even less than that, depending on the product. So I might even go, you know, a hundred or maybe even go down to 50 searches a month and kind of put those keywords into their own little campaigns, maybe five to 10 keywords each, and focus on some pay-per-click strategies there, make sure those keywords are written into my listing so that I can actually start targeting those.

Carrie:

And if they have those seed keywords in there, you can start ranking for those major keywords. So it all kind of works together to take your product to the top. So I wanna show you how those smaller search volumes can really add up. So I’ll go ahead and I’ll share my screen. So what I’ve done here is in magnet, I’ve actually searched coffin shelf. I did a little filtering for phrases containing coffin and here I am just finding a bunch of different keywords. I checked off the keywords that I think are going to be most relevant, but they might have a lower search volume like this one has 598, 223. So you can see that, you know, those are pretty substantial over time and there are some keyword sales that come from that. So this one has 93. So what I like to do is I like to analyze, you know, how impactful all of these keywords together could potentially be.

Carrie:

And the way I do that is I check those off and then I add them to a list. So I actually have created just this random folder here to show you “coffin analyze.” And so I created that folder and then I added those keywords to that folder. Okay. You can create this keyword list also in Cerebro. So if you wanted to analyze keywords from Cerebro, you could do that here too. So I’m gonna take that keyword list and I’m gonna hit Analyze Keywords and I’m gonna click add from my list. Okay. So I’ve got these coffin shelf keywords that are lower search volume and I wanna see how much impact they can make if I maybe targeted them in a smaller PPC campaign and put them into my listing. Okay. So right here you can see the total search volume is 3,989, which is pretty substantial when you really think about it, all these little tiny keywords that we thought maybe were nothing and we didn’t target actually could potentially add up to something.

Carrie:

So you can also see the keyword sales here. So we’ve got, you know, 75 here, 936, there’s all of these are gonna actually add up over time. So over the course of a month, this could actually add some good numbers to your sales. And not only that, if you’re targeting these keywords, they’re long tail keywords, they also have your main keywords in them. So that can also help you to rank for those. So I usually like to include those lower search volume keyword phrases, because I think that they could potentially grow over time, first of all. But then also you don’t wanna miss out on that low hanging fruit, especially in more competitive niches. So I challenge you to go ahead and try out Magnet, the Analyze tabs right here, Analyze Keywords, try it out, and see for yourself. Just go ahead, search for some lower search volume keywords, analyze the total search volume and the potential sales that you could get, and then go ahead and put them in a campaign and see what happens over a month and see if it actually adds to your sales over the course of a month. I think it definitely will because I know it has for me and I look forward to hearing all of your success stories. So I hope you have a great day.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. Thank you for that Carrie. Now lastly, I told you guys, I’ll give you an opportunity to get a one-on-one session with me. And what gave me this idea was last week, we had a special on our Bigger, Better Launch where if you were to sign up for Sell and Scale Summit I was gonna hook you guys up with my Chinese sourcing agent and that ended already. So I was like, what else can I provide? You know, people were asking me like, Hey, Bradley, I missed that. I saw it on the replay on YouTube, by the way, guys, if any of you had missed the Bigger, Better Launch for this month you can watch on YouTube, but you’ll see that I had offer that, but you know, that offer expired. So I was like, no, I can’t give that anymore.

Bradley Sutton:

So what can I give if people sign up for Sell and Scale? So what I’m gonna do for now until Sunday, all right now until Sunday, if you guys sign up for Sell and Scale Summit, and you can do that, h10.me/s3 or sellandscalesummit.com, it’s up to you h10.me/s3 or sellandscalesummit.com. And you use the code S3BS100, S3BS100. That saves you a hundred dollars off. But for everybody who does that between now and Sunday, I’m gonna go ahead and give you guys a 30 minute consultation, one-on-one, not a group one where, you know, you’ll be all in a group, but for the first 20 people who do this, we’re gonna go ahead and give you a one-on-one consultation with me, where you can go over your brand. I can do some product validation for you, maybe optimize your listing, whatever you guys want to talk about.

Bradley Sutton:

So once you sign up for that link, you guys are gonna need to just show a screenshot of your receipt and send it to my assistant Mhel, and you can email him at [email protected]. So if you miss this, you can ask support to reach out to Mhel, Bradley’s assistant. But again, if you sign up with my code from now until Sunday night, then we will go ahead and give you a 30 minute consultation. All right, guys, well, thank you so much for tuning to the buzz this week. We’ll see you guys next week to see what’s buzzing.

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 us 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.