Helium 10 Buzz 3/15/24: Amazon Big Spring Sale | New AI Listing Help | FTC Investigating Fees

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, interview someone you need to hear from and provide a training tip for the week.

Amazon’s new Big Spring Sale is coming March 20-25—here’s everything you need to know to shop deals on spring essentials
https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/retail/amazon-big-spring-sale-faq

Amazon now lets sellers create listings through a URL by using AI
https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/13/amazon-now-lets-sellers-create-listings-through-a-url-by-using-ai/

Exclusive: The FTC is probing Amazon’s new controversial fees in its $140 billion seller business
https://fortune.com/2024/03/08/ftc-amazon-seller-fees-inbound-placement-low-inventory-antitrust/

Everything you need to know about Amazon Business, one of Amazon’s fastest-growing ventures
https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/what-is-amazon-business

NEW Store Spotlight format - Custom Image links to store subpages!!

Also on the docket is Kevin King's upcoming free live strategy webinar which promises to be an invaluable resource for Amazon sellers of all levels. Discover new earning avenues with Helium 10, and get the scoop on the expanded day-parting schedules for ads that could change how you place your ads based on time-of-day performance data. Plus our training tips of the week talk about how to use the Helium 10 Profits tool’s Expenses tab and the Inventory Heat Maps tool. Don't miss out on these insights that could make all the difference to your e-commerce success.

 In this episode of the Weekly Buzz by Helium 10, Bradley covers:

• 00:56 - Amazon Big Spring Sale
• 02:20 - Amazon AI Listing Tool
• 03:24 - FTC Investigating Fees
• 04:44 - 2 Factor Sign On
• 05:35 - Amazon Business
• 06:53 - New AD Type
• 07:34 - Meltable Inventory
• 08:31 - Live Webinar with Kevin King
• 09:32 - New Feature Alerts
• 13:15 - Pro Training Tip: Profits Expenses Tab & Inventory Heat Maps

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Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

A non-Prime Day event was announced by Amazon. You can use Amazon AI to create your listings. If you've got a website. Soon, you have to use two-factor sign-in for signing into Seller Central. These stories and more on today's episode of the Helium 10 Weekly Buzz. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Series Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that is our Helium 10 Weekly Buzz, where we give you a rundown of all the new stories and going on in the Amazon, Walmart, and e-commerce world. We let you know what new tools and features Helium 10 has come out with and we give you training tips of the week that will give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Let's see what's buzzing Couple news articles that might be of note, and something that just kind of came out of left field that I didn't even know about was that Amazon has this sale event that's coming up out of nowhere next week.

 

Bradley Sutton:

It's not really a prime day, but it's kind of like a prime day. It's called the Big Spring Sale. It's going from March 20th to 25th. Now, I haven't been paying much attention to announcements. As far as deals and my deals dashboard, was there something announced about this? Could be, but maybe I missed it, my bad. But basically this is not a Prime Day because it's not only for prime members. Now, some prime people get exclusive discounts on some things, but this is the very first ever event of its kind and there's going to be all kinds of different discounts. Amazon says here People are going to be able to shop these deals at Amazon.com forward slash big spring sale starting on March 20th. Now again, I don't know too many details about this, but Amazon is really pushing this out. It was all over the news. So even if you didn't jump in and run a deal during this time, well, first of all, you might be able, you might want to do some kind of deal during the 20th to 25th or, at the very least, be on the lookout for increased traffic during this time, all right, so it might be a time to do a coupon if you were so inclined, or might want to check your PPC budgets a little closer, just in case there's a lot of extra traffic that might be happening due to Amazon promoting this event.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Next article is from TechCrunch and it's entitled Amazon now let sellers create listings through a URL by using AI. All right, so in the list your products basically let's say you haven't sold on Amazon before, or at least you haven't sold a certain product Instead of just putting the name of the product in the search bar. You know, like normal, let's say you've got a Shopify website or your own.com website where that product is listed, you can paste the URL of your product into the Amazon Create Listing page and it's going to use generative AI to kind of like extract the details of the listing and create like a description for you. So it's interesting, you know, if you're somebody who trusts AI a lot for this kind of thing, this is a completely free service. From what I understand, it might be worth a try. So I know Amazon really wants to promote off Amazon brands, to get on Amazon. I think that this is one of those things that could definitely help them.

 

Bradley Sutton:

On the flip side of Amazon news, fortune.com is reporting that the FTC is probing Amazon's new controversial fees in its $140 billion seller business. All right, so this is the fees we've been talking about on this show for the last few weeks, and so many sellers are in an uproar. First of all, don't forget, guys, check back on our weekly buzz. The last couple of weeks, we show how it's not as bad for many sellers as it seems to be due to the reduced FBA fees. But, yeah, like there's some serious stuff going on, especially for those people who are doing pallets and truckloads and containers and things like that. I'm seeing people having to pay thousands of dollars more for shipping. Now the funny thing is, what have I been saying for like a year about this FTC case? The FTC case is like full of nonsense that not one Amazon seller could care less about. They think that they were pulling a gotcha on Amazon for this, that and this, and literally they have no clue how Amazon sellers feel, because there are so many other things that Amazon sellers are concerned about, the things that the FTC was trying to like focus in on. However, that being said, for the first time, hey, this is something that is concerning to Amazon sellers, and so it's going to be interesting how this plays out. For the first time, the FTC might actually have something that Amazon sellers are worried about, and so let's see how this investigation pans out.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Next article is from your Seller Central dashboard and it's entitled to factor authentication will be required for Seller Central sign in. Some of you guys have that already, but this is going to go in on March 28th and you're going to have to use a mobile number or authenticator app to do it. All right, so this, guys, is is, in my opinion, highly recommended even before March 28th. There's so much like hacking going on out there and password hacking and things like that. I think on most critical websites, especially your Seller Central account, you should have two factor authentication. On matter of fact, you should have two factor authentication on a helium 10. All right, guys, you know the helium 10 always has that available. So if you don't have that on Seller Central or helium 10, go in there, turn on two factor authentication to keep your accounts secure.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Next article is from Amazon. Now, this was interesting to me because it says everything you need to know about Amazon business, one of Amazon's fastest growing ventures. All right, so I think most of us have known about the Amazon business program, where you can kind of, or businesses who are registered with Amazon, when they shop, they have a little bit different experience. They can get like quantity discounts and just business discounts and they see different things. It actually reached $35 billion of sales in 2023. All right, so this is quite interesting. This article goes on and say more than 6 million customers are now buying on Amazon business. This includes small and medium sized companies, and also Fortune 100 companies use Amazon business, such as Intel and City and John Hopkins University, et cetera. Now if you want to get more information to see, are your listings, are you enrolled in Amazon business? You know what's going on there. Just just going to Seller Central guys and type in Amazon business and you'll go to this dashboard where it talks about the Amazon business Seller program, all right, and has a whole bunch of frequently asked questions, tons of details about the ins and outs of this program. But it's kind of a surprise. It was kind of surprising to me to find out that that is actually one of the fastest growing programs that Amazon has.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Next article is not really an article, just a post from Destaney’s LinkedIn, where she discovered, or her team discovered, a new ad format. All right. So this is something that she says combines the traditional sponsored brand format of showcASINg three ASINS with a custom image, but also layering them in the value out of a store, spotlight add and the sub page navigation and she put here a sample of that where you can see like the different links here in that custom image. So that is going to be interesting if this is going to be rolled out to everybody. Has anybody actually had access to this and been able to test it out? Let me know. In the comments below Last article, something that we have now reported on, I think four years in a row that's how long we've been doing the weekly buzz. Always around this time of year the same little article comes out, just as a reminder. So I'm just going to go ahead and throw it out there again.

 

Bradley Sutton:

By April 15th, guys, you have to remove multiple inventory from Amazon. Now, a funny thing is is when I was typing out, the little ticker that you see here on the side, meltable, doesn't seem to be a word that my spell checker understands, like I always thought meltables are. Anyways, I digress, meltable is a word to Amazon and you should know what your multiple inventory is Heat-sensitive products, you know, chocolate, gummies, jelly and wax based products. You have to get those out from April 15th to October 15th or else Amazon's going to toss it All right. So just make sure to go ahead and take care of that. All right.

 

Bradley Sutton:

One thing I wanted to give you guys a heads up on is that Kevin King is doing a live strategy session. He hasn't done this in probably over a year from helium 10. It's going to be a live webinar and you guys can actually tune in. H 10.me forward slash Kevin King live. All right, so you can register there. H 10.me forward slash Kevin King live 100% free webinar that he's giving on March 21st, Thursday at 9am. All right, this is so important. I'm going to be doing it at midnight from the Philippines. I'm going to be on the webinar with him and he's going to give such strategies as two proven techniques to make a million dollar main image, seven AI tools Every Amazon seller should be familiar with and a lot more high level strategy. So, regardless what level Amazon seller you are, make sure to register for that workshop. h10.me/kevinkinglive.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Let's go ahead and hop into the Helium 10 New Feature Alerts of the week. The first one is a way to make money now with helium 10. Just as a regular user. There's two different ways, all right. The first way is you guys can actually go to your dashboard and on the on the very right hand side where it has your name. Might be hard to see it here on my window, but if you click on your name on the right hand side of helium 10, you're going to see a button that says become an affiliate, all right. So that's, if you have, like a community or you know, YouTube channel and you think you've got people who are, who are following you out there, well, becoming an affiliate, you could get 25% commission for life, all right. So somebody clicks on your ad for helium 10 or a video or a link that you put out for helium 10. They sign up for helium 10. You don't even know who they are. You've never talked to them and you never talked to them again for the rest of your life, four years from now. If they're paying helium 10, a hundred bucks a month, guess what? You're getting a check for $25 every single month for life, all right. So that's a pretty cool thing. There's also, for some reason it's not in my account, but I think most everybody else if you click on that your name you also have something that says refer a friend or something like that, or refer a customer, where it's not an affiliate whole plan. But if you just have, you know, like a buddy who wants to start learning Amazon, you want to get him started. In the freedom ticket program you can get discounts on your own membership by signing people up. So there's two new ways to make money with helium 10 becoming an affiliate or doing the customer referral. So again, check that out on the right hand side of your dashboard.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Next update is in our tool inventory management. All right, so something that people have wanted for a long time is the ability to have multiple warehouses, multiple 3PLs A lot of people they have, they don't have or they're not like me, and they have all of their inventory in one warehouse. They might have a East Coast warehouse, a Texas warehouse, a West Coast warehouse. Well, now, if you go to your inventory, you're going to have the ability to add multiple warehouses. So it's right here on your warehouses page, you can add as many as you want and then put the specify the inventory that is in each of those warehouses and then, basically, when you send inventory to Amazon, you choose which warehouse is coming from. The inventory is going to be drawn out from there. So remember, last week we announced that we now have inventory management for all of the European marketplaces. Well, now we have multi warehouse management for this tool. Anything else that you guys would want for inventory management, please let us know.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Last Helium 10 New Feature Alert is in atomic and it's our day parting schedules now released for all ad types. And then it's also across all of North America, all of Europe and all of Asia. All right, so you can look at your sponsored product, sponsored brand and even sponsored display, heat day parting, like heat maps if you were. So that's like. Here I can see, hey, for my whole account. Oh, my goodness, my a-cost at 3 am Is absolutely abysmal. You know, maybe I want to turn off my ads or lower my bids at that time, but hey, my a-cost at this other time might be pretty good. Maybe I want to increase my bids, maybe I want to pause my bids, maybe I want to increase my budgets. All these things that you want to do, you need to do it based on information, and so what helium 10 is showing you is the performance of your PPC by Time, hour of the day and by day of the week, and even by your Campaign. So make sure to check that out. If you have atomic day parting across all marketplaces, all ad types. All right, let's get into our training tip of the week. There's actually two things you know.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Thinking about the Amazon fees, I think that a lot of sellers are very conscious about, hey, I need to save pennies wherever I can. I need to know where my money is going. So there's a couple things that I want to show you that every single helium 10 member has, whether you have platinum or diamond, or even if you have the starter plan. All right, so these tools are in profits. Now the first thing I'm going to show you is your expenses, all right.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So did you know that with it, just a couple of clicks, you can find out how much you are paying Amazon per month, like, for example, my FBA fee charge for storage in February last month? I can see right here is a hundred and eleven dollars. That was actually up by forty dollars over the previous month. If I'm wondering which are my products that are getting those storage fees, I just hit that button for the February month and I can see at the ASIN level everything that I am paying storage on. I can see Wow, I got fifty dollars worth of storage for these bat bath mats that I just launched. All right, kind of sucks I shouldn't have, maybe. I'm like why do they have to pay fifty dollars? When I just launched it? You know How's that, but whatever, if I think it's right or wrong, at least I have visibility and I'm not just throwing money at Amazon Without knowing where it's going. All right. So make sure to check that out and then, as you guys might have seen from my workshop last week that, or a few days ago that we did you have a way to automate this where, if you're getting more storage fees or more refunds, things like that, you can actually Automate this alert and have helium 10 let you know that your storage fees are going up. All right, so that's on your insights dashboard. One more thing that is going to help, like when you're launching and help me when I was launching is Are the heat maps inside of helium 10? All right?

 

Bradley Sutton:

So, for any of your products, if you are just about to launch, you might want to make sure that your inventory is Distributed across the country. So the way you can do that is go down to one of your product tables like I'll go ahead and pull it up here for the bat bath Matt and then you want to hit inventory maps. Okay, and then now you're going to see the map of everywhere where your inventory is, and I can see here. I don't even have any in Texas, maybe they. That seems weird to me. You know Austin has some of the most bats in the world. Why don't they send any inventory to Austin? You know, for for my bat shaped coffin mat, but tons of inventory here in New Jersey, more inventory in Maryland, over here, Utah and Florida, and then I could also see my sales distribution based on certain times of the of the month, or I can look at it at the state level, or in the past week, in the past month, whatever, and I can see wow, okay, I've got a lot of sales in Florida during this couple day time period, so maybe that's why there's they sent so much of my inventory to Florida. So make sure to check out those heat maps.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Sometimes, when you're launching a product, you want to wait until Amazon distributes that inventory a little bit more evenly across the country, so you might have your maybe listing closed for a couple days until they distribute it more. And then that's when you turn on your PPC. Well, instead of being blind about where Amazon has distributed your inventory or trying to find some hard to find report inside of seller central. Just go into profits. Go into inventory heat maps and see every single warehouse when your inventory is across the country. All right, guys. Thank you so much for tuning in this week. That's all for the news and feature alerts. Make sure to tune in next week to see what's buzzing.