#646 – Amazon Seller Account Health & Security

Amazon seller account security has never been more critical. What if your business could be halted by a single phishing scam or misplaced credential? In light of recent hacking incidents, we’ve invited Chris McCabe from EcommerceChris to share expert advice on fortifying your Amazon accounts. He uncovers common mistakes sellers make, such as sharing credentials and missing out on two-factor authentication, and offers actionable steps to avoid them. Join us as we discuss the importance of creating unique user permissions, the necessity of revoking access when it’s no longer needed, and the benefits of deploying tools like Helium 10 Alerts to monitor and protect your accounts.

Navigating the aftermath of an account flagged as compromised can be daunting, but it doesn’t have to spell disaster. We explore strategies for quick resolution, including the right Amazon teams to contact and how SAS Core representatives can assist in regaining control. Chris provides insights into managing accounts that are linked to both buyer and seller profiles and shares advice on keeping them secure. We also address the use of VPNs while traveling and the potential impact on account visibility, stressing the importance of maintaining primary email access for appeals.

Managing multiple Amazon accounts doesn’t have to be risky if done correctly. Discover why using subaccounts with unique logins and enabling two-factor authentication is vital for security. We’ll also discuss leveraging remote servers to protect personal devices while handling admin tasks. For sellers looking to expand, we touch on the potential within the arts and crafts category despite inflationary pressures, offering tips on finding low-competition niches. To wrap up, we highlight how Helium 10 Black Box can be an invaluable tool for effective product research, helping you identify seasonal top sellers and capitalize on market trends. Tune in to ensure your Amazon selling endeavors are both secure and successful.

In episode 646 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Chris discuss:

• 00:00 – Keeping Amazon Accounts Safe
• 04:40 – Amazon-Related Account Security Concerns
• 08:36 – Resolving Amazon Account Compromise Quickly
• 12:34 – Amazon Account Termination Warning
• 14:43 – Preventing Amazon Account Compromises
• 17:58 – Secure Amazon Admin Account Setup
• 22:57 – Amazon Account Responsibility Clarity
• 24:16 – Managing Multiple Amazon Accounts Securely
• 33:09 – Questioning Competitors’ Tactics on Amazon
• 34:10 – Utilizing Helium 10 for Product Research
• 38:00 – Product Analysis for Top Keywords
• 40:42 – Identifying Seasonal Top Sellers for Amazon

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Have you heard lately of people who’ve gotten their Amazon accounts hacked? Well, it’s not commonplace. It’s something that all of us need to watch out for. So today we’re going to go over different methods to keep your Amazon accounts safe. 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 is our monthly training in Ask Me Anything, and we are recording this live in front of a studio audience to hundreds, thousands of people around the world. Well, regardless of where you are watching from, you know something that I think is important is your Amazon account security and arguably recently, maybe more than other times, you might have seen in LinkedIn and different stories about people getting their accounts hacked and things like that Buyer’s account, their seller account and some large sellers. You’ve seen some that do millions a year, even tens of millions a year, and they lose control of their Amazon accounts. Now, I don’t want to try and sit here and say this is some common occurrence like, oh, 10%, 5%, even 1% of accounts, this is happening to. No, but the fact that it can happen should be alarming to you guys and should make you think like, hey, do I have my account secure? Now, we know that there are very advanced hackers out there and a lot of times you know if they really want to do something, you know they might be able to figure it out. But there are steps that you can take that can either help mitigate the damage, help put you on alert so that you can take care of it a little bit faster, or potentially even make it impossible or near impossible for some of the maybe less sophisticated hackers to get access to your account. So what I want to do today was just for a few minutes here, before we get into our Ask Me Anything is bring on an expert on the topic he’s been on the podcast many times but just to see what’s going on out there and what are some easy steps that everybody watching and or listening to this episode can do in order to keep their accounts safe. So let’s go ahead and bring Chris McCabe from e-commerce Chris on. Chris, how’s it going?

Chris:

Good? Good morning. How are you?

Bradley Sutton:

Where are you located today?

Chris:

I am in the Boston area.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, so east coast, east coast. Out there it’s hopefully it’s warming up a little bit for you guys.

Chris:

Yeah, 40 degrees today, maybe we’re hoping degrees.

Bradley Sutton:

That’s t-shirt weather.

Chris:

We’re hoping for Boston it went down to 10 a couple nights ago.

Bradley Sutton:

Oh five yeah, that’s why. That’s why that’s what I thought, um, all right. So, first of all, like, have you seen  an uptick as well, Chris? And like you know, uh, you know, bigger accounts getting people getting locked out, or people getting, like, the two-factor changed, or people with nefarious, uh intentions getting holds of people, uh, people’s accounts.

Chris:

Accounts are being compromised. It’s not large sellers predominantly that we’re hearing from. I think we’re hearing from a scattering of the spectrum, but those common cycles are waves consistently throughout the year. I would say every year and not as often as it used to be. People used to before two factor. I mean it depends on how far back you want to go. People are still making some of the same mistakes now that got accounts compromised two, three years ago. That’s what kind of concerns me. But the problem can be divided into, you know, preventing it from even happening in the first place. And then there’s the sellers who are contacting us, typically because they’re having trouble resolving it right. It’s already happened, so there’s no prevention talk. Maybe once it’s fixed you can talk about future prevention. Okay, but the two things I usually mention about preventing it from happening at all, aside from you know the basic, like protect your password. I think I told you the other day on our podcast. People are still emailing me. Like can you sign into my account and tell me what’s wrong? Here’s my credentials, here’s my password. Like obvious stuff like that. Don’t do that. Yeah, anyone who gets access to your. First of all, don’t grant access to just anybody who says they want to look at your account. I know it’s kind of popular for people to say, hey, I’m gonna give you a free audit, tell you what I can improve. People hear the word free, they start doling out, you know, user permissions left and right. Maybe think twice about that because you don’t want to connect yourself to whoever that party is connected to, but create unique user admin permissions for that party. If they’re done with their audit, which hopefully is like within a day or two, take them out as soon as they’re done,   unless you’re signing on the dotted line to indefinitely work with those.

Chris:

People still ask some security questions. How many people have access to this? You know internally how many people would be signing into my account from your organization. Ask them if they are sellers themselves. This is a common thing where people hire a service. By the way, we at eCommerce Chris none of us are sellers, just so you know. People sign up with a service and the owner of the service also has a seller account and if that account gets suspended, sometimes they’re using the same laptop to sign in or there’s other relationships there. Maybe an address is being used it depends on what. The service is Right, but Amazon makes related account block decisions just based on what they see in the tools, right, they’re making kind of a snap judgment based on data points, not necessarily putting a lot of thought into it. So there’s that element of security like be careful who you grant access to.

Chris:

Then there’s the whole other piece of people still get duped by phishing emails. Maybe we could argue that that’s less common than it was five years ago. But I still talk to numerous sellers who cannot tell me what they think, even after they fact find or research. They can’t tell me how they think their account’s been compromised. Their account has definitely been compromised, the password’s been scrambled and Amazon either sanitized the account because they detected an illicit sign in or they’re just not sure. And to be on the safe side, they send you password reset instructions. Right, and I’ll talk about that in a second, because that can go sideways too.

Chris:

But train your teams on like don’t just click on links. I mean this is the standard phishing advice. Only sign in to Seller Central on the Seller Central page, not through a link that you get in an email. The email that’s the primary email on your account. Make sure it’s only known to you or to whoever is accessing your account to review account health, performance notifications or just within your organization, and make sure people that you hire are trained on phishing emails account security. They don’t all have access to the email address. Do not use an email address as your primary which is public. You know it. The top two people in the organization know it. Maybe some other employees know it. That’s it right. And obviously, if you’re working with somebody like me and I want you to email an appeal, I’m probably going to know what the primary email is too, but I worked on these teams at Amazon so I understand account security. I used to be the person that was scrambling your password or sanitizing your account and sending you password reset instructions back in the day and designing some of those SOPs with some other people I work with now. So don’t have that email as your customer service email. Don’t have it as an email you use for personal stuff. Never use the same email on your seller account that you have as your buyer account email, because if you lose your buyer account for any reason, then it pulls your seller account down with it, or you at least can’t sign into your seller account. The listings may stay active, but you might not be able to see or access your seller account. That’s kind of an oldie but a goodie, but not good, because people are still using the same email for their buyer account as they are for their seller account. Never, ever, do that. But also just use an email that you know that is not known to anyone who might try to spoof like they might try to make it look like Amazon is getting an email from that address.

Chris:

There’s been tons of people who had problems with spoofing, account spoofing, email account spoofing. Well, they can’t spoof your email if they don’t know what the email is. That’s the primary in the account and if they do spoof it, it wouldn’t be the primary on your Amazon account. It would be related to other things that you do with email. So that’s kind of the prevention stuff and I’m happy to answer questions. I mean I can go into the weeds more about prevention stuff.

Bradley Sutton:

What about as far as the two-factor versus passkeys, versus sending it to your phone?

Chris:

Two-factor is fine

Bradley Sutton:

Is there a better one out of all the options.

Chris:

I mean two factors fine, I think it’s just. Is it executed properly or not? Sometimes Amazon thinks your account is compromised and it’s not, and it’s a huge inconvenience. You might lose a day of sales if they sign you out as a precaution, but part of the issue is the reason why people have been hiring us lately. I don’t know, you’ll have to tell me when you first started hearing about this recent wave. I’ve got it at like two, three weeks ago. Maybe you see it going back into January. But people are like just going in circles, right Seller support, or they try to call account health from a number they find, or they try to call into support, but they’re just opening cases, they’re going in circles or they can’t talk to anyone. Your best, quickest way of getting this resolved is emailing from your primary, assuming that you haven’t lost control of your. If you’ve lost control of the primary email and somebody else is running not just your Amazon account, but they have taken control of your primary email, that’s a different kind of problem, right, and that requires higher level strategy. Let’s say, but let’s just say for the moment you lost control of your Amazon account, not the email. Well then, your primary email can still be a conduit for sending appeals that have nothing to do with Seller Central. So as long as you know where those appeals need to go whether it’s to a person at Amazon or an email queue you can resolve it quicker than you would chasing your tail with support, trying to call into account health some other way. Obviously, if you can’t get in your account, you can’t hit the call me now button, but trying to reach some other team, if you have an SAS core rep, if you’re paying for an account manager, presumably you’ve got a way of getting in touch with that person and they can maybe open an internal ticket. I’ll have to assume for the moment that you don’t have that ability, but this can be resolved within again, 18, 24 hours. Your account may be down while they’re sorting stuff out and verifying that you’re you, but this can be resolved within a couple of days. I don’t understand. I guess I do understand, much to my chagrin, but I don’t understand why people are contacting us after two weeks of no sales. It means they’re either emailing the wrong place, or they’re not emailing, or they’re following some other playbook that I’m not aware of. That doesn’t really work very well, because it should not take two weeks.

Bradley Sutton:

A couple of questions before we let you go here. There’s somebody who heard what you said and then ask a follow-up questions here. Morris says if you did use your buyer email as the same seller email, what should you do? Which one, I guess, do you change or try and migrate out of there?

Chris:

Yeah, I mean you would fix this as soon as you fix this problem. You will eventually fix this. If they sign you out, you can still email in appeals from the primary, but as soon as this is fixed. First of all, it depends on the nature of the problem on your buyer account, which could be lots of things. If they think it’s improper credit card use, if they think gift card abuse, if they think that you were returning too many items, start with why were they upset with what happened in your buyer account? Or were they not upset with you? They just think it’s compromised. You can still email into Amazon and resolve an issue with your buyer account from that email address. Again, the caveat being unless you’ve lost control of the email inbox entirely. But as soon as you resolve it, switch out, put a different email as your primary. I mean, maybe that’s already understood right If you’ve been flagged properly, it’s not just a precaution. If they think you’ve committed fraud or you’ve done something illicit through your buyer account, then that’s going to be extremely difficult to resolve because you probably can’t even resolve the buyer account issue in order to fix what’s going on with your seller account. If they think you did something nefarious with your buyer account, then they’re assuming you know that you’re going to lose both if they catch you. So I’m assuming for the moment that there’s nothing fraudulent going on with your buyer account.

Bradley Sutton:

I would imagine not necessarily. But this question next question says are brand registered accounts any less at risk as far as the login and stuff like that pretty much it’s all the same, all the same?

Chris:

It’s all the same um, but the same escalations you’d send from a buyer account to get your buyer account back would be similar to what you do on a seller account. You’re reaching to management sources to say something went wrong here. Let’s just say you’ve been inadvertently signed out of your buyer account. Um, the one thing they can’t fix is if you terminate your buyer account this is, this is I don’t know. Have you heard of this? If you terminate your buyer account, you close it permanently and it’s the same email as your seller account, at least publicly. Amazon says you can’t fix that. They can’t fix that for you. You’ve terminated yourself and that account is gone. They, that account is gone. They still say that. I hear they’ve been working on some. You know hacks for that, but I haven’t heard of anything conclusive. So if you have a buyer account and the email is the same, definitely do not close your buyer account. I’m not sure why so many people are closing their buyer accounts. And I’m definitely not sure why people are closing buyer accounts if the email is the same. I mean, if your buyer account isn’t in use, they don’t close it for you, so don’t you just leave it there if you’re not buying with it. I don’t understand why people close buyer accounts.

Bradley Sutton:

Weird. Alright, AA says I’m traveling a lot. Should I always use a VPN set to my home country when I’m abroad? I mean, if we’re talking about security, I don’t think that really changes anything. But is that just good practice to not raise too many red flags on Amazon, or it doesn’t matter?

Chris:

I mean they’re tracking IP addresses and they’re tracking location to the best of their ability. Plenty of people are using VPNs. If you’re not using VPNs consistently, if you’re doing it, I would say, if you’re doing VPNs, do it all the time. If you’re not using VPNs, if you’re doing it inconsistently, then that’s going to look a little funny to them and you’re just increasing the odds that they’re going to. I mean, part of the problem isn’t what you’re doing, it’s that they’re misunderstanding what they’re looking at, right, so you don’t want to create opportunities for a low-level staffer to misunderstand the data in front of them, which is what happens in related accounts.

Bradley Sutton:

If, heaven forbid, anything happens and people you know need to reach out to you for some account help or maybe it has to do with account suspension, which we didn’t even get into today how can people find you on the interwebs out there to get your help?

Chris:

I mean, I would my website’s ecommercechris.com. I would email support@ecommercechris.com. There’s several of us who see those as they come in. The parting advice I wanted to give is there seems to be a huge spike in people using ChatGPT appeals to solve some of these nuanced, sophisticated problems because they think it’s all AI. Like Amazon AI is the only thing looking at appeals and you can send all your AI at them. Don’t do that. I’ve read a lot of these AI appeals or ChatGPT appeals and they sometimes just they’re not things that would make sense to Amazonians and it’s just creating more havoc and confusion. I know this is trendy stuff. I know everyone likes talking about AI, but it’s not. AI is not ready for prime time when it comes to the appeals process. Maybe we can talk in 2026 and that’ll be different. But if you’re emailing us, just put your Helium 10 member in the subject line. We flag those, we track those, we respond to those quickly.

Bradley Sutton:

Thank you very much for joining us. Really good, really good point. All right, everybody else. A couple other things that might help somebody who I heard, a LEAP member named Yitzhak. He had issues. We’ll try and bring him on the podcast soon, soon where his account. Somebody got into it and even though he had two-factor and everything and they got into his account, how did he know? Well, one of the benefits that he had was the hackers were doing this in the middle of the night in the US. He’s selling in Amazon USA. So probably they were thinking, okay, I’m going to get in there and do some crazy stuff while he’s sleeping. But little did they know he actually lives in Israel and also little did they know that he had Helium 10 alerts activated. So for anybody with which I’m assuming that the majority of those who are listening here on the call is make sure, guys, that your Helium 10 Alerts are active, so you just go to alerts inside of Helium 10 and then just turn on the on button on everything.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, how did this help him? Well, how it helped him was, all of a sudden, in the middle of his day, middle of the night here in the US, he started getting the text messages left and right, all right about the price change. So what his hackers did when they went into the account uh, they wanted to like just sell a whole bunch at once. They were probably going to maybe try and take over his bank uh account um, you know, like disbursement and so they lowered the price across the board on all of his products. And that’s one of the alerts that you need to activate. In Helium 10 Alerts there’s a settings feature where you can put, hey, which alerts do I want active? And then his phone started blowing up. Basically the instant it started happening where the prices got changed, and that’s how he knew somebody was in his account and so that’s important to have. So if you have Helium 10, no matter the plan, Platinum, Diamond, Elite, whatever go to your alerts page and make sure everything says on that is an active product and that could save you. For I mean, of course there’s other reasons to have alerts on. You know it’ll tell you if your dimensions get changed or if you have hijackers in the buy box, like other sellers outside of your account. But if the sellers are doing funny things like messing up your images, messing up your title messing up your price. You’re going to get a text message notification if you have the alert on and you have the text message option going there. So that’s just something to keep in mind as well. We’ll try and have him on the podcast to give us a full recap of what happened but that’s something that can help keep your account safe as well of what happened, but that’s something that can help keep your account safe as well.

Bradley Sutton:

Another thing I personally do you know, I don’t think this is completely necessary, but it has other benefits is that we all have an admin account on Amazon, right, and so what I like to do is for my accounts I have them set up, never on my personal computer, never on a local computer that I have at my house, my warehouse, et cetera I do it like on a virtual server, where I log in on a remote computer and just set everything up and then I grant access to another sub-account that I’m going to be logging into on all my personal computers and then only if I have to do something at, like, the admin level, I then connect via the virtual server. Um, that helps like, especially if you have, if you’re doing other amazon accounts um, you know you have clients, uh, or something that you’re logging into different accounts. Never log into anybody’s admin account, like on your own computers, because now it’s tied there and that doesn’t necessarily have to do with hackers, but it’s more like you know what amazon is looking at when they’re monitoring, um, the accounts uh, where you know you don’t want cross contamination going. Or all of a sudden you have a couple friends amazon sellers over at your house and maybe they’re the ones who haven’t changed their buyer, uh, you know account with their seller account and then all of a sudden now amazon’s looking why, and one wi-fi, is there multiple admin accounts you know hopping, hopping on and we didn’t know that they’re related or something. It doesn’t always happen, but it could be Like in an extreme circumstance, if Amazon is relating a couple accounts, it could happen where you’re going to have issues. That happened to one of our Project X account to open up in Europe because it said we were related to this other account that somebody else who worked at Helium 10 a long, long time ago had and that, for whatever reason, got suspended and now we can’t open an account overseas. So just weird things you know might happen like that. So that’s another thing that can help you.

Bradley Sutton:

So now, what I want you guys to start doing is about anything else. Ask some questions away. This is our Ask Me Anything, um. Now, uh, what I want you guys to start doing is about anything else. Uh, ask some questions away. This is our. Ask Me Anything doesn’t mean ask me stuff about account security. Uh, I want to know what are your issues with your Amazon account? What are your issues with Helium 10? Uh, as far as not knowing how to find the right keyword or not knowing how to find the next product, anything I can help you with. For the rest of the show, let me know how I can help. Jules was saying what were you talking about when we were saying buyer account? That means you’re like Amazon Prime account, like, if you have Amazon Prime, what you use to actually purchase products, not necessarily a B2B. So some people have the same email for the Seller Central, the same as what they’re logging into by like on their mobile app, et cetera. It should definitely not do that.

Bradley Sutton:

He says what service providers would you recommend for liability insurance? I’m based in Germany. I would check that. Go to hub.helium10.com. There’s some insurance providers that we have there. Obviously, Helium 10 doesn’t provide insurance, but for things that Helium 10 doesn’t provide, go to hub.helium10.com and take a look there and see if there’s any companies that has gotten reviews. There’s some in there, like Ashland Haddon Liability Insurance. Not sure if they cover Germany or German companies, but worth reaching out. There’s a contact button in there for some of the insurance companies there. Perry says where exactly is the alerts page? So let me just show you. If you hit tools, just go to tools and then under operations you’ll see the alerts button right there.

Bradley Sutton:

Oresh, can you talk about examples for virtual servers? Just type in like virtual server, remote server. I think the one I use might be like Atlantic.net. Yes, that’s it. That is one of the ones I’ve used in the past, Atlantic.net. So that’s the kind of one I’m talking about. No affiliation with Helium 10, even though they’ve got some nice blue and white colors there. Yeah, I’m not an affiliate of them or anything. Atlantic.net. Perry says we have one of our products as FBM. The shippers USPS or UPS is slow to deliver the product and we get warnings from Amazon. Is there any way to extend the days to deliver? So who are the shippers? Right, I like, are you? Are you shipping it yourself? Are you using MCF, multi-channel fulfillment? Let me know there, if you’re using it yourself and you’re using USPS, well, what you’re going to have to do is take a look at the delivery normal delivery time. Now, maybe you just got to stop using whatever you’re using, or you go into your shipping setting times in Seller Central and you might need to add a couple of days. Whatever your settings, right now you’re locked into that kind of delivery promise date. So it’ll say like, hey, three to five days delivery, one to three, like go in there and you’re going to have to do a different shipping profile if you want to keep using the same shippers and you are getting delays. I’m not, you know, maybe use the default, or maybe somebody in your team accidentally changed it and you didn’t realize it. But yeah, whatever your shipping profile setting says is the delivery window. You are locked into that. Now, where I’m not sure who’s responsible, let’s say you’re buying the postage from Amazon, like, are they responsible for it? I’m not sure, but you could still buy it from Amazon. But if you put some crazy time you know fast time in your shipping profile, it’s still you who are saying that that’s what the delivery time is going to be. So you’re going to be kind of on the hook for that.

Bradley Sutton:

Hector says when I create my seller account, it automatically created a buying account with all information from a seller. Yeah, I mean, if you’re logged into Seller Central, you are technically logged into a buyer account, but that’s not. You know, it’s not like it gives you Amazon Prime or you have to purchase on that account, it is just automatically linked. So it is just automatically linked. So just let that go, but don’t be using that account to buy. In other words, Chris was saying. Sue says what about legal recommendations for companies to help with IP infringement, patent copyright Again same thing hub.helium10.com and there’s a few there, like Rich Goldstein is a company that’s in there patent attorney and there might be a couple others, but that that’s a good place to start. Kathy says where can I find out how to create a variation of an existing product? We’re actually going to have a tutorial soon on how to do that with flat files in Freedom Ticket, so make sure to check that out. Um, we’ll have that maybe next month or the month after.

Bradley Sutton:

Victor says what’s the best approach to managing multiple Amazon accounts for the clients as a manager in terms of should I use a different email for each? That’s an open question. Like, subaccounts usually are pretty safe, as in you could have you could be a subaccount for 30 different people and there should be no issues. The issue is when you’re, when you know, like you’re passing passwords over chat or something that where you know, and then you’re going to get into the admin account of one of your clients. Never get into the admin account of one of your clients. If you have to have something done in the admin account, have them do it for you. Like, there’s very few things that really needs to be done in the admin account. Um, if you’re a service provider or managing different accounts, like, you should be completely fine with a sub account and for you like, like if you just gave everybody the same one, yeah. But here’s the thing, you’re kind of on the hook for who your clients are and if you’re not taking care of your own login, that’s obviously an issue. You know all of these things that we’re talking about for Amazon sellers. You know those of you who have subaccounts to other Amazon sellers. It’s applicable to you. Now, maybe somebody can’t hack if you didn’t have the rights to like change bank account information and stuff which I would assume you shouldn’t have that in your subaccount. Now is the damage that somebody could do the same. But no, like, let’s say, you have pricing ability to change pricing. If you’re not protecting your own account, you’re putting your client’s accounts at risks. Now, if, because of that, you want to kind of like minimize the damage, like hey, you don’t want to let anybody get in your account Because if they do, then they can get into like 20, 30 other accounts, if you’re worried about that, yeah, you know that is an option where you can have separate subaccounts and separate logins. It’s just very tedious, obviously, to be logging in and out of accounts. But yeah, that’s a security step that you could take if you were worried about that, because it’s arguably even more critical that your account is safe if you’ve got access to like 30 people’s accounts in just one.

Bradley Sutton:

Bogdan says I’ve given full access to my buyer account as secondary email to my seller account. Is that okay if I leave the country of residence and connect to my seller account? Well, that’s the same thing. If that’s just what you use, that’s what I do. I have my admin account, but then I also have an account that has mostly admin rights that I use to log in, but just not admin. It’s not the same account. Where I am in the world doesn’t really matter as far as that goes, you’ve got to keep that other account just as safe as your other account, like all the things that Chris was talking about. Guys applies, like I said, whether we’re talking about the admin account, whether it’s a sub-account, whether you’re somebody who’s a sub-account of other Amazon sellers, all of these things about you know not using your regular, you know known email address and you know making sure to use two factor and stuff a hundred percent the same application there. Pez says how does this work exactly with the remote server admin? No, remote server means it’s kind of like I’m renting a computer, a virtual computer that that’s sitting in some warehouse somewhere and I’m the only person who uses that computer and I log into that computer. It looks like a window where it’s the desktop of that computer, but it’s not my computer. So, like my, it’s not on my wifi, it’s not on any of my computers here. It’s a computer that I’m using in a remote location and that’s just. If I have to do admin things I do it on that computer and never on my home computers.

Bradley Sutton:

Pranav says his arts and crafts and sewing a good category for a new seller in light of the suddenly increase in inflation in the US. As mostly a wants category, I would say any category is the same as far as newer sellers like you can find opportunity in pretty much any category, even some of the crazy ones like electronics or health and household. Now would it be easier to find percentage-wise like new products that would be popular in some categories over the other, of course, like it’s probably going to be difficult to find a very profitable low-competition cell phone case, for example, right to sell like I’m sure there’s maybe some obscure you know, like a Vietnamese phone or something that very few people have, that maybe some of the big cell phone case companies are not making a lot of cases for. Okay, well, maybe there is even a cell phone case that you can find that has low competition. But could it be more? In the arts and craft category it could be, depending on the product. But guess what, for every one opportunity there’s probably 10 that are completely saturated even in that category. So when I do my product research and if I’m using Helium 10 Black Box and I’m looking for opportunity, if I’m using a category, it’s not because I think that a category is per se better than another. It’s because, like, let’s say, there’s a category that goes with my brand. You know, like, if my brand is Manny’s Mysterious Oddities, I’m not looking to open a product in the food and grocery category. Like, like, there’s no way that that would fit my brand. The other reason that I do category switches in Blackbox is just to keep the results to under 200. Remember, whenever you’re doing searches in Blackbox products or Blackbox keywords, you want the results to be less than 200 so that you can have a realistic number of opportunities to look at. And it’s almost impossible to do that if you’re not doing it by the category. So if you’ve got some special skills or factories that can really do well in the arts and craft category, by all means look into that category. But I wouldn’t do it because of inflation or something like that. No, you’re going to find an opportunity in any of those categories.

Bradley Sutton:

Kim says have Helium 10 accounts ever been hacked to obtain data on seller accounts? Yeah, if there’s people who don’t protect their Helium 10 account and you, like, use some generic email address, I’m sure you know people can get into your account. So Helium 10 has two-factor authentication. If you guys are not using two-factor authentication for your Helium 10 accounts, that is not good either. Or if you’re using a basic, a generic email address a lot of the stuff that Chris was talking about earlier for Amazon you should be doing the same thing for Helium 10 to keep that safe as well. Victor says a few words about AI, ads and the Platinum plan. Is it Adtomic, but a bit cut feature? So AI ads and Platinum, basically, is Adtomic. Well, it’s called Ads now. All of Helium 10 Adtomic is called ads now, but it’s only AI that you can use. So that means it’s all automatic. You can only put in which ASINs and like what’s your ACOS goal, and then Helium 10 is doing the whole thing, like you don’t control bids, you don’t control rules, you don’t control anything. So that’s the difference between AI advertising and just regular Helium 10 ads, is that For me? I’m not trying to say this, guys, as a salesman or something here or trying to make Helium 10 more money I don’t get commission on anything that happens at Helium 10. My salary is set whether we have a million customers or whether we have two million. But I personally say it’s more than worth it to have the regular ads in the Diamond plan. The Diamond plan is a lot more expensive. You get a lot more things, of course, but one of the benefits is in Helium 10 ads you can have your own custom rules, because the AI advertising is kind of like one for all. And if time is your biggest factor and you just don’t have time to make custom rules and things like that, yeah, like AI advertising might be the way to go. But for me I like controlling what’s happening with my rules, and so that’s why I use on the Diamond Plan the full Helium 10 ads and I just make my own rule sets.

Bradley Sutton:

John says how do I automate reviews? If you mean like automate review request, go to follow up. If you’ve got Helium 10, you’ve got full access to it. So go to Helium 10 Follow-up and look at the learn follow-up buttons there. It’ll tell you how to use follow-up. You want to set up the automatic request review and then those will go out automatically whenever you specify after the certain number of orders. Looks like Anita had the same question. Yeah, follow-up, Helium 10 follow-up is what you need. Veronica says is it possible to have all Helium 10 applications work in the Emirates market? Most do, but the ones that don’t. All you have to do is in the tools guys. Let me just show you really quick. This is for anybody out there. This is for anybody out there. On the very top of your Helium 10 screen. Do you see this button right here? You hit that button and another window is going to pop up that says submit a feature request or something like that. That’s what you want to do. To like submit a. That’s what you want to do. To like submit a feature request or say, hey, I would love Helium 10 to have X tool work in the X market. You know that it’s not like right now we don’t have anything for Amazon, Saudi Arabia, KSA, so then you would submit there.

Bradley Sutton:

Hector says I’ve got a question about variations of a product. Some competitors have, say, a color or size variation under the same listing. However, I’ve seen a few sellers that have listed variations as new, separate, essentially started with zero reviews. The variations could fall. Why do they do this? Well, some of them are doing kind of like something a little bit shady where they make it on a separate listing to start um, in order to like do vine again and then, once their vine goes through, then they combine it. I say shady as and that’s not technically against Amazon terms of service per se some feel it might be, um, you know, kind of like skirting the line there a little bit um, or you know, because amazon actually does want products that are different color variations to be in the same variation from day one. So in that case it’s kind of against the terms of service, um, but yeah that if you ever see that happening, like brand new listings, watch it and see if they ever combine it later, because maybe after like a month or two, when they get the minor views, they might combine it. That’s what some sellers say. I can’t say particularly. You know, I don’t know what you know, your seller or your, I don’t even know who your competitors are, but I’m just saying that that is a known thing that some people do, Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Christopher says do you remember what podcast episode talked about using listing builder for AI for different languages? No, but basically go to helium10.com/podcast here. This is what you can do. I’ll just show you, we’ll find out that together. Go to helium10.com/podcast and then go to listing build. Just type in the search listing builder, AI, let’s just say, and then any, any episode that that had that before would say it. And so you, you just find it here all right, in the in the searches. I would say that there’s one that was kind of like called a seller strategy master class, and so that’s the way. Um, that’s the way you would find it. Ava says would it be okay to change a default email address in seller central and Helium 10 at any time for security reasons? Uh, I’m not sure. Every, every company, including Helium 10. It’s a different process for that to go like, if you’re going to do that in your, your Helium 10 account for security, like they might like, need you to show like your id or take a selfie or something, just to make sure that you’re just not some random person trying to trying to change the email. But you know that’s If, if, if you think that that would help. Pez says can we have a quick product research insight tip? When using Helium 10 research, I would say, you know, the number one tool that I think you guys should maybe be using is Black Box brand analytics that not a lot of people are using. So, for example, I’m not sure if it’s going to work I was. They were doing some maintenance on the account earlier today. I’m not sure if it’s going to work. They were doing some maintenance on the account earlier today. Let me see if it’s going to work here. But go to ABA top search terms from Black Box. All right, aba top search terms. Go down here and select a certain week, like, let’s say, hey, something that was from January, or you know what. Here’s an example. This is a great way to do historical.

Bradley Sutton:

When is Valentine’s Day guys? When was Valentine’s Day last year? Let me just search Valentine’s Day 2024. What’s February of 2024? Okay, so here’s what I can do. I can say let me look February. Oh, you know what? No, I forgot. Valentine’s Day already passed. What is something in the future Fourth of July that’s coming up? Right, watch this. Let’s say I’m doing a seasonal product and I want to Right now. Are people buying tons of Fourth of July products? No, it’s February, march, right? Let’s go last year and look at June 23rd to June 29th. Okay, let’s look there. And as of that date, let’s type in 4th of July and hit apply filters. All right, so this is looking last year, last June. What were some of the top 4th of July keywords first of all, and then what were the top products there? All right, so this might take a little bit too long, but it came out right here. So look at some of the top keywords here. 4th of July shirts Funny 4th of July shirts. Now, if I were to look at this now, it was 143,000 searches. Look what right. This second, which is the end of middle of February, that search volume is 100. 100. But what does it jump up to? The week before 4th of July? 140,000. This is 100, no, 10,000 X, 100,000 X. My math is not working. I just woke up, all right, but look how much the search volume goes up. And then now I know, hey, who was the top sellers of these 4th of July shirts. Look at this. This is amazing. This product is not even like a product anymore. It’s completely disappeared from Amazon and here was the top products for 4th of July. And then this allows you to like, just look back at what were the top products. And then what I would do is I would then look at these products and see what other keywords they were selling for. Like, well, let’s just find something a little bit more unique here, something that’s not searched for a hundred thousand times Fourth of July plates. All right, that’s 24,000 searches. And then look at the top product from that time.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, let’s take a look here. It is just a regular Kingsford. This is like that brand that does like barbecues, right, and this product is look at that. That’s not even. It’s not guys, oh, this is beautiful. This product is not even in stock on Amazon right now. Do you see how? There’s no featured offers available? So the number one selling 4th of July plates from last year is not even in stock. So if I were using any other tool other than Helium 10, tools that we will not mention here would I be able to prepare for what the best keywords are or even know what the top product is? No, if you’re not using Helium 10, you’re kind of messed up as far as looking for what are the top keywords for 4th of July plates? But watch this. Let’s go ahead and take this ASIN, unless it just barely went out of stock. Nothing is going to show up here other than Amazon recommended keywords, because I’m assuming it’s been out of stock for like six months, who knows. But watch this, let’s run it through Cerebro. This Kingsford patriotic plate that is not even in stock now. Now, probably it’ll either say zero or it’ll only show Amazon recommended keywords here in Cerebro. Let’s take a look at the results. But I’m going to show you something amazing. Amazon recommended rank is the one showing actually it looks like this product was in stock a little earlier or actually hold on. This is because this is a. I’m going to exclude the variations. That’s something important, guys. You only want to see a certain variation, like I didn’t realize. Look at this. You see how there’s multiple variations. So others might be showing up, but remember, this particular one is the one that said it had good sales, and this particular one, yeah, look at that. Almost no keywords, okay.

Bradley Sutton:

So what we’re going to do is we are going to hit the historical trend for this product and let’s look back to last year, in June of 2024, when this product was selling at its peak. And now, instantly, I’m going to see the top keywords it was getting sales from. Let’s type in at least 300 search volume, organic rank one through 10. Remember, we’re taking a time machine back and looking at what money generating keywords it had. And take a look there. Let’s sort it by search volume. Look at that number one keyword exactly what we found from Brandon Licks 4th of July plates. But look at these other keywords that I was getting sales from 4th of July, party supplies, supplies, fourth of July paper plates, paper plates, heavy duty. It was a top seller. That makes sense, everybody wanting to do Fourth of July parties. That doesn’t mean they’re putting Fourth of July in the search term red paper plates, patriotic paper plates. So there, guys, like we just did in a few minutes, found a top seller that’s not even in stock right now. That, who knows, maybe there is time for us to do something for 4th of July. Um, if we were into making seasonal products, all right, guys. Uh, thank you very much. Appreciate all the time that you guys spent with us and all the great questions, and thank you again to Chris for joining us to give us those important account security updates. I hope you guys implement those ASAP to keep your account safe. All right guys. Thank you so much for joining us. Hope you guys appreciated this episode and we’ll see you in the next episode. Bye-bye now.

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