Helium 10 Buzz 1/25/24: TikTok Usage Slowing | Amazon AI for Listings | New Helium 10 BlackBox Tool

We’re back with another episode of the Weekly Buzz with Helium 10’s Senior Brand Evangelist and Walmart Expert, Carrie Miller. 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.

TikTok Shop buyers will have to pay higher order minimums to get free shipping as the company cuts back
https://www.businessinsider.com/tiktok-shop-cutting-back-free-shipping-trims-costs-2024-1

Amazon aids seller listings with new generative AI partnership
https://chainstoreage.com/amazon-aids-seller-listings-new-generative-ai-partnership

Etsy targets gift shoppers with AI-based tool
https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/19/tiktok-usage-is-starting-to-slow-is-tiktok-shop-to-blame/

TikTok usage is starting to slow — is TikTok Shop to blame?
https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/19/tiktok-usage-is-starting-to-slow-is-tiktok-shop-to-blame/

Learn how to stay ahead of the curve as Carrie shows you the power of  Helium 10’s BlackBox tool together with Amazon’s Brand Analytics data. Your perspective is the missing piece so make sure to share them in the comments below or in the Helium 10 Users Facebook group as we dissect Amazon, Etsy, and TikTok shop’s evolving marketplaces and the power dynamics at play for sellers.

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

• 00:43 – TikTok Shipping
• 01:25 – Amazon Listing AI
• 03:32 – Etsy Gift Finder
• 04:23 – TikTok Usage Slowing
• 05:32 – Amazon Search Terms
• 07:14 – New BlackBox Tool

Transcript

Carrie Miller:

TikTok shop, possibly slowing down, new limits for search terms on the back end of Seller Central, and a new tool that helps shoppers find exactly what they’re looking for on Etsy. This and so much more on this week’s episode of the Weekly Buzz. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Welcome back to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosted by Helium 10. I’m Keri and I will be your host for this episode, and this is our weekly buzz episode, where we give you all the latest and greatest e-commerce news Walmart, Amazon, Etsy, Shopify and we also give you serious strategies for serious sellers at any level. So let’s go ahead and see what’s buzzing, Okay, so the first article that I would like to talk with you about today is from Business Insider, and what they’re saying is that TikTok is going to increase order minimums for shoppers because they’re kind of losing money.

Carrie Miller:

They’ve been offering free shipping and also reimbursing sellers on the other side, so they’re actually losing money in that way. So they’re going to try to increase those minimums for free shipping in order to kind of not lose that, those incomes on the shipping. So we’ll see how that affects actual sales on TikTok, but I don’t think it’s too much to be concerned about, because people are used to kind of minimums for shipping on a lot of sites. So I’d be interested to know what you think if you’ve ever purchased something on TikTok. Does free shipping make you make or break the deal? Let us know in the comments below.

Carrie Miller:

Okay, and the next article is about Amazon. Now, last week if you didn’t hear about this from Shavali. Shavali talked about how AI kind of changing listings for sellers, and it was causing a lot of issues because sellers were getting de-indexed for different things, and so now there’s an announcement about the partnership for a generative AI for listings. So what they are partnering with is NVIDIA and what they’re saying is they’re going in and identifying product listings where they think the content could actually be improved upon, and so they’re automatically creating or generating revised content on there. So basically, what they’ll do is they’ll contact the sellers and allow them to give them the feedback and allow them to decide whether or not they want to change it. Now this is very interesting because the way it’s been happening is that they’re actually automatically have been changing it in the last few weeks, which is because a lot of ruckus in the seller world.

Carrie Miller:

Now the question that I have is maybe the reason for that is because of who has the access or kind of authority to change the listing. Now, the more that you contribute to editing your listing, the more you are kind of like an authority on that, on that listing, and have editing access, I guess you could say. And so if you maybe have set your listings up for a few years and you haven’t really edited or changed them, then you don’t really have as much power to edit the content as, say, Amazon would. So I’m curious to know if that is actually how they’re. You know who they’re asking is whoever has the highest rank in terms of editing on that particular listing. So I don’t know if anyone else has heard about this. If you have any additional thoughts about this AI stuff, please leave it in the comments for everyone to know. But that’s a really interesting thing that they’re, you know they’re saying that they’re going to have sellers, you know, choose whether or not they want to change it, but that since that hasn’t happened, do sellers have the authority that they think they do on their listings? That is my biggest question. I don’t think it’s too much to worry about. Just if you haven’t set up your Helium 10 alerts. Make sure you set up your alerts to make to see if Amazon or anyone has changed your title, your bullets, your images or your description, and you’ll be notified, and then you can change it back if you need to. So there’s no, no worry there, as long as you have those alerts set up, Okay, the next article is about Etsy, and this is a really interesting and cool tool that I think a lot of people will find helpful is basically, it’s an AI, it’s a gender, another generative AI tool that you, if you’re searching for a gift for someone, you can basically go onto Etsy and fill in the details about what you’re looking for for that person, and just about that person, and they’re going to show you gift ideas on Etsy for that person based on the input that you give it.

Carrie Miller:

So I think that might be quite an interesting thing. There are some sellers who are, you know, opting into this whole thing, and I wonder you know how well that’ll do, and I think, I think for me that would be great. If I’m looking for, you know, something for a specific person, maybe that’s harder to shop for it. You can find some really cool ideas on Etsy, and so I’m curious to know if anyone out there has seen this or if you’ve actually used it to find gifts. Let us know in the comments below. Okay, so this is something that I think you know people have been very, very excited about TikTok, and TikTok is our next article, and it’s about you know whether or not the usage is slowing down. Now, personally, I do like TikTok and I love the content that’s on there, but I have noticed that about every other video is a TikTok shop video where someone’s trying to sell you something. So the question that this article is, you know, saying is you know, is it slowing down the usage on TikTok? Is it because of TikTok shop? And so you know that’s a question. I think that people are still using it quite a bit, so I really don’t think that there’s much to be worried about. In fact, Bradley has a podcast that he’s going to be talking about two of our elite members. They will talk to you about their TikToks that are journey and how they sold out of their inventory in one day.

Carrie Miller:

I know that even if TikTok shop is slowing down in usage, that doesn’t mean that the opportunity isn’t there. I really think that TikTok shop, especially in 2024, is a huge opportunity. There’s always people on there. There’s always going to be opportunity there. So don’t sleep on it this year if you haven’t gotten on there, and let us know if you have started selling on TikTok shop and what your success has been on that so far. Okay, the next thing we have here is in our seller central account here for our many’s mysterious oddities, and if you look here it’s called generic keywords now, where it used to be called search terms, and they are allowing up to 500 characters in some instances and you can actually add more lines here, so you can add more characters in the back end. Now, with testing, Bradley has actually done quite a bit of testing, if you’ve been listening to him, and this is actually not the most important area where you’re going to start indexing and ranking. It’s not really giving you ranking juice per se by having these keywords in the back end. So something that’s really interesting about it is, say, you have a term like black and then you also have black egg tray. You can only index for a black egg tray if you have kind of this egg tray written into your listing. You can’t just index for words that are individually written in the back end, and I’m going to show you what I mean by that. So if we went to helium tens index checker, what I did is I took our ASIN, I put it in there and I put black and then black egg tray and you can see that we’re not actually indexed for black, but we are for black egg tray. So the trick is that it has to kind of match up to something that’s already written in your listing that you’re indexed for, and then you can kind of index for that full phrase. So if you’re indexed already and showing for egg tray, then you can put black in there and you can also index for black tray black, sorry, black egg tray if people are also searching for that. So that’s something to consider, test out and if you have Helium 10, hopefully all of you do, because it’s the best tool out there check your index checker and start to test this out and let us know if you’ve had the same results that we have in terms of the single keywords or the phrases as well.

Carrie Miller:

Alrighty, and last but not least, I wanted to get into something that is really cool, I think that a lot of us will benefit from, and that is our newest tool in black box and it’s our ABA search term tool that is in black box and it’s basically bringing in brand analytics information and brand analytics. What it started out as is it’s only for you know, brand registered sellers, and you had this access to all the search terms I think up to a million search terms where it shows you the search term and the top clicked and top converted products for those keywords. Now the way that you had to get that information is you would download these spreadsheets. It’s like a million lines that would take hours and hours. Some people were using developers to kind of sift through this to find really cool product opportunities, and there were some really cool product opportunities. But it really was quite a headache to sift through this brand analytics data, although it’s really cool to see it. But now we have this amazing tool that is our brand analytics ABA top search terms within Blackbox. So you can see it’s this little tab. So if, once you’re in Blackbox, you’re gonna click on this little tab here and this is where it is Now you can choose the weeks that you want to search in here. So it’s gonna change every week based on the brand analytics terms. So you know. If you do see that there are different. You know different results every week. You’re gonna know it’s because the brand analytics data is gonna be different every week.

Carrie Miller:

One thing that I like to do, and I think is kind of interesting, is going in here and going to the phrases containing and seeing if there’s anything similar. So we sell the coffin shelves. I wanna see what keywords come up that are similar to coffin and this can help, you know, maybe define some more keywords, also some product ideas. So I’m looking at coffin and I’m gonna see it, what it comes up with. It looks like 168 keywords and there’s a lot of coffin nails because that’s like an actual shape and some coffin stuff. But let’s see if we can find something interesting. Okay, so right here we’ve got coffin cat tree. So coffin cat tree if I expand this out, I can see this on Amazon. It looks like it’s a pretty good price point. They’re kind of a range of price points, but we can pull our X-Ray extension and see what we’ve got here for this potential product idea, which is a really cool idea. Looks like, you know, you could potentially make some good profit on it. Okay, so we’ve got this one right here. This looks like it’s making the most 60,000 in revenue every month. They’ve got 449 units sold in the last 30 days and that’s a great price point. So that could be something that would be interesting to kind of differentiate on and see if you could sell it.

Carrie Miller:

Now, all of these on this page are not even, you know, coffin cat trees, but you might, you know, think about maybe ways you could differentiate with agothic cat tree things like that. So something else you can do is you can also just take this asin and I’m gonna just copy it and go back into the black box and I’m gonna go up here and clear these filters. So I think that’s a great idea. But let’s see If we wanted to see kind of the top keywords. They have the top click share and conversion share for. I’m just gonna put that asin in there and I’m gonna apply the filters and this will actually show us the top clicked and the top converted keywords for this particular product. So we’ve got goth cat tree and that they get 37% of the click share and 29% of the conversion, which is pretty amazing. Goth cat tree they’ve got, you know, 41% of the click share and 38% of the conversion. So you can actually see some keywords that are related to this particular product. That, would you know, you might not have actually found or thought about, but you could potentially target too if you wanted to sell this product, and you can analyze each one of these. You’ve got a black cat tower. You’ve got, you know, black cat tree. That one’s you know. Even better, you can, you know, see what kind of differentiation you have there. So there’s a lot of great opportunities here that you can take a look at.

Carrie Miller:

It’s gonna take you on, you know, down rabbit holes, but a little it’ll help you to find some really cool products that are in demand. You can see that people are actually searching for these products and potentially add them into your product line. So if you haven’t checked it out, you need to check this out. You’re gonna find some really cool products and there’s even more that you can do than what I even showed you today. But you can play around with all these filters. There’s even some advanced settings where you can, you know, sort by the top clicked and top converted keywords A lot of really cool stuff in here. So you’re gonna wanna check it out and let us know what you think If you have any feedback. We always are open to feedback to make sure that we have the best product possible. But that is all that we have today for the Weekly Buzz. I’m sorry to say that we’ve come to an end. Thank you all for tuning in and we’ll see you again next week and we’ll see what’s buzzing. Bye.

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.