Helium 10 Buzz 12/28/23: Amazon Prime Video Ads | 2024 Amazon Events | SnS Tracking

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 Prime Video viewers will have to pay an extra $2.99 monthly in January to avoid ads
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/consumer/amazon-prime-video-ads-commercials-when-does-it-start-how-to-avoid-rcna131369

Amazon customers have scored 1 billion packages from U.S. Same-Day sites
https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/transportation/amazon-same-day-delivery-milestone

Amazon.se: Three years in Sweden
https://www.aboutamazon.eu/news/job-creation-and-investment/amazon-se-three-years-in-sweden

Bringing electric cargo bike deliveries to Croydon, England
https://www.aboutamazon.eu/news/sustainability/bringing-electric-cargo-bike-deliveries-to-croydon-england

Meanwhile, Bradley is buzzing with excitement as he gears up to jet-set across Pakistan, Germany, and back to the US next year for multiple Amazon events. He’s excited to meet you in person! But before you think this episode is all about the hustle, he introduces you to slick additions and features to Helium 10: the product tag group, Chrome extension updates, and the new subscribe and save feature. It’s all about giving you that competitive edge.

And for a final flourish of wisdom, Shivali steps in with her training tip on using Inventory Heat Maps, ensuring you’re never caught off guard by shipping delays again. This year might be winding down, but we’re just getting started on setting you up for success!

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

• 01:17 – Amazon Prime Video Ads
• 03:19 – Billion Same-Day Orders
• 05:04 – Amazon Sweden
• 06:07 – Vacation Settings
• 08:00 – Amazon Delivery Bikes
• 09:19 – Catch Bradley On The Following Events
• 14:52 – Helium 10 New Feature Alerts
• 21:18 – ProTraining Tip: Inventory Heat Maps

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Amazon sponsored TV ads are about to go into effect. Even more, amazon just delivered its billionth same-day delivery product the Amazon conferences you need to attend in Q1 of 2024. How to check which warehouse is your inventory is at in FBA All of these and more on today’s weekly buzz. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I’m 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 news stories that affect Amazon, Walmart and e-commerce sellers. We let you know what new tools and features Helium 10 has, and we also 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. We’ve got a few articles that we’re going to talk about some various topics that are actually not that much going on in the e-commerce world. For a change, it’s the holiday week and not a lot of news reporters out there or Amazon press releases going on, so a little bit light, but make sure to stay to the end, because we have some cool training tips. I think that will help you. Let’s go ahead and hop into the first article

Bradley Sutton:

Now. The first article is actually from Amazon, and this article I actually pulled from CNBC. But Amazon announced that Prime Video viewers are now going to have to pay an extra 299 monthly fee in January to avoid ads. So ads are now going to go ahead and start coming in. This was announced a while back. We talked about sponsored TV. That was announced at Amazon Accelerate or Amazon Unboxed. It was talked about, and so how people are going to consume these ads is basically everybody who’s been watching Prime TV shows or Prime movies. They’re going to start seeing these ads more unless they pay this $2.99 fee starting in late January. That’s going to be in addition to the $139 cost of Amazon Prime I didn’t remember that Amazon Prime cost that much or the $8.99 a month Amazon Prime subscription. Now this should come as no kind of surprise as far as Amazon always trying to find new advertising lanes. This article talks about how Amazon’s advertising is now 8% of the company’s total net sales and advertising incomes surpass income from subscription services last year. All right, so are you going to be trying these sponsored TV? It’s different than pay per click where it’s like, hey, somebody sees an ad of your product and they could purchase it right away. Now there are some versions of this where that can happen. We saw that in was it the Black Friday football game a few weeks ago but this is more of a brand play, like an awareness. I think that’s going to be the benefit of this, and that’s a little bit harder to measure if you’re a smaller brand. This totally makes sense for a huge nine figure and above brands. What about you? How many of you are interested in trying out sponsored TV ads? Has it? Have any of you tried so far? Let me know in the comments below.

Bradley Sutton:

The next article is also having to do with Amazon, and it was entitled that Amazon customers have scored 1 billion packages from US same day sites. Now, they had this quarterback from some college I think he’s from Washington or something, Michael Penix and he actually physically himself delivered the 1 billionth package. This article brought out that there’s actually 90 different metro areas where same day delivery is possible and 55 different locations that’s delivering, and this is all just big cities like the ones mentioned here, which are San Francisco, LA, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Orlando, Detroit and Miami. There’s a lot of other places like I live in like a suburb of San Diego and you know this is a tiny, not tiny town, it’s like 50. 50, 80, 90,000 people, but a lot of the stuff I get is same day delivery. So this is, you know, something that just I think, makes Amazon Prime more sticky for customers. And so the more inventory you put into Amazon, the likely, the more likely, that a portion of the population are going to have it available for same day delivery. Now, where you’re, you know if you actually get a list of warehouses where Amazon does offer same day delivery service. Now, that would be something interesting for you guys to check and cross reference with where Amazon is storing your products to see if you know how big, how much of the country or how many of these 90 locations are getting same day delivery. And actually, the training tip of the week this week, you know, Shivali is going to talk about how you can actually see where in Amazon your inventory is stored.

Bradley Sutton:

Next article, also from Amazon, it was entitled Amazonse three years in Sweden. Believe it or not, guys, I mean it just seems like yesterday this was one of the new kids on the block in Amazon. Europe was Sweden, but, believe it or not, it began in late 2020. So now it’s three years and there’s 550 million products available on Amazon Sweden in 30 categories. I’ll tell you right now I have not heard of one amazing success story from Amazon Sweden. Obviously, you know you can look at this article that’s linked in the comments. But you know there’s Amazon Sweden is moving some numbers, but I want to hear from those who are crushing on Amazon Sweden, because I haven’t yet. You know, like, like, we always talk about the big five in Europe, you know being UK, France, Spain, Italy and Germany, but I don’t hear too much about Amazon Netherlands and Sweden and Poland, about you know, some people crushing it. So if you are selling in that marketplace, let me know in the comments and let me know how it’s going for you Speaking of Amazon there in your seller central dashboard.

Bradley Sutton:

There’s just a reminder for those of you Maybe this is your first holiday season. Maybe you’re going to go on vacation and you’ve got fulfilled by merchant listings. That would be me. I’m not going on vacation, but I have tons of everything I sell in Project X and in my own accounts is fulfilled by merchant and I also have another skew for FBA. Now what you need to do if you’re not going to be able to fulfill. You know you have to be able to add tracking numbers right To orders. It’s better to not close the listing one by one, especially if you have a lot, but set up vacation settings is what Amazon is reminding you to do. So you can actually do this by setting up vacation mode on the account. There’s a link right on your dashboard to do that, and so just with a couple of clicks Now all of your fulfilled by merchant listings are going to be paused, so you’re not going to be responsible for shipping anything.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, one of the things that this doesn’t do is affect the time that you have to reply to customer service emails. Remember, you have 24 hours a day. Due to that, 365 days a year, seven days a week, you have to reply within 24 hours to customer service email. So I didn’t know about this and I wouldn’t pay for this. I’m just gonna always, you know, reply. But they say in this article hey, you should consider setting up customer service by Amazon. It’s a paid program that’s why I wouldn’t do it but where Amazon will take care of customer service on, even on your self-fulfilled Orders, and they’ll they’ll take care of that by a phone, a chat and email. So, again, if you’re going on vacation at any time of the year not not just here in the holidays and you’ve got fulfilled by merchant listings, amazon doesn’t care that you’re on vacation. You still have to deliver it within a certain time, so it’s best to turn it off. Or if you’ve got a lot, go ahead and put that vacation settings on a last article of the day. It’s just kind of like a funny article, you know, if you think of, you know FedEx trucks. You think of the white with the blue and red letters, right, if you think of, ups trucks is brown. You know those brown trucks. They all look the same and even now Amazon has mostly those like gray, amazon Prime kind of like electric looking trucks and other vans.

Bradley Sutton:

Amazon put out an article from Amazon Europe. They have got the coolest delivery out of everybody. I think, right, like I would rock this, like I would deliver pizza in this. But, guys, if you guys are watching this on YouTube or if you’re watching this on the podcast, go watch us on YouTube. Take a look at this article. They’ve got these cool electric Cargo bikes, they call it. They’re kind of like four wheelers, almost With no doors. It’s kind of hard to describe if you’re not, if you’re not looking at this, but I would totally have rocked this when I was like in high school to go to school or something or you know, deliver pizzas on the side, but is this like what you guys in Europe, is this how you guys are getting your Amazon deliveries on these cool, these cool electric bikes? They even have like a windshield and a windshield wiper and it’s just. It’s kind of hard to describe here, but definitely take a look at it. If you’re just listening to this on the podcast, I’m just curious is that what you guys are used to? As far as what’s delivering your products? Let me know, all right.

Bradley Sutton:

Next up, I want to talk about the different Events I’m going to be at and all over the world. You know, you guys know I like to travel, but I like meeting helium to members in different parts of the world. Now, the very first event of the year that I’ll be at will actually be back in for my third time in Lahore, Pakistan. All right, so that it’s the reality check growth conference. Saddam from AMZ One Step is one of the ones who is putting it on. I’ll be one of this speakers there, there’ll be other speakers, you know, people I’ve met before and a lot of service providers and agencies Coming out. So if you are in the Lahore area or anywhere in Pakistan you’re able to go. Go to h10.me/reality. It’s January 14th in Lahore, Pakistan, you know, one of my favorite countries to visit because of the food, the hospitality. There goes my diet for my news years. If I had New Year’s resolution in January, it’s gone, because I cannot be on a diet in Pakistan with the Chicken Biryani and everything else I want. I want to eat. But anyways, January 14th, if you guys are in that area, make sure to come by.

Bradley Sutton:

The next event is going to be January 25th, all right, and I don’t have a, a website for this yet. We’ll announce it next week. It’ll be in Frankfurt, Hermany, right in the airport. Like literally, you walk off the airplane and there’s the airport and then it’s a building that’s attached to the airport. It’s gonna be a co-hosted event with Avosk and this is gonna be the first half is gonna be an Elite workshop. So if you’re a helium-10 elite member or serious sellers club member, go to the Facebook group and I’ll give you guys a link to sign up for that. It’ll be free for you and you can stay the whole day. For the afternoon it’s gonna be open to the public. I believe it’s gonna be 75 euros and there’ll be tons of different speakers at the event, including myself. I’ll be speaking at the event and there’ll be other speakers from different countries around, including potentially speakers from who have worked at Companies like Lego, etc. So We’ll be confirming the speakers and confirming the the how to sign up shortly.

Bradley Sutton:

But mark your calendars Frankfurt, germany, on January, the 25th, speaking of Germany, also going to be at AMZ Hacking live. That’s gonna be in Berlin, germany, and that’s gonna be on the 27th of January. So make sure to go to AMZ hacking line. You can go to the website by going to h10.me/germany to get tickets. I’m just one of many, many speakers who are gonna be at at this event. It’s gonna be great. There’s gonna be like VIP dinner the night before and then a social afterwards. So that’s definitely one of the top events in for the entire year in Germany is the AMZ Hacking live, all right.

Bradley Sutton:

Another event this is actually a virtual one in February, all right. So after the Germany ones, the next one that I’ll be doing is online wins the billion dollar seller summit. All right, this is gonna be an online event. You can go to h10.me/bdss, BDSS it’s there’s and then look for the online event, or it’s called the virtual event, and that’ll be February 21st and 22nd, put on by Kevin King. Tons of speakers there. I’m gonna be doing a presentation unlike anything I’ve ever done before, completely different than what you’re used to when you’re, when you’re seeing my, my presentation, and we talk about stuff I’ve never talked about before. So make sure to go to that one, too.

Bradley Sutton:

Next up, there’s going to be back here in the United States a Want pretty much usually the biggest conference In the United States outside of the ones that Amazon does every year, and that’s the prosper show, and it’s going to be in Vegas at Mandalay Bay, all right, from March 4th to March 6th, all right. So you know, I’ve been to probably every prosper Since like 2018, so I don’t know how many. That is 6, 7 or something like that. Always a great show. I’ll be speaking at that event too. If you guys want to get tickets, go to h10.me/prosper. And I’m not sure where this coupon code comes from, but there is a coupon code for this event that you can use to get a hundred dollars off, alright, and it is SANAR1100OFFSPEAK. So again, if you’re, you know, just listening to this and you don’t see the little ticker right here, write this down SANAR1100OFFSPEAK. And that should save you $100 off of the ticket. That again, that’s in, that’s in Las Vegas, and we’ll probably do, like you know, maybe some, some mini socials or something that we can, you know, get together at that event. Now, shortly thereafter it hasn’t been confirmed yet I might be going to do an Amazon event, like an event that’s actually put on by Amazon in the Philippines, their first time Going to the Philippines. That’ll probably be announced in the next couple weeks. All right, so that’s it for all of the events in Q1 of 2024. A lot going on. I know there’s other events too, but those are the ones that I’ll be personally at, and others from my team might Be there as well, so you can meet us and hang out. We always love to do that.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, next up, let us go into the new feature alerts from Helium 10. This is something that we do every week, because literally every week, Helium 10 is launching either a new tool, a new feature, a new function, some kind of you know request that the customers have been asking for. The team is working year round. Here we are right after Christmas and there’s stuff to announce, all right. So the first one I want to talk about is this again comes from the customers, because a lot of you guys were asking like, hey, yes, that’s cool that in Helium 10, you know, in the profits and the insights dashboard, I can see products group by parent and things like that, and I could, you know, maybe even buy brand. But I want to have like full flexibility about Grouping products together so I can maybe see all of the sales of a certain you know like niche of products, or maybe it’s not everything in a certain brand. Whatever the case is, you can now make custom groups and we call this tags. All right, so in your dashboard, your insights dashboard, I should say there will be a button that says tag, with a plus sign. So what you can do is hit that button and then you are going to go to this create tag. Like, let’s say, I want to make a group of my products or a tag for all of my coffin shelves, all right, so I type in the name and then I add all the products that are coffin shelves, all right, and so I can just go ahead and do a search for coffin shelf. So what I can do is I can just go ahead and select, one by one, all of my coffin shelf products and then now I have this tag of coffin shelf and so I can just go ahead and hit this button uh, coffin shelves and then now in my insights dashboard, where it shows all of my product performance, I can just instantly see, like, all right, how’s my keywords doing on on this? Um, how is my inventory doing? How many units have I sold in this timeframe? So a kind of cool feature there that you guys have been asking for is the ability to make groups of your products.

Bradley Sutton:

Next thing I want to talk about a couple uh updates to the Helium 10 Chrome Extension the most used Chrome Extension in the world for Amazon sellers, over one million active users and a couple of things you’re going to uh, notice. First of all, this is just the beginning. You’re going to start seeing widgets that are in other sponsored ad placement. So you guys know that in the uh, you know search results of Amazon when you run the chrome I mean, actually you don’t even have to run the Chrome Extension It’ll start showing up these little widgets that say where the seller is coming from, what the BSR is, how many sellers there are, et cetera, et cetera. But now, like, for example, in the sponsored brand headline ad you know that that you guys, hopefully, are running sponsored brand ads you’re going to be able to go ahead and grab that ascent information right there, cause you know you can’t really see what ascent it is unless you go ahead and click on the ad. So that’s one update that has happened. Uh, another update is in this niche or keyword summary section that’s at the top of any search result page, once you hit show full summary. Uh, something that a lot of customers were asking for was the ability to sort within the charts that come up here. So now, uh, if you hit the show full summary at this top little widget, any of these charts, you can go ahead and sort by organic rank, by the revenue by the market share, uh, things like that.

Bradley Sutton:

The last thing I want to talk about in the Chrome Extension is an Xray. All right, so when you run x-ray, first of all it’s like loads, a lot faster than it did before and you can see tons and tons of rows. A lot of you guys were saying, hey, we want to see a design where there’s a lot of rows showing up here. Now, something you’re going to see at the very top right is this little section. Now you know there’s no uh, more multi-factor success score. This is called the two-factor score that you can customize so it says top 10 products with revenue over $8,000 in mind and under 125 reviews. So what it’s doing is instantly we just a click of the button on x-ray. You can take a look at the search results pages and now know from the top 10 organic positions how many have revenue over x and how many have reviews under y. Now everybody has different thresholds. Like, I put here $8,000 of revenue and so I can see six out of the 10. Top 10 organic ones have $8,000 revenue, but three out of the top 10 have under 125 reviews. Now if you want to customize, like, what thresholds you want to see with that quick access. Just hit your Chrome Extension button and go to the settings gear button and from there now you can go ahead and specify how you want your two-factor success score to work. So again you can. I put $8,000 revenue and 125 reviews because that’s what I’m looking for in my top 10 products Last up.

Bradley Sutton:

Are you somebody who uses subscribe and save? Hopefully you are, if you have some kind of replenishable product, like in grocery or another category. One of the accounts I work on, as you guys know, is a hemp cream, and so this account definitely uses subscribe and save. So now you’ve got a way to quickly track, get some you know cool information on your subscribe and save in your dashboard. All right, so you’re going to want to go to the very bottom of the page and then you’re going to hit add chart. There’s an add chart button and the chart that you’re going to want to add is the subscribe and save chart. Once you go ahead and add that, it’s now going to come up a new widget that will tell you exactly, in the timeframe that you have selected, what’s going on with your subscribe and save. You’ll be able to see your rate, the number of units that you’ve sold in, subscribe and save your sales, what kind of discount the customer got, and then your day by day chart. So this is just the beginning of this tool, but it’s something that’s going to allow you to just get a quick snapshot at how your subscribe and save is hopefully growing over time and then, if there’s like any issues, watching this chart frequently is something that’s going to help you out. All right, guys, that’s it for the new feature alerts.

Bradley Sutton:

Last up, we’ve got Shivali with our training tip of the week. I talked earlier about you know understanding where your inventory is at in the United States, especially when you’re launching that’s important or when you’re relaunching, coming back into stock, or you want to know how many people have access to you know same day service. So you have a list of those locations. Here is how you can see where your inventory is at in the United States. Shivali, take it away.

Shivali Patel:

Knowing where your inventory is located in warehouses across the country can really come in handy. After all, in the case that you were just launching, opening up your listing before your stock is nicely spread out means running the risk of having potential customers ditch your product for a competitors, all because your delivery time was two to three weeks compared to that gold standard two day shipping. Or perhaps you just want to see where the heck all of your inventory is because you’re already selling, but waiting for a shipment to be checked in and save you from low stock or those incoming low inventory level fees that we discussed last week can be really beneficial. A great way to stay on top of both of those concerns is our inventory heat maps located inside of Profits. Think of it as the big brother of all of your Amazon FBA inventory, or a visual map that can help you see where everything is stored. For instance, I am looking at a product I recently launched this past month I actually had the shipment sent to a single Amazon facility a while ago and check out how you can see the inventory spread day by day across the whole country all the way going into December. The bigger the circle you have, the more product you’ve got there and it’s updated every day, giving you the low down on sellable items, on damaged goods, defective items and the total count for each city.

Shivali Patel:

God forbid but say that there was a tornado that hit an Amazon warehouse or a worker strike, causing chaos. You need to be able to see if your product is affected. At the bottom, you can see how many units are available at every single facility that your shipment has been sent out to, and with heat maps. That is something within reach, because you always have a bird’s eye view of your inventory. So go ahead and give it a try. Maybe you’ll even get to make some correlations between where your inventory is situated and where it’s being sold with the tab over, to help you make smarter decisions and ultimately keep your business on track. Cheers.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, thank you very much, Shivali, for that. So that’s something you guys all have access to. Make sure to check that out in your Profits dashboard. All right, guys. That’s it for the news and training of the week. Hope you enjoyed this episode. This is our last one of the year. I’ll see you guys next year, 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.