Helium 10 Buzz 3/22/24: TikTok Shop Update | Amazon Accelerate | Walmart Summit

We’re back with another episode of the Weekly Buzz with Helium 10’s Principal 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.

Mark your calendar—Amazon Accelerate, our fifth annual selling partner conference, is returning to Seattle from September 17 to 19, 2024!
https://sell.amazon.com/blog/announcements/amazon-accelerate-2024-save-the-date

With a Ban Looming, TikTok Pushes Forward with New Commerce Features
https://www.retailtouchpoints.com/topics/digital-commerce/with-a-ban-looming-tiktok-pushes-forward-with-new-commerce-features

Walmart replaces plastic e-commerce envelopes with recyclable paper
https://www.greenbiz.com/article/walmart-replaces-plastic-e-commerce-envelopes-recyclable-paper

Walmart Seller Summit 2024 Announcement
https://www.walmartmarketplacesellersummit.com/

Switching gears, we talk about how you can get discounts on your Helium 10 membership with the refer a friend feature. We also share a handy tip on leveraging historical search data to capitalize on seasonal trends, proving that strategic advertising on low-volume keywords can give sellers an edge before peak season hits. So, join us for a riveting exploration of these developments and take away actionable strategies to enhance your Amazon and Walmart selling journey.

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

• 00:41 – Amazon Accelerate Dates
• 01:45 – TikTok Shop New Features
• 03:58 – Walmart Replaces Plastic with Paper
• 05:02 – Walmart Seller Summit
• 06:23 – Helium 10 Refer a Friend
• 07:25 – Pro Training Tip: Historical Ranks And Search Volume

Transcript

Carrie Miller:

Amazon and Walmart announced their yearly conferences for sellers. And what is TikTok shop doing in response to all of the news about them being potentially taken down in the US? This and so much more on today’s Weekly Buzz. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. 

Carrie Miller:

Welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers podcast hosted by Helium 10. My name is Carrie, and I will be your host today, and this is our Weekly Buzz, where we bring you all the latest and greatest news in Amazon, walmart and the e-commerce world. We also bring you serious strategies for serious sellers of any kind. So let’s go ahead and see what’s buzzing. Alright, let’s go ahead and get straight into the news story. So the first news story that we have and I think this is pretty exciting is that Amazon has announced their dates for Amazon Accelerate. It’s the fifth annual Amazon Accelerate and it’s going to be returning to Seattle from September 17th to the 19th 2024. So you’re going to want to get excited about hearing about the latest tools and innovations. You’re going to get direct access to Amazon experts. I know a lot of people really love that aspect of doing that at the conference to get issues solved. There’s networking opportunities with other sellers and there’s just so much more. They also usually do some major announcements at this conference. So if you attend, you’re going to be among the first to know about any new changes. So attend in person at the Seattle convention and I guess they also have a virtual option, so you’re going to want to stay tuned for more info on that. And then they’ll also be sending out more information on registration details, speaker announcements, hotel reservations, airline discounts and more. So if you haven’t already blocked off your calendar, go ahead and block off those dates, because you don’t want to miss Amazon Accelerate 2024. 

Carrie Miller:

Okay, so back into the news stories. Let’s talk about TikTok shop. I know there’s a lot of news buzzing around about TikTok shop being taken down potentially, and so I’ve always been kind of curious as how they’re kind of responding and what’s kind of cool is. I think they’re kind of business as usual. So I noticed that they have actually done some more things to kind of improve the experience. They’re really really pushing hard on just making themselves established as an e-commerce platform. So the first thing that they’re doing is they have, you know, extended shop ads within the TikTok shop tab. So when you go to the shop tab, you can actually see that there’s going to be some sponsored products in there so you can actually promote your products directly within the shop tab using an image from your product catalog. So this means you know it’s basically a little when you’re, you know, exploring your for you page or then people that you’re following, there’s also that tab. So now you know if somebody searches on there that they want a coffin shelf, then we could potentially advertise our coffin shelf on there and see ourselves at the top of the search. So that’s really exciting news. They also have TikTok video shopping ads that are now available globally to brands and retailers, according to this article, and so it’s going to feature new formats and creative options, and also TikTok has made them these videos, the advertising videos available via search tab. So that’s going to make it easier for potential buyers to be finding these advertisements and you know products that they actually want. Merchants can now populate catalog images into TikToks. You know formats like the carousels and product tiles, and there’s also going to be more simplified onboarding process for ads. So there’s lots of really good things. They’re really just continuing to move forward, they’re forging onward and continuing to create value for sellers, and I really think that that’s going to be an important part of the entire puzzle, just kind of continuing on and hopefully they don’t get taken down, but I think they’re kind of business as usual continuing to go at the very fast speed. They’re innovating, they’re really trying to make it so that sellers can be successful on their platform. So we just got to keep watching for all these great updates. We’ll keep you updated and business as usual on TikTok. 

Carrie Miller:

Up next is an interesting article about Walmart. So Walmart has actually replaced their shipping envelopes from being plastic to paper. They actually have saved more than 2,000 tons of plastic in the last fiscal year. So that’s pretty incredible and they are going to continue to be, you know, working on just being more sustainable in all of their packaging. Something that I really thought was amazing is the right sizing other boxes. I noticed like sometimes when I order from Amazon, I’ll get these ginormous boxes for a little tiny item and that’s going to cost, you know, amazon a lot more money. And I think Walmart is really going to be focused on making sure to, you know, get custom boxes and make sure that the contents fit specifically into those boxes so there’s not a ton of space as things are shipped. So I think this will help save them money, which also, hopefully, they’ll pass those savings along to us. Maybe We’ll see, but I think it’s a really good initiative, really a lot less wasteful than other things that we’ve seen in the e-commerce world. So I think I’m hoping that they continue on this path and I think it’s a great initiative to be more sustainable. 

Carrie Miller:

Okay, continuing on with Walmart. We’ve got some great news out of Walmart, and that is that they’ve announced their Walmart seller summit. That’s going to be in August. They had their last one in Las Vegas in August of 2023. And now it’s going to be in San Francisco at the Mascon Center. So it’s going to be an exclusive event. It’s going to be focused on helping businesses grow. With Walmart, you’re also going to learn specific ways They’ve promised specific ways to reach millions of customers globally through Walmart. So I’m sure there’s going to be some great announcements. You’re going to get to know some of the latest innovations that they’re building for sellers. They really are, you know, investing a lot of money to help third party sellers to be successful. So you’ll hear all about that. At the conference You’re going to get to share your ideas. You’ll be able to meet with experts and merchants across Walmart, solution providers and other members of the Walmart community. I think this is a great opportunity. If you had any issues, you can usually meet with Walmart directly and they can help you to solve those. We, as Helium 10, will be at this conference, and so it’s going to be a great way to connect with us as well, and it’s just a great opportunity to learn how to scale your business with Walmart, which is one of the fastest growing e-commerce platforms, and so it’s a great, great thing to do to invest in your business and yourself. So I hope to see you at the Walmart conference this August in San Francisco, and again, that is August 26th to the 28th in San Francisco. 

Carrie Miller:

Okay, and last but not least, we actually have some really great offers through Helium 10. And this offer is going to help you potentially save up to 20% on your subscription. So the way that this works is when you’re scrolling through the pricing page on your plan, when you log into Helium 10, it says refer a friend to save 20%. So you can see that up there and you can save up to 20% for three months, and also your friend will also save 20% for three months, so you get the 20% discount for three months when your friend uses that referral link. So all you have to do is, when you get onto this page, you’re going to click on the referral link and it’s going to populate the referral link and you can share it. So take advantage of that opportunity to be able to save on your subscription and share it with your friends, help them with your business while you’re helping yourself. So definitely, let us know what you think about that referral plan as well. You can put some things in the comments, but I think the more you can save the better, because overall, you know Penny is out up, so check that out and referral refer all of your friends to Helium 10. 

Carrie Miller:

All right, so for this week’s training tip, I’m going to talk to you about historical searches and historical ranks. So let’s go ahead and get into it. If any of you have ever wanted to sell seasonal products, like, for example, summertime products, I have the best tool for you. This tool is going to help you to find historical search volumes as well as historical ranks of competitor products, so that you can know exactly what you should start targeting now. So, for example, if you want to sell a product that’s a Fourth of July product, you can take that asyn of a competitor’s asyn and you can actually put it into Cerebro and you’re going to be able to find where that particular product was ranking for seasonal keywords. And you can also see the historical search volume as well, so you can see what keywords you would want to start targeting Now. A lot of times what happens is right now for example, fourth of July searches are really really low. So if you are able to find those keywords that maybe go up to 100,000 searches in July, you can start advertising on those keywords now, when they’re maybe 700 search volume, and you can start ranking for them and then you can be positioned when everyone starts to search for that particular keyword, you can be positioned at the top. 

Carrie Miller:

So I want to go ahead and show you how you can find these amazing keywords and how you can implement this. What we’re going to do to be able to find these keywords is we’re going to go into Cerebro, and Cerebro is where we’re going to find all this great historical information. As you can see on here, I’ve already put in an ASIN here and this is actually Fourth of July party favors that I wanted to just take a look at and see what they look like historically. This is the ASIN I put it in there and I did a reverse ASIN search and then I’m going to click on show historical trend and this is going to show the last 24 months of historical data so that you can go back in time and see all of those great keywords that this particular product was targeting. 

Carrie Miller:

So I’m going to take a look at either June or July probably June because people are probably most searching for these things to have them by July 4th. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to click on this June 20th, 23 and I’m going to click on apply filters down at the bottom, and then what it’s going to do is it’s going to go back in time and it’s going to show us where this particular product was ranked number one organically and all the sponsored ranked keywords. So if you take a look at this, the organic rank is showing here. So, for example, we’ve got a search volume here of, you know, 2000 search volume back in June. We have, you know, an organic rank of one and so you can see where all the keywords are that they target and you can see there’s a lot of really good ones. So fourth of July accessories is a great, a great keyword. 

Carrie Miller:

If you take a look at the actual graph of search volume, you’re going to see that there’s barely any search volume right at this moment. There’s about 1000 search volume when you see some of these keywords and they’re going to go ahead and spike way up here. Okay, so what you want to do is you want to find these keywords that are really going to have great search volume and you want to go ahead and start ranking for them now. So this would be, you know, a few months beforehand this is March and then by the time your competition gets in there, you’re already ranked and positioned ahead of them. You could even start this in February if you really wanted to. So you just start running ads on these particular keywords and then, if you take a look at this one again, you can see it goes all the way up to 214,000 search volume. So lots of really great potential for all of these keywords. 

Carrie Miller:

And you can sort by rank up here if you wanted to say oh, I want to see where they were organically ranked between maybe one and 20. And then you can apply those filters and you can see what’s going on there. You can see all of those rankings and you can see the search volume. You can also sort by search volume if you wanted to. Basically, this is going to give you a great amount of information on how to find these keywords that maybe they have very low search volume now, but if you go back in time, you can see where your main competitors were ranking, what keywords they’ve targeted and where the best keywords will be for you know, for example, fourth of July seasonal keywords. 

Carrie Miller:

So if you want to find seasonal keywords, this is the best tool to use and we hope that you’ll check it out. So that is how you can find those seasonal keywords that you can target without having to, you know, look the year before. You can literally go back in time. You can see historical rank and historical search volume so that you can focus on the keywords that are going to matter for you during that seasonal time. So you know, for example, if you wanted to start targeting keywords now for Fourth of July probably would be a great idea, because they’re going to start going up quite a bit and you’ll be able to sell a lot more during that time. So hopefully this was helpful and if you do sell seasonal products, and even if you don’t check it out and see what kind of keywords that you can capitalize on, that maybe you didn’t think before. All right, thank you so much for tuning in to this week’s episode of the weekly buzz, and stay tuned again for next week so we can see what’s buzzing. We’ll see you all then. Bye.

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