#410 – The Best Walmart And Amazon Seller Strategies Of 2022

We’re back with another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast, and this episode is one of our listener’s favorites, where we go over all the best of the best 30-second and 60-second Amazon and Walmart tips from our guests this year, 2022. We know that you guys haven’t listened to all of our single episodes this year, so our team compiled all the tips, and Bradley hand-picked the best of the best. As a bonus “peek behind the curtain,” Bradley shares his plans for physical health and records this podcast episode on a treadmill! How cool is that?

I hope you guys had an excellent 2022 and looking forward to more Serious Sellers Podcast episodes in 2023!

In episode 410 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, we discuss:

• 02:00 – Focusing On Health And Wellness Next Year
• 03:40 –  Finding Good Keywords For Amazon PPC
• 05:20 – Why Using Helium 10 Alerts Is Important
• 07:30 – Nurture Your Top Products And Do Not Neglect Them
• 08:20 – Do Not Look For A Product. Look For A Keyword
• 09:30 – If You Don’t Have Good Amazon PPC Analytics, You’re Blind
• 11:10 – Optimizing Your Image Stack
• 12:00 – Getting Reviews For Your Walmart Listings
• 13:18 – Launching On Etsy Before Amazon
• 13:50 – Valuable Listing Tip From Tomer Rabinovich
• 17:05 – It Pays To Own The IP And Design Patents
• 18:02 – How To Approach Influencers For Your Product
• 19:50 – Use A Tool That Computes Your PPC ACoS
• 20:50 – Award-Winning Buy Box Hack From Josh Hadley
• 23:30 – A Clever Packaging Strategy
• 24:26 – How To Create Successful Amazon Vine Promotions
• 27:22 – How YouTube Can Benefit Your Amazon Brand
• 28:00 – Focus On Your “Superpower” When Scaling
• 29:30 – Image Optimization Hack That Improves Conversion Rates
• 30:45 – Killer Differentiation And Packaging Hack From Norm Farrar
• 36:20 – Get High-level Strategies From The AM/PM Podcast
• 37:00 – Don’t Forget To Leave Us A Review!

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today we are gonna have one of our favorite episodes of the year. For some of you, this is our top strategy for the entire year of 2022. Get ready guys, this is gonna be a fun-filled strategy fest. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think.

Bradley Sutton:

Wanna check estimated sales for products you see on Amazon? Or maybe you want to instantly see how many listings on page one of a search term result, have the actually searched keyword in the title. You can find all of these things out and more with the Helium 10 Chrome extension tool Xray. More than 1 million people have used this tool. Find out what it can do for you by downloading it for free at h10.me/xray, h10.me/xray. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Seller’s Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s a completely BS-free unscripted, and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And for those of you watching this on YouTube, or you might be listening to the podcast, you might see me moving a little bit strange and you hear some heavy breathing, weird noise.

Bradley Sutton:

I’m actually on an under desk treadmill right now. So one of the things for next year on the podcast in 2023, as we get in there, it’s gonna be a kind of a key thing as I think health is important. Mental health, physical health, diets hobbies, things like that. You’ve already seen me start some new things on the podcast, on the YouTube version where we show videos of me and my travels cuz that’s my hobby. Everybody has different hobbies. Mine is travel, so I try and incorporate a little bit of travel to each of the episode and some of the other hobbies. But health I think is something that entrepreneurs, we kind of like take for granted sometimes. And for those who don’t know I even had a heart attack this year, was out dead for 10 minutes before being revived by paramedics.

Bradley Sutton:

So obviously health, physical health is something that’s at the top of my kind of like list of important things. And you never think that somebody our age or my age might, that could happen to you. But as entrepreneurs, I think sometimes, especially those who work from home, we might get in this routine where we don’t have the best eating habits, we don’t have the best exercise habits. And so I’m gonna try and bring that out with a lot of our guests this coming year. Like, hey, seeing what they’re doing. And one of the things for me is, hey, every day I wanna do at least like a mile or two on this treadmill, this standing desk treadmill that I’ve got here. Whether I’m recording podcasts or on, on calls or things like that.

Bradley Sutton:

So as you can tell, I’m really outta shape. That’s why I’m breathing heavily even though I’m only walking on this thing. But that’s my kind of like motivation that, hey, I need to make sure my physical health is taken care of next year, and hopefully you guys are able to do things of that nature. But we’re here not just to talk about health, let’s talk about health of our Amazon businesses and Walmart businesses. And one of the ways we can do that is by going over some of our guest top strategies. So I know most of you guys haven’t been able to listen to every single episode out there. So what our team has done Mhel and Nikko on the back end is they have taken out some all of the 30-second tips and 60-second tips that our guests have given. And then what I did was I picked like some of the best of the best. And I there’s a lot I couldn’t get out here, but we’re gonna go over some of these strategies so that you guys are ready to crush it in 2023. So let’s hop right into it. Here’s the first couple from Andrew and Kareem.

Andrew Engle:

So I know you’re talking about negative keywords with PPC everyone does that, blah, blah, blah. But I do think there’s some keywords that people shy away from and I do kind of have a strategy for finding some good ones. A lot of people are kind of scared of the negative phrase keywords. And one of the things I’ve started doing with the Helium 10 tools is if you use Adtomic, they will give you, there’s two years of the search terms that you’ve had stored in there. You can download the last two years of search terms. And so I do that. I download the last two years of search terms. I take that whole list and I put it in Frankenstein. So you break it down into individual words and then you take those individual words, you put it into Excel and you gotta do a little Excel magic.

Andrew Engle:

But you can actually search through all the search terms and have it sum up all the sales for each word. So say you have a random word like orange or something, you can look up how many sales you got on orange and say you look through the last two years and there’s no sales for orange, then that means okay, you can make a negative phrase out of this and you have two years worth of data to back this up so you’re safely making these things. And that’s, I think that’s better than the exact keywords, than the exact negatives, because it can be in any different phrase. Sure. So you just save yourself a bunch of money in the future.

Karim Bhai:

Yeah. So we have Helium 10 Alerts that are kind of on there and we use the Helium 10 Profit Tracker to look at our sessions conversions. We use a lot of the, almost every Helium 10 tool, cause Amazon does Cubiscans and a lot of times they don’t even pick up your new packaging. So it’s good to make a separate SKU with your new packaging so that you can differentiate which one is the new packaging or which one’s an old one, or also you’re gonna get stuck in that cycle cause you have one item that’s left over in the old packaging. Amazon just for some reason it’s just bad luck and they keep scanning that one item over and over again when you have this whole new packaging that can save you a dollar or two. But yeah, doing the regular re-measurements if something spikes up, use the alerts from Helium 10, keep track of ’em.

Karim Bhai:

If it goes up, remeasure it, and hopefully, you’ll get back to your lower fee. Especially right now because fees have gone up another 5%. One of ’em is probably something that you guys have been using a little bit more is using the brain analytics with the search terms that Helium 10 has kind of moved into Magnet. So I’ve been actually paying attention to that a lot more since that, that those keyword datas you can actually get. So if your product is not doing as well as last year, or if you’re seeing some spikes, make sure to go into your Brand Analytics, look at those keywords and sort by your searches or your purchases. So you can see maybe there’s a keyword that you don’t even know. There’s random keyword that you’ve been hitting and you’re not even advertising on it, and you’re in the middle of the page. And a put a high bit on there and get to the top of the page. And that can make, that can make, or break your product.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, so that first one was from Andrew. It was from episode 319. So if you guys want to take a listen to that episode, h10.me/319. Really great interesting episode about how two brothers actually started, two brothers from the same mother literally started their businesses together, and episode 397, h10.me/397 was with Karim. And there was another great episode full of a lot of strategies. So make sure to check that one out too. Now our next two clips here are from the same episode, and these are two sellers who came from Nigeria and are just crushing it online.

Elizabeth Adeoye:

Okay. So now because of this new product that I had a lot of success with, it kind of made me neglect the other product that was doing great for me prior to having that product and that’s why this year I decided not to launch any new product, but just to kind of natural the same way as Sharon spoke about earlier. So even when you are having great product at a point just keep in mind that you see have a good product that was doing okay prior to that product arriving. Cuz you never can tell what might happen to this new product. Cause with Amazon. So do not neglect the other products that have been doing good for you. Nurture them and make sure that they don’t run out of stock or you lose focus on those products.

Sharon Asibor-Swarn:

Okay. my next 30-second tip is about when you are looking for a product, do not look for a product, look for a keyword. If you’re looking for a product, it means the product already exists. Instead look for a keyword. When you find a good keyword, then you figure out what product can I sell under this keyword? What product does this keyword really describe? Describe and when you find that product, invest in packaging. And the reason is that, however, if, let me just throw figures out there. So even if this product cost you $4 and the package cost you $2, that extra $2 could mean you’ve being able to sell your product to an extra $10. So if you look at it, it’s like selling two products in one. It’s like a bundle. You’re selling a product and you’re selling the packaging. The only difference is that you’re not paying FBA fees on the packaging because the FBA fees is on the product. So you just sold your $2 package for 10 bucks without FBA fees.

Bradley Sutton:

All right guys, I highly recommend checking out that episode. That was episode 317, h10.me/317, see Elizabeth and Sharon’s stories. Really inspiring to check out that whole episode. Let’s go into our next couple of guests with two, with the name of start with the name of m Matt and also Mina.

Mina Elias:

Okay, so the first one is, if you don’t have like a really good analytics, you’re blind. And so this is what I do. I have daily for seven days and seven days chunks. PPC spend, PPC sales, total sales units, sessions cost per session, click-through rate, conversion rate, cost per click and then sale price, Amazon fees, cost of goods and then the profit. And so you can calculate all of those. And then at the end of the seven-day period, calculate the total and then do another seven of them. And then at the end it calculates the total. Then start noticing the changes week on week. And so if on Monday you made optimizations then you wait a week and you look at the new total and your PPC spend goes up, but your sessions don’t go up, then understand what the effect of those optimizations are.

Mina Elias:

So once you have your analytics built like that and I can obviously share my sheet and you can just like duplicate it, but once you have it built like that, it’s so easy to see week on week the change. Cuz so many people will just say, okay, your PPC spend was a hundred dollars. Your PPC sales was $500. Is that good or bad? No idea. But good or bad is always dependent on, okay, what was it before? So if it was $500 PPC spend and 500 sales, and now it’s 100-500, that’s amazing. And so that’s, it’s great to always benchmark what you’re doing in the previous weeks and then see, okay, what’s new this week? So now your PPC spend went up, and everything looks good. Okay, let’s do a few more optimizations. And then you notice the new total a week later. That’s one of like the biggest game changers for me.

Matt Altman:

I would say probably our biggest thing here recently, and this is every client that we bring on, it’s something that we do as soon as we bring them on the first month, really optimizing your image stack. So we pull everyone’s questions and answers and we make sure if there are questions that are coming up on every competitor’s product, we answer that in our first two to three images. Because I don’t know about you, but I only shop Amazon on mobile. I never scroll down to the bullet points or the A+ Content on mobile. I swipe the first three to four images. If it doesn’t say what I wanna see, I’m onto the next product. Doing that alone has doubled our conversion rate on a lot of products. So it doesn’t take much time to do Helium 10 actually scrapes it.

Matt Altman:

That’s where we’re getting all the questions and answers from. And super simple. So we do basically every marketplace at this point. For Walmart, it’s honestly kind of like where Amazon was six, seven years ago. You can get away with a lot of things that you can’t on Amazon to ship URL still work perfectly fine. You can rank a product to the top of any page with just add to carts. You don’t actually even need purchases. But the biggest thing that I think people miss out on is Walmart will actually upload if you’re a new seller, say you’ve been selling on Amazon or Shopify your reviews to your product on Walmart all you have to do is open up a support case with their team and basically prove that the reviews are on your Shopify site and they’ll port them over. Most of our clients are like, well we don’t have that many reviews on our Shopify site. So we use Helium 10’s extension to go ahead and scrape those reviews. And then we post them ourselves to our Shopify site and then we get Walmart to syndicate them up to the products.

Bradley Sutton:

Alright, those were some two great tips. How many of you guys are using something similar with your PPC strategy that mania was talking about, or perhaps interested in getting more reviews on your Walmart listings like Matt was talking about? Those two episodes that these ones came from is another great two episodes. So if you want to catch the full ones, Mina’s is episode 340 and Matt’s was episode 363. Remember any of these episodes, you can just go h10.me/ and then put that number of the episode there. Let’s get into our next two.

Shan Shan Fu:

A 30-second tip would be to launch on Etsy and then find out what is stats you need for it to be a top 20% seller. And you do that with just the products that you currently have. I found that the stat I need is I need the clickthrough rate to be above 0.8 and I need the conversion rate to be above 2% and I need to add to cart rate to be above 4%. And if that hits all three, then I know it’s a top 20% seller that I can then sell on Amazon.

Tomer Rabinovich:

Yeah, well one thing that is missed with keywords I feel is the title. The title is obviously a critical point. So one of the things that I call is like the variation in the title. What I mean by that is like the color, the size, the quantity of the product that you’re selling, where do you place that in the title and how do you write it? Like, do you write pieces in pieces or do you write PCs? Do you put it in a space? With the number of units without space. All of those kind of question marks that I have. So what we started doing is it just depends on the product. So again, we take all of the titles of the competitors, copy all of them, put ’em in a nice war document, like a Google document, and then we just start coloring things inside of it.

Tomer Rabinovich:

So we start coloring the keywords that repeat themselves. So all of like, let’s say yoga mat, so you color yoga mat all of the place. But then with the pieces we are looking not just how they write it cause we wanna write it same way. We also look at where they place it in the title. Because if it’s like a first aid kit, you probably want to have it at the beginning. Like the number of pieces that’s critical for them to know how many pieces come with this first aid kit, 350 pieces, 200 pieces stuff like that. And if you think about usually color, for example, like a red yoga mat that will probably be at the end of the title, like the color red will be at the very end. So you don’t really need to start your title with like red yoga mat.

Tomer Rabinovich:

But again, I think that’s a lot of times missed and a lot of sellers kind of have like, and when we do this exercise, we did it so many times. You see so many sellers are just like off point completely with like five keywords that shouldn’t be in the title because no one else has them, doesn’t have any ranking relevancy or anything of that. So that’s one exercise everyone can do right now. And you will just get more impressions, like if you have a better title, just means more impressions, more relevancy and just take your competitive titles and just improve it slightly. That’s all we really do. And I think a lot of sellers are starting with Cerebro just to kind of see what are the top keywords and then build their title from scratch. Instead of what they should be doing is they should be taking their top 10-20 competitors, take all their titles, come up with something that seems better, and then check that Helium 10s’ Cerebro and see if they missed any important keywords that they don’t have yet.

Bradley Sutton:

Alright. I love Shan Shan’s real quick and to the point, probably something 99% of you didn’t even think about is actually getting proof of concept on Etsy before Amazon. And of course Tomer always comes with a hot strategy. So I hope you guys think about that when thinking about the titles. it’s not just about looking at title density and saying, I’m gonna have something in my title that nobody else has. That’s a great way to know how easy or difficult it might be to get to page one. But it’s about look, taking a holistic view of your niche. So if you want Shan Shan’s full episode, that is 344, and Tomer’s full episode, where you get a lot of other great tips is 364. Let’s go ahead and get into the next two strategies.

Rich Goldstein:

Yeah. So it pays to file design patents. If you’ve got a distinctive-looking product, it pays to file a design patent application. Keep in mind that you need to do it at as early as stage as possible. If the product has been on the market for a year, it is absolutely too late. But having a design patent on a distinctive design could be very effective for shutting down competitors. But also these days Amazon seems to easily shut someone down when a product looks even remotely similar to a design patent. A lot of times this is unfair. So a lot of times you might get shut down from someone else’s design patent where they really legitimately shouldn’t be able to shut you down, but that’s why it pays to be the one holding the design patent. If Amazon is deferring to IP owners, it pays to be the one holding the IP.

Gracey Ryback:

Okay. So like the most common question I get is like, I’m looking for influencers. Can you help me find them? Or like, how do I reach out? How do I find them? My best tip is, look on social media. Like look on TikTok, look on Instagram, look on Facebook, look on any platform you’re interested in and use hashtags. Use hashtag Amazon fines, hashtag Amazon Fashion, Amazon Beauty, Amazon Hall, and Amazon must-haves. These are all really popular like Amazon-related hashtags that content creators are using with their content. So when you look it up, you find content, you can niche down Amazon pet, whatever your product is, you can niche down the hashtag, and then find creators already talking about similar products. And if you look at their content, vet their content. If you’re like, okay, I like the way that this person creates content and I like their engagement and I think their follower base would be a good fit with my audience, then reach out.

Gracey Ryback:

I always suggest an email, but if you can’t find an email, DM them and then just like, remember that they’re human and like remember, like as much as they wanna bring you value, I think it should be mutually beneficial and like, you should bring them value as well. So treat them like a human and like it’s a partnership. So that’s what I recommend. It’s use social media hashtags and then vet the content from there. And if you wanna just get a good response and like develop that partnership, make sure it’s like worth it for the both of you guys.

Bradley Sutton:

Love this. Completely different kinds of topics. Completely different type of guest. first we had Rich with that one about patents. So if you guys wanna find out more about trademarks, patents, definitely check out Rich’s episode, it’s 368. And then on the complete opposite end of the spectrum, Gracey was talking about influencers. we always wanna send outside traffic and maybe TikTok influencers, but how do we get those influencers? That was a great tip from Gracey. If you wanna see her full episode, make sure to look for episode 360. Let’s go to the next two.

Benjamin Webber:

One of the biggest mistakes that we made was we were looking at ACoS and we weren’t using a tool for it. We weren’t like, we weren’t using any kind of software or anything. And so if you sort in Seller Central by ACoS, it completely ignores the things that haven’t had a sale and was, and are just wasting money. So make sure that you are looking at the products that the keywords that are just outright losing money and not converting at all, because you will waste a lot of money if you don’t eliminate those. So there’s just these ones that like, if you’re not using Adtomic or any other software, like you’re blind to them and you can lose a lot of money very quickly. And the other thing with that is even if the top keyword for your product is like, oh, I have to advertise for this because the top keyword for my product, if you’re losing a lot of money on it, stop advertising on it. Come back to it. Once you’ve actually have sales from other things and you’re ranked up in other places, and Amazon might give you a better positions, like, don’t just throw money at something that is useless.

Josh Hadley:

Yep, yep. So anything in the buy box. Now this is my favorite hack because it is all White Hat, right? And that’s one thing that allows me to sleep at night, is everything we do is White Hat absolutely. So it’s all white hat, that’s the best part. It’s able to, and I’ll give a little pitch to it, it’s going to be able to increase your average order value. It’s going to be able to influence the frequently purchased together with section. It’s going to be able to take up more real estate on your Amazon listings, and then it’s going to be able to help you launch new products faster, right? That’s a pretty sweet hack. So what this hack is, is essentially, and one of the best examples is go to like any of the MacBook listings on Amazon. What you’ll notice is below the add to cart button, there is this whole section on the right hand side that says Add an accessory.

Josh Hadley:

Okay? And then there’s little tick boxes. And right now there’s four different accessories that you can add onto a MacBook purchase. So there’s little tick boxes. All the customer has to do is just hit the tick box and it automatically goes into the cart. So what this does though, is you would initially think like, oh, well, I don’t want to divert traffic away from somebody that’s about to buy my product, right? What’s cool is that Amazon, if you click on any of those accessories and you’re trying to figure out like, what is this? Do I need this? It just brings up a popup. You don’t leave that page. Brings up a popup where you get to see the product photos, the description, the bullets, but in a much more condensed way. It’s one of my favorite things on Amazon. And then you’re able to click out of it, add it to your cart, and then what we’ve seen, because we’ve tested this, you don’t have to say, or it doesn’t have to be in like the same like product category per se, right?

Bradley Sutton:

Now, guys I just wanna tell you, Ben’s episode was one of the most unique ones. That was just one of the many tips that he gave. By the way, it’s episode 379, but he had crazy other tips. Like he talked about how he had one listing that was made up completely of puns. So I highly recommend checking out that full episode when you have the chance. Episode 379. And then Josh’s one, that tip that he gave there’s actually, it’s actually longer, so make sure to check out the full version. But that won multiple awards that won Best Hack at the Billion Dollar Seller Summit and at Sell and Scale Summit in Vegas from Helium 10 that won, like he won prizes for that one. So if you want us to check out the full one, make sure to check out episode 387. Let’s get into the next two episodes.

Anne Ferris:

Well, we were just talking a lot about packaging, so I think packaging is a really good strategy and you can change up your packaging. even if you have a current brand, find a good designer. I think Upwork is such a good place to look. And if you email people, they will send you their proposal, they’ll send you other things, other brands that they’ve done. So look and see, and really when you’re working with graphic designers, collaborate, if you give them the freedom, like they’re creative, they do this all day, they see stuff all day. So ask them to send you brands that they’ve worked on that have similar products, take ideas from them, let them give ideas to you. But bright and colorful packaging will stand out. Like a brightly colored box will stand out so much in your hero image, and that will help you get the click to your listing. So it’s like the number one thing your customers see.

Leo Sgovio:

I guess I can give another tip on reviews. Something that worked very well for us was using Vine. Vine needs to be used in a certain way to be to be successful. One thing that I learned is that Vine reviewers actually pay taxes when they order their products over $600 o or overall $600. So Amazon just gives them this tax notice. And so if you have products that you sent to Vine that are not worth their while or their taxes, they have to pay on that they probably won’t redeem it. And so when you develop a product considering that now it’s very hard to get reviews and Vine is really the only option that we have. Think about that as well. Like cheap products are a no-brainer for them.

Leo Sgovio:

Grocery are free. They can get as many grocery items without paying any taxes. So if you sell groceries, they can get you can get a lot of buying reviews and they can redeem those for free. And if you decide to go regardless with the product you have in mind, what I suggest is, and this is kind of like maybe a grayish if you will, Bradley, but we, we send the first 5,000 items in a nicer kind of packaging simply because we want to deliver a much better experience to these Vine reviewers. They care about the product, the packaging they’re very critical. And so we want to make a really good impression. Now, it doesn’t mean that after this products have been redeemed, we change the packaging.

Leo Sgovio:

Now the packaging is the same, but we perhaps put it in another gift box or like you cannot ship to them using the gift wrapping the Amazon default option. But you get the point. The point is to give them a packaging that looks a little bit more appealing and it’s nicer, and you most likely will get the five-star reviews compared to the three or four that they typically give you because of their level of criticism. So I would say these are my top tips at the moment.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. Another great two episodes. Anne has been on this podcast multiple times, but to to see more about packaging, and actually, if you watch the YouTube version, you could actually see some of the packaging that she’s talking about. Hers was episode 388. That’s a great tip that I think a lot of us sellers don’t think about sometimes. And then the one that Leo was on was episode 389, great tips about reviews, but in his full episode, he talked more about outside traffic and a lot of other cool things. Let’s go to the next two.

Rob Stanley:

Yeah. So one of the tips I want to give Bradley with a quick 30 seconds is take a look at YouTube. I think YouTube is not being utilized as much for people that are selling on Amazon FBA, as we all know, everybody goes to Amazon to search for a product. And once they got that product, let’s say, if it comes to either a feature or maybe how to do something like replacing a battery on a remote, they’re gonna do a Google search. So I suggest to build out your brand or your product go over to YouTube, start a YouTube channel, put some videos in there on how to replace a battery, or more about your product or brand. And I think that’s a really quick way to kind of extend out promoting your product and brand. That’s not necessarily on Amazon.

Crystal Ren:

And second one is, I would say there’s a saying, genius is the one most like himself. So don’t try to be some somebody else, right? Like in this Amazon world where a lot of people, they’re like, oh my gosh, somebody is an eight figure seller nine figure seller. Like, I wanted to do that, right? But I felt like you can never be some somebody else. So you need to find your strength and you need to use that every single day so that you can reach to their height one day, but in a different way. And the third I will say is find your superpower. So like some people, maybe they have, I think everybody of us have quirks, right? So some people might have OCD, like ADHD, autism, whatever, but you can channel that superpower in entrepreneurship so that you can focus on how to leverage your correctness into something instead of be like, okay, I need to fix this. I need to do finance, I need to do everything right? So you can all sorts those things and you can just focusing on your superpower as you scale.

Bradley Sutton:

All right? So that’s maybe something that you didn’t think about as far as what Rob was talking about for YouTube we think of like TikTok and maybe Instagram, but don’t sleep on YouTube. If you wanna check out Rob’s full episode, make sure to go to episode 399. Again, that’s h10.me/ 399. And Crystal was somebody who actually, I forgot what it was, the actual number. I think she started with like a hundred thousand dollars investment in her business or something really high like that, and she was able to exit her business right away. So to get her full story, make sure to s check out episode 351. All right, so let’s get in to the last Serious Sellers Podcast strategy with Anthony.

Anthony Cofrancesco:

Okay, another 30-second tip is something I’ve been practicing with image optimization of trying to actually get a score for speed of comprehension. And so you can use a split-testing tool, something like PickFu audiences is, it would be fantastic, is you’ll upload an infographic, something in your image gallery, a secondary image, and you ask, what is the purpose of this image? And then what you think the purpose is, but then you’re just trying to gauge if you’re getting 50 responses. If 40 outta 50 people put in the response that you think is close to that, then you’re good. You’re like 80%. But if 10 people outta 50 are saying that you’re getting the same response, then most likely people in a distracted shopping environment, it’s not gonna click that speed of comprehension are not there. And it kind of blows my mind doing this with other sellers, how often you’ll put in like what is image position two or three, like really important images that the vast majority of people totally think the purpose of that image is different than what you think.

Bradley Sutton:

Alright, that was a very interesting thing. A lot of you guys are definitely using PickFu or Helium 10 Audiences. So that was a great tip. If you wanna check out Anthony’s other strategies, make sure to check out episode 403. All right, for the last strategies, actually, not from the Serious Sellers Podcast, but it’s from the AM/PM Podcast. All right. whatever you’re listening to this on, you can also see the AM/PM Podcast there. So check this out from episode three 320 of the AM/PM Podcast.

Kevin King:

And one of the things, you mentioned it earlier, and I know it’s one of your hallmarks of what you do, and you’re similar to me in this way, but a lot of people, it’s just something that they just don’t understand or don’t wanna put the effort or the money into, but it’s differentiation with packaging. You’re huge on that. And I think it was you that told me a story about some swords or something like that where you did, did something and the sword was in one type of box, and I’m just making things up here, and it was selling for 10 bucks, but then you put it in some sort of other type of packaging and you sold the exact same sword for like $50 or something crazy like that. Can you tell me?

Norm Farrar:

You’re almost there. You’re almost there. It was a knife.

Kevin King:

A knife, okay. A knife,

Norm Farrar:

Yeah. Cost of goods was 16 bucks. The client was selling it at 49, and I looked at, it was a ugly clamshell package. Said suggested that we could change this and have an outer box. So it kind of looks like an iPhone box, really clear silhouette on the outside full color process, on the other side. So people see when they got it, they could see what the knife looked like. Really cool. Then you opened it up and it was a rigid box with a magnetic clasp. When they opened it up. It had all the features and the benefits of this full four color processed knife right there. You didn’t see the knife, you had to unveil the knife. So you opened it up and then you saw the knife and really beautiful, like the logo was in the pivot or the rivet and it was also in the on the blade changed that. And we were able to go from we tried different price points, but we went to from 99 to 124.

Kevin King:

Exact same knife. Nothing changed?

Norm Farrar:

Nothing, nothing, nothing changed, nothing. And how

Kevin King:

Much did the extra packaging cost you?

Norm Farrar:

$3 ish? Not even that. So I, I don’t even think it was close to that. But anyways even we put it into a high-density compression foam like an EVA foam. So when you got the knife, it was, it looked beautiful, and then you popped it open, like there was a thumb groove. Everything went into this like the convenience and just psychological things. Oh, you don’t have to force your fingers in to get the knife. There was a way to pop it out. And then the insert went to an extended warranty. Now, this is where we cleaned up. I didn’t tell you this part. We created a 52-week meal plan, and we also created two cookbooks. So if people signed up for the extended warranty, they also got the meal plan, but we would email them and now this is if they registered, right?

Norm Farrar:

So we would have their email address if they wanted the weekly meal plan, we’d send it to them. Now, how did we develop the weekly meal plan? We sent the knives to chefs and we sent the knives to culinary schools, and we asked them for recipes. So they gave us all these recipes and they kept the knife, they took pictures with the knife, and we asked them to tag us on Instagram. We got tons of user-generated content. Thousands of user-generated content for people that were giving us 10 photos, a hundred photos, giving us photos with food, and we could use that over and over and over again. Plus videos, like some of the videos that we have. Beautiful. Really well done. Okay, this is now, we started that a few years back, but as of right now, that same culinary school, guess what, they’re doing? An Amazon live cooking show.

Norm Farrar:

And they’re going on, they’re using all of their, the knives now, like there’s a full selection, and we’ve got it where they’ve agreed that they’re going to broadcast a cooking lesson through Amazon Live. And during the live, we’re gonna be selling the product. But just going back to that knife for a second. So then went back, and this is where talking to a manufacturer really helps out. So we went back and we said, what can we do differently that kind of keeps in the same price point? He said, well, hammer the knife. Okay? So they showed us these hammered knives and the exact same knife. It’s a Damascus steel, one’s hammered, one is layered, and same price point. Okay, let’s get a wood case and let’s get like the satin finish, and let’s make it look even better than the other one. Package it in a black box, etch it with like a like a premium, whatever the addition was. And it, it stood out. Gorgeous. All right. So the wooden, I know this for a fact. It was $3 and 50 ish cents packaged with the wooden case. That $16 knife was introduced at 224 bucks.

Kevin King:

That’s the power of branding and packaging that so many people will just completely overlook.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, so that one wasn’t necessarily a 30-second tip. Kevin doesn’t do those, but you can find a lot of high quality, high end, especially for high level, I should say strategies from the guests that Kevin brings on there. So make sure to subscribe to the AM/PM Podcast if you have not yet. That episode, again was episode 320 of the AM/PM Podcast. Right there, you can see that on YouTube or Spotify, or also on Apple Podcasts episode 320. All right, guys, that’s it for this special episode. In every single episode, our guests are giving hard-hitting strategies like this. So as much as you can, I highly recommend downloading each podcast, trying to listen to it on your own time, taking notes, and these things. And if you really had enjoyed the podcast this year, please leave us a review on whatever platform you’re listening on. But just know that even if you don’t listen to every single episode every at the end of every year, we’ll try and summarize some of the top ones that our listeners have voted on and have said that, hey, these strategies really help them out. So make sure to always tune into this episode. I can’t wait for another 408 episodes or so for the next few years. So we’ll see you guys in 2023.

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