Helium 10 Buzz 5/4/2022: Amazon Shares Fall, Gas Discounts For Walmart+ Subscribers, And More!

We’re back with another episode of the Weekly Buzz with Helium 10’s Brand Evangelist and Walmart expert, Carrie Miller. Every week, we cover the latest breaking news in the Amazon and E-commerce space, interview someone you need to hear from, and provide a training tip for the week.

Shares of Amazon closed down 14% on Friday after the company gave a revenue outlook for the current quarter that fell short of Wall Street’s estimates. It’s Amazon’s worst day since July 2006.

In order to drive more customers to sign up for Walmart+, Walmart is offering cheaper gas as one of its new perks by doubling its current savings per gallon and expanding the number of gas stations it applies to.

Victoria’s Secret is finally making the move to Amazon to sell its beauty goods. Over 120 different products will be available within a brand new storefront on the Amazon site.

Carrie also goes on to answer some of your most frequently asked questions and get you caught up to speed on what you need to know!

Helium 10’s Chief Brand Evangelist, Bradley Sutton, closes out the episode by getting into how you can analyze a competitor’s listing by using Listing Builder and how it can give you the upper hand within your niche!

In  this episode of the Weekly Buzz, Carrie talks about:

• 01:03 – Amazon’s Shares Fell Down 14%
• 02:29 – Walmart + Gives Discounts
• 03:42 – Victoria’s Secret Joins Amazon
• 04:37 – What Is The Best Way To Launch A Product?
• 06:01 – Having Trouble Updating Your Titles?
• 06:43 – Having an Issue with Indexing or Showing Up In Any PPC Ads?
• 07:40 – Using Helium 10 Audience To Know Which Color To Start A New Product
• 08:49 – How To Analyze Competitor’s Listing Using Helium 10 Listing Builder

Transcript

Carrie:

Hello everyone,nd welcome to another episode of helium tens weekly buzz. My name is Carrie, and this is the show where we get you familiar with the late news in the Amazon and e-commerce space interview, people that you need to hear from in the industry, and also provide a training tip of the week that will give you serious strategies for serious sellers in the Amazon, Walmart, and e-commerce world. So let’s go ahead and see what’s buzzing. So today we’re gonna talk about Amazon’s shares falling 14% on Friday. We’re also gonna talk about how Walmart is using some really great strategies to incentivize their Walmart + membership. And then we’ll also talk about how Victoria’s Secret is actually joining the retailers that have jumped onto Amazon. So let’s go ahead and get into it. So first off Amazon’s shares closed down 14% on Friday after the company gave revenue outlook for the current quarter that fell short of wall Street’s estimates.

Carrie:

It was actually Amazon’s worst day since July of 2006. So Amazon said it projects revenue between 116 billion and a121 billion in the second quarter trailing the 125.5 billion average analyst estimate. Amazon’s retail business has actually tapered off amid the economies reopening from the pandemic. Amazon’s operating expenses are increasing faster than their sales, and they have actually invested heavily into staff suffering warehouses and combating supply chain issues. But now also Amazon is facing rising inflation as well as an increasing transportation and labor costs. Amazon also lost about 3.8 billion in the first quarter compared with a profit of 8.1 billion the year prior, the company’s investment in electric vehicle maker. Rivian was actually what weighed in on that loss.

Carrie:

So up next, we also have Walmart+. So Walmart + is actually very similar to prime in that it’s, it allows you to have free shipping. They actually give you free delivery on groceries of $35 or more. And they also give you discounts on prescriptions, a lot of great perks with Walmart +, and they’re actually some perks to that pile. And that is something that is really going to touch a lot of Americans and that is at the fuel pump. So they’re giving discounts to Walmart + members at the pump. So this is definitely a great incentive for many of people to join. So they’re really working hard to get those Walmart + customers in there so that people are not only going to the pump and using those discounts, but also utilizing the perks and shopping online, which would give a great exposure for a lot of online retailers who are online sellers, who are selling their products on Walmart.

Carrie:

So if you’re a Walmart seller, this is really good news. They’re doing a lot of great things to incentivize customers, to not only join their Walmart +, but shop on their online store. So what do you think, do you think this is going to help increase just the shoppers every month? And what do you think this is gonna do for Walmart sellers? And finally we have Victoria’s secret. So Victoria’s Secret is actually joining in on the retailers that have jumped in on the Amazon space. So they’ve actually held out for quite some time and remained in the retail space, but now they’re going to offer all of their fragrances and scrubs and lotions on Amazon. They’re not gonna offer their linger at this point, but it is quite an interesting experiment as they have never done anything like this before.

Carrie:

And I’m curious to know if you think of any other big retailers that have been holding out or gonna jump on the Amazon space cuz as we all know, if you’re not on Amazon, you’re really not anywhere. And our next section, we’re gonna go ahead and we’re gonna answer your question. So we have this ask me anything section every few weeks and I’ve collected some frequently asked questions that we found in our Facebook groups. So I’m gonna go ahead and answer those right now. So the first question is, what is the best way to launch a product? And this is actually quite a good question. It’s actually a little bit more challenging than it has been in the past because we used to be able to do some search find buy in the past, but Amazon has now said that that is illegal.

Carrie:

So if you haven’t actually checked out Bradley Sutton’s podcast, the Serious Sellers Podcast, we have some episodes on there called the Maldives Honeymoon Strategy podcast. They’re basically episodes that talk about some great ranking strategies with pay-per-click advertising and some other just strategies. So if you haven’t listened to those episodes, go ahead and go and search for the Maldives honeymoon strategy in the Serious Sellers Podcast. And that will take you to those episodes. So listen to those and you’ll get some great tips there. Also, I recently did a launch and did some work with AZ Rank. So AZ Rank actually helped me to get to the first page of some very, very competitive keywords that had thousands and thousands of searches. So I would recommend if you want to invest, you can go ahead and work with them and they can help you with a bunch different strategies to help you to get to the first page of some of these very competitive keywords.

Carrie:

So let’s go to the next question. I’m having trouble updating my title. How can I get it updated? So this has happened in the past to me where you go to the back end, cuz you wanna make a little slight change and you edit it and then you push save and it doesn’t actually save. So the situation here is that you’re probably going to need to do a bulk file upload. So if you haven’t learned how to do these, this is a great time to learn. It actually solves a problem really quickly by just uploading these files. And if you don’t know how to do it, you can also, you know, contact Seller Support and sometimes they can walk you, it’s definitely something that will help it go quickly and efficiently if you can just upload that flat file and that’ll take care of the issue for you there.

Carrie:

All right, the next question is I’m not indexing or showing up in any PPC ads, what could be the issue? So this actually did happen to me, when I was launching a product, I was not showing up in any ads and not indexing for anything, any of the keywords that I was focusing on. So the reason for that is I actually chose the wrong category path. So if you’re in the wrong category path, then you’re not gonna index for anything. You’re not gonna show up for pay-per-click ads, it’s gonna just be a wash. So you really need to make sure that you look at your competitors to see what, what categories they’re in, so that you can make sure to choose the right category path.

Carrie:

Now you can fix this by, you can use a flat-file and uploading the correct flat file. Sometimes that fixes it. If that does not fix the issue, then you’ll need to contact Seller Support. I actually talked to the FBA team. It was escalated to the FBA team and they were able to change the category path for me in the backend. So that solved my issue. So hopefully that will also solve your issue if that is happening to you. All right. And the final question is how do I know what colors I should start with for my new products? So that is a really good question because when you’re starting out with a new product, maybe you took a long time to find a new product. Now you’re like, well, what color should I offer? So a great way to do this is we have an Audience’s tab in Helium 10, and that is actually connected to PickFu where you can actually pull your ideal audience on what colors that they would choose for your product.

Carrie:

So it is a little bit of an investment, not, not too bad, it’s not that expensive. And it’s a really good way to find the right color that your audience would prefer to have before you go ahead and manufacture your product and launch it. So they’ll give you really great feedback. They’ll actually write comments in there and tell you what they like about the product, what they like about the color, and why they would prefer a certain color. So it’s a really, really good strategy to choose the right color for your audience. So check out Audience on helium 10 and that is definitely a great way to do that. So hopefully these answers were helpful for you. And so let’s go ahead and get into the tip of the week where Bradley is going to be talking about our Listing Builder.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, now you’ve learned how to make your own listing or optimize an existing listing, but under what circumstances would you want to analyze a competitor’s listing? Well, maybe you’re, you’re new to a niche. Maybe you don’t even have a product in a niche and you’ve done the keyword research and you know, what the most important keywords are. And before you start making your own listing, you wanna take a look at a few listings perhaps and see if there’s any things that are happening thematically. What do I mean by that? That means some of the competitors using certain keywords multiple times throughout their listing? Are some competitors not even having main keywords in phrase form in their listing, these are the kind of things that you can actually find out using the Listing Builder. Let me show you guys how to do that.

Bradley Sutton:

The first step would be maybe to go to Amazon and find a competitor that you want to analyze. All right. So let’s look up an egg tray. All right. Let’s go to Amazon and let’s look up egg tray. All right. And maybe, actually, I’m gonna say, I’m gonna say wooden egg tray. I can spell wooden. There you go. All right. Now I’ve got a wooden egg tray that it’s searching for here. And let’s just take a look here and there’s our product. Here’s a competitor product, right? So I’m just gonna copy this product right here. And here’s what I’m going to do. I’m gonna add a listing and I’m gonna do create from scratch, but then I’m actually gonna put it right here, enter an ASIN. All right. And I’m gonna hit start building. Now, what it’s gonna do is, it’s actually gonna pull in the front end of that listing, right?

Bradley Sutton:

The next step is maybe I already have my own keyword bank, so I could do it by egg tray or maybe I just wanna see, you know, what I wanna see, how many times do they use egg tray, egg holder, wooden egg tray wooden egg holder, and then, you know, egg holder countertop. You know, I would theoretically have a lot bigger list than this, but let’s just go ahead and add that to the bank right here. And then I’m gonna hit next. Now, as you can see, it pulled in this listing here of this product. You can see it here, this is their listing right here.

Bradley Sutton:

It pulled in the front end of their listing. Now, how does this help me to analyze well, as you can see here, if this was my main keywords I’m seeing, wow, they don’t even have wooden egg tray anywhere in their listing. That’s interesting to me, if I wanna know how many times they’ve used wooden egg holder, or if I wanna find where they use it in their listing, I just have to hit the button or hit it, wooden egg holder. And as you can see, it’ll highlight where they have a wooden egg holder. So this is really good to kind of see how do they have their main keywords distributed? Actually, they don’t have their main keywords distributed very well at all. They only have a wooden egg holder once here and an egg holder only in the title. And they don’t even have an egg holder, you know, here in the rest of the listing.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. So this, again, guys give a great way to analyze the keyword density of your competitors where you can see are they focusing on certain keywords, you know, are they doing that for a reason, if they’re a big seller, maybe they have some data that shows that duplicating the keywords is important. Maybe they have something that shows that not even having the keyword in phrase form, and they’re still able to compete for it. So this is a great way to kind of check out what your competitors are doing again, it’s by importing their listing into Listing Builder and comparing it to whatever keyword lists that you have, that you want to get insight into, how they’re using certain keywords.

Carrie:

All right. Well, we hope that you’ve enjoyed this week’s episode of the Weekly Buzz, but I wanna leave you with one small call to action. And that is to subscribe to our Helium 10 YouTube channel. So if you haven’t subscribed to our channel what are you waiting for? This helps you to get notifications for all of our great content so that you are in the know of all the latest ingredients with Amazon and Walmart and all the rest of the e-commerce world. So definitely go ahead and hit that subscribe button. Also, make sure to like our videos, so that we know that you’re liking the content that we are providing for you. We’ll see you again next week on the next week’s Weekly Buzz. Bye.

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