Helium 10 Buzz 5/24/24: Online Sales Surging | Amazon Alexa Change | Walmart Virtual Shopping

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, talk about Helium 10’s newest features, and provide a training tip for the week for serious sellers of any level.

Target, Walmart shoppers seek home goods, grocery delivery online
https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/target-walmart-shoppers-seek-home-goods-grocery-delivery-online-2024-05-22/

Join the Amazon Ads team and our very own Bradley Sutton on June 4 and 5 for a free virtual event to help you maximize your brand and performance marketing during Prime Day, coming back this July. http://h10.me/primeads

Amazon plans to give Alexa an AI overhaul — and a monthly subscription price
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/22/amazon-plans-to-give-alexa-an-ai-overhaul-monthly-subscription-price.html

New Beta Amazon Advertising Product Launch – Canva Connect
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jeffreycohen_la-canvacreate-activity-7199484241636728835-1SAS/

TikTok unites ad tools (including new AI-driven products) with TikTok One hub
https://www.tubefilter.com/2024/05/23/tiktok-world-ad-announcements-ai-symphony-one-shop/

Amazon Ramps Up Logistics Expansion to Speed Delivery, Reduce Costs
https://www.pymnts.com/amazon/2024/amazon-ramps-up-logistics-expansion-to-speed-delivery-reduce-costs/

Amazon continues laying the groundwork for Prime to be to sports streaming what ESPN was to cable. https://www.axios.com/2024/05/19/amazon-nba-deal-nfl

Will Walmart Dominate Virtual Retail?
https://retailwire.com/discussion/will-walmart-dominate-virtual-retail/

In another part of our episode, Bradley highlights the latest from Helium 10, starting with a must-have Prime Day preparation checklist courtesy of Carrie at Helium 10. Tune in for updates on Adtomic’s new features, including advanced custom PPC rules and insightful metrics that could be game-changers for your strategy. Don’t miss our training tip that leverages Cerebro’s historical data for seasonal product research, exemplified by a dive into Valentine’s Day candy keywords that could give you an edge in the market. Whether you’re new to the e-commerce scene or a seasoned pro, these discussions are packed with actionable advice to help you stay ahead of the curve.

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

• 00:58 – Online Sales Surging
• 02:54 – Amazon Prime Day Ads
• 04:06 – Amazon Alexa Update
• 06:05 – Amazon x Canva
• 07:02 – TikTok One Hub
• 08:12 – Amazon Size Chart Tool
• 09:02 – Amazon Logistics Plans
• 11:33 – Amazon x NBA
• 12:42 – Walmart Virtual Retail
• 14:28 – Prime Day Checklist
• 14:58 – Helium 10 New Feature Alerts
• 17:05 – Get A Free Demo Of Adtomic
• 17:13 – Pro Training: Cerebro’s Historical Data Analysis

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

E-commerce reaching levels it hasn’t released since COVID. Big changes coming to Amazon Alexa. Walmart releases a new virtual shopping environment. These stories and more on today’s Weekly Buzz. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Hello everybody, 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 new stories and goings on in the Walmart, amazon and e-commerce world. We also give you training tips of the week and let you know what new features that Helium 10 has that will give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Let’s see what’s buzzing.

Bradley Sutton:

We’ve got a lot of articles today. I keep saying this guys, it’s so weird how things just come and go Like I remember last week there’s like three articles that was worth reporting on. This week we’ve got about eight, nine, so let’s go ahead and hop right into it. The first story is from Reuters.com and it’s entitled Target and Walmart shoppers seek home goods grocery delivery online. Now, this article was kind of talking about Walmart and Target, not too much about Amazon, but what is interesting here is that it’s saying, hey, US online spending experiencing a rebound, spurred by high gas prices, convenient delivery options and a surge in deals following a brief post-pandemic slump. Us retailers say Now the key stat here I wanted to bring out where it says here e-commerce sales made up 16% of total US retail sales in Q1 this year, the highest since they peaked at 16.4% when, during the height of the pandemic, in 2020 Q2. So a lot of you had, you know, super, you know huge sales during COVID perhaps, and maybe some of the sales slumped off afterwards. Well, this is kind of interesting. We’re seeing some big numbers according to this article here. Now. Target especially says it’s online sales returned to growth in the Q1 after more than a year of decline. So a year, week over week, it was declining and then finally, target start had an increase and that’s probably going to keep going because of their upcoming release of Target 360. Walmart had a 22% surge in online sales last week, which exceeded the 17 percent growth recorded during the strong holiday season. Now, this again is interesting because, if it continues, what does that mean? That means good news for you guys. Again, this article didn’t talk too much about Amazon, but if there is a general increase in online sales, you got to know that Amazon’s got to be a part of it, since Amazon is the, you know, the biggest online sales channel or platform out there. So let’s keep a close watch on this. Are your sales up the last few weeks? Hopefully they are.

Bradley Sutton:

Next article is just from Seller Central. An announcement on your dashboard you might have seen. There’s Amazon. I think this might be one of the first ever. I don’t remember this before Amazon Ad Summit, especially for Prime Day. All right, so this is June 4th and June 5th and it says here don’t miss the chance to join our Amazon ads experts for exclusive workshops, in-depth discussions and more. Now, the cool thing is it’s almost all Amazon employees who are doing this, but if you go ahead and register for this h10.me/primeads, you’ll notice that on the signup page there’s an outside expert. There. There’s only one outside person, and this is a guy here with the name of Bradley Sutton. So check me out, guys. I flew out to Amazon’s headquarters in New York to film this and it was pretty cool. We went over some just general strategies that sellers of all levels can learn from. So if you want to learn from the Amazon speakers and yours truly, again, go ahead and register for this. This is not a Helium 10 event. This is 100% Amazon. You can even see this in your Seller Central. Again, go to h10.me/primeads and register for this training that’s coming up.

Bradley Sutton:

Next article is from CNBC and it’s entitled Amazon plans to give Alexa an AI overhaul and a monthly subscription price. Now, this hasn’t been confirmed by Amazon yet, but according to this, hey, amazon is supposedly not going to include Alexa free of charge in Amazon Prime subscriptions anymore and it’s going to offer like a more generative AI kind of feel to it. Because, you know, like Alexa believe it or not is like 10 years old now and it’s kind of like almost antiquated, you know, when you compare it to a lot of the generative AI things that you see out there. So, again, there’s no comment from Amazon on this, but it’s going to be interesting to see why, because how is this going to affect shopping with Alexa? We’ve been talking about for years how you know you should probably optimize your listings for Alexa, but the you know, until now, sales from Alexa is not that great, right, and it’s probably because the experience is not that intuitive, right. But if there’s this huge overhaul with Amazon Alexa. It would kind of like be you know. Go without saying that the shopping experience might be a lot easier on there. And now, all of a sudden, it could be exponentially more important that you do optimize your listings for the Amazon Alexa AI, whatever it’s going to be. So just something to keep your eye on. I’m not 100% sure this is going to be like a big thing for Amazon if they start charging, I mean, who knows, like I’m not even sure I’m going to pay for it. If it’s like $3 a month, since I have like a million Alexa devices in my house, sure I’ll pay $3 a month, but if they’re going to be like oh yeah, you want generative AI and it’s going to be $30 a month, I might just go ahead and give up my Alexa devices because that that might not be worth it. So again, let’s. And how it’s going to affect shoppers and sellers.

Bradley Sutton:

Next article is not really an article, but from our buddy Jeff Cohen from Amazon. His LinkedIn post talked about Canva. There’s going to be a new kind of like collab between Amazon and Canva so that you can seamlessly connect Canva to your Amazon ads creative library. You know, as we know, there’s a lot of like generative AI tools where you can create images. Even Helium 10 has that in Adtomic and even other parts of our tool suite. But it’s going to be interesting to see, hey, what new features does Canva allow you to do that the generative AI couldn’t Like. For example, generative AI the one that Amazon has doesn’t really allow you to put text on images. So if you’re trying to create infographics or something like that, you really can’t. You still have to go to Canva outside right. So maybe this could all be now in one you know kind of like process. You can go ahead and create infographics with text thanks to this Canva integration. Let’s see how that works out.

Bradley Sutton:

Next article is from tubefilter.com and it’s entitled TikTok unites ad tools, including a new ai driven products with TikTok one hub. All right. So this is a an appeal to advertisers. It said um, where they talked about some new things coming to TikTok, including an ai driven tool named TikTok symphony and a marketing optimization solution for TikTok shop. Now this is especially going to affect those who are doubling advertising with their TikTok shop strategy. These new improvements, this article says, will enable new opportunities for advertisers who are already seeing strong returns on TikTok In a newsroom post recapping TikTok world, the app noted that 61% of users have made a purchase either directly on TikTok or after seeing an ad, while 79% of TikTok users show a preference for brands that demonstrate a clear understanding of how to create content specifically for the platform. So, hey, you know we’ve talked a lot about TikTok shop. I’m not selling on TikTok shop yet. I’m going to very soon. But let me know those of you who are also selling on TikTok have you seen this new platform yet and do you think it’s going to help you with your advertising?

Bradley Sutton:

Going back to Amazon Seller Central for the next article here, something entitled brands can now add size charts with the new self-serve tool. So, you know, are you selling in apparel or do you have a product that has like size variations? Well, now there’s this brand new tool that you’re automatically going to be enrolled in if you have brand registry, and this new size chart tool is going to have features such as existing size chart templates that can be used for new charts, the ability to apply a size chart from a single product to up to 1000 ASINs across entire product types. So you’re not having to make 1000 different size charts anymore, you just create kind of like one template and then apply it to the rest of your products. You can also receive real time instruction to improve your size chart accuracy. So if you want to get more information on this, go ahead and check your Seller Central dashboard.

Bradley Sutton:

Next article is from Payments.com. I found this one interesting. It’s entitled Amazon ramps up logistics expansion to speed delivery and reduce costs. Now, in the past and weekly buzz, you know we’ve talked various times about Amazon like downsizing their footprint as far as warehouses goes. But now it says, hey, amazon has leased, bought or announced plans for over 16 million square feet of new warehouse space in the US this year alone, according to this report, and this is in addition to they’re already over 400 million square feet of real estate. It also mentions how it says they’ve overhauled their domestic shipping network, shifting from a centralized network to nine regions that are designed to operate independently. All right. Now, again, they’re trying to get goods closer to consumers, enabling faster delivery times and lower cost, it says. In Q4 of 2023, amazon reported more than 65% increase in orders delivered same day or next day in the US compared to the previous year.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, it says, to support this new approach, what is Amazon doing? Well, we know what Amazon is doing. Right, it says here it’s requiring itself and third-party merchants on the platform to hold inventory across multiple locations rather than in a few centralized places. Well, that’s a nice way of saying that, causing Amazon sellers to pay more fees if we only send it to one or two locations, as opposed to spreading it across the country. But also something interesting says the company has been opening inbound receiving centers, which are warehouses that are from like 600,000 to 1 million square feet to store goods across the country. All right, so they’re opening up smaller warehouses in rural areas as well for last mile delivery stations. So it’s going to be interesting how Amazon kind of like you know, expands their network. How Amazon kind of like you know, expands their network. You know it talks about here that this is partly maybe in response to Walmart being able to fulfill through all their 4,600 stores. Right, so Amazon’s, like you know, amazon doesn’t have stores across the country as much as Walmart does, so it wants to get a little bit closer to the consumers to give faster delivery time. So, again, all of this is something that’s going to affect Amazon sellers. It already has. Part of this is causing us to have new fees, but then is this, you know, faster shipping time going to cause customers to order more from us. You know, then, maybe in the long run, this could actually help Amazon sellers. Let’s see how this works out.

Bradley Sutton:

Next article is from Axios.com. It says Amazon’s big league ambitions and, just briefly, it’s talking about how, you know, amazon might be part of this bid with, like NBC, to broadcast NBA basketball, professional basketball games. It talks about it has a deal with the NBA. It’s been doing football, you know, like a Thursday night football for the last few years. It’s talking with a regional sports network, one that I used to watch my LA Clippers on, where they’re going to try and pull it out of bankruptcy and maybe get games on Amazon. Now, this is it. Why would you care about this? Maybe you’re not a sports fan like I, am right, but this is important because we all know that Amazon is really pushing sponsored TV and all these new ways for average sellers to be able to have ads on their streaming platforms or another kind of like media in which you, potentially, might be able to run ads, and so the more deals that Amazon makes like this, the more opportunity for you to get your products in, you know, in front of different audiences.

Bradley Sutton:

Last article of the day is from retailwire.com and it’s entitled will Walmart dominate virtual retail? All right, so this is kind of interesting. Virtual retail All right, so this is kind of interesting. It says Walmart has launched a virtual shopping flat platform called Walmart Realm. All right, now, this is an innovative marketplace, it says, that includes a unique blend of influencer led virtual stores and it creates an immersive shopping experience for consumers. Now, part of this is like these. Virtual, it says consumers. Now, part of this is like these virtual. It says fantastical worlds of shopping that it creates in virtual environments that allow users to interact with products, but they all also offer nostalgic online games, making the shopping process engaging and entertaining. Now, it says, at the core of this, this Walmart realm, there’s distinct virtual shops that are led by influencers and inspired by social trends and, for example, a few of these. One of them is called so Jelly. This is described as an underwater playground filled with vibrant colors and whimsical surprises, providing a playful shopping experience. Now, it says, in addition to these themed shops, it’s also going to have content from their creators, enhancing product discoverability and engagement. Now, for those watching this on YouTube. I’m just going to play this video here where you can kind of see a little bit of how this virtual world is. It’s kind of wild Like I’m not sure if I want to shop in this kind of thing, but hey, this could be the future of online shopping and Walmart could be a pioneer in this. I’m sure, if it’s successful, we’ll see that coming to Amazon as well.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, that’s it for the news this week. One quick note before we go into our next feature is Carrie, here at Helium 10, made a cool checklist, a printable PDF that you can use as a kind of like guideline for what you need to do to prepare for Prime Day. So in order to go and download this checklist for free, go to h10.me forward slash prime list, h10.me/primelist, and then you can just enter in your email and we’ll email you this PDF for free help you get ready for Prime Day, which is coming in July. All right, let’s get into our new feature alerts from Helium 10. And these are going to be from Adtomic. There’s actually nine different updates this week. I’m only going to mention a couple of them and then refer to some of the others, and you know, for those of you using Adtomic, you can hop in there.

Bradley Sutton:

Now. One of them is you know you’ve always been able or not always, but for the last couple of months you’ve been able to create custom rules in Adtomic so that you can kind of like help reach your own goals for your bidding right Now. A lot of you guys had feedback on what you would like to see, and so now we have, more than ever, different criteria so that you can design your own PPC rules, like you’ve always been able to make it off of hey, if my ACoS is above this and below this. But now you can do it all based on things like the impressions, the current bid, the conversion rate, the click-through rate, the number of PPC orders spend, et cetera, et cetera, and then even the actions. You now have more options Like, for example, instead of just increasing or decreasing the bid based on the criteria that you put, you can say, hey, take the cost per click and multiply it by this target ACOS, right? Or multiply the current bid by this target ACoS. There’s a lot of new features that you guys ask for and that we now have. So if you haven’t checked out the custom bid rules in Adtomic lately. Make sure to hop in there and do it.

Bradley Sutton:

Another thing that we have here in Adtomic is on the analytics page. You guys wanted to start seeing some of the Amazon metrics that we didn’t have in Adtomic, such as impression rank and impression share. You’re going to be able to see that now on the analytics page of your Adtomic dashboard. Now, I mentioned that that’s just a couple of the new updates to Adtomic. Some of the other ones are you can add keyword harvesting and negative rules in the campaign builder. You can now sync your data on demand from Amazon to Adtomic. You’re going to be able to see day partying heat maps now and when you’re creating day partying schedules. The list goes on and on. Make sure that you are up to date with everything that is in Adtomic, and if you guys haven’t used Adtomic, interested in trying it out, go to h10.me/adtomic for a demo.

Bradley Sutton:

Now let’s get into the training tip of the week. So we were at the Billion Dollar Seller Summit in Kauai, Hawaii, and it was interesting that, for a hack, Carrie mentioned something about doing historical analysis. Now, this is something that’s not new, like it’s been around for two years and most of these. I think there’s only two people in the room had said they had used this before. All right, so I was like you know what this needs to be our training tip of the week, because it’s super valuable, my opinion, one of the most valuable things that we have here at Helium 10. Now let me set the stage here for the first use case of looking at historical data on Cerebro and, by the way, this is for those of you who have the diamond plan and up. Now, let’s say you’re in a seasonal niche, or looking at a seasonal niche Like right now we are in what? May-June of 2024.

Bradley Sutton:

Valentine’s Day passed, and if you were to look up a certain product in Cerebro for now that was maybe a top seller for Valentine’s Day, you might not be able to see too many good keywords, right, you’re not going to know what were the main keywords for it during Valentine’s Day, because already Valentine’s Day was months ago, right Now. Here’s an example. Let’s say I was using a Helium 10 Amazon brand analytics tool in Blackbox and I was like, hey, during February 18th to February 24th, let me look for keywords that had 2,000 search volume each, that had the word Valentine’s in it and that got some sales and I could see a whole bunch of keywords here, such as Valentine’s Day decorations, men’s Valentine’s gifts, etc. And then here’s one Maybe I’m interested in Valentine’s Day candy and for that week of February, right before Valentine’s Day, I see that the number one purchase product, or the number one click product was Reese’s Milk Chocolate Peanut Butter. All right. Now, if I look at on Amazon, now that that product here in May and June, I can see that this product isn’t even in stock. There’s not even a buy box here. All right.

Bradley Sutton:

So if I actually ran it in Cerebro right now and I was like, hey, what keywords is this product ranking in the top 10 for? As you guys can see what I’ve done here, for search volume of 500 or more, look what comes up? Zero, there’s no keywords that come up for it. Right. So it’s like if I want to get ready for next year for Valentine’s Day and I want to really, you know, do well with a Valentine’s Day candy or something I’m kind of like, not, you know, able to see, what keywords do I need to put in my listing? I can’t, I don’t want to wait until February to actually see. But then this is where the historical Cerebro comes. All I have to do is hit this button right here called show historical trend. And then I want to go back to February, right, first of all, I can see here, and if I hit the show historical trend, I’m going to be able to see the history of how many keywords, month by month, that this product has been ranking for. And then when I actually go into February of 2024, I do that same exact search. Hey, what were the keywords that had 500 search volume, whereas ranked between one and 10. And now I see over 10 keywords here, all right, like, for example, reese’s hearts or Valentine’s Day Candy 2,000 search volume. Valentine’s Treats 20,000 search volume. During February that keyword was nowhere to be found right now because nobody is searching Valentine’s Treats, right? If you’re searching Valentine’s Treats in May and June, you got some relationship problems, probably. So this is the first way in which you can do this Looking at seasonal products.

Bradley Sutton:

Take a time machine in Cerebro to go back and look at when that product was really at its peak in its season. What keywords was it getting sales from? And now, you know, maybe come the end of this year, November, December the search volume for those Valentine’s Day keywords is still low. That’s when I want to get my product maybe in stock and start ranking for those keywords and then come February everybody’s going to try and like, play catch up to figure out what’s the main keywords. I’m already on page one for all. What are the best keywords for that product in Valentine’s Day? All right? So that’s use case number one. Here’s use case number two. Let’s say that you are checking out your competitor, like right here, here is a rival coffin shelf. This coffin shelf is actually the Amazon’s choice for coffin shelf right now, not the helium 10 one. And I’m looking here at the BSR chart history, all right. So I can see with this helium 10 BSR chart, looking at last year’s. So I can see with this Helium 10 BSR chart, looking at last year’s, I can see that, wow, look at this, like in December or you know, the sales were pretty okay, especially in the middle of December, right, look at this BSR of less than a hundred thousand sometimes. But then look what happens in January They’ve got like 200,000 BSR. So the sales really went down when you look at December of last year to January of this year.

Bradley Sutton:

So, again, let’s look at their Cerebro, right? So I just run Cerebro on them and I could do that with one click. I just hit keywords right here on their product page and sure I can see where they’re ranking for right now. But what I want to do is hit the show historical trend and then I’m going to open up in two windows hey, what were the keywords that it was getting in sales from in December compared to January? So, for example, here I opened up their December keywords that’s when their sales were popping Right and I just did a filter of hey, what were the keywords that had a thousand search volume where it was ranking in the top 10? You could see there’s 10 keywords that it was getting sales from right here in December. Now, in another window, I’m going to run the historical trend again and take that time machine. I just took the time machine to December of last year. Let’s take that time machine to January of this year Remember, that was the month that I saw they had low sales. And look at this there’s only six keywords that hit that criteria of a thousand search volume, organic rank one through 10. So now what is the next step? Well, the next step is all right.

Bradley Sutton:

Where were the keywords where they maybe lost their rank. You know, I could see here, coffin bookshelf is on both lists, so they. They kept their rank right there. But look at this keyword here emo decor thousand search volume. They’re organic rank two. Look, when I hit January, they aren’t. They aren’t even in the picture for emo decor, right. Look at this keyword gothic shelves, 1100 search volume they’re organic rank four. Oh, gothic shelves right here, they’re still organic rank six. So that’s not a good example. Here’s another keyword here gothic bookshelf, thousand search form. There are page one, position three during December. But in January they were no longer there in the top 10 for that keyword. So now, all of a sudden, I have a picture of my competitor, or this could have been my product, right, if I notice a big drop in sales and now I know like, oh shoot, this product lost sales because they lost rank on these certain keywords. I can do this the opposite way. What if I saw a month where sales increased a lot? Well, I’m going to look at the previous month and say, hey, what keywords did it all of a sudden hop into the top 10? And now I know, wow, these are keywords that are money driving keywords, because there’s a direct correlation with them getting the top 10, with their sales increasing. So there’s so much possibility that you can do with this.

Bradley Sutton:

Guys, this is like probably one of the top three features, if not top two, in the entirety of Helium 10. And a lot of you are sleeping on it. So, if you’ve got the diamond plan, this used to be a Helium 10 Elite only and I was like, man, this is too valuable even for Helium 10 Elite, like I would pay Helium 10 elite just to get this. And then we moved it down Like we always do with everything down to the next plan, and now it’s only. It’s available even if you have diamond. So, guys, if you have diamond, you got to be taking advantage of this. If you don’t have diamond, this, in my opinion, pays for itself. This one feature is like what diamond should be, you know, like that makes diamond worth it. For me, I would pay double just for this feature. That’s how valuable this is. So, guys, make sure to make use of Cerebro Historical Trends. All right, that’s it for the news and features and training of this week. We’ll see you next week to see what’s buzzing.

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