Helium 10 Buzz 6/27/24: Prime Day Dates Announced | Amazon Becoming Temu-ish | Target Partnering with Shopify

We’re back with another episode of the Weekly Buzz with Helium 10’s Principal Evangelist and Walmart Expert, Carrie Miller. 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.

Amazon’s 10th Prime Day Event Returns July 16 & 17, With Millions of Exclusive Deals for Prime Members
https://press.aboutamazon.com/2024/6/amazons-10th-prime-day-event-returns-july-16-17-with-millions-of-exclusive-deals-for-prime-members

Walmart’s ‘largest deals event ever’ to rival Amazon Prime Day
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/walmarts-largest-deals-event-ever-to-rival-amazon-prime-day–plus-sales-to-shop-now-215140714.html

Amazon to launch discount section with direct shipping from China, the Information reports
https://www.reuters.com/technology/amazon-launch-discount-section-with-direct-shipping-china-information-reports-2024-06-26/

Target and Shopify Partner to Help Consumers Discover and Shop an Expanded Assortment on Target.com
https://corporate.target.com/press/release/2024/06/target-and-shopify-partner-to-help-consumers-discover-and-shop-an-expanded-assortment-on-target-com

Buy with Prime is helping this rapid hydration brand not only increase shopper conversion, but also bring in new customers.
https://buywithprime.amazon.com/customer-stories/case-study-hydralyte

Amazon is working on a ChatGPT competitor
https://qz.com/amazon-generative-ai-chatbot-chatgpt-metis-1851558879

Stay ahead of the curve with insights on the latest updates within Adtomic, especially the game-changing brand performance dashboard that offers critical data for making savvy pay-per-click advertising decisions. Our training tip of the week emphasizes the importance of leveraging historical data to boost profits during Prime Day, illustrated vividly with a real-world example of a Tyneco vacuum. Tune in to gain actionable advice that will help you optimize your advertising efforts and dominate search results as Prime Day approaches.

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

• 00:49 – Prime Day Dates Announced
• 01:35 – Walmart Summer Deals
• 02:20 – Amazon Temu-ish Service?
• 04:49 – Target and Shopify Partner
• 05:45 – Buy with Prime on Homepage
• 07:32 – Amazon Version of ChatGPT?
• 08:48 – Helium 10 New Feature Alerts
• 09:46 – Pro Training Tip: Leveraging Historical Data to Boost Prime Day Sales

Transcript

Carrie Miller:

Prime Day Dates announced. Is Amazon trying to be like Temu and Amazon’s new version of ChatGPT? This and more on this week’s episode of the Weekly Buzz.

Bradley Sutton:

How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show. That is our Helium 10 Weekly Buzz, where we give you a rundown of all the news stories that are going on in the Amazon, Walmart, e-commerce world. We highlight the latest new feature alerts from Helium 10, and we review a training tip of the week that’ll give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Now, today, our host is going to be Keri Miller. So, Keri, take it away and let us know what’s buzzing.

Carrie Miller:

Okay, let’s go ahead and get into it. The first thing I want to talk about is the Prime Day dates were just announced. So Amazon officially announced Prime Day 2024 dates, which is going to be July 16th and 17th. And now something interesting about these dates is that Bradley Sutton actually on this very show, he actually predicted that Prime Day would be on these exact dates way back in April. So let’s go ahead and go back to that clip and show Bradley’s predictions for Prime Day.

Bradley Sutton:

Amazon hasn’t necessarily announced the new Prime Day, but I’m like 95% sure I was able to figure out when it’s going to be All right, so bear with me. Here’s why I think that and by the way, spoiler alert, I that’s just my rough guess.

Carrie Miller:

So there you have it. Bradley predicted these exact dates for Prime Day, so how cool is that? All right up next we have Walmart. Okay, so Walmart announced their largest deals ever, which is going to be from July 8th to July 11th. Now this is coming off of Walmart Plus week. That was last week, so during these days you can actually expect discounts on pretty much everything. Walmart Plus members are actually going to have early access to shop the best deals of the season by beginning at noon Eastern on July 8th, which is actually five hours before the rest of the public actually gets access, and this, I believe, is probably in competition with Amazon’s prime day. So they’re doing a lot of great deals over at Walmart. So not only as a consumer, that’s gonna be helpful, but for sellers, it helps to attract a lot of people to the site, so really good for everyone all around.

Carrie Miller:

Okay, next, now this one. This next piece of news is a doozy. Okay, so Amazon plans to launch a section on its shopping site featuring cheap items that ship directly to overseas consumers from warehouses in China. Okay, so this seems to be a response to sites like Temu and Shein, and I actually asked some sellers what they thought about this move and they said they believe that Amazon is being more of a follower and not innovating and creating their own path. So they’re basically trying to maybe catch up with Temu and Shein. I’m not really sure. Some other. Some other sellers also said that they think there will be an initial negative reaction, but buyers will probably try it out. So I’m curious to know what you think. Do you think buyers are going to be excited about this? I’m not really sure. Someone else mentioned that they think this could be what puts dollar stores kind of fully out of business. We’ve seen some of the dollar stores going out of business recently and they think that this would be a kind of a direct competition to more of the dollar store quality, so that that is another interesting perspective.

Carrie Miller:

The products in this program will be delivered from China directly from China to the consumer between nine and 11 days. So a big question in my mind would be will Amazon allow American third party sellers to drop ship from warehouses in China as well? Some sellers already store their products in China in warehouses, like with SKU Drop, and it’s definitely something that they could do. Amazon said they are going to start signing up Chinese sellers in this summer and they’re going to begin accepting inventory in the fall. This article also highlights that sellers in this program will be able to produce small batches to test the demand for any new products that they launch. So that’s something else that we know that we have questions about. You know, a lot of third party sellers like to do the same thing. Will third party sellers have the same luxuries to be able to do this without losing rank, things like that? So really a lot of questions in my mind with this new development.

Carrie Miller:

This article also questions if these packages that are coming directly to a consumer from China, if they will be exempt from US customs, since there is a provision that exempts individual packages that are valued at less than $800 from taxation. Now, third-party sellers, you know, if they’re not allowed to do this, they still have to pay the taxes that are coming in. You know, when we ship goods in from China. So that kind of defeats the whole purpose of the taxation there. It really is going to hinder, maybe, third party American sellers. So that’s something to really think about too. All right, so I’m really curious to know what you all think. What do you think? This is a good thing? This is a bad thing. Are you enraged? Are you happy about it? What do you think? Please let us know in the comments.

Carrie Miller:

Okay, so that leads me to my next piece of news, and that is that Target and Shopify are partnering to offer a selection of targets Popular merchants, such as their true classic and caden lane, to offer their products on target plus. The new partnership with Shopify will expand target plus and will give consumers more options to purchase from these selected brands. Target will also be the first mass retailer to work with Shopify to bring select merchants products into their physical stores in the months to come. If you want to apply to sell online and target, you can actually go and apply on target plus through the marketplace connect app. I really do believe that, with everything that’s happening, all the changes that are going on, I do think it’s really important to diversify. So you know, getting on target and starting to sell on target might be a really good option for a lot of third party sellers. So check it out, if you haven’t already done that, because it’s potentially a good opportunity to not only sell on target but to get in target stores. All right.

Carrie Miller:

So the next piece of news is a case study out of Amazon and this is for buy with prime. Now, this is a company called Hydralight, and Buy with Prime showed how they actually helped this particular brand increase shopper conversion and bring in new customers. The study highlights and they have it down here a little bit it’s highlighting 16% increase in conversion rate, 37% of new customers purchased through Buy with Prime and 90% of the Buy with Prime customers are new orders. So that’s not even the most interesting part, though. I know if you haven’t added this button to your site, it’s probably a good idea to do so. But the most interesting thing is I actually saw a post from Destiny Wishun from Better Media on LinkedIn and she actually showed a screenshot of these buy with prime merchants and their ads on the homepage actually directing straight to their actual site. So they’re direct to customer site, which is really interesting. So I think they might be testing this out and I’m not sure if it was actually an ad or if, what the whole situation was, but there is. If you’re interested, you can look on her LinkedIn. There is a whole clip of it and she shows how these actual little icons on the homepage are leading customers to the direct to consumer sites. So that could be a really good motivation and reason to participate in Buy with Prime, if you haven’t already done it. I think there’s a lot of evidence to show that Buy with Prime is really helpful for your conversion rate on your own site. But then if Amazon is going to start promoting your products on actual Amazon and directing them to your website, that is something that could be really amazing. So my question is what do you all think about this, and have you added the Buy With Prime button to your website? Leave comments below on that.

Carrie Miller:

All right, so let’s get into the last piece of news, and that is that Amazon is working on an AI chatbot, internally called Metis, to rival OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Okay, the chatbot is going to be accessible through a web browser and it’s going to be powered by one of the company’s internal AI models called Olympus. Olympus is supposedly even more powerful than Amazon’s publicly available AI model, which is called Titan. Now Metis can generate conversational texts and image-based answers, provide source links, suggest follow-up questions and generate images. Amazon also reportedly wants to use retrieval, augmented generation or the RAG method for Metis, meaning the chatbot would be able to reference knowledge outside of its original training data and therefore could provide more up-to-date answers. Metis is reportedly also meant to be an AI agent, I guess, kind of your like personal agent, I guess, capable of completing tasks such as turning on lights and booking flights.

Carrie Miller:

So the question I have for all of you is with this change, do you think that more people are going to be doing voice search through Alexa? Do you think this kind of AI integration is going to change the way shoppers find products on Amazon and other websites? I do believe it is going to kind of change the context and way people are searching for products, but I’m really curious to know what you all think out there. All right, in our next segment, we are going to be talking about the latest rollout within Atomic and this is really important. Going to be located in Atomic and you’re going to go to the dashboard and then scroll all the way to the bottom where it says brand performance. So what is being shown here is brand performance data and what you’re going to be able to see is you can see the number of brand searches, you can see the detail page views and you can see the customer conversion rate. You can see the new percent of new to brand customers. You can see the shopper engagement rate. You can see all this great information all in one place and it’s just really giving sellers more information that they need to make better data-driven decisions in their pay-per-click advertising. So it’s going to allow you to see category comparisons how many clicks are within your category, how many detail page views are within that category and how you actually compare to the average. So I think this is huge in helping you to make better data-driven decisions in your pay-per-click advertising.

Carrie Miller:

Okay, so let’s go ahead and get into this week’s training tip of the week Now. I think this is one of the coolest things for Prime Day that you could utilize to help you make lots and lots of money this Prime Day, and it’s going into historical data. So what I’m going to do, I’m just gonna go ahead and I’m gonna share my screen and show you how this strategy works and how it can help you to make tons of money this next Prime Day. Okay, so I did an example and I took an ASIN from Amazon and this is the Tyneco vacuum, because I know it does pretty well on Prime Day every year. I know I’ve purchased one and many people I know have purchased one, so I wanted to use this one as an example, and what we’re going to do is I just did a reverse ASIN search on it and then what we’re going to do is we’re going to go into historical trend.

Carrie Miller:

Now, once I click on historical trend, you can see all of these months. This goes back 24 months of data and what I want to do is I want to go back to the month of July of 2023, which is last year’s prime day. So I’m going to click on that pillar right there with July of 2023. And then I’m going to click on apply filters. Now this is going to show basically all of the keywords that this ASIN was ranking for organic and sponsored and you can also see the search volume. So if we look through here, you can see their organic rank in here for a lot of these different words. Now, one thing that I like to do is okay, I can see these great keywords and where they were ranked and all of that, but I want to look at Prime Day specific keywords. So I look at, I go into the filter phrases containing and I put in Prime and I hit apply filters.

Carrie Miller:

Now this is going to show you all of the kind of Prime Day related terms that you’re going to be able to utilize and maybe do pay-per-click advertising on, and you could even do an evergreen cap campaign on this, maybe even throughout the next year, to make sure that you can kind of start ranking and stay on top of these. But we’ve got Prime Day vacuum here and that they are organically ranked 230. Okay, they’re not even doing any sponsored ads. This has an 8,500 search volume. That definitely looks like it’s wide open. If you hover over this you can actually see who is ranked in the top for that keyword. But if you go down you can see all of these different keywords where this main competitor is not even ranking organically in the first page for these keywords and they’re not even doing many sponsored ads. They’ve got one sponsored ad here, one there as well, so they’re kind of probably just guessing.

Carrie Miller:

But you can utilize this historical search volume, historical searches, to do some exact campaigns and start, you know, making sure to capitalize on these keyword searches, cause it looks like a lot of people are doing even just stick vacuum cleaner, cordless, prime day deals got 1800 searches. So you know really good opportunities to do some exact campaigns to really win all of this where lots and lots of traffic is going to be. So if you haven’t already checked out the historical trend, go ahead and check it out. It is an incredible tool and I do believe it can make you lots of money. Right now, some of those keywords are very, very low search volume, and so if you start advertising now, you could potentially get to the top of the search and start ranking for those before prime day. You still have some time, so go ahead and start trying to dominate those incredible prime day keywords. All right, and that is all that we have for this week’s episode of the Weekly Buzz, and we will see you again next week to see what’s buzzing. Bye everyone.

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