#715 – How to Double Your Amazon Sales in 2025

Unlock the secrets to doubling your e-commerce sales with insights straight from industry expert mentors. In our latest episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10, Bradley Sutton is joined by Leo Sgovio and Melissa Burdick, two experts who have navigated the complex waters of e-commerce and are here to share their wealth of knowledge. We dive into the Scale Stories episode 2 case study with Essential Candy, addressing common challenges such as competition, tariffs, and inflation, while providing actionable strategies to overcome them. With Leo’s expertise in SEO and Amazon and Melissa’s impressive journey from Amazon ads to Pacvue, this episode is packed with practical advice suited for brands looking to thrive in the digital marketplace.

Discover the game-changing role AI plays in revolutionizing advertising on platforms like Amazon. Imagine having an army of assistants to refine your marketing strategy. AI makes this a reality. From manual bids to automated intelligence, we explore how technology has advanced and opened new doors for advertisers. We reflect on the evolution of Amazon advertising and share personal anecdotes about pioneering advertising efforts, such as Unilever’s Amazon homepage video ad. This transformation has not only leveled the playing field but also advanced ad optimization and market analysis to new heights.

We also dive into optimizing your e-commerce basics for growth and improving your brand’s Amazon presence. Leo and Melissa evaluate a brand’s strategies and provide insights on leveraging tools like Amazon’s Product Opportunity Explorer to gain a competitive advantage. Enhancing product listings, utilizing customer insights, and considering new platforms like TikTok Shop are among the strategies discussed. Whether you’re looking to refine your advertising, streamline business processes, or explore new marketing channels, this episode offers a comprehensive guide to scaling your e-commerce business. Listen in and equip yourself with the strategies you need to propel your brand to new heights.

In episode 715 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley, Leo, and Melissa discuss:

• 00:00 – Scale Stories AMA With Expert Mentors
• 05:17 – AI Impact on E-Commerce Growth
• 17:41 – Starting Small Business Success Journey
• 21:26 – Improving E-Commerce Basics for Growth
• 27:47 – Focus on Basics Before Advanced Strategies
• 33:24 – Evolving Accessibility and Targeting in E-Commerce
• 35:44 – Amazon’s Rapidly Changing Marketplace
• 37:00 – Improving Sales Through Customer Insights
• 42:20 – Strategies to Boost E-Commerce Sales
• 46:21 – Discussion on Creative Sample Packs
• 48:17 – Utilizing Helium 10 for Sales Growth

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

What does it take to double your sales in 2025 or 2026? It’s not just one magic technique. Today, we’re going to talk to a couple of expert mentors who are doing a case study showing everyone the exact steps of what they’re doing to help a brand double, or even more, their sales. 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 a special workshop we are doing, halfway celebrating scale stories, but also halfway to be able to get a lot of the brands out there. Some very necessary information on a topic that is very near and dear to many brands and seller’s hearts, which is hey, this day and age of more competition, inflation, all these different obstacles that might be coming up, how can we scale up? Can we double our sales, can we triple our sales? What are the steps brands need to take? And we’re actually doing that live over the next few months in a live case study that we’re calling Scale Stories. In a live case study that we’re calling Scale Stories, but we are also wanting to hopefully not just inspire that brand to double their sales, but all the rest of you brands out there who are looking to do the same. We want to show you the steps that you need to take as well, and it’s not the same steps for everybody. There’s different strokes for different folks, as we say, right, but we got some of the best mentors in the world to come together and help us brand essential candies and we also wanted to show you guys that some of these steps it doesn’t matter if you’re selling essential candies or you’re selling coffin shelves that a lot of the same steps you guys can take as well. I’m going to go ahead and introduce our two mentors. We had three, or we have three, but one of our team, Natalie. She is unwell. We wish her a speedy recovery, but Leo and Melissa will be holding it down for Natalie. But let’s go ahead and introduce you to them. Leo, would you like to introduce yourself first?

Leo:

Of course, good morning or afternoon. I don’t know where you guys in the world are watching from, but my name is Leo, one of the mentors here on Scale Stories. Nice to meet you all. I’ve been in the space for a while now. I think 2007 was the first I put my work into the SEO space and then got into web analytics all the way 2015, starting my journey on Amazon. And here I am today helping you guys on your Amazon journey. So, I’m pretty much involved in the community and, yeah, today you can ask me anything.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome, awesome. And Melissa, would you like to introduce yourself?

Melissa:

Sure. Uh, so I’m president and co-founder of Pacvue. Pacvue’s the sister company to Helium 10, so we’re all one company, um we. Pacvue focuses more on the Enterprise Market, Helium 10, of course, Seller Market, um. But before Pacvue and co-founding Pacvue in 2018, I worked 10 years at Amazon. I was the original health and beauty vendor manager, launched the category back in 2005. And I call it the cheapest MBA I didn’t have to pay for because I learned everything you could learn about e-commerce and all that kind of stuff. And then I also was early in the ads business as well, working in ads.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome, awesome. Okay. So, we wanted to bring people from different backgrounds and different expertise in order to help Dean and Tracy with the essential brand, or essential candy brand, but also because there’s a lot of different key factors and key areas that will help a brand double their sales if that’s their goal. It’s not just one thing where, hey, I’m going to implement better advertising, boom goes the dynamite, I’m doubling my sales. Hey, I’m going to um, leverage AI or social commerce into my brand. That’s going to double my sales. Uh, being able to increase your sales is a long process that includes a lot of different steps and some of which you guys have already seen. If you hadn’t heard of who is Essential Candy, how are you guys doubling their sales? Make sure to go to YouTube after you listen to this, or, if you’re listening to this on the podcast, just pause it and then maybe come back. Just type in Helium 10 Scale Stories and you can see two or three episodes that have been released so far.

Bradley Sutton:

But this is the one that you guys want to watch, the one about Dean and Tracy and the brand Essential Candy, and you can get to know the brand a little bit more. Before we get into the specifics of increasing a brand. I just want to talk about kind of like e-commerce overall and what’s new. So, Leo, I think the first thing that is so different from like the first time we started doing case studies about how to increase sales on brands. We had another case study called Project X and that started five, six years ago and then a couple of years later we’d come back and show how we launched new products and how we did different things. But I would say the biggest difference between now and like those days is maybe AI and how that is changing how brands operate themselves, how Amazon, you know, might operate, et cetera. So, what can you talk a little bit about that? About how AI has either helped or potentially made things more difficult or more complex for sellers out there?

Leo:

Yeah. I agree with you, Bradley. I think AI definitely is a differentiator today between you know, compared to a few years ago, we have so much more power in our hands, which we didn’t have right. It’s like having an army of people just our assistants working with us on pretty much any task, from the prior research to persona research, market analysis or even like figuring out what’s working with your paid ads was working with your paid ads. So, with episode one, for example, with Natalie, I’ve used AI a lot to understand more about our niche, more our product, and understand, even from what she was passionate about, what could be could have been a good product for her. Now, with Dean, it also helps us understand more about that niche, what they were doing right, what they were doing wrong, and so I personally use AI on a daily basis.

Leo:

I’m a little bit more advanced when it comes to that and I try to even develop my own agents that help me on a daily basis, kind of like understand what is going wrong or perhaps what I could improve, but I definitely like yesterday, I think, or a few days ago I saw someone created an AI agent that allows you to source products using an agent. So instead of you going to Alibaba, now you can just chat with someone. It’s a tool similar to ChatGPT, but it’s specifically trained to probably look for products on Alibaba, so it uses the Alibaba probably API in the back end and you can just get right there. Answers on suppliers. They also rate suppliers based on those badges that they have on Alibaba, so I thought it was great. Probably one of the things that was missing in the space. Yeah, so I think definitely AI is making things better, leveling out the space, so everyone has access to the same tools, and so it’s all about how you use it now. But with the right brain obviously human brain behind it, it can be a very powerful tool.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, yeah. Sure you know, Melissa. You mentioned some of your background. It’s not as humble as you made it sound in advertising, but I believe you were one of the ones who even launched the first ever I forgot what it was like a sponsored brand headline ad or sponsored display ad or something like that. You literally did the first one, so you’ve been around the block as far as how Amazon advertising has really just become what it is today, which is this behemoth of operation. What are some of the biggest changes in advertising Amazon advertising specifically that have happened not way back then? Obviously, there’s a lot of things like the launch of sponsored video ads, but that’s been around for like five years. Well, but maybe just looking back at the last three, four years or even shorter, what, what do you think are the biggest game changers that have happened in Amazon advertising?

Melissa:

Well, first, I think that’s a really kind way of saying how old I am. You didn’t say that

Bradley Sutton:

I did not infer that at all.

Melissa:

I have this face that’s very young looking, but I’ve been in the business for 20 years and the funny story about what you’re talking about is I was at Amazon so long ago before ads existed, and what you’re talking about is Unilever. Dove came to me and they said hey, Melissa, we want to play our Super Bowl commercial on the Amazon homepage. And this was like no ads, no video ads, no, nothing. Ads did not exist, nobody was doing advertising from Unilever to be on the homepage of Amazon play their Super Bowl commercial. Begged the leadership to be able to get a widget to create a video ad and then it drove to a landing page that had totally out of stock products. But that was part of the original business case to create an ad program in that, hey, brands like Dove want to pay money to be on amazon like a publisher.

Melissa:

But also fast forward to when I was doing I was a hands-on keyboard person a long time ago bidding using Amazon’s UI and it was so mickey mouse is what I like to call it literally friend of mine was representing tide, the big behemoth. I had Tide detergent. I had a competitive brand and literally we were going in every day bidding a penny up on laundry detergent. That’s how old I am and how back in the day bidding was. And so if you fast forward to where we’re at today, the sophistication of where we’ve gotten to with automation of bids and what you can do using Amazon Marketing Cloud to retarget and things like that that’s kind of been the biggest game changer is just going from really manual adding a penny to a bid to where we are today. And I’ll say in some ways it it’s harder because the skills there is less available to you. It was easier because it just was so manual and you were able to just manually figure it out.

Melissa:

But Leo just talked about with agents. That’s a different kind of brain for some people and they have to want to go do and figure that out. And some people who don’t have that you know they’re doing so many other things and figuring out how to create an agent is like number 100 on their list. So in some ways it’s really hard. But I think just the automation of where we’ve gotten to today. And then the other thing that I think is really cool is the generative creative of how far that’s gone, and when that first came out we were like nobody’s using it. But now I mean actually some of the stuff of creating real videos with your products, like that. In some ways, I think on the creative front, love to hear from you guys, but that seems to be one of the bigger advances. That’s pretty easy to use and really helpful because you can just start creating a bunch of different creatives, which we know is so important for ad conversion. You want to have really great, especially video. Has been performing really well video creatives, so

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, yeah. I think, um, I mean it kind of ties into to what Leo was talking about with the AI how, how AI has also made things more accessible to people, even on the advertising side, where you know before, before you know, like sponsor brand video I just mentioned and sponsor display and stuff like that. That’s been around for years but not everybody, I would say, had equal access to it, especially newer brands, you know, because it’s expensive to have professional video made and custom creatives made. But with AI now, all of a sudden, you know you don’t have to go have a you know $2,000 photo shoot or video shoot in order to make seven different ads. You might be able to do that, you know, with AI, and so that has also been a big factor, I think, in things. Wanna know what keywords are driving the most sales in the listing on Amazon? To do that, you need to know what highly search for keywords that products been ranking maybe at the top of page one. You can actually find them out in seconds by using Helium 10 keyword research tool Cerebro. Now that’s just one of the many, many functions that make this tool my favorite tool in the whole suite and it’s the most powerful keyword research tool ever created for e-commerce sellers. For more information, go to h10.me/cerebro. H10.me/ C-E-R-E-B-R-O. Don’t forget to use the Serious Sellers Podcast discount coupon, SSP10.

Bradley Sutton:

Going back to Leo, you know the other big thing. I think that definitely helps sellers improve their overall e-commerce penetration. I guess we could say and thus obviously would help increase your sales is implementing different marketplaces. You know, five, six years ago, same thing with Project X. We just were Amazon USA right, and if we wanted to do one for Europe, we would have been like you know what, let’s just go ahead and do Amazon UK or Amazon Germany, if we were trying to show a European case study. But nowadays, even if you’re just newer on Amazon, it’s like hey, are you selling on TikTok shop? Are you selling on Walmart? Do you have Shopify? Can you talk a little bit about which marketplace? You think if somebody’s out there, whether they’re doing 1 million now, whether they’re doing $100,000, $10,000 a month, where do you tell people like, hey, if you’re only on Amazon, that’s not good. Here’s the next place you need to go.

Leo:

Yeah, Bradley, I think it obviously depends on the product, right, but let’s say, for the most part, everyone should be also on TikTok shop today, considering the amount of traffic that a platform is just getting. In July they launched the desktop version. Before, TikTok shop was only available on mobile devices, right, and only for, obviously, people in the US. Today, like in July this year, you can see, you can also reach the TikTok shop on desktop. So it’s not the best, I would say, experience like the Amazon marketplace, but it’s there, right. So, with the right strategy, because today you still need influencers like creators, affiliates, to drive potentially external traffic to your Amazon marketplace, and so might as well put your products also on TikTok shop. It’s a different game. I would say it’s a very pay-to-play game on TikTok shop, because if you stop working with influencers and affiliates, you’re pretty much getting no traffic. But it’s pretty much like what we’ll do on Amazon with paid ads. So the other thing is assuming that your listing is in English today is a no brainer. Launching in the UK, for example, the English speaking countries when we launched today, we tried to also go in Europe from day one and, for example, launching in Germany is great. Germany is one of the best marketplaces in Europe for us as well, and in Europe they have also this program that allows you to pretty much, or customers to buy from any country and then they fulfill it from whatever FBA fulfillment center is available. So if your product is in Germany, they can also ship to Italy or Spain or anywhere else. So, and now there are some emerging ones as well, like, for example, when we were in Seattle I saw Shein had an event there like apparently a few sellers getting some sort of like good results on Shein as well. I even played with their marketplace. To be honest with you, I sell on Amazon and TikTok shop, but these are obviously two that I definitely recommend anyone selling on.

Bradley Sutton:

I wanted to get some initial impressions on the brand that we were helping and, again, you guys can watch this on Scale Stories on Helium 10’s YouTube channel. But, Melissa, when you first met Dean and Tracy learned a little bit about what their motivations were and the history of their brand. What their motivations were and the history of their brand, what were some of your first impressions of them and or their Amazon situation, their brand, et cetera?

Melissa:

They were just such like lovely, honest people that were truly wanting to learn how to be successful. I mean, they have this great product. They had a great story of Tracy’s sons you know their son’s baseball coach that had cancer and they wanted to create this candy for them. And you hear a lot of these stories. Like Poppy, you know, like I, had gut health problems, so they start in their kitchen. And dude wipes started in his college dorm. So you like hear all these like wonderful seller stories where they just they start their brand and it’s like from scratch and they have put like it’s their baby, you know they pour so much love into it and so then, just like such a great opportunity for us to help them because they had some low-hanging fruit things that I know you helped both of you guys helped them a ton with just fixing some small things that could get them going. And the other thing that I noticed was just how manual they were. They were writing handwritten notes to everybody that was buying their products. They were going to hundred. You know little fairs and trade shows. You know showing people their products because they love that, but like trying to take them to like the next, you know to scale their business and be able to really be successful. And, you know, launch on TikTok, you know, like, help fix some things on Amazon. They were just so willing to learn and how to do that. And we’re hungry for a community. And that was kind of the exciting thing for us because that’s really what Helium 10 does is bring that community sense to them, helps them.

Melissa:

You know, I’ve always said it takes a village to commerce and to do e-commerce, and that really is true. Like you cannot do it alone. You need to hear ideas from Leo about, oh, you can create an agent to go source things on Alibaba, like, oh, wow, you can do that. How, how did they do that? And that’s just to be successful, you really need to be talking to other experts in the space. Having that community have them help you, and so they and just their desire to learn was really great. And then also, having started my own business, I know how it feels when people like maybe call your baby ugly, you know, and they kind of took that in stride, where it’s like, oh, that’s not what we’re doing, we’re just we’re really trying to help you. But I could see how that could be not offensive. But like my way is good, like what’s wrong. Why are you poking holes at it? And they just they had so much grace to take feedback and you know, like packaging. Like you know, we had all these ideas about their packaging. Like you know, Dean created all those pictures himself and images and like that was his baby. But he was like, tell me how to make this better.

Bradley Sutton:

You bring up a very important point, because sometimes brands can let their pride get in their way and be like hey, I know my brand better than anybody. I’m going to stick to my ways and I’m not going to let some outsider tell me what to do. And that definitely is not the case with Dean and Tracy, and that’s important for anybody else listening to this episode who’s maybe in a similar situation, where they’re like, hey, I do want to improve. You can’t have that attitude of, hey, my way or the highway. You have to be open to advice from those who have been in the game maybe a little bit longer than you have a little bit more experience. Dean and Tracy definitely were like that. What about you, Leo? What was your first impressions of them and their brand?

Leo:

Yeah, I pretty much shared the same feelings that Melissa here shared about them. I think they’re a lovely couple and I like that they put so much passion into these products that they sell, and I remember when I started also, I was basically making things in my kitchen, so it reminded me a little bit of how I started as well, and I think it’s great. You know, one of the things I appreciate and admire the most about entrepreneurs is when they put effort into understanding the business so they’re running themselves, instead of just throwing people at operations, at PPC, at whatever you know it takes to succeed and I think you know that eventually has got a short, you know, lifespan. But, um, their story overall and you know the why is actually what touched me the most, the fact that they are generally trying to help people that are struggling with certain, you know, health issues. Um, I think when you do that uh, run your business with a strong why you find your way and people understand that there is a genuine intent behind your business. It’s not just about to make money, and so that kind of struck with me the most.

Bradley Sutton:

Melissa. What were some of the things as soon as you started, maybe looking into their brand, either on the show or before, where you’re like, oh wow, this is definitely some low-hanging fruit or this is something immediately they should be improving on as part of this, like, hey, here’s some of the steps that’s going to help them double their sales you know, sales from the viewpoint of advertising or retail readiness or anything else that you had noticed.

Melissa:

Well, one of the things that I dug into first that was my area was ads, and so a couple of things that I first noticed was one they had hired an agency that had just put them on autopilot and so really weren’t getting any attention in ads. It was just literally like check a box I have ads running, it’s on autopilot and what was happening was they were doing a couple of things that was not great for them, which was one? They were bidding on all their branded keywords, so essential candies which for them was not a great idea because they’re not getting any incremental or new shoppers coming in to buy their products. So anyone that’s typing essential candies into the search bar you know that’s a pretty niche, unique person that knows their brand and wants to go buy it. So not a good probably use of their very small budget to go after their branded keywords and so things like that where they’re just going after you really hard words, like hard candy, you know, like Hershey’s or Jolly Ranchers, is winning keywords like that. So they didn’t have a right to win in that space.

Melissa:

So really, just like some of this autopilot check the box that’s running, because they had 100 other things they were working on and ads was like kind of not the top of their list to optimize and they were kind of outsourcing that to an agency that had put on autopilot and to them they’re like I don’t think it’s going really well, but I don’t really know what the questions to ask them to know if it’s not going well. I just kind of feel like maybe it’s not being optimized and so being able to come in and be and see in their account, that kind of like the two things that they you know is not the best thing to really focus on when you have a very small budget, like they did was to be, and that was for us it’s like great news because it’s an easy fix in some ways to help them.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, yeah, what about you Leo?

Leo:

Are you referring about PPC?

Bradley Sutton:

Some of the specific things that like first things you noticed when you’re doing audit on them.

Leo:

We all noticed right away that they weren’t Prime right, so they weren’t leveraging the Prime option on Amazon, and so that, to me, was like a no-brainer. I’m like come on, guys, you have to leverage Prime. Because the problem that they have is that they’re still manufacturing everything themselves, and so even recently, I think, they only sent in about 300 or so units, and so, in my opinion, that, to begin with, was a scalability issue. Like you cannot have inventory limitations when it comes to eventually doubling or 5X in your brand, so to me, that was an instant issue that needs to be fixed. Obviously. When it comes to the listing itself, like the images, I pointed out on the show that I would have liked to see a little bit more of a brand story or even following the guidelines that we normally recommend, like see the images that you’re showing now on the screen. They’re kind of repetitive, there is no added value, and customers today on Amazon obviously look at the images first and maybe they read some bullet points just to make sure they’re buying the right product.

Leo:

So I think it was missing kind of the core, the foundation for a brand to be successful on Amazon. So the fact that they are selling well in Amazon, I believe, is their primary online channel, still is great and it validates the fact that people like the product and there’s demand for it fact that people like the product and there’s demand for it. But I think they’re just missing out on a lot of opportunity in general just by not focusing on the fundamentals that we stress about when, obviously, we start on Amazon. So I think the opportunity for them is huge. We identified that instantly when we looked at their products. We thought about virtual bundles, like they’re not leveraging. We thought about improving the main images, like the packaging that you guys came up with was amazing. So I think all these things put together for most likely next year, they’ll definitely result in a huge lift in sales and I’m excited to see their feedback in a few months from now.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, yeah, I think that’s another thing. That was even yesterday the premiere. I was like live chatting on the premiere of their episode and somebody had put in the chat, oh yeah, it’s like you guys are just talking about, you know, some of the or. It just seems like they’ve got a lot of basics they need to worry about too, and that’s absolutely the case. Sometimes it’s not some fancy convoluted, really intricate advertising strategy or some you know, really difficult implementation of AI, like we were talking about. That, you know you should jump right into. You’ve got to first look at the basics that they didn’t have, you know, in line like, like their advertising strategy, just doing auto campaigns or just focusing on their branded uh keywords, uh, instead of trying to uh, you know, go after keywords. They might have a better right to win. Um, they didn’t even have all their product in FBA. Um, as I was showing the, the, the listing here, you know they. They are just now implementing a plus content on some of their listings. Here’s one of their listings and they just have a very small part of the description here, no A-plus content. Some of these images could be definitely improved. Sometimes it’s the basics of what you have to like start working on first before you can go to some of these advanced strategies. And that’s definitely the case with essential candy. You know, like they’re getting their inventory into FBA across their board, they’re redoing their images the last month or so. You’ll be seeing that soon implemented. And then, yes, now we need to start thinking about some different forms of advertising. Once you have the basics of the advertising. They didn’t have any sponsored display ads. They didn’t have any sponsored brand video ads and I know the team was very excited about this brand is because they actually had a lot of the harder stuff that other brands can’t even do or it’s very difficult for them to do. They’ve got that on lock. You know they’re actually in a number of Walmart stores. They’re not across the board. You know, and that’s the holy grail for an amazon brand to try and get your stores in Walmart at all is. You know that’s like one in a thousand. They’re already in some of the Walmart stores. They go and set up at these shows around the country and will sell hundreds of packs of their product there.

Bradley Sutton:

And what does that mean? That means there’s thousands and thousands of people out there who have tried their product and are probably looking for them because they discovered them at a, at an expo or at a farmer’s market that they set up or something like that. You know like, I’ve never done that in any of my brands. I I’ve not, I’ve never, you know, set up at an exhibition or have people just on the street. You know thousands of people looking. You know like, I kind of rely mainly on e-commerce for brands, and so it was kind of exciting to see, right, how they have this stuff that other brands wish they had, but they’re just not covering the basics. You know, on online. Leo, were you going to say something?

Leo:

Yeah, no, I see that happening a lot actually, Bradley. When you have brands that typically focus on retail first and then they go online, so they tend to, obviously they don’t know how to succeed online, and that’s why we came across this brand. That was the basics. But also there are so many sellers Bradley that I meet. They’ve never been at a conference, they never watch events like this, but they’ve been successful and that’s the power of Amazon, right. If you have a good product, and eventually they did. Especially a few years ago, the traffic that they were getting from the platform was good enough to be successful, but they had no clue of what we were doing to obviously accelerate the growth of the growth. So that’s why I’m excited for the opportunity that we have with, with Dean and Tracy, to make a difference and show them that, with the right support, you know, they can take it to a whole different level.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, yeah, for sure. All right. Any, I’m going to keep asking questions here. But I want to make sure that the audience has a chance, too, to ask any questions, either about the specific case study that we’ve been doing or just in general. We’ve got some of the top thought leaders here in the game on the show, and so if you guys want to ask about, you know, new kinds of advertising, or, uh, hey, what, what should my TikTok shop strategy be? Or, hey, I’m doing this is a little bit about my brand. How do I double my sales? Um, ask any, any and everything. Amazon, TikTok shop. Uh, AI related? Uh, please go ahead and start dropping your questions in the chat and we’ll get to them live.

Bradley Sutton:

Melissa, you mentioned earlier AMC and that’s still very fresh for a lot of sellers. It’s not something new. AMC has been around for years. But why is there all of a sudden, a sudden focus on AMC, where, all of a sudden, even regular sellers are thinking about it? And you know, it was a big part of Amazon, accelerate recently, etc. What’s been the big differences or the big change in the accessibility, I guess, of AMC. And then what aspect of it do you, or aspects of it do you think is the most game changing for sellers out there?

Melissa:

So when, when Amazon first launched AMC just like anything it was really I mean, it was like 70% done and it was hard to use, like you had to write SQL, like you had to be able to. It was really kind of inaccessible to everyday people. And so, um, only like you know, managed service or like you really couldn’t use it very well. So what happened? What’s since happened is people have created templates, people baked it into things. The amazon just launched amazon marketing club for sponsored products and search, so that’s something that is much more accessible. So one is it’s a lot more accessible is the kind of bottom line of it. What a lot more accessible is the kind of bottom line of it.

Melissa:

What’s cool about it is just how in-depth targeting you can get and so like, as an example, people who’ve added your stuff to cart but you have not bought it. You can retarget them using some of the AMC logic and accessing Amazon Marketing Cloud and so like that’s. You know this is more advanced strategies. This is definitely not, you know, the. You got to get everything else right first, but this is a really smart way to kind of retarget people and find new customers to your brand. So once you’re, like you know, going with gas and you’ve kind of got the basics done, then it’s some of these more advanced tactics and strategies that can really help you find. I mean, that’s what the story is about is really trying to find new customers coming into your brand in a really smart way, and so that’s what Amazon Marketing Cloud really helps you to do. And the interesting thing is, you know we’re working with, especially on the on the Pacvue side. because a lot of the brands aren’t just on, they’re on Amazon TikTok, Walmart, Instacart, Target, like they’re on. You know 50 retailers that we’re helping them with. And so a lot of the other retailers, like Walmart and Instacart, are trying to create an Amazon marketing club. They’re trying to go after a similar concept, which is being able to have smarter targeting, but they don’t have the cloud infrastructure set up at all. So that’s just an example. We’re going to get there, but not there yet.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, let’s see. We got another question here from Joel and this is interesting. I’m mainly going to take this one just because it’s pretty interesting, but to show how fast things change on Amazon. There was an episode that just came out of the podcast. He’s referencing 710, and I recorded that at Amazon Accelerate but this episode just came out less than a week ago and in it we were talking about, you know, analyzing reviews and it’s actually interesting.

Bradley Sutton:

But since we filmed the episode, amazon actually had a crackdown on websites and tools, you know, like ChatGPT, like Helium 10, that would extract reviews from listings to analyze them, listings to analyze them, and since then, Helium 10 had a tool for eight years where it was called Review Insights, where you could look at the reviews, and then Amazon asked us to remove that tool and they’re in the process of telling anybody who’s looking at the reviews in that way that no, you cannot have this kind of tool and have a good relationship with Amazon, cannot have this kind of tool and have a good relationship with Amazon, and so that’s changed. However, that doesn’t mean that you can’t analyze reviews at all. There’s things, even in Amazon now, that you can do. Let me share my screen again so I can show Joel here. So basically what you can do is you can go into Product Opportunity Explorer. It’s not going to be as robust as the Helium 10 one was, but this is free. You don’t even have to have brand registry for this and like, let’s say, I was Dean from Essential Candy. I want to put in my ASIN for my digestive blend. That’s the one that we were looking at. Put the ASIN in there, or a competitor brand.

Bradley Sutton:

Not all products are here, but give it a try. So let’s go ahead and look up Dean’s and then we can see there it is essential candy. You hit the button there and then you hit this button called customer review insights. I wonder where they got the name of that too. Anyway, anyways, uh, here in customer review insights you can see the positive topics, negative top uh topics like 33 or 33 percent of people were talking about overall taste. Uh, which child item had the most mentions? What were some of the snippets about taste? You can see here uh, somebody said it tastes amazing, the candy tastes great, et cetera. And then you can look at the negative topics. This one barely has any reviews. So there’s no negative topics here, but this is similar to what you might have done with the Helium 10 review insights in the past, and so maybe the way to do things changes over time. Like for years, I was always talking about using Helium 10 review insights.

Bradley Sutton:

Now you got to use Product Opportunity Explorer review insights, but the basic premise is still the same. When you are looking at your reviews, at competitor reviews, especially one of a niche that you’re looking to get into, you’re going to get insights pun intended there for how your customers think. Insights pun intended there for how your customers think and this is a very important aspect for improving your sales is doubling down on what customers love about you and your competitors’ products, but also trying to look at hey, what are people complaining about your product? That’s something that is going to be important to fix, because you know a product with less than four stars, you’re not going to be I’m sorry, but you’re not going to be able to double your sales, which is what we’ve been talking about today. So, you’ve got to make sure you’ve got a well-reviewed product, and if you’re in the product development stage, this is something you should be doing even before you have the product or a product in a certain niche is looking at the reviews. Obviously, you can’t look at your own reviews you don’t have a product but you look at the existing market out there. Can you fix what people are complaining about on the competitor products? Because now you launch your product, you’re going to have that competitive advantage there.

Bradley Sutton:

Martin’s got a question. We’ll go ahead and mention it here, just uh to, so everybody can benefit from it. Who is listening later on the podcast? He said before creating a custom AMC audience, we would like to analyze what our customers have in common in order to build an audience precisely around that. Is it possible to extract data such as age, gender, interest etc. From AMC analytics and use it to create a new audience? This is a little bit advanced, but he’s talking about hey, even before creating it, is this something that they’re able to look at? Melissa?

Melissa:

My understanding is there’s something called the AMC 1P Demographic Report. So I think that you can. I think you can create Amazon doesn’t let you have like you can analyze customer behaviors and patterns, and so I’m pretty sure you can build something off of that. But there will be a report in AMC around that.

Bradley Sutton:

Yes, and then also even in brand analytics, you’re able to see a customer demographics report. But again, that part is only about what you’ve been selling. But again, that part is only about what you’ve been selling. But similar thing for AMC, like, if you haven’t sold in a certain niche, well, that’s not what AMC is for. AMC is not for doing market research on prospective niches. It’s about, hey, where you are selling in. Let’s try and target your advertising to certain relevant markets. So if you’re just looking for demographics in general, you to do some um, you know you. You might look at brand analytics and some of the other growth tools in Amazon Um, who was that, martin? But if you’re wanting to, like, target your advertising more and really niche down to audiences, then then yes, AMC is the place, a place to go. Um is the place to go.

Bradley Sutton:

Last questions now, Leo what do you think or do you think we’re going to be able to double or even more Dean and Tracy’s Amazon and online sales? And if so, what are some of the other ways that we haven’t seen them in blood? We’re doing this in real time here, like we just had meetings with them last week and we were talking just yesterday in our little Slack channel about the reshoot of images and things. So this is something that’s happening in real time, but give people a preview of the next few months. What are some of the things that you think are going to help Dean and Tracy get to that next level?

Leo:

Absolutely yeah. So I totally think we can double the sales. In fact, I think in the episode I also mentioned, we can go beyond that, simply because I don’t think they’ve leveraged the Amazon platform at its full potential. So by redesigning the listing, by working with Melissa and her team on the advertising campaigns, leveraging obviously that space as well, we can help them improve drastically the relevancy and the visibility of their products on the Amazon marketplace. By tapping into the TikTok shop, I think their product is very TikTokable as well. It could be easily promoted there. So we can definitely drive outside traffic from TikTok. On the TikTok shop platform itself, our idea was to bundle some products. So the issue that I saw there, especially when you work with any really uh niche that involves some sort of like flavors or taste or smell I had a question last week I think it was on um on the other um call that we had, Bradley, someone was asking about perfumes, uh, and they reached out to me on LinkedIn as well. And you know, like perfumes, like candies, like anything that has a taste of flavor, is it’s hard. Like people don’t know what they are buying. They obviously like the image. You’re convincing them with the listing that this is what they’re, uh, that they need, but then when they taste it, they might be disappointed, and so the problem there was that, in my opinion, if they buy one candy or one flavor for you for a specific thing this is the digestive one and they don’t like the flavor, well, you probably lost that customer or the opportunity that you had to have the customer buy something else from you, and so my recommendation was perhaps to have a sample pack where a customer can get one candy for each, or maybe two or three for each flavors that they have, and this way they can try more than one. This way, if they don’t like one, they might like the other one, and you still can convert that into a potential customer instead of losing it because of that wasn’t the right flavor for them.

Leo:

So I think the opportunities from a strategic perspective is pretty big. Obviously, we can’t implement these all at once. We do, you know, we do baby steps, we fix what’s broken. Today I want to make sure that they have enough stock with the Amazon and Amazon FBA warehouses, because if they have enough stock that we can push advertising, we can push outside traffic, we can really start doing what we know to do best and then, once we at least double the sales and they are happy, we can start playing other strategies. But I see no reasons why they shouldn’t be selling way more than they’re doing today, for sure.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome, Melissa. Any last words of wisdom for Dean and Tracy, what they’re going to be working on, or just in general for the audience out there, because I think everybody, myself included, we would all love to double our sales. So what can you tell us all?

Melissa:

I think it’s fixing. I mean, one is just identifying what the low-hanging fruit is and fixing those things, so like kind of, and that just applies to anybody. So it’s like for Dean and Tracy, it’s like, oh, they’re not at VA, oh, they have some of these issues, so everyone has low-hanging fruit that they can go fix. You know, some of this creative stuff with generative creative that you can do that Leo was talking about his advice of like, hey, I could do it or I could outsource it to like an expert for less money than creating it. That’s also really great advice because you don’t have to do everything yourself. You can outsource some of these things. So I think just the AI tools are going to get better understanding which are the ones that people are using and asking your friends, your colleagues, your customers or whatever, what are the best AI tools out there, and starting to experiment and use it. But I’m really excited for Dean and Tracy and I was kind of laughing when Leo was talking about the creating sample packs because remember when we said that we all know that like literally those are the best assortment packs or the best things on Amazon, because it’s like, oh, I can try a couple things and then you can go back and subscribe to some of these things. But do you remember they said it was like it’s never so easy. It’s like each of their packages are clear, so then they’d have to get like colored packaging, does it, you know? And then they were so specific about how their infused candies have all these flavors and they’ve like infused together and so, like you know, then we were like, okay, we can get creative about how we create these sample packs. They can be, you know, you can still create them. It’s just like not so easy to create it.

Leo:

I agree, Melissa. I think they are manufacturing process right now. It’s a little bit too complex.

Melissa:

Yeah.

Leo:

They need to streamline that part and probably even detach themselves from that process so they can focus on growing the brand more. As entrepreneurs, I understand like we try to always fit multiple hats and we like to have control over everything, but then you need to understand what are your strengths, what are your weaknesses. Focus on your strengths, outsource the rest and grow the business. That way, Like, but I think they, they, they got it and they appreciate the advices that we’re giving them and I see good response on their end. So I, I’m, you know, I’m faithful, let’s put it this way I think they, they’ll get there for sure.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome. Well, with mentors like you and Natalie, who couldn’t be with us today yes, I think they have a great shot at reaching their goal and perhaps even hopefully surpassing it. So, again, this episode wasn’t just about Essential Candy, but all of the brands that are out there who are looking to increase their sales in an ever more competitive market that we have to play in these days. Take these, uh, this advice that we’ve been talking about today. Apply what applies to your own brand, um, you know, to your business, so that you can also, uh, reach your goals with the help of Helium 10 and also this case study, Scale Stories. So, again, if you haven’t seen Scale Stories yet, go to YouTube. Type in Helium 10, Scale Stories. You can also see some of the episodes on our website. Make sure to check those. There’s some episodes that aren’t on YouTube. Just go to Helium10.com and look for Scale Stories and you’ll see a backlog of all of our other episodes where we go into a lot of these steps that we talked about today that we’re implementing with Dean and Tracy in order to help them to extra sales. So we hope this inspires a lot of the brands out there and we’ll see you guys in the next episode. Bye-bye now.

Leo:

Bye guys.

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