#718 – The AI Playbook for Amazon Sellers

Could AI be the game-changer for Amazon sellers striving for efficiency and scalability on a budget? Join us as Shivali Patel from Helium 10 and e-commerce expert Leo Sgovio unpack the transformative role of AI in revolutionizing e-commerce. We’ll explore how AI tools are streamlining essential processes like product research, SEO, and ad creation, eliminating the need for large teams and hefty budgets. From AI-generated graphics to Helium 10’s innovative Listing Builder tool, discover how sellers are now empowered to generate content and optimize their listings effortlessly, making it possible to launch products even with modest budgets.

Shivali and Leo also shed light on the evolving strategies for optimizing Amazon listings with AI tools such as Rufus. We’ll discuss the importance of maintaining a safety stock and leveraging Amazon’s FBA for seamless inventory management and fulfillment. Learn how the integration of Amazon with TikTok Shop can significantly expand market reach and maximize sales potential. Finally, understand the power of competitive analysis tools to enhance visibility and sales performance across multiple channels, and how real-time optimization and bidding strategies are being revolutionized by cutting-edge AI solutions.

In episode 718 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Shivali and Leo discuss:

• 00:00 – AI’s Impact on E-Commerce
• 05:15 – Keyword Research and Content Creation Efficiency
• 10:48 – Discovering Market Trends With AI
• 12:00 – Optimizing Listings With AI Strategies
• 16:44 – AI Applications for Amazon Ads 
• 20:26 – AI Advertising and Rules-Based Automation
• 21:19 – Maximizing Sales With AI Strategies

Tramscript

Carrie Miller:

In this episode, Helium 10’s Shivali Patel sits down with e-commerce expert Leo Segovia to discuss how AI is reshaping e-commerce, particularly for Amazon sellers. This and more on today’s episode.

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’s completely BS-free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world.

Shivali Patel:

Hello, welcome. My name is Shivali Patel, I’m a Senior Brand Evangelist at Helium 10, and I’m here with Leo Sgovio, who is an Amazon seller as well as the founder of Spliced. How are you, Leo?

Leo:

Hello Shivali, it’s good to see you. I’m fine. How are you?

Shivali Patel:

Good, I’m good too. Well, I’m really excited about today because we were talking about a very sexy topic that everybody’s really excited about. It’s changed a lot. I remember two years ago I tried to generate some images and I had like six fingers, maybe 10, I don’t know. But we’ve come a long way since and because of that I want to pick your brain on all things AI and how it is most implementable into the business.

Leo:

Amazing. It’s one of my favorite topics. Hasn’t that changed right?

Shivali Patel:

Yeah, it has it has.

Shivali Patel:

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Shivali Patel:

How have things changed from when you first entered Amazon to now, where you do have access to AI that boosts the efficiency and really helps you build your brand’s moat?

Leo:

I think the most important shift and change is that we used to do everything manually. We had to figure it out and we had to have a team, and so scalability was an issue, right. Imagine like you’re studying a brand and you have a limited budget, but now you’ll need budget for your images, budget for your listing, budget for sourcing products, budget for pretty much everything you’re doing. Well, right now, with AI, you can outsource pretty much all of this stuff and this costing you a couple of hundred dollars beef. And so that is this what I think a big opportunity, of course, but what changed the most? So that allows you now to build a seven, eight figure possibly, brand with two, three people team, like you don’t need a big team. Before, we used to have a lot of VAs in the Philippines to do all of this work, so I think that’s the major change that I’ve seen over the past few years, for sure.

Shivali Patel:

Amazing. Let’s break that down a little bit because I want to talk end-to-end creation, starting from product research. After that, you have SEO stuff going on keyword research, you’re building out that list and you’re creating the ads. How does AI play a role in each of those sectors, starting with product research?

Leo:

Well, look, I think what we’re seeing every day on LinkedIn posts or pretty much everywhere around us is, within the graphic space, right. A huge shift from like graphic, anything graphic related made by humans, to AI generated videos or content or UGC content today. So that is the really, I think, number one change, right, when it comes to what we’re currently using AI for. And then when it comes to the listing itself, I mean, you guys have a great tool, the AI listing builder, and like the fact that you can just press a button and say generate it for me or write the listing for me, using an image as an input to me is like next level. It’s a huge evolution and innovation. And so, yeah, I think these are probably the top two things.

Leo:

With ChatGPT, there’s so much you can do from product research, audience analysis. We worked on Scale Stories together. We recorded these amazing episodes. One of the things that we were trying to actually prove is that you can still launch a product on Amazon with $5,000 budget. Back in 2015, you probably needed $500. Now it’s $5,000. But that’s still a very small investment considering the kind of size of business you can build in today’s world, and what we did there was finding a product from scratch, so we were able to find a product. With ChatGPT, we were able to find the right audience, also diversify the type of product that we were going to launch. So in one day we really had a go-to-market plan, using AI tools and before it was going to take us a couple of weeks to figure that out.

Shivali Patel:

Yeah, I remember back in the day I’d have to do all the work manually. You’re finding the keywords, you’re surfing the website, you’re trying to write it down, and so much of that has gone away. And you really can’t hire a team without hiring a team. Do it yourself in ways that you would never imagine before.

Leo:

Exactly. 

Shivali Patel:

Yeah. I will say there’s also, for example, the Listing Builder aspect that you talked about. I just want to touch on a little bit more in case those of you that are watching or listening and don’t know about it. You can go in and actually create entire listings, especially if you’re somebody who’s not used to doing copywriting or actually right doing any sort of writing. Right, it’s a creative skill set and so being able to go in and put in your keywords, phrases, create, generate entire listings, you can do so much with that. You can also do keyword translations, so you’re expanding into marketplaces. I think that really eases things off, because I don’t know any Italian or Spanish. I cannot do it, yes, you can, but you know, not everybody has a guiding teacher for Italian. You might have to go in and do keyword translations.

Leo:

I agree. I mean doing that with a tool like yours, I think, is a huge help, obviously for Amazon sellers looking to expand internationally, and Amazon has put together a lot of also great tools that help Amazon sellers today. I think, when it comes to the listing itself, today we are in a totally different position. From the images to videos to the description of the product itself, we can have an excellent listing done today using AI or with the AI support. That before probably would take us a full day, I would say, to figure out. I think one thing that I would like to mention is that I wouldn’t completely outsource all of this to AI, because you still need to be in the middle there and ensuring, especially right now. You saw Rufus right, this AI assistant that is helping shoppers purchase products. You probably were going to ask me that question.

Shivali Patel:

Yeah, that was my next question.

Leo:

Yeah, so you want to make sure that you are writing listings with an intent behind the title or the keywords, because now searches are intent-based, they’re kind of going their way right that direction, instead of keyword only. And so, yeah, AI is good, but AI needs also instructions to write, using semantics, for example, or intent-based bullet points, intent-based bullet points, and so that is one thing that us, as humans utilizing these tools, need to be aware of, and so it’s kind of like, right now, everybody’s scared of AI, right, how will AI replace me? I don’t think people should be thinking if AI will replace them. They should be thinking how can I use me to become better or to do excellent my job, right? And so when you combine these two things together, I think you are a much stronger seller overall.

Shivali Patel:

Yeah, I had two questions. While you’re chatting about that, I’m trying to remember if I can retain them. One when you were trying to prompt an artificial intelligence model, how would you make sure that the brand story or the brand voice is retained, so that way you’re not building or crafting a very generic listing?

Leo:

Yeah, so, Shivali, by the way I did it actually while recording Scale Stories, so it was a recent episode or use case. We were looking, first of all, we needed to understand who the audience was and all the keywords, so we started with the keywords, we used Cerebro with Helium 10, and then we fed all these keywords to AI, we used ChatGPT, and so after that we looked at the output, so we asked the AI to generate the listing for us.

Leo:

But one thing that was important is that we wanted to also make sure that the brand story was kind of like explained and told inside the listing, and at that point we told Judge EBT what the story was as well, and so he rewrote the listing in a way that made a lot more sense, because you want to connect with your audience, you want to connect with the purchase, with the buyers, right, and so it did already a really good job in including those kind of like brand unique value propositions that you want people to know about you. For example, in that case we wanted to donate some of the revenue, the profit, to a charity, right, so we wanted to make sure that ChatGPT knew that, so that when we wrote the listing, there was also some sort of dimension to that. But ultimately, I think before this listing goes and gets published on Amazon, you want to review it and ensuring that it speaks your language and resonates with your audience. So it’s a combination of manual plus AI work, but it definitely minimizes the time spent on this task specifically.

Shivali Patel:

I would say perhaps you have to put in the time upfront to provide it with the context so that it’s not outputting something that’s really generic. You can have something very specific to what you’re outputting.

Leo:

Yeah, you want to be very specific at the beginning, because you can have these AI agents act as anything really. It can be an accountant, it can be a data researcher, it can be a doctor, it can be anything. So the more context in your prompt, the more details you give, the better the output will be right. So in that case, we not only give the keywords, we ask to act as this person expert in healing, because the actual tool sorry, the product we found was Healing Forks. Have you ever heard of them.

Shivali Patel:

I don’t think so.

Leo:

It’s a fork. They make a sound when you talk to them.

Shivali Patel:

Oh, the tuning fork.

Leo:

It’s a tuning fork.

Shivali Patel:

Yes.

Leo:

Yes, and so the whole story around that was to help people heal with sound waves and frequencies, and you cannot do that just by researching keywords. You need to know the space, and ChatGPT helped us discover the space in a few hours, understand exactly who was buying it, who was the potential buyer, where are we going? For chiropractors or for the general market, or could we find a product that serves a combination of both? And we couldn’t do that without AI, or it had to take us a few iterations, like launching, maybe, version one and then see what the market responds and maybe launch a variation later. Now, this time around, instead, with AI, we know exactly what sells or what could potentially be appealing, and so we created a product that has a much higher chance to succeed once we launch it.

Shivali Patel:

Let’s go back take the conversation back to Rufus for a second, because another thing that I remember, the second thing I wanted to ask you from before, which was a lot of folks are playing into Rufus and saying you need to future-proof your listings. Well, what about the traditional keyword strategies that have worked up until now? What’s your take on that?

Leo:

Yeah. So, first of all, I love Rufus and I love where Amazon is going and the direction they’re going with this. But I just want to say we don’t know yet Amazon has never officially told us what the utilization is today between the traditional search bar and Rufus. And there’s a lot of rumor there’s a lot of iPod there in our space, in our community, by people that have done a lot of research saying that Rufus works in a certain way, and what I would say is traditional search is probably driving still 80%, 90% of the conversions of the sales currently occurring on Amazon.com. That’s just what I believe, and so, yes, it’s important to focus on Rufus and the optimization, the way that we write the listings, because ultimately, rufus is acting as a shopping assistant, right, and people are asking questions. So instead of typing on the search bar winter coat, they’re typing in what’s the best winter coat for New York or to keep me warm in minus 30 degrees? And so the way you write your listing right now should be different. It’s intent-based, you’re answering questions right in your listing, versus just stuffing your title and bullet points with a bunch of keywords so that I would say get ready for it, start writing the listing so you can not only feed the engine what it needs. So add your keywords that you found with Helium 10, put them in your listing, but add it in a way so that they answer a potential question that someone is asking Rufus. That’s what I think the best utilization of it should be today, instead of just going Rufus 100% and then you’re missing out on a bunch of keywords that perhaps you cannot cover in a contextual way because not everybody understands semantics and all of that, right. So I think perhaps one of the tools that we could develop Amazon can make available is that right, Because Rufus is a Q&A kind of engine, like ChatGPT, perplexity, all of those, but sellers are not there yet.

Leo:

Because it’s a mental exercise, right? How can I say the same thing? Usually, what I do, I go to ChatGPT, I say this is my title, traditional title, and I say now rewrite it in a semantic way that doesn’t include the keywords. If I can read the title without the keywords and I still understand what type of product that is, then I got ChatGPT to do what I wanted to do, and so you know, sellers need to think this way in order to write listings that also now feed the right kind of like information to Rufus. And so ultimately it comes down to the back end, the attributes and all of that. But instead of saying winter coat, feather goose right, sorry, goose feathers you would rather say winter coat with goose feathers. This winter coat, stuffed or filled with goose feathers, will keep you warm during the coldest winter, or something like that. So if someone is asking Rufus, what’s the best winter coat for a cold winter, you probably should probably show up. Make sense?

Shivali Patel:

Yes, I think this plays very adjacent to the context conversation we were having before is give it really good context and it’ll do really well for you, especially because I don’t know if you know about this, but amazon lens live also launched for consumers. This is not the seller side of things, but you can take your phone and scan something and it’ll actually show a product, as well as the Q&A from Rufus for it, which again kind of plays back in for us as sellers, where the consumer experience is improving, which hopefully means more sales for us, but also the importance of actually making sure that, yes, you’re doing your traditional strategies for the ranking and the indexing, but you’re also keeping in the back of your mind that the semantics are there and that you’re providing a holistic view of everything.

Shivali Patel:

And what about ads? Do you have any AI applications for ads that you’ve heard of or that you’re utilizing?

Leo:

Yeah, so look for ads. We use your tool, we use Helium 10. We do a lot of manual still manual work when it comes to advertising, but I think you know now with AI, the real-time optimization is a lot more efficient, I would say, than before. Like, there is this. Obviously, I can understand in real time what’s happening.

Leo:

What I think a cool tool would be, you know, if I had to wish for something cool like in Seller Central would be like an AI powered, for example, recommendation engine that looks at your listing, your performance, your ads, and says, hey, do you know that if you increase this keyword by 20 cents, you can get this many more sales?

Leo:

Right now, that exercise is done kind of manually. You have to go in and increase the bid, but based on, for example, market factors such as your competitors are out of stock, ai knows that, hey, increase the bid because your competitor is out of stock. You can get capitalized on the sales right now. Right, so things like that I think could be really, really useful right now for sellers, and we have already the tools to being able to get or to maximize our sales and opportunity on the platform. So that’s, by the way, one thing that I think would be cool. But when it comes to ads itself, I think right now there are a lot of cool tools already that have implemented and adopted AI, especially when it comes to bidding optimization, but they don’t look at things like what I just mentioned. Only Amazon can do that right, or perhaps they can if they see that a product is out of stock, but there are specific use cases where I think having that coming straight from Amazon would be super useful.

Shivali Patel:

Yes, definitely directly from Amazon. I look forward to that happening in the future. I will say Helium 10 does offer AI advertising. So if any of you that are listening in are newbie sellers and you’re not entirely sure how to approach ads, that’s a really great place to go and start because you can choose your objective. You can choose whether you want a shared budget, fixed budget for individual product types, and then kind of go in and put in your keywords and negate whatever you feel is not relevant for you or hasn’t done well for you, and you know that. So that is a good starting place, for, of course, there’s plenty of suite of tools that are empowered by AI and Helium 10 is definitely one of them that I will represent. But yeah, I think, just to close it out, let’s kind of recap what we talked about and maybe, if you want to do a sign off of like two or three implementable things that somebody that’s listening in could do right now, if they already have their SKUs up and listed on Amazon.

Leo:

Yeah, look, the number one thing I will do, I think, is leveraging AI for the graphic aspect of your listing. So, anything that today you were doing it through Photoshop or graphic designers, try to leverage AI and do as many A-B tests, split test your images, split test your videos, split test your content, because that’s like even a 0.1 or a 1% increase in conversion rates can mean big numbers for some sellers, and so today you can do that before you could not, right, or at least you need a bigger budget. So I would say leverage AI for that. Number one, the listing itself. Using tools like yours, the Listing Builder, also play with the text in your listing. So the bullet points. There was one thing that I was thinking about with regards to AI use cases today, but it doesn’t matter, I don’t remember right now. I think the top two if someone does it today can dramatically increase their business.

Shivali Patel:

Split testing and listing.

Leo:

Yeah, yeah. Play with the images, the graphics, and then the content itself for sure.

Shivali Patel:

Yeah, what I would recommend I guess my two or three would be yes, I agree with you. Split testing is amazing, because even the smallest conversion change can do numbers for your business and that’s what you want which all kind of funnels back to what’s inside of your listing. So how well is your context? That’s actually in the listing, your ads as well, making sure that your ads are on point. You can do that with AI advertising, as I mentioned, instead of Helium 10. Plus, we have rules-based automation, which is really really cool, because you can go in and say, hey, I’ve gotten 30 clicks but zero sales, so can you make sure that this is we’re not spending any more money on that? So you can go in and automate all of this stuff, which is efficient right. 

Leo:

Oh, the third things.

Shivali Patel:

Well, is your third first or is my third first?

Leo:

Go after it, then I go.

Shivali Patel:

And my third thing is well, if you were already selling on Amazon, what’s really cool that Helium 10 can do is you can also automate your listings and convert them over to TikTok shop, which creates a halo effect to your Amazon listings. I have talked to so many sellers who are like oh yeah, I’m selling on Amazon and then they bulk convert their listings. Link the products. You don’t have to have product at TikTok shop, you can keep your product at all your inventory, excuse me at the Amazon warehouses. Link them, map it out, so that way you have a safety stock.

Shivali Patel:

Your Amazon momentum is always good. If you go viral I hope you guys go viral and then you have that halo effect because anybody that sees that product on TikTok shop there’s going to be a lot of them that also want prime shipping and so they come back and you find all that increased traffic and, of course, Amazon loves increased traffic and we love the additional sales. So I would also recommend that as my third is make sure you guys you’re gonna think about expanding out to marketplaces. Use the resources available to you, like keyword translations, like the Listing Builder and like the automated function for TikTok shop. Back to your third.

Leo:

Yeah, just to wrap it up, I just wanted to give away like a hack, let’s call it this way. Do use Rufus to do competitive analysis, because Rufus is a powerful data mine today, and so ask questions about your own product as well as your competitor’s product. See why Rufus is recommending your competitors instead of your product, and try to leverage that information to optimize your listing so that Rufus can index your listing better and then mention you instead. I think that’s a powerful one that a lot of people today are kind of under utilizing. The Rufus answers a lot of questions based on reviews, so see, what your customers think of you. That’s a good way. Before we used to use Zealand Zillion 10 or other tools to download the reviews, understand the feelings behind some reviews, negative sentiment behind the feedback there, but today we have Rufus that can do that for us. So that was my third one.

Shivali Patel:

Amazing. Well, with that, I think we’re going to close out. You guys should have gotten plenty of actionable tips to go and implement. Of course, you can listen to us talk all day long, but it really comes down to whether you’re applying it in your business, and so if I could recommend anything to you is make sure that the things that we talked about here you go and do at least one tonight. With that, thank you so much for tuning in.

Leo:

Thank you guys.

Carrie Miller:

Thank you so much, Leo and Shivali, for sharing so much incredible information. I loved hearing how AI is completely transforming Amazon selling, and your discussion about optimizing for intent with Rufus and using AI to test, translate and scale listings really showed how sellers can boost their sales and keep their brand successful on the Amazon platform. One of the things that you mentioned is using Helium 10 to instantly get your Amazon listings live on TikTok shop. So here’s Shivali again with a quick demo of how that works.

Shivali Patel:

How to convert your Amazon listings to TikTok shop in seconds. Why is this important and how can it make you money? Now, we’ve been talking about it for a while now. Tiktok shop offers a massive opportunity for Amazon sellers, especially in the USA. Some sellers are able to match their Amazon sales within a couple months, you guys, or even surpass them. That could be you next.

Shivali Patel:

But the big complaint in the early days of TikTok was I don’t know what makes a good TikTok listing. I don’t want to have to download all my Amazon images one by one, listing per listing, and upload them to TikTok, and I don’t know how to optimize my listing. Tiktok doesn’t even do bullet points, so what the heck do I do with my Amazon bullet points? Well, that is where the TikTok listing converter from Helium 10 comes in. What we do is we take all your Amazon listings and, in seconds, publish them to TikTok shop. That’s right. We completely got rid of a reason for you to complain. So here is how you can do that. Go inside of the tool this is for any diamond members and up, go to listing optimization and then listing converter.

Shivali Patel:

It’s going to show you all the listings that are in your Amazon account and after that hit the next step. Once your products show up, you just want to select as many as you want to actually convert over and then select bulk convert, and there you have it within 30 seconds or less, your listings are now up on TikTok. That doesn’t guarantee sales. There are other tools from Helium 10 to help you with that, but imagine all the time that we just saved together. It takes 30 seconds to do what would have taken 30 minutes or more in any other scenario, and we’re even using AI to optimize your listing for TikTok shop. We’re not just copying and pasting your Amazon title or bullet points, which TikTok does not even use. We’re using AI to optimize based on best practices for TikTok shop listings. So make sure you’ve got your Amazon listings converted and I’ll catch you on TikTok shop.

Carrie Miller:

Thank you so much for that, Shivali. Now what’s the next step that Leo and Shivali talked about for getting set up on TikTok shop? It’s actually tying your inventory to Amazon FBA via MCF so that your TikTok orders can be fulfilled with your FBA inventory. So Shivali is going to talk about how to do that in this clip.

Shivali Patel:

How do you connect your Amazon FBA products to your TikTok shop products so that Amazon can fulfill those orders? And, more importantly, why is this such a big deal and how can it actually make you money? Maybe you already have all of your TikTok listings live and ready to sell, but here’s the problem you don’t have your own warehouse. You don’t want to store boxes of inventory at your house, so how are you supposed to ship when orders come in? The answer, my friends, is Amazon MCF or multi-channel fulfillment. This is where Amazon takes care of shipping for your non-Amazon orders, whether they are coming from TikTok, from Walmart, from Shopify or anywhere else. Here is where it gets exciting.

Shivali Patel:

With Helium 10, you can set this up in seconds. All you need to do is map your Amazon SKU to your TikTok shop SKU. That way, as soon as that order hits TikTok, Amazon instantly receives that order and handles everything from picking, packing, shipping all the way to delivering. No more manually creating orders, checking tracking numbers or updating statuses. It’s all automated Inside of Helium 10’s inventory management. You will see your TikTok shop SKUs and just link each one to the correct Amazon SKU. Alternatively, you can click the dropdown in the right-hand side of your account dashboard and select connections. That is going to take you into that inventory management section where you can do the same exact thing. You can even set a safety stock buffer. So TikTok only pulls inventory down to a threshold that you are comfortable with. Plus, you can decide if you want Amazon to send orders standard, expedited or priority and the bottom line is you get to do it all selling on TikTok without ever touching your inventory yourself, while Amazon handles the fulfillment behind the scenes. It’s speed, automation, scalability all built into Helium 10.

Carrie Miller:

Okay, everyone. So there you have it lots of incredible tips from Shivali and Leo on AI advertising, TikTok shop and more, and I hope you guys can implement these to help boost your sales this Q4. Thanks for tuning in and see you on the next episode.

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