Helium 10 Buzz 4/11/24: Dietary Supplement Policy Updates | Amazon’s Focus On AI | New Freedom Ticket Course

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

Amazon updates its dietary supplements seller’s policy
https://www.nutraingredients-usa.com/Article/2024/04/05/Amazon-updates-its-dietary-supplements-seller-s-policy#

eBay Uses AI to Deliver Personalized Recommendations to Fashion Shoppers
https://www.pymnts.com/news/ecommerce/2024/ebay-uses-ai-to-deliver-personalized-recommendations-to-fashion-shoppers/

Magento bug exploited to steal payment data from ecommerce websites
https://www.techradar.com/pro/security/magento-bug-exploited-to-steal-payment-data-from-ecommerce-websites

Amazon invests $25 million in a 10-year research collaboration to advance AI
https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/innovation-at-amazon/amazon-invests-25-million-in-a-10-year-research-collaboration-to-advance-ai

Amazon announces over €700 million investment in robotics and AI powered technologies across Europe
https://www.aboutamazon.eu/news/innovation/amazon-announces-over-700-million-investment-in-robotics-and-ai-powered-technologies-across-europe

Exclusive: The FTC is probing Amazon’s new controversial fees in its $140 billion seller business
https://fortune.com/2024/03/08/ftc-amazon-seller-fees-inbound-placement-low-inventory-antitrust/

We’re proud to announce the launch of the new and improved Freedom Ticket course! Our award-winning, best-in-class FBA course has been streamlined and updated, so it delivers even more value in less time—setting up Freedom Ticket students just like you for sustainable Amazon success in 2024 and beyond.
https://www.helium10.com/blog/freedom-ticket-fba-course/

And, for an added edge in the e-commerce arena, Carrie Miller shows us a savvy strategy for leveraging Helium 10’s Cerebro for your Walmart listings, serving up another round of invaluable tips and tricks for selling on Walmart.com.

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

• 00:46 – Supplement Policy Update
• 02:05 – Ebay Utilizes AI
• 02:57 – Magento Payment Vulnerability
• 03:36 – Amazon Invests in AI
• 06:35 – FTC Probing about New Fees
• 07:15 – New Freedom Ticket Course
• 09:35 – Pro Training Tip: Cerebro for Walmart

Transcript

Carrie Miller:

Amazon updates its dietary supplement sellers policy. Amazon and eBay invest heavily in AI for their e-commerce platforms, and what does the FTC have to say about all of the new fees for storage that Amazon has imposed? This and so much more on this week’s episode of the Weekly Buzz.

Bradley Sutton:

How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think

Carrie Miller:

Welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers podcast hosted by Helium 10. My name is Carrie and this is our weekly buzz episode, where we give you all of the latest Amazon, Walmart and e-commerce news. We also give you a serious strategy for serious sellers at any level. So let’s go ahead and see what’s buzzing. Okay, so let’s go ahead and get into our first article, and this first article is about how Amazon is updating their dietary supplement sellers policy. Now, this is kind of a long time coming. This has been in the works for a few years, and so basically, what’s happening is, instead of the seller being able to send in their third party testing and certificates and just submit them through Seller Central, now the analysis has to be done and sent straight from a lab to Amazon. So it’s actually a more direct approach. They want to make sure they can really verify that these supplements have been third-party tested, and that goes for all the compliance that they have. So what it says is that if you want to ensure that your listings are compliant with the policy, that you just need to go to manage your compliance dashboard and initiate the test for each of these products. This actually came about because there was a private lab that was actually testing the quality. So the quality some of the dietary supplements on Amazon was requested question repeatedly over the past several years and they found that maybe some of the supplements didn’t have exactly what they said in them. So this is probably a really good thing for consumers and, you know it’ll help the sellers to really be able to verify that their products are really legit and what they say. They are so curious to know what you think. If you are a nutritional supplement seller, what do you think about this new qualification that you have to or compliance thing that you have to do?

Carrie Miller:

Okay, next article is about eBay, and eBay is actually using AI to deliver personalized recommendations to fashion shoppers. Now, this, I think, is really cool because a lot of stuff on eBay is used and so when somebody looks at some sort of a style, they actually are going to recommend similar style products. It’s going to be based on the previous 10 clicks, so sometimes this could be good and sometimes not, because maybe somebody clicked on something they like. I don’t like that, but it could get quite a few more sales and more exposure for sellers because it’ll start recommending these similar styled clothing items to buyers. So I think this could be a really cool thing. They’re starting with fashion and then they’re going to move out to other categories, and this could be a really good thing for especially eBay sellers when you’re selling used items, to help people to find your items much faster.

Carrie Miller:

And the next article is about Magento. Magento has had a bug that really exploited the payment area, so it basically left vulnerable to bad actors to be able to steal payment information data on your Magento site. There are 150,000 Magento sites. There are over 150,000 Magento sites out there site. There is a fix for this, and so you can basically download the fix or upload the fix. However, it works usually with a developer and you can make sure to secure your website so that you do not have somebody that can go in and steal your payment information.

Carrie Miller:

And next, this is a really interesting piece of news, and that is Amazon is investing $25 million in a 10-year research collaboration to advance AI. So they’re doing this with the University of Washington and the University of Tuscuba I don’t know how to say it and NVIDIA, and they’re all focused on AI. So I think this gives sellers a really good opportunity to really focus on AI in the next few years, because this is the direction that Amazon is going. So the more that we can stay on top of it, the better that we can sell our products and get what you know get the products that we want to get into the customer hands. Um, so it’s going to be, I think, a lot of innovation over the next few years. In addition to that, they have invested $700 million in robotics and AI-powered technologies in Europe. Some of the things I think these are really cool to look at how the Amazon warehouse does things, but they’re actually. They have this innovation lab that’s in Italy, and this is where scientists go all over the world where they’re investing in these technologies, and this is where scientists go all over the world where they’re investing in these technologies, and some of the technologies that have come out of here are really quite interesting and I want to scroll down and show you.

Carrie Miller:

So we’ve got the universal robotic labeler. So it’s a high-speed auto-labeling technology so this is kind of how it looks and they can basically quickly label all those packages. And then there’s a universal item sorter and they can basically quickly label all those packages and then there’s a universal item sorter so they can use these machines to sort all the items and make sure they’re sorted efficiently to deliver them to the locations every day, and they’re usually sorted into where their similar locations or destinations are. There’s an automated tote retrieval, which I think is really kind of an interesting thing. They basically have these totes where they put all the products in to be packaged so really interesting. They have a bag containerization all kinds of really cool stuff. An automated guided cart that goes through the Amazon fulfillment centers and a flat sorter robotic induct so if anything falls off or they basically can pick things up and put it back on where it needs to be. And a palletizer it’s a robotic palletizer. Really interesting stuff here Automated packaging, so basically they wouldn’t even need people, which is crazy.

Carrie Miller:

And then Amazon robotics floor so really interesting stuff that is coming out of Amazon and so I think the more they already are using robotics and a lot of these technologies in their Amazon warehouses. So the more time that goes on as they continue to research, I think there’s gonna be more of this involved. Obviously, people are going to need to be there to operate in these types of machineries, but probably less people involved. But it’s also going to be important, you know, just because there’s also a lot of investment going into AI for the actual platform itself. So we really need to stay on top of AI, make sure that our listings are going to be something that the AI can read and deliver to customers, so definitely something to keep on your list to stay up to date on that information.

Carrie Miller:

The next article is from fortunecom, basically, and they have a whole article about the FTC and how it’s basically probing and questioning Amazon’s controversial fees, and this came after a lot of outrage from sellers over the fees. So they have been looking into this because of know just so much has been going on. There’s been a lot of noise about this, so we’ll have to wait and see what the FTC thinks about this, what they’re going to do about it and if it’s something that they can do something about. So we’ll stay tuned on that, all right. So that is all for the news that we have this week.

Carrie Miller:

Okay, so let’s go ahead and get into the Helium 10 feature updates. Now, this is one of my favorite updates that we have, and that is we have Freedom Ticket 4.0. This is perfect for beginners as well as advanced. There’s something for everyone here. Kevin King is leading this Freedom Ticket 4.0. And so you’ve got a lot of great information from Kevin King on how to get started with your business. We also have a bunch of expert guests that are really giving you some really great information. So if you are advanced, you’re going to have that. If you’re a beginner, we have stuff about product research, how to find your product, how to calculate profitability correctly, how to know when to pay yourself insurance all that great stuff so that you are fully prepared for your business. But for any of those who are more advanced, you’ve got also some great modules like, for example, the power of AI for Amazon sellers. That’s done by Steve Simonson.

Carrie Miller:

There’s some stuff about exiting your business. We have Scott Dietz from the Northbound Group, and he talks about beginning with the end in mind, because your exit is going to be where you make most of your money from your business. Then we also have some listing, content, optimization things, how to help your customers find your products, and, if you go down even further, we had Destaney Wishon, who talked about pay-per-click advertising, did a great job in explaining pay-per-click advertising and how to utilize PPC on Amazon. We have some great information about supply chain logistics how to source and ship your products and so we have some expert guests on that. And we also have some great information from eCommerce Chris on compliance, which is really, really important to make sure that you don’t get banned from Amazon as a seller, that you stay in good compliance with their policies.

Carrie Miller:

And I think one of my favorite modules on here was finding and hiring VAs and managers for your business. Josh Hadley led that one and really did a very good job, step by step, of showing how to hire the best talent for your business. So if you’re advanced or if you’re a beginner, this is perfect for you, and if you have employees, you can have them take this course If you want them to be better versed in the Amazon world, help them to understand, get a really good education on how Amazon works. This is perfect. You can have them go through the course and they’re going to learn so much, but it is for everyone. I learned so much even just listening to some of these experts that talked about all these different topics. So just listening to some of these experts that talked about all these different topics. So definitely check it out, you are going to love it.

Carrie Miller:

Okay, so now I’m going to go ahead and get into the training tip of the week, which is Cerebro for Walmart. A lot of people don’t even know that we have Cerebro for Walmart, but it is an incredible tool to optimize your Walmart business by helping with your listing optimization and your pay-per-click advertising. So I’m going to go ahead and share my screen and show you how this works. So what you’re going to do is you’re going to go to Cerebro and you need to make sure to choose Walmart, which is way at the bottom. So usually it’s at amazoncom, but you want to scroll all the way down here to walmartcom and you want to choose the walmartcom market. Okay, the next thing you want to do is you want to go to walmartcom. Now I have just chosen garlic presses here and we do.

Carrie Miller:

Just another note we do have x ray for Walmart here, but I like to pull x ray because I like to use this to find the product IDs, and this is basically where this is like an ASIN on Amazon, but they have product IDs. Another way you can find it is by just going to the actual listing, and you can you can scroll over to the very right, the very far end of it, and it’s at the very end. It’s this number, right here is the product ID number. So what you’re going to do is you’re going to basically copy that product ID, so I can just copy it right here and I’m going to put it into Cerebro. Now you can do more than one product ID at one time, but I’m just going to do this one, and this is going to pull up all the keywords for this particular product ID.

Carrie Miller:

That shows you all of the keywords that they are ranking for organically and sponsored, so you can see down here all of their keywords. You can see the search volume on Walmart and you can see it on Amazon. Now, I wouldn’t be dismayed about the low search volume. You still are going to make sales Even if there’s a low, low search volume. I’ve made some good sales on those keywords for my own business.

Carrie Miller:

But something that I love to do too is I like to sort by the sponsored rank. So I like to see exactly where my competitors are advertising. So this is going to show pretty much their exact strategy, because they don’t have as many. A lot of people are using exact keywords, exact matches, so this is going to show you exactly where they are advertising. It’s going to give you a huge list of really good keywords that you can utilize in your listing. And another thing you can do is you can just sort by organic rank. You can clear these filters. I had them on, I think, a little bit earlier, but see, there’s actually even more keywords here that they’re advertising on, and so we can see that there’s a lot of really good keywords that are going to be very, very relevant. By just sorting the sponsored rank, you can see the organic rank. I sometimes like to filter by organic rank to see where they’re ranked, maybe one to 10. You can also sort by volume.

Carrie Miller:

On Walmart or on Amazon, you can sort by phrases containing. So maybe you wanted to just see. You know, press all the phrases containing, press and, basically you know, pull up a bunch of very relevant key terms, and so this is an incredible tool to help you to find those keywords for Walmart, and it’s definitely helped me. I’ve done a great job with these keywords on my pay-per-click advertising. The exact matches have done really well. So if you take the time to do this research, maybe take the top 10 to 20 keywords that you want to focus on on Walmart I think it’s a really good strategy.

Carrie Miller:

Really write them into your listing. Make sure that you have these keywords in your title the main one that you want to focus on, at least in your title. Don’t keyword stuff, because they will actually penalize you on Walmart for that. Have your main keyword phrase in there and then write these keyword phrases throughout your listing to optimize it and also start your pay-per-click advertising with these exact match terms and I think you will be pleasantly surprised at the results that you see. That is all that we have this week for the Weekly Buzz. Thank you so much for tuning in and we hope that you check out our Freedom Ticket again. It’s in your learning hub, so check that out, let us know what you think and we will see you again next week to see what’s buzzing. Bye, everyone.

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Want to absolutely start crushing it on Amazon? Here are few carefully curated resources to get you started: 

• Freedom Ticket: Taught by Amazon thought leader Kevin King, get A-Z Amazon strategies and techniques for establishing and solidifying your business. 
• Helium 10: 30+ software tools to boost your entire sales pipeline from product research to customer communication and Amazon refund automation. Make running a successful Amazon or Walmart business easier with better data and insights. See what our customers have to say.
• Helium 10 Chrome Extension: Verify your Amazon product idea and validate how lucrative it can be with over a dozen data metrics and profitability estimation. 
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