#562 - New Amazon Releases For Launch and Brand Stores

A brand new AI helper for your sponsored brand stores that 99% of you probably didn't even know was in your account. All of the latest updates dropped at Amazon Accelerate for tools like Product Opportunity Explorer and more. Hello everybody and welcome to the AMM podcast. My [music] name is Bradley Sutton and I'll be your host and this is the show where we discuss all things Amazon, Tik Tok Shop, and Walmart private label and how to generate recurring revenue streams 24 hours a day during the A.M. AM and the PM. Hence the name of the show. Get it? AM PM podcast. [music] And as a matter of fact, when I was in Seattle at Amazon Accelerate, I went to this restaurant Ludies waiting [music] for ube pancakes. And even though I waited in line for an hour, I was still making money online. How [music] cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. All right, guys. So at Amazon Accelerate uh we have an interview with uh one of the head Amazonians who is helping bringing new tools like product opportunity explorer and and other aspects that help uh new sellers launch. He's going to talk about different programs uh available and a lot of cool new features that were uh talked about at Amazon Accelerate. I sat down in the Amazon ads content studio to talk about something that's pretty new and it's about your brand stores. All right, this is important for Amazon advertising, but a lot of people don't realize you can actually have different brand stores show up or versions of your brand stores show up depending on the cohort. Uh we invited Angie on to this uh uh interview and Angie's been on the Serious Sellers podcast before talking about her brand. We're going to go a little bit uh more in-depth on what she's doing with advertising, but also especially uh about this brand store feature. So, it's going to be a great twoin-one episode. Hope you guys enjoy. All right. So, we've got a familiar face to the podcast, but we were just uh talking offline here. It's been maybe two or three years since you were on before to talk about Amazon Vine. So, we have a lot of new listeners who might not have seen that episode. So, can you give a little background on yourself to introduce yourself to our audience? >> Yeah, absolutely. Nice to see you again, Bradley. officially. I've been at Amazon for a little over 10 years at this point and I've got the opportunity to work across bunch of different spaces all the way from customer trust and safety to improving customer shopping experience, marketplace growth and seller success. So yeah, really had a great time. More recently, I have been leading in the new product success space. Our team is basically focused on developing sophisticated AI and ML powered tools that help sellers identify, launch and scale new products. Before Amazon, I have been an entrepreneur. I've shared this story with you before where we built a cloud-based solution that helped tier 2, tier three colleges and students in India to get jobs. Uh did that and then came to us to do my MBA at Michigan and Amber and since then I've been at Amazon. >> Uh Wolverine, right? Yes. All right. So you mentioned the department you're in now, new product success I think it's called. So what what that might be new to some of our audience. They might not have heard of that department. Can you talk a little bit more about uh what your team does? >> Yeah, sure. So our mission really with new product success is to make Amazon the best place on earth for all entrepreneurs to bring their new products to life. Think about what does it take to launch a new product. I'm sure you already know this, but for our listeners, it's a lot of decision fatigue. You have to think about what to make, what to source, what about the inventory, how much inventory, find the right customers, get the signals and then learn bases those signals and make a decision whether you want to scale up or move back. That is a lot and a lot of times sellers do tell us that either this is too costly, takes too long or they fail too often. So we're really here to change that. We take everything that Amazon has, which is billions of customer signals, which is the first party demand signals, the fulfillment channel infrastructure we have, and connect it all into one connected system for launch moment. And we help you figure out what to build before you spend a single dollar. Once you get it live, the the work that it takes to get it live, we help you do that with burning as little cash as possible. And then once you launch, get the real customer signal super fast. So yeah, you can focus as a seller on launching good products that customers love where we take care of mechanics. That's how we think about it. >> Yeah, for sure. Amazon has always given uh so much uh excellent data to the brands and I think we uh you guys maybe didn't know who to thank for it. It's it's uh Ami's department here that's done a lot of that. So you mentioned product launch, right? This is something that a brand new seller has to do. This is something somebody who's been selling for 5 years, they don't want to sell the same products. They have to keep launching new products. What are some things that uh you know sellers maybe forget about when they're thinking about this launch process? >> I think it's a great question. I'd say two things. One is the product market fit which is pre-launch and then the other is making the most of your early traction or what you call as honeymoon period which is post launch. I know what it feels like to believe in your product because I have been an entrepreneur myself. But belief is not data. Today sellers start with a hypothesis. They do quick research. They feel confident and then they commit thousands of dollars in inventory. When it doesn't sell, they blame either the competition or the algorithm. But the truth is a lot of times the product was just wrong and it didn't even have the right product market fit to begin with. Another thing that we've seen that catches people off guard is they think launch day is finish line. But launch day is definitely not. If anything, it's the starting gun. They put all of their energy in sourcing, listing, inventory and then wait and they sit back. But here is the reality. New product is actually invisible. No systems can detect without any of the early signals such as sales data, reviews data, customer engagement data. System really doesn't know what to do with it. So the sellers who truly break through this period are the ones who treat the 90-day period as a sprint and they are actively driving traffic, getting reviews, building momentum, not waiting to get the organic discovery and conversion to kick in. So I would say those would be my top two areas where I've consistently seen sellers underestimate. >> Yeah, a lot lot a lot of things you mentioned resonate. You know, like one of my specialties is is about the product launch phase and you talk about that early window. I know there's not necessarily an official term like the industry has made this term like the honeymoon period or whatever you want to whatever you guys want to call that first part is very important and then yeah you know data is so important you know for making the decisions you know maybe 15 years ago >> Amazon did not give the kind of data points that it does today there was no such thing as helium 10 and so yeah maybe you need to use your gut and and and a lot of times because there was it was just a blue ocean out there it was so easy to to make money a lot of people had success that way but but nowadays guys you've got so much data don't be just trusting your gut or just going, "Oh, I'm passionate about this. I'm guaranteed to have success." If the data doesn't say that this is going to be a good product market fit and that there's sufficient demand and maybe signs of opportunity, it might be something that you don't want to waste your money on. >> Absolutely. That's spot on. >> Now, you mentioned product market fit. So, let's dive a little bit into that. what does your team have that uh is available for uh brands who are launching new products and especially interested in the stuff that has uh maybe new since the last time you were on the show or since last year's accelerate. >> Yeah, absolutely. So in this space the question that we really obsessed over was what if you could know what will work before you spend a single dollar on inventory or any kind of manufacturing. know the real demand, know what kind of price point will work, and know what features will really resonate with customers. And that's why we've built product opportunity explorer, which I know you know very well, one of my favorite tools. >> You've been a big uh proponent of it. More recently, we've been working on the customization and precision of the insights that we are providing through the product opportunity explorer. So, first thing now we we're no longer just showing broad category trends. What we're doing is now we have used a lot of sophisticated ML based insights to surface opportunities for unmet demand. That means demand that customers are still actively looking for and have not yet found great options. And we give these opportunities to you with a benchmark price feature set as well as images where possible. And all of this is tailored to your profile. What's more exciting is to make it more fun for you. We're also attaching lot more incentives associated with it. >> Awesome. Yeah. Before you there still was a way to kind of like get what the opportunity might be with product opportunity explorer. I remember you I've given this example before as I remember I told you I sell these coffin shelves, right? And then one time I was looking in product opportunity explorer in my niche and these spooky keywords and and I could see in product opportunity explorer um the conversion rate for a keyword and for most of my keywords in my niche it was it was like five 6 7%. And then I saw one keyword was coffin bookshelf it was like 0.3%. And so you know what that basically means is hey a 100 people search this word coffin bookshelf not even one person buys it. like less than half of one person. I'm not sure how half of a person can buy something, but again, that means like it would have to be 200 or more people to search for just to get one. And then when I searched on Amazon, I could see why. Well, it's because there was nobody selling coffin bookshelves. So, people were not seeing what they were searching for. And so, it sounds like this new feature kind of like takes away that whole process of me having to make the calculations and then look on Amazon. You're doing a lot of that lab work. So, that's pretty cool. Yeah, we're using some of those insights and and a lot of other things, but that's exactly what we're trying to do, which is like help sellers understand what customers are looking for and still not be able to find. Another thing, Bradley, that we've added is let's say for example, you say, I don't want to look at the opportunities you're telling me. I know what I want to launch and I want to go ahead with that. We thought about how can we help you in this space. And what we did is we've added something really new that's going to change the game completely. All you have to do is plug in a concept that you have in mind with the title and bullet points and features and price point and then you just enter it and we are now going to show you an completely AI generated competitive assessment that tells you in real time how your product is going to do across different dimensions especially versus features that customers care for as well as competitors that are the top competitors in this space. So that's something we're excited about. This is if you think about it a completely fundamentally different starting point because launching with Amazon's customer data is basically showing you where the gap is and now it also tell you how to close the gap. >> Yeah, I remember when that first came out I don't know how how many weeks ago or a month ago or so um I was playing around with it and what's interesting about it is that uh I get access to these data points that I think is kind of hard to get or maybe impossible to get elsewhere. If I'm already selling in a niche, I could, you know, search create performance and different aspects even opportunities for I can see what my own niche is doing. Uh, but until you start selling there, you don't get that data. But I can just enter a concept and then I'm getting like, you know, category level data and and kind of like benchmark data. So that's really cool. What is that called? Like what do you click on in order to get into that section? >> It's called validate your product ideas. I can tell you a little bit more about that. >> Please. So this is the feature is called validate your product idea and it's a part of opportunity explorer. Basically um what we want to do is enable sellers to be able to quickly pressure test their ideas before they manufacture. So as we were talking before a lot of times sellers start with a hypothesis and then they go and spend thousands of dollars in inventory and they get something live then they wait for months to collect the customer signals and then they decide whether I want to double down or not. That is an expensive way to learn both in terms of time and money and that's what this feature tries to bridge the gap with and we obviously we are still in early days but it is an exciting feature. All you need to do is as you said put in a concept with basics such as working title, target price, a few features and once you submit you get a full competitive assessment, a feature level customer insights as well as optimized recommendations and the three sections that we have in it are first is market segment level analysis which includes things like brand share, click trends, demographics data so you understand a little bit more about the market segment. Then comes comparison to top competitors in this space where we pick similar products that are doing exceptionally well in this very space and we show you across features and dimensions. How does your product compare against those top competitors? Are you at par? Are you doing better than them or are you not going to do better than them? So we show you that and then finally we show you something that is based on customer needs where you basically can see customer loves and complaints and then you again see across the top customer love and complaint facets. How does your product specifically do and what you need to work on. So yeah, what's really cool about it is it's fully iterative. You can keep tweaking the price or the feature until you really feel comfortable about what you're going ahead and launching with. And then that that's really cool. And the other piece that is cool about it is completely free of cost and super fast. So you save the loop that used to take thousands of dollars and a lot of months can now be like expedited as well as you can get first party data from Amazon and it it's free of cost. >> Okay. So let's say I go through the process uh maybe I find some idea in Helium 10 or even in product opportunity explorer. I take it through this new validate an idea. I'm like hey I'm feeling good about this. What's the next step? Yeah. So the question after you launch really becomes how do I get this moving right? So that's where we've learned there are a couple of different categories of actions. One is what we call the foundations and then the next is accelerance. When it comes to foundations we think of things that are absolutely critical and table stakes to get right. This includes largely things such as listing quality through which you will be able to show your value proposition very clearly. It includes speed competitiveness and uh fast delivery because that's what customers care about and then price competitiveness. Uh again something that customers care about. We've seen that when you get these right your other levers don't have to work extremely hard. So that's your foundations and then comes the accelerance and then for accelerance we have a plethora of options that we help sellers provide. It includes wine A+ ads brand referral bonus so on and so forth. So over here, what we've seen is it's not one sizefits-all. If you have a $9 phone case, for example, you don't need to get 50 reviews and A+ content before you start doing your ads. But say, for example, you have a $200 espresso machine, getting conversion ready and having those first reviews and write A+ content becomes so much more valuable and important. So it really depends. In certain cases, also getting ads from day one is the right thing to do. So the point is it's not really a fixed order and knowing what to prioritize in what you said the honeymoon period is critical. The gap today that we've seen is sellers are just doing guessing because sellers find it it's not because it's hard because they don't know what is really the right thing to do for their specific product and it it is different for different products like we just discussed. So as of today in accelerate we've announced an exciting feature. It's an AI powered playbook that we are launching. So, as soon as you complete your listing, we'll create a new personalized playbook for you tailored to your specific product based on the insights from top uh sellers uh and top products in the category and we'll tell you what actions to take and which sequence the actions to take and then for each of the actions also like what's the best way to do the configuration and why and then moving forward we'll also be adding more agentic capabilities to it. So what we really want to do over here is get the most for the seller in the early crucial honeymoon period as we were talking about. >> Awesome. Uh you didn't know this maybe but actually before I was selling coffee shells the first company I work for the uh the in maybe 2013 2014 it was $9 phone cases was was what we were doing. Yes. >> Oh wow. Nice. It's awesome. >> Launch is not cheap and it should be you've got to be ready uh you know to to invest in your business. All right. So costs are obviously something top of mind because because of this. What is Amazon doing with this in mind to to help uh sellers plan? >> Yeah, absolutely. So launch costs are real. If you think about it, it's all the way from the inventory cost to marketing to storage and it goes on and all of this before you even make a single dollar. So we recommend taking advantage of new selection program which is built especially to give you discounts and incentives that take away the financial burden for you in the early launch window. In fact, we recently just announced a lot more discounts within the new selection program. If you enroll your product and it's a branded product into FBA, then you can unlock a bundle of savings in the first up to 120 days. very specifically. Say for example, when it comes to referral fees, we give you 10% off for your first 100 units and then 5% off for the next 100 units where applicable. We also give you up to 200 units off with no inventory utilization search charge or low in stock fees. Further for marketing, we help you with wine credits as well as we give you coupon credits to be able to drive early conversion. And then to reduce your risk, we help you with returns processes processing and make it completely free as well as your liquidation for up to 200 units is also completely free. So you know our philosophy really is we don't want cost to be the reason why seller is not taking the right actions they need to take to do the best launch readiness. At the same time if for some reason things don't work out, we don't want them to suffer from trying and experimenting new ideas. And what we've seen is sellers who take advantage of these benefits together actually have a much better start at early sales. So that's why I would highly recommend for sellers to avail the FBA new selection program incentives. >> So this is not something that's automatically enrolled in. It's something that as I launch a new product, I need to uh go enroll in in seller central. >> That's right. Yeah, you need to enroll it in seller central in the post-launch acceleration experience that I was talking about which is the new AI powered playbook that we will be launching. We will show we'll be directly showing it to you if you have an eligible product those incentives and you can directly enroll from them. But in future we're trying to see if we can autoenroll you as well. >> And then you know like for example with Vine um for Vine like we talked about before I can enroll as many of my new products as I want as long as they're eligible. Is there a limit as far as the new selection program for my new launches where I can only do a certain number a month or or all of my new launches I can enroll in this form? >> As long as it's a new F FBA, it's a new branded product that's enrolled in FBA, you can enroll. >> All right. So, last question is, you know, you've been talking about what's new in the last few months. We always, you know, us Amazon brands, we want to know what is coming in the horizon. What what can we look forward to that your team is going to be doing to to make things even better and easier for us? Yeah, absolutely. I can tell you the long-term direction we are headed towards and I'm super excited. Accelerate announcements that you heard today and yesterday as well as what we talked about here is really scratching the surface and is the foundation. The vision is much bigger over here. We are moving towards a single agent conversational experience that is almost like your own personal launch team which is powered completely by AI. No more toggling between multiple tools and stitching it all together yourself. And think about it as like if you're a seller and you come and say I want to launch a vegan lip which is at some point I'm going to launch that product because I've been having that in my mind. The system calculates directly the demand cost customer wants suggests you the right specs and the price points. It can also test your concept with the competitors and it can autocreate your listings with enhanced content. You can build your launch plan, enroll you into the right programs, get your reviews rolling, and then keep optimizing as needed. All of this with as limited hands-on guidance from the sellers as needed so that the seller can truly focus on the building of right product. That's the vision we want to go towards. And what why we want to do this is because we want to make sure every seller gets what most sophisticated brands used to have before in terms of intelligence and capabilities. And nowadays with AI that's becoming a lot more possible. So that's where we want to go and it's super exciting. >> I love that. You know when I was in the general session on the first day they were talking about you know future integrations with uh like MCP to claude and and different things like that and and our Helium 10 audience knows that you know we have a Helium 10 to Claude. So you've got data uh that you can import to claude from Helium 10. You're going to have data from Amazon and all the different departments in one place. These are things you used to have maybe eight steps you had to do and then maybe they were downloading Excel files. You got to use pivot tables and bring things together and then look, you know, download all these reports. Now you're just going to be able to have like a a conversation, a genta conversation here and be able to tie this all together. Very exciting future we have to look forward to. So thank you so much. >> That and then eventually maybe we just do the work on their behalf. That would be cool. >> That would be nice. Yes. Yes. Um awesome. more. Well, Ammy, thank you again for all that you and your team does, you know, from Amazon Vine to Product Opportunity Explorer. Seems like uh you have the the mightest touch there at Amazon. You touch the the cool things that help a a seller. So, we appreciate that and we look forward to what's coming. >> Thank you. I've just been privileged. Thank you. >> All right, let's go with the interview with Angie. All right, we are back here Amazon Accelerate. We are in the ads content studio. It's actually funny like there's um there's like these little pins that they're giving everybody and there's one at our booth and I swore it was a Star Trek logo and I was like why are there Star Trek logo but then I came here it's like a fireside logo. I was like oh it's a okay there's like actual meanings behind that they're not all Treky fans but we're not here to talk uh Star Trek we're here to talk about ads and so first you know uh for listeners to the podcast this might be the first time they're um meeting you. So can you tell uh talk a little bit about the brand you work for and the history of it? Yeah. So, I'm with Stardust Spill Products and Stardust Spill Products has been around for over 30 years in the industrial space. Um, we make spill kits and uh spill containment products, cleaner degreasers. Um, but we started our e-commerce journey on Amazon a few years ago and it was one of the best decisions uh that we've made. >> And so, what do you do there? >> I basically run Amazon, >> including the advertising, everything a toz. >> Yeah, we initially had an agency do our our ads. Um, but with this year, the beginning of this year with the help of Helium 10, we took we took that on in-house. >> Now, you've been on a podcast before, but um, we didn't talk about what we're about to talk about now. And and because I didn't want to spoil it, what what's happening in Unbox next week is you have a session with me where we're really going into the sponsored brand store, something you probably never even touched much uh, when you first started working there. And so I wanted to talk a little bit about some aspects of that because it's something that I I would say 95 or 98% of Amazon sellers don't even realize is in their console. Before I showed it to you, you didn't even know it it was there, right? >> I mean, I created a brand store because of a Helium 10 podcast a while ago, but that was the >> shameless. [laughter] >> That was the extent of it. >> But but that this the whole AI thing and the analytics you had never even seen. No idea. Okay. So talk about the first aspect of that. I I think the analytics is is interesting because were you doing anything before as far as looking at the numbers of your brand store? Like after you created it, would you go in and kind of look or >> No, I had not looked at any of the metrics for the brand store. >> Yeah. Now that's always been there's always been some kind of metrics like hey I could see how many visits or something. But the new thing talk a little bit about uh your impressions the first time you saw that new interface that Amazon showed you is available now. >> Yeah. So because of type of business that we are, we target B2B, right? We want to sell to businesses. And so now with the AI and customizing our brand store, um, we can really change the face of our store so that when a business customer comes onto our page, they are seeing what we want them to see. Not they're not a new customer. They don't need a single pack, but we can target them with our six-packs or 12-packs, things that are specifically interested interesting to them. And then we had also like an introduction video to our company. Something a business wouldn't need but maybe like a BTOC customer, a new customer might be interested in. >> Yeah, that's really important because one aspect of what we're going to talk about in this session is the reasons you don't want to have a one-sizefitsall store experience. You know, there's somebody who might be coming to your brand for the first time. And you know what? They might need that video to see what even like what even is a spill kit or or how does this even work or what's the maybe mission statement from the from the founder? Like what kind of company? Like a lot of your customers are people who might give you thousands of dollars over time and it's like, hey, I need to know what this company's about. But then you've got somebody who is a like on the cusp of purchasing. Might be a little bit different uh like journey you want them to be on. And if this is your longtime customer, they don't need to see the mission. They like they know you guys, you know, like they might you might want to show them here's our new products or here's some new bundles you haven't seen. You want and before you didn't we didn't have that option to like you know there's one brand store and it fits everybody. So if you guys are out there and you're like wait a minute I didn't know about all this. Well don't worry this is not something that has been there for years and you've been missing. It's something very recent that Amazon has released. And so um the analytics too, the AI analytics about what your brand store now is doing. Uh what kind of insights did you get from that and and why was that interesting to you? >> Yeah, it was interesting to see where the traffic's coming from. I realized that we actually didn't have any um sponsored brand ads going to our uh storefront page. And >> where are they going to? >> Um sponsored products and the sponsored products page, but not directly to the store. So, we were able to start those campaigns and then also with the AI chat box like running reports really quickly and getting that information within seconds. >> Mhm. >> Yeah. So, guys, go into your sponsor brand store. You're going to see this whole new interface where you can first of all see the analytics of what is happening now. Uh, and then also go in there and you can start customizing the the cohorts. Now, somebody might be thinking, "Wait a minute. It took me hours and hours just to make my regular store. I don't know how long it took you, but then what? Now I got to make a completely different store for all these different cohorts. That's going to take me even longer. I ain't nobody got time for that, right?" But that's not the case. So, so what what did you what did you learn from the sponsored brand team about what's available now? >> Yeah. With the AI, you can just um get the customized suggestions. Yeah. suggestions on what to do and um it's just a click of a button and it can change the page for you. >> Love it. Love it. Yeah, the AI is amazing. Now, for your images in there, were these the ones that you made in the original store, was this all just stuff that your own graphic designer or you yourself had done? >> Yes. >> Have you ever used any of the AI image generation that lives inside of uh Amazon advertising? >> We have. Yeah, some of our ads incorporate that. That's that's another way that that that somebody could could kind of streamline uh time a little bit. Now, let let's talk about you talked briefly about, hey, you weren't sending traffic to your store. I think one no-brainer way uh that that she mentioned was, hey, run some sponsored brand video ads, sponsored brand uh headline ads, then instead of going to a product page or a product collection, go directly to the store. But the question is, how do I find what to target? So what kind of uh ways have you been using in order to find your initial targets for these campaigns? Like are are you targeting keywords and then how do you get these keywords? >> Yeah. Um we're targeting keywords. We're using Helium 10, you know, to find those keywords and see historically what keywords have worked um and what keywords are not working as well as um finding what what our competitors are doing with those keywords as well. >> Yeah. the other brands out there. Um there's always I I I've without fail I think I I have a screenshot in in in the presentation we're do with you where um even though you're like pretty much number one in the space it doesn't mean that you're doing every single keyword that everybody else is doing. Even though the ones who are selling less, maybe even ones who are selling a quarter of what you're selling, it's almost guaranteed that outside of branded keywords, they're they're selling for some off-the-wall keyword that you might have never thought was irrelevant. And so it's really important to do uh that lookup. Now for a lot of the people out there, you know, like some of my products that that start getting more popular doing uh Halloween or or um I sell a lot of like straws and things too. And so some of them have different themes on it. Like I have some straws that are football related and so like a few weeks ago when everybody was having fantasy football parties, it was just like completely popping off. But >> those kind of keywords are I would I would definitely consider seasonal. Well, it's not necessarily a season, but football is kind of a season. But, you know, outside of August, September, people are not searching fantasy football party unless it's some, you know, I don't know what they're doing. They're maybe the Canadian football league or something like that. So, I was also having um I also have like a basketball straws where which you would think is popular during NBA season, but actually during like the high school basketball season towards the end of it, like when people are having their parties and stuff, it would be popular. So, again, different times of year, different keywords uh pop off. A lot of products are giftable. We're getting right into Q4. This is the kind of thing now for you. I don't think people are buying Christmas gifts with these $100 or $1,000 spill kits. That would be a weird Christmas gift. But do you have anything where at different times of year different keywords work for you for any of your your products where it might be a different strategy or are you pretty much static throughout the year? >> We're pretty much static throughout the year. Yeah, we don't have any seasonality in our in our niche. >> I'm gonna check that later. You know, I after a year, I want to like look back at you and your competitors because I'm like there's got to be something, you know, like even like surprisingly even like coffin shells and things like that are actually selling throughout the year. Um the only seasonality might be like Halloween, you know, related keywords and things like that, but there might be something where there's like a lot of events that happen at a certain time of year where people are searching for for different things. So, that's definitely something we should be um looking into. Now, in general, you said you had an agency before doing advertising, and there's nothing wrong with that. Uh, we have a lot of agencies I work with with, uh, Helium 10 and and agencies are great in certain contexts, but sometimes people want to get more control over it. So, how was that transition going from maybe not having to do much in advertising yourself and just letting an agency do it and now bringing it inhouse? It was a it was a huge transition, but I definitely think that with the tools that Helium 10 has that offers, um it was a smooth transition and um we've done really well. Yeah. >> Okay. What what was the biggest struggle for you? Uh I mean it's not all rainbows and unicorns here to to do something like that. >> Yeah. Well, it was scary taking that steering wheel and then it was a lot of learning involved. Um, and then also cleaning up because we we had had several agencies throughout the years and we had hundreds of campaigns, um, different naming systems and, um, trying to figure out what their purpose was for each campaign. >> I'm smiling here because I'm thinking about our call last week where we saw some crazy uh, bids >> on on some target some target bids. What What were some of those amounts that some agency had done? >> Like I remember one that was an $800 bid. an $100 bid on a keyword. That would have been so dangerous. It actually turned out to be like $105 bid, which actually, you know, some people might be like, "Oh my god, $105 bid. That's crazy." But your products are hundred, you know, $200, so there's nothing wrong with a $105 bid. But yeah, that's the problem sometimes when um you know, regardless if you use an agency, if you have an in-house employee, you got to know who is in your account and what they're doing and why. You know, like you saw that you're like, "What in the world is this?" You know, there could have been a reason. Who knows? you know, they might have found some kind of, you know, interesting strategy, but without you knowing what's going on in your own account, that is never a good way to manage your your your advertising. So, guys, you know, moral of the story, do not have $800 random bids out there. All right. So, you've been leveraging AI a little bit more. Um, in general, just outside of advertising, your company or even your personal life, like when did you start using AI and what was the biggest unlock for you? Personally, I started using AI maybe the beginning of the year and then brought it into the company around the same time and I think mostly in the company we use a lot of AI to run reports and now with the um not only the read access but the right access um with Helium 10 and the MCPS has really just made a time since I'm the only one running our Amazon account >> uh in in office um >> it just has been timesaver. How much spend are you guys doing uh monthly for advertising? >> We're at 55K. >> 55K. So, that's a pretty pretty significant account. Now, how much time are you yourself? You you said you're the only one on it. How much time are you dedicating to just Amazon advertising? >> I would say 10 to 15 hours a week. >> 10 to 15 hours a week. You know, that that's pretty that's pretty good, you know, for such a large account. Um, and probably one of the reasons why is with the AI. So, in an advertising sense, how have you been using uh AI specifically? Well, I have our AI connected to our Helium 10 account as well as our Amazon uh console and I use it to do a daily task. I use it to run reports. I use it to um change bids to look for keywords. >> What kind of reports are you running? >> Yeah, I want to find how much we're spending, what's working, what's not working. >> Have you found any anything any gaps because of this? Like are you looking for like keywords that have a lot of clicks and spend without without sales, things like that? >> Oh, yeah. We have found thousands of dollars of wasted spend. >> Uh that's been helpful. >> Yeah. All right. So, yeah, AI can help with I mean it's this is not something brand new like, oh my goodness, this is earthshattering, but normally, especially when she has hundreds of campaigns in her account to download all the reports and then sift through it probably would have taken hours and now she's spending minutes because of of AI. So guys, if you're scared of AI, don't be. All right? just just take some videos, learn some videos, and then we've got some great tutorials in Helium 10 for the MCP that will allow you to to analyze what would have normally taken hours in minutes. What's your goals for the for this Q4, the rest of next year for your Amazon business and advertising uh in general? >> Keeping ad spend where it is, but increasing sales is our main goal. Um, increasing our B2B sales as well. and uh new products. We have some new products launching at the end of Q4 that we're excited about as well. >> Awesome. Awesome. Guys, she's been on the podcast, multiple ones of our podcast, both Serious Sellers Podcast and AMM podcast. We're doing a case study. So, uh she's, you know, gladly opened up her account. A lot of uh brands don't like to show what what they're selling, but she opened it up on the podcast. So, follow her journey, find her original podcast, check back in like 6 months, 12 months. We're going to go into her advertising. We're going to go into her brand store to see how all these changes of customizing it for the cohorts work. And so, Angie, thank you so much for being uh willing to be open and sharing your your story with everybody. >> Thank [music] you.