#649 – Amazon Spring Deal Days & New Search Query Performance Tool | Weekly Buzz 3/19/25

#649 – Amazon Spring Deal Days & New Search Query Performance Tool | Weekly Buzz 3/19/25 Shivali Patel: Upcoming Spring Day events, Amazon ads integrating with Adobe Photoshop, and Walmart's got an AI guy of its own now? This and more on this week's episode of The Weekly Buzz. Bradley Sutton: How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that is our Helium 10 Weekly Buzz, where we give you a rundown of all the new stories that are going on in the Amazon, Walmart, and e-commerce world. We highlight the latest new feature alerts from Helium 10, and we review a training tip of the week that'll give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Today, our host is going to be Shivali Patel, and so Shivali, take it away and let us know what's buzzing. Shivali Patel: Alright, first up, let's start with news that falls somewhere between two platforms. The spring sales season is in full bloom and both Amazon and Walmart are rolling out major promotional events that can impact both sellers and shoppers. Meaning if you're selling on Amazon or Walmart, now is the time to lock in on your strategy before customers start shopping in full force. Here's why. Amazon's big spring sale runs from March 25th to March 31st. And then we have Walmart having a secondary event, which lasts from March 24th to Tuesday, April 1st. Both events offer massive discounts across key categories. And let's be real, who doesn't love a good deal? According to a Harris Act survey, 76% of online shoppers say the thrill of Saving on something they already plan to buy is even better than stumbling on a surprise discount. However, this is not just a chance for consumers to grab a deal. It's an opportunity for sellers like us to clear inventory, attract new buyers, and capitalize on increased platform traffic. Amazon's daily deal drops will feature brands like Samsung, Hydroflask, and Bumble, while Walmart's event will showcase Apple, Vizio, and Bissell with up to 55% off on things like Crocs, 50% off jewelry, and even 50% off purchases from Amazon Haul. I'm expecting competition for consumer attention to be fierce, so make sure that your listings are optimized, your ads are dialed in, and you're strategically pricing products to move. It goes without saying that you should be fine-tuning your PPC campaigns and ensuring that your inventory is stocked for the inevitable shopping surge. Simultaneously, Amazon's Spring Deals Day will run across Europe from March 25th to the 31st, bringing markdowns across 35 plus categories on everyday essentials, electronics, home goods, and fashion. With 50% of shoppers tightening their budgets due to inflation, this means that deals are now more important than ever before, which means as a seller, you should strive to think more like a buyer. You can prop like a pro by knowing that Amazon's wish list, deal alerts, and watch a deal are all features that are going to let shoppers track price drops. So if your product is not positioned competitively in those marketplaces, you might be left out of the conversation, which would be the last thing we would want. Opportunities are meant to be capitalized on and spring is all about fresh starts for closets, homes, and apparently shopping carts. The whole deals day thing leads me to talk about Prime Day, aka one of the biggest sales events of the year. If you want your products fully stocked, Prime Badge eligible and ready to convert like crazy, you need to send inventory to Amazon Warehousing and Distribution by May 15th. If you miss this deadline, you are going to be gambling with delayed shipments, potential stockouts, Lost ranking right when traffic is at its peak. That is brutal. The thing is, Amazon's recently expanded distribution centers in South Central, Southeast, and East Coast give sellers more storage, faster replenishment times, And better fulfillment, efficiency. So, AWD is not just extra storage. I would almost treat this like an insurance policy against running out of stock when it matters most. AWD can automatically restock your FBA units, ensuring faster deliveries, better conversion rates, more sales. You get my gist. Imagine your best-selling ASIN blowing up on prime day only to get slapped with the out-of-stock label because FBA couldn't keep up. That, I think, there's just very few things that smell more like regret, more than a great sales velocity followed by an out-of-stock label. Now, you do have a little less than three months to get ahead of this, so no rolling the dice on last-minute logistics. I hope this is the boot you need to get your ducks lined up in a row and keep things uninterrupted. Okay, over to LinkedIn, where Jeffrey Cohen dropped an exciting announcement from the Adobe Summit. Amazon Ads is now integrating with Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Express. Making it easier than ever for sellers like you and I and advertisers to design, validate, and publish ad creatives directly from their preferred design tools. For years, e-commerce brands and agencies have dealt with platform switching, designing assets in one tool, and then manually having to upload those to Amazon ads. But those days are thankfully behind us. Instead, you'll soon be able to design, validate, publish Amazon ads Directly inside the Adobe tools you are already using. No more downloading, re-uploading, compliance issues, catching you off guard, just seamless ad creation from start to finish. I love some good old efficiency. Time is money and reducing creative bottlenecks means faster campaign launches, improved creative consistency, and better ad performance. Reethu mentioned that Canvas Amazon Ads integration in the comments section is something that made life a breeze. I think this new integration with Adobe is one of those things as well. It's going to be a tool that's already used really by a majority of design professionals And this will just add a new level of impact. Jeffrey also noted that Amazon is looking for beta testers for this integration. And so ask yourself this, how much time do you currently waste tweaking creatives, fixing rejected ads, manually formatting assets? And if the answer is too much, if you run sponsored brands or Amazon DSP or Storefront Creative, this could be an early opportunity for you to gain a competitive advantage. I would reach out to Jeffrey Cohen or Amazon Ads to get in on that beta before it goes wide. Next up, let's jump into some Walmart news. On Amazon, we have Rufus and now Walmart sellers have Wall-E. That's right. Walmart is really stepping up to the plate in AI-driven retail. If you don't know, Wally is a Gen AI-powered assistant designed to streamline data analysis, automate insights, and eliminate hours of manual reporting for Walmart. Merchants. So it is a little bit different from Rufus on the Walmart platform, of course, but this is and will be how massive retailers make decisions on which sort of products to stock, where to place them, what trends to follow, and what used to take a merchant multiple reports, digging through spreadsheets and having to figure out, you know, what's going on store to store across markets. This all can be interpreted within seconds while you can pull up sales trends, identify opportunities, and even explain why certain products are over or underperforming. Sure, this is an internal efficiency boost, but I see some real implications for brands selling on Walmart, and here is how. When merchants access faster AI-driven insights, we can expect more agile product placements, quicker trend adoption, and better inventory decisions. Say that you are a Walmart supplier, and this could mean that strong product performance gets recognized faster, whereas slow-moving SKUs don't really get buried as easily. I'm curious, if you sell on Walmart, would you trust an AI to make product placement decisions for you? Moving on, outside of sales events, if you're looking to move product, not just in new ways, but new places, Amazon just launched Amazon Ireland, bringing 200 million plus products, fast local shipping, and a dedicated Irish Prime membership to customers in Ireland. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. This move gives Irish consumers easier access to global and domestic brands. It eliminates custom fees for locally fulfilled products, introduces one-day delivery on items. So, this is not just a few items. This is millions of items. Going forward, businesses in Ireland will have a new highly visible marketplace to showcase their products with Amazon, even introducing something called Brands of Ireland. If I can just spot it here, there it is. We have Brands of Ireland. This is going to be a page in partnership with Enterprise Ireland to help promote local businesses like Barry's Tea. Beulings and independent fitness brand Swifter. For Irish sellers, this could mean a huge opportunity to scale their businesses given that over €170 million worth in export sales were generated by Irish small businesses selling on Amazon in 2023. This launch also raises questions for existing UK-based Irish sellers. Will they move inventory to Amazon Ireland for faster local fulfillment or will they continue to leverage Amazon's UK massive customer base? Maybe this is a question for you. At the moment, Amazon Prime is available in Ireland for €699. I definitely just read it here somewhere. There it is. And this gives members free one-day delivery, Prime Video, Prime Gaming, exclusive partner offers like Deliveroo Plus, Silver and discounted Odeon tickets. I don't know if I even pronounced that right. UK Prime members can switch seamlessly and will receive a refund for their UK Prime membership as well. This expansion is a clear signal that Amazon is making deeper inroads into the Irish market and that is a move that's not just about consumer convenience but also about boosting local business presence on a global scale. They're also doing really interesting things like doubling down on sustainability efforts, offering 100% recyclable paper-based packaging for all orders fulfilled by Amazon Ireland. But what about you? Do you as a seller or agency plan to expand and take advantage of this new platform in time before competition heats up? Speaking of heating up, if your inventory melts faster than an ice cream cone in July, it is time to get it out of Amazon's fulfillment centers before April 15, 2025. Starting on that day, Amazon's warehouses will not accept meltable FBA inventory, including chocolate, gummies, wax-based products, anything else that turns into a hot, sticky mess Over the temperature of 155 degrees Fahrenheit. This lasts until October 15th. And if you think that Amazon is going to babysit your leftover multiple stock, think again, my friends. Come May 1st, they're going to start not only disposing anything that you've left behind, but they're going to start charging you for disposal fees for the privilege. I don't think any of us want to be paying Amazon to Throw away our own candy. So if your inventory is more suited for a air-conditioned display case than a warehouse in the summer, it's time to act. Sell through, remove, or risk the great chocolate purge of 2025. If you're not sure if your products are affected, check Amazon's multiple ASIN list and submit a removable order ASAP. You should be able to find that list inside of Seller Central News where this news piece was originally located. Have a heat-sensitive product that you're scrambling to move? Well, Maybe it's time for an everything must melt fire sale. Now the final breaking news for today is giving me copious and copious amounts of nostalgia. Forever 21 is closing hundreds of stores across the U.S. after filing for bankruptcy protection for the second time in six years, with the first 236 locations shutting down by March 30th, and then we have the rest likely gone by May 1st. According to court filings, the company could not compete with ultra-low-cost fashion giants such as Shein and Timu, which had leveraged the now-defunct De Minimis loophole to undercut traditional retailers on pricing. Brad Sell, I definitely read it here somewhere. He is the CFO of Forever's 21 parent company and he blamed rising costs Shifting consumer trends and foreign competition for the retailers downfall, making it clear that without an aggressive pricing advantage, brick and mortar fast fashion brands simply cannot survive. The collapse of Forever 21 mirrors a growing retail apocalypse with industry analysts predicting that 15,000 closures will occur this year, even though the firms projected about 5,800 store openings nationwide, the overall result is a net loss. While Forever 21's physical stores may vanish, its intellectual property and brand name remain very much alive and intact, leaving the door open for a potential digital-first comeback strategy or licensing strategy. By the way, I do want to let you know we just started a TikTok shop sellers group. This link is going to be h10.me forward slash TikTok group. You can go to it, click join group. It'll ask you a series of questions, which then you should answer. Make sure you're using the main email address that's associated to your account to log into Helium 10. And when you go in and click submit, you'll then have access to amazing network of sellers who are also beginning to either sell on TikTok Shop, or maybe they've been established for a while and you can pick their brain, really learn from them. Right, and that is it. That does conclude our news pieces for this week. It's time for new feature alerts. Let's turn things over to Bradley to tell you all about an exciting new SQP tool that has been released. Bradley, take it away. Bradley Sutton: All right, everybody. I'm super excited to present to you probably the most requested tool in the history of Helium 10 by you, the community, and also my most requested tool since it came out, and that is our tool for search query performance. So this has been the data point from the Amazon released a few years ago, but you can only do it inside of Seller Central, but it's by far the most valuable thing that Amazon has ever given. It gives you data on your own clicks and the market clicks by keyword, the purchases by keyword. I'm not going to go too deep into what Search Query Performance is. Make sure to go into YouTube and type in Helium 10 Serious Sellers Podcast Search Query Performance. We've done podcasts on it before where we talk about, but in a nutshell, this is giving you all the search data that happened. It's also making it denormalized search. So you might see the search volumes different than in Helium 10 normally. Well, that's because It's counting like if somebody clicks back on their browser, if somebody clicks to page 2, like these are all counted as searches and so the search numbers is highly inflated. But what you're going to see here, if this is your first time using it, is how many products we're showing on page 1. For a certain keyword, how many times did you show up on page 1 for that keyword? How many times did somebody click on any product at all? How many times did somebody click on your product? How many times did anybody add to cart? How many times did somebody add your product to the cart? And then most importantly, how many purchases overall were generated from that keyword that resulted in a sale within 24 hours? This is only going to show about 20-30% of the overall sales because not all sales just come from search, right? But then also it's going to show how much you had. So you're going to be able to get some data here that you've never had insights to like, is your conversion rate on a certain keyword better or worse than the whole market? And with this, the most important thing is now you can take action. Like, for the keywords that maybe you're not getting many impressions for, but your conversion rate is great on a certain keyword, what are you going to do? Well, you've got to increase your visibility. You've got to double down on your advertising spend, right? So then you'd go into Helium 10 ads or your advertising tool and increase your bids because you know you're converting really well. On some of the keywords where you can see your conversion rate's not as good as a competition, well, maybe you might want to back off spend because you're like, It's probably throwing money away advertising on this keyword. The use cases go on and on. So this is just the first in many videos that I'm going to be doing where you're going to be able to kind of understand how to use this new tool. Let's go ahead and hop into it. So where this tool exists, first of all, you'll go to tools and under analytics, search query analyzer. All right. So here we are. Now, the first thing you want to let me show you what you can do. Like I can actually just look at my bat bathmat. Right. I can type in bat mat, and then there's that one product. So let's just pretend I'm picking one product here, okay? And now instantly, I can just look at one week, but here's the beauty about this. I can select multiple weeks. Now let me just tell you guys right off the bat, if you're watching this early, Amazon is severely limiting how many weeks you can download to your account at once. And so because of that, you might only see four weeks, five weeks of the recent data here, but don't worry, week by week, We're hitting Amazon hard to make sure all your reports come in. I've got more in mind because I've been in this a few weeks already, but the rest of you, you'll have more weeks, more months to do later on, all right? And you can also select perhaps some of these weeks and it might move it up the queue, but it might take a little while. But right off the bat, you should be able to do at least four weeks here, okay? So then I'm going to select a whole bunch of weeks here for my bath mat. Let's go ahead and hit Apply Filters. This is already better than Seller Central because Seller Central only allowed me to look one at a time. Now I can see multiple weeks here and I could see pretty much any keyword that brought me sales. I could go here and I could look at my purchases. Now, I can see, hey, I got sales from Batman. Which week was it? I hit this chart and I could see it over time. I haven't got any sales on that keyword lately, but I had some a few weeks ago. I could see how's my conversion rate doing over time, all right? It was 25%, pretty good. I could see what the market conversion rate is over time. I can see what the variance is. This is something different that you don't have in Seller Central where I can see, hey, is my conversion rate better or worse? If I wanted to kind of like zoom in, On that I have these filters. LPC means my conversion rate is below the market conversion rate. Alright, so I'm worse. SGK means these are products that have produced at least one sale. So like I could just filter that up here and I'd be able to see that. I think this is EI or EL, EI maybe. This is where impressions is above the search query volume. Alright, so normally you might not be able to see that. The reason why this came up, you see how my impressions is 706 and the search volume that week was 523. Well, that's because I probably had my organic rank and my keyword rank on the top of page one and that's why I have more. So this is kind of like cool to see, hey, where's my impression more than search form. Now I know I got like two placements there, you know, sponsored and organic. And if it's not there, well, that means I could be leaving money on the table if it's a really good keyword for me. All of the regular columns are included here from Search Query Performance Report, but we've got extra ones. I just showed you my impression share. This is something different than what you see in Seller Central. ClickShare is in Seller Central, but then what you can do is you can see my click-through rate. This is not available in Search Query Performance in Amazon because what we're doing is we're dividing the columns for you and it's over time. What I'm seeing here because I'm looking at multiple weeks, it's adding everything up for this keyword over all these eight weeks. If I want to dive into it and see week by week what is my click-through rate, I can see clearly here that it's fluctuating. I can go back multiple time periods and see that. Let me see if I can do months. Let's see if I do three, like four months here and then we're going to get even more data here. This is what's going to happen if you don't have the data yet. It'll say preparation and progress and wow, that's amazing. It's only going to be two minutes. I thought it would take like 24 hours. So on the dates that you don't have yet, You're going to get this message. All right, so let's just go ahead and look at my existing data. So far, it looks like January 2025. I don't have yet. This is what's going to take two minutes to download, but I can see my data in February. I can see in December and November, there's a lot of action happening. But then on this, I can go here and see that I had lots of purchases for Batman bathroom decor. In which month was it? Well, I can see it was in October and I had three purchases. In November, let's look at another product here, maybe something that had more consistent sales. Let's go to this egg tray and let's take a look at some recent weeks and let's see what we can find here. Apply filters. This is super fast, guys. I'm really proud of the team, what they were able to do here. But look at this, egg holder for fridge. So I was getting multiple sales here, all right, over the last few weeks. Look at that, three purchases, three purchases, two purchases. So I could see what keywords are driving sales. The other thing that is cool here is I can see over time all of these data points, all right, like the click-through rate variance, the impression share, etc. What is The top features I think that you guys can do. There's a couple of them. Number one is Find all the keywords over time that drove sales within 24 hours of the search. That's like a no-brainer. That's data from Amazon. It's not Helium 10 guessing or something. The other thing that you can do is, where are all the keywords where you had sales but you couldn't determine, is my organic rank increasing or decreasing? Why isn't it? This is how you can determine that. Oh, my conversion rate for this keyword is not as good as the competition. Oh, okay. I need to go ahead and figure out what's wrong or else pull back my spend. Oh, my conversion rate is better than the market conversion rate. Oh, my goodness. This is going to be something very interesting like I need to double down. I need to be showing up at the top of search as much as possible because I know I'm going to get a better conversion rate than my competitor for this keyword. So those are just like the top three things I look at. Your sales drop over time. Take a look when it started dropping off. Was it a certain keyword that your conversion rate started performing badly for? Now you take this data, like once you know your impressions and things, and now you go to Keyword Tracker. And you see, where was my organic rank? Where was my sponsor rank? So this is how you can have like some synergy with the Helium 10 tools. But this is just version one, guys. Every week, we're gonna be adding features and I'm gonna record new videos. But I just wanted to get you guys started in this. Again, this is like the most powerful tool instantly that you might have right now. So every single person using Helium 10, if you have the diamond plan, you definitely need to be using this. So let us know. Send a message to customer support. What is working for you? What's not working for you? How do you want to visualize the data in a different way? Let us know and we'll get on that. But until then, hope you have fun with this version 1.0 of our Search Query Performance Analyzer tool. Thanks, guys. See you later. Shivali Patel: Wow, am I right? Thank you very much, Bradley. And of course, last but not least, our training tip of the week, I'm going to pass the baton over to Carrie to tell you all about one of my favorite features at Helium 10. This shows you how you can maximize visibility of your listing and even identify key phrases where your competitors are taking a backseat on PPC. Carrie Miller: Today, I want to share an advanced strategy that also revolves around historical data, but from a different angle. And you know, this is my absolute favorite tool. It's absolutely a game changer. Helium 10 has the best tools for this. So let me set the scene. Imagine you're analyzing your sales and notice a fluctuation, either an increase or a drop from one month to the next. Or maybe you're looking at a competitor's BSR chart and think, wow, what happened this month? Their sales just shot up or maybe they took a nosedive. So what would you want to know? Well, there are plenty of reasons sales might fluctuate. It could be due to an increase in keyword search volume, maybe seasonality or something else. But more often than not, it's tied to visibility and specifically their ranking on important keywords. Whether it's sponsored or organic rank, if a competitor suddenly lands at the top of page one for high volume search terms, their sales are more than likely going to spike. And conversely, if they lose their ranking, sales can drop. So this is exactly the type of insight you should be tracking both for your competitors and for your own products. So if a competitor's sales drop because their keyword rankings slipped, you'll wanna make sure your rankings stay strong. And on the flip side, if your sales increase due to higher keyword rankings, those are the keywords you wanna double down on. You never wanna lose momentum on those really important keywords. And if rankings start to slip, well, it's time to take action. So I'm gonna just show you how you can analyze this in seconds, okay? This is actually the coffin shelf we did an example before. This is actually not listed right now. But if we take a look down here, we're gonna look at their sales data here. And you can see that from June of 2024, they had a really high BSR. So that means their sales were probably Not very good. And then you can see that it went down in July of 2024. So that means their sales probably went up if they had a higher BSR. So what we want to do is we want to figure out what exactly happened from June to July to cause this spike in sales. So what we do is we take the ASIN and we do a reverse search here. And so I've already done the reverse search on that ASIN. And then what we're going to do is we're going to click on monthly comparison. We want to compare June of 2024 to July of 2024. So you can click these two months and hit apply. You can actually do up to three if you want to. But then the next thing I want to do is I want to see, you know, where the minimum basically was 20 in, say, June. So this is the first month. In June, their minimum rank was 20 on keywords, but then maybe those keywords the next month jumped to rank ones between one and 10. And then you're going to hit apply. And what you're going to do is you're going to see those keywords that maybe could have been a game changer to increase those sales. And we've got 18 filtered keywords here. So you can see, for example, emo decor. They were ranked 165 in June and jumped all the way to spot 10 in July. So that is a huge jump and that's definitely going to help increase sales. You can see coffin decor. You can see that it went from 21 all the way to spot 1, which is absolutely incredible. We've got gothic shelf went from 33 to 5. Let's see if we can see another big jump down here. I mean, these are all pretty big jumps like 48 gothic wall shelves down to spot 2. So definitely as you can see here, you can see that the keyword rank is definitely tied to a lot of keyword sales. You can see that they actually, and you could expand this out a little bit more and you could see even more keywords where maybe they had that huge jump where they actually lost rank and then they got it back. So I could also look at this in another way if you wanted to. If sales were high one month but dropped the next You know, where do they lose keyword rank? Where do they pull back on advertising? So this is game-changing information. And Historical Cerebro completely revolutionized keyword research when it launched. And before, you could really only analyze what's happening right now. And most tools, including the base Helium 10, you know, show you current data, which is great if a product is performing well in the moment. But to get the full picture, you really need a holistic approach. So looking at what's happening now, yes, but also taking an extra step and then connect the keyword ranking trends To sales fluctuations. And once you do that, you're gonna see how many actionable insights this strategy provides and you can take so much action to really make a difference in your sales. So if you haven't checked out this incredible tool, it's the monthly comparison in historical trend. If you haven't checked it out, you need to go ahead and check it out now. It's a game changer. Shivali Patel: Thank you, Carrie. Isn't that incredible? Go try this out on your ASIN to forecast a coming month or on your competitor's listings to see if you should be making any sort of adjustments on strategy somewhere. That is it for this week. I hope you enjoy this week's Weekly Buzz. We will see you next week to talk about what's bussing.