79. From Sleeping in a Car to Helium 10 Expert – The Untold Bradley Sutton Story!

79. From Sleeping in a Car to Helium 10 Expert – The Untold Bradley Sutton Story! Speaker 1: Hello to everyone listening today. We have a very, very special guest, Bradley. He has been in this space for some time. If you don't know who Bradley is, and you're in the e-commerce world, especially Amazon, You have probably been under a rock somewhere. He has been giving gem after gem online events in terms of strategies of how to grow your brands. So Bradley, it's a pleasure and honor to have you. Thank you so much for joining us. Speaker 2: Thank you for having me. Pleasure to be here. Speaker 1: Awesome. I want to do something different with you, Bradley. This can be slightly different to what people usually see because they tend to see you giving some advice in terms of hacks and how you can improve what you've got going, how you can make best use of the tools at our disposal. I want to kind of more so talk about your history. When did you first come into contact with e-commerce? Speaker 2: It was probably about 25 years ago now when the first Fast and Furious movie came out. I was all into that for my car, but I had a Korean car at the time, a Hyundai. In those days, Hyundai didn't have a great reputation and nobody had parts. For that car, everybody was doing stuff for Honda and Toyota and the Japanese cars. And so I found a website in Korea that had products because in Korea, Hyundai and Kia, that was like the Honda of that country. And so I started ordering some products from this one website. And I always had an entrepreneurial mindset, I feel like just naturally. And so then I was like, wait a minute, there's got to be other people in America who are looking for these products. And yeah, I could order and wait like two months and pay a boatload of shipping. But I was like, there's got to be a better way. So I contacted the owner of that company. I was like, hey, let me like, Open a warehouse for you and let me be your partner and then I'll handle your customer service and I'll handle your shipping. You ship containers over and boom. That was a kind of website that was just starting off and I haven't been affiliated with them like 20 years, but I just checked. It's still there. It's called a sharkracing.com. He's still selling Korean car parts to Americans. And yeah, I was very early in on that website. That was my first e-commerce. Speaker 1: Oh, wow. Okay. And then when did you kind of get your first sniff at Amazon? Speaker 2: That was probably in the mid 2010s. Um, that started me working with Korean companies. And so like from there, I always like work for Korean companies, uh, off and on for like 20 years. And then one of the groups I was working with, uh, started selling phone cases and it was cliche now to sell that on Amazon. But in the early days it was, it was crazy. And they, and these guys were selling thousands of phone cases a day even. Um, and I was kind of like the, the entity guy, like, you know, they're all Korean. So like, I was the one who made the US company, I provided the warehouse, like, you can see a theme here. That's what I do, I guess. Um, and I didn't know anything about Amazon, but they started selling on Amazon. But I was The one I was shipping FBM so like I was I was packaging we had a little machine like 500 to 800 FBM phone cases a day. I was shipping by hand by myself and then I would send stuff to FBA for them but I really didn't know anything about like the inner workings of Amazon outside of a label and customers were ordering and stuff like that. So that was my first taste and then when I Kind of like split from them, I made a decision. I was like, I want to find out more about this Amazon. I was like, this is interesting. How could they come out of nowhere and sell thousands of phone cases a day on this platform? Maybe there's something there. And then that's why I started like, you know, going to conferences and educating myself. Speaker 1: OK, so when you're going to conferences and educating yourselves, were you doing anything yourself outside of that working with that brand or was it? Speaker 2: No, so it was a it was a fast like turnaround. Like when I split from that company, I. I went to a conference and it kind of changed my life. It was called Zon Squad Live. It was like in 2016. I think it was in Chicago. I was so poor in those days. I've told this story before that I had enough money for either a hotel or a rental car. I was like, well, how am I going to even get to the hotel? Uber wasn't really much of a thing then. I got a rental car and I slept in the car during this conference because I didn't have enough money for a hotel. It opened my eyes. I jumped right in. This is kind of like a mastermind level event. I jumped right into an advanced thing. It blew my mind the possibilities of e-commerce, especially when it comes to Amazon. I dedicated myself for one month just learning everything else I could and then I didn't start selling myself. What I did was I immediately became a consultant, like I even became a consultant for my ex-partners because I found out that they really didn't know what the heck they were doing. They just kind of like lucked into all those sales and so like immediately I became a consultant for my ex-partners and then other people out there. Speaker 1: What was it you think that made you love this space? Because you can't be doing the amount of content that you're doing right now and been going for as long as you've been going if you don't love it. Speaker 2: It's I love the science of it, too. It's like it's not I've never been one of those people who's like into things that you have to have a really good feel for, you know, like, oh, stock market or real estate or it depends on the right timing and Things that are predictable I like. Amazon obviously is unpredictable, but when I talk about predictability, I was fascinated with launching products. That was my early specialty. I didn't know anything about PPC or advertising or listing optimization. I wasn't really good at it, but I was just fascinated with the launch and how it worked and how do you get a product visible? How do you get it on page one? How do you make it stick? I was just obsessed with trying to investigate the Amazon algorithm and figure out what worked. I lucked into a couple of different strategies. Reverse engineer. I was like, okay, what happened? Like I didn't do this on purpose. Let me reverse engineer. How in the heck did I get this kind of success on these launches? And that was just what I was obsessed with in the beginning, I guess. And even to this day, it's like, you know, like there are certain things on Amazon that just work and sometimes things change on Amazon and being able to try to reverse engineer what those changes are in the back end or how you can adapt to the changing algorithm, like that stuff, I guess, that really gets me going. Speaker 1: There must be a time that you can remember where there was just... The biggest change in Amazon that had to shift a whole load of things for so many people, what would you say has been the biggest change? Because there's been a few, but what do you think has been the biggest change it has had to make people shift the way they operate on Amazon? Speaker 2: There's one for me, since I love launches. And there's another one that's probably above that level, but it didn't really affect me because I didn't use it that much. And the two main ones, the one for me is When search find by two-step URLs, Amazon said, no, these are not available because I made a living off of that. There was this one launch company called Zomblast and they were later called Sixleaf and I was like their biggest customer. I was launching hundreds of products with them for consultants. I always had said, I was like, hey guys, I'm not a person who likes to predict, but if, you know, gun to my head, like I'll probably say that one day Amazon is going to say, no, we don't want people doing search, find, buy. I mean, I didn't think it made sense, but like Amazon, you know, just it made sense to me that Amazon might make that nonsensical move because it never hurt Amazon. And sure enough, they did. And just in one day, you know, launches changed. The other thing was before then, I never used it too much, but the whole thing was incentivized reviews. Before, you could just Give product away and it was actually encouraged. Amazon even had a little badge that said, hey, this product was given away in exchange for a review. And then a lot of people, it wasn't me, but I know a lot of people out there, their whole launch strategy or their whole momentum strategy was based on giving out hundreds of products and then getting reviews in the early days. And in one night that just went away. So I would think those are the two that stick out the most to me. Speaker 1: It's funny you mention that Bradley because just a year ago I was talking to a friend of mine and one of his kind of associates was in the process of selling their brand. Most of the volume came from Amazon and they were kind of going to close the deal for kind of mid eight figure range. And just as the deal was closing, they saw some grey stuff that happened with reviews Two years before, because of that, Amazon just decided to shut their entire account down, which completely destroyed the whole deal. Speaker 2: That's one thing that Amazon is consistent at being inconsistent, but if there's one thing that Amazon has been consistent about is how seriously they consider reviews, at least in the last five years. If you remember, a while back, there were all these exposé stories in the news about There were fake reviews and how prevalent it was. Ever since then, Amazon is super, super sensitive about reviews. They let a lot go, like stuff that probably we sellers wish they would crack down on, but they're consistently Very, very strict about anything related to customer reviews. Speaker 1: And I'm finding that it's becoming more and more severe. There was even someone I was speaking to recently where they Encourage someone in their group to buy their product. And the group of friends in that WhatsApp group bought the product and they left a review. And then even with that, there was a review ban on that product. And somehow Amazon managed to link that entire group of friends. They found some form of connection between that group to make it go, right, no, this isn't happening. So it looks like they're getting tighter and tighter with this stuff. Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure. I've always said that it seems like the things that Amazon really is strict about is the stuff that they get bad press about. Amazon does not want bad press. about something, they're going to crack down on it, whether it's brushing or review manipulation or things like that. Sometimes people want Amazon to take action on. Speaker 1: Okay, great. So we got to your journey in terms of you've done some consulting with a few people and you're in this e-commerce space and you're really enjoying learning about how Amazon works and just how endless the possibilities are. How did you then get connected to Helium 10? Speaker 2: I didn't start using Helium 10 in the beginning. I didn't even know about Helium 10. I was using other tools that were at the time better than Helium 10 and then one of the tools I was using like the keyword tracker that I was using it for broke and so I had put just a random message in one of my Facebook groups like hey I need a new keyword tracker because This one sucks. And somebody mentioned Helium 10. I was like, wow, this is pretty cool. So I started using Helium 10 probably like 2017, around there. And I've always been like this person who likes to debate and likes to argue or I've always hated misinformation out there. And so I was that guy who would go into their Facebook groups and then just look for people like saying stupid things or like saying incorrect things about launch. I would go and go off and like put 75 screenshots and diagrams of why they're wrong and how come they're idiots. And the founder of Helium 10 was like, who is this guy who's always coming into our Facebook group? And And then they found out that I live like an hour, hour and a half away from their office and they're like, hey, come by and hang out. I was like, cool. To me, the founder of Helium 10, he was the host of the AM PM podcast I was listening to for a while. He's like a celebrity. So like, oh, he wants to meet me. I was like, cool. So we hung out. I didn't realize it was a job interview. And then so Basically, long story short, yeah, I started working. I didn't want to at first. It was a long drive. I hate driving, like going an hour each way, but they stayed after me and I'm happy they did. Speaker 1: Okay, great. So obviously now everyone knows your journey within Helium 10 and obviously your understanding of the tool and how to best use the tool and all the features that it has. I'd love to dig into that a bit more. For those that might have not used Helium 10 or might have not Seeing the possibilities that it has, what are maybe the top three ways people can use the tool to propel what they're doing with Amazon? Speaker 2: To me, there's a lot of things that set Helium 10 apart. One is just the fact that it's everything. There are a lot of tools out there who have one specific thing that they're pretty good at, be it advertising, be it inventory management, catalog management, things like that. But Helium 10 is the only one out there that has everything like you pretty much don't need for on Amazon. You don't need anything else once you get Helium 10. So I've always liked how they've even from before I worked the companies always strive to be the all-in-one solution. The thing that we're most known for is probably the keyword research and the important thing is that it's about the quality of the data. There are some people who say, hey, I think it's this XYZ tool It's not about the quantity necessarily of the keywords. It's about the quality and Helium 10 has always had the higher quantity because we just have so many data points. Because of the extra data points that nobody else is accessing, That's where the quality of the keywords comes in. When you're doing research in Helium 10, you are getting sometimes double the amount of keywords that could get you sales. When I say double, I'm not talking about the fact that we have 30,000 results when you do a Cerebro. That's not meant to get 30,000 keywords that get sales with many uses of Cerebro. I'm talking about if you can find 30, 40 keywords in another tool, I guarantee there's probably going to be 70 or 80 that you'll get from ours that are high quality. The reason is we're hitting data points that for whatever reason Nobody else is hitting. We bring in all the keywords directly from brand analytics. It's something directly from Amazon. You can run a search. You could probably do this in Seller Central, but it would take you hours, where I could say, hey, show me all the keywords where this ASIN or this group of ASINs has not only been one of the top three clicked, but also had at least one sale, not by Helium 10's estimation, but directly from Amazon. This is just a direct API. In the last three years, it would take forever to do that week by week on Amazon. We're now bringing in the search query performance, all of that data. We're tied to this relevancy We're the only one that has a relevancy score that is directly us. We're pulling it directly from Amazon where you can see exactly for any product what does Amazon think it's relevant for. Obviously, everybody knows the regular Cerebro like, hey, where's the product ranking now? But we're the only ones that has a tool where you can go back to three years and say, hey, where was this ranking in some of its peak times? And so it's just like the number of good keywords you can get is just unparalleled in any other tool out there. And I think that's like the core of what we do good because that's the start. You can't have a good listing if you don't have the right keywords. You can't advertise against all the potential keywords that can bring you sales if you don't have the right keywords. And so I think that's what really sets us apart. Speaker 1: Yeah and actually to add you can probably name with one hand the tools out there that have the history of data as well because you go back right to the beginning. So that's another big thing that we found as well with Helium 10. Now let's just say I am new to Helium 10 and I You know, the data, like you said, is going to be more accurate than anything anywhere else, like any data you can get anywhere else. What would be the first places people should start when using the tool to get the biggest bang for their buck? What's the kind of the gateway drug in a sense? Speaker 2: If you're an existing seller and you're new to Helium 10, like you're already selling on Amazon, you've got some products, I would hop right into Cerebro and start analyzing your product and your competitors' products as well as the BlackBox brand analytics tool. That's just going to give you a start. Once you have all your keyword lists, put them all into Listing Builder because Listing Builder is able to analyze, hey, how many of these main keywords are you indexed for or are you searchable for potentially? How many do you have it in phrase form? That's the thing that some ChatGPTs and some things aren't that good at is because you have to know how the Amazon algorithm works with how to structure a listing. More and more, actually, Amazon is bridging the gap. Some of these new algorithms they have where sometimes you don't even have to have a keyword in your listing to be indexed. After five or six months, let's say I have a coffin shelf and there's a keyword. Well, from day one, I'm not going to be indexed searchable for a witchy gift. I can't run advertising to it if I don't have that keyword in my listing. But after a few months of buyer behavior and then all these witches are buying other stuff and then they buy my coffin shelf, Amazon is probably going to index me for the keyword witchy gift. I feel like Amazon, with all their new AIs and things, are kind of bridging the gap of Sellers who aren't doing the right thing to sellers who are doing the right thing and say, oh, you didn't put what you get, but we'll go ahead and index you for it. But here's the thing like. You don't want to wait months for Amazon to figure that out. Why not capitalize that right now today? I guarantee if you're new to Helium 10 and you're selling products, you're going to find at least 10, 15 keywords that you never knew could bring you sales instantly. You just put it into your listing, you're going to see your sales increase. Speaker 1: Yeah, and we also like to use Cerebro to kind of find what are the terms that the biggest sellers in a particular category are all ranked well for, to give us an idea in terms of the highest relevance within that category. So that's been a really good use case. Now, because you're speaking to so many People who are in the day-to-day trenches of managing their accounts, what would you say is some of the common and biggest issues being faced right now within Amazon? Speaker 2: For me now, it's funny. There's a couple main pet peeves I have and one of them is distraction. What's happening out there is people are getting distracted by new and shiny things that are not being used and are not proven yet. One of them is Rufus. I'll tell you right now, I have optimized my listing based on Rufus. If I've done all the basics and all the strategies I need to make a listing relevant, the next step is logically, all right, let me make sure My listing answers the questions that Rufus is asking on my product and I've optimized for it. Rufus is amazing. It'll index in five minutes. As soon as the listing is updated and you ask a question they didn't know how to answer before, it'll answer it. But the problem is people out there are seeing so many talks about Rufus that I have talked to a lot of sellers who are so worried about, oh, I got to do this for Rufus, and I ask, well, have you looked in your search career performance reports to get the keyword? This is actual Amazon data, an amazing Amazon data point. I'm not even talking about in Helium 10. Search career performance has been out for like two years, even in Seller Central. People are like, no, no, I don't even know what that is. I'm like, how are you even talking to me about Rufus? You don't even know what search query performance is. But what's happened is so many people are talking about it. It's fine. I understand you talk about new things. I do it too. And like I said, I'm not going to completely badmouth Rufus. I literally have made changes to my own listings based on Rufus, but there's a place, there's a hierarchy of what you should be doing on Amazon. There should never be a case where you say, I'm very worried about Rufus and I have no idea what search group performance is. And so that's like one of my things. I'm like, people need to like stop, you know, drinking the Kool-Aid of like these new things that are not even proven yet. And at the expense of proven strategy. And then the other thing I think that is a big danger is AI is great. Helium 10 has been using AI for years, but some people are thinking that, hey, all I need is AI, and I don't need a tool like Helium 10 or whatever tool, or I don't need search query performance. I don't need Amazon Product Opportunity Explorer. I'm just going to use AI, and AI can make good listings, but the problem that people don't understand is without the underlying data, You're not getting all you can out of AI. That is the wrong use of AI. AI is not connected to Helium 10, like outside AIs. ChatGPT does not have access to Helium 10's database. ChatGPT does not have access to search query performance. It's basing it off of other things. If you use AI on an island without all of the important data from Amazon, you're shooting yourself in the foot. I'll ask you, hey, what are the top keywords for this niche? It'll give me a couple of good ones, but it's just guessing. It's not based on the search volume and all the stuff that you have access to in Seller Central. So you absolutely use AI. It's going to save you a lot of time, but feed it the data. Download all the search query performance reports. Connect it to Helium 10. Download your Cerebro reports and then use AI. Don't try and use it by itself. Speaker 1: I want to talk to you about, and I'm sure you've probably spoken in other places about this, but now with the fact that search query reports now open up the API access, how is Helium 10 now going to use that data to provide even more for Helium 10 users? Speaker 2: Yeah, so we just launched this week our version 0.1, I call it, of the data and so you already can go into Helium 10 and do things that you couldn't do in Seller Central like I do multiple products, not a full brand level, which obviously you could already do in Seller Central, but like I'm saying, hey, let me just pick five of these products. Let me pick products in three different brands and see them all at once. And not only that is see multiple. Not only that, you can see now multiple weeks, multiple months at one time. So like instantly, hey, show me all the keywords that brought me sales over the last five months, instead of having to download five reports. 10 ASINs, one by one, 50 reports, you get it instantly. And then all those things that we use to maybe put in an Excel file so we can have a formula for it, like, hey, what is my conversion rate? What is my click-through rate? What's the market click-through rate, the market conversion rate? Where is there a variance? Where is my impressions more than the search volume? Where is my impressions lower? All those things we have It all calculated out for you. So you can even filter like, hey, show me all the keywords where I had a better conversion rate than my competitors. And that's maybe where I want to double down on my average. And so like you're instantly going to get that. So like that's just version A. And we invite everybody to use it and let us know like, hey, well, I'm sure you guys were doing probably your own things in search query performance that we haven't even thought about. Let us know what you would like us to do and we'd be happy to implement it. Speaker 1: Amazing. So you said it was launched early this week, right? Speaker 2: So where can people find it within Helium 10? If you go into Helium 10 and you hit the analytics and it's a tool, it's called Search Query Analyzer. Speaker 1: Fantastic. Okay, great. So outside of that, what are some of the exciting things you see on the horizon for those selling products on Amazon that they should be thinking about now and taking advantage of? Speaker 2: To me, it is about AI. I'm not trying to be anti-AI, but AI is the future as far as not just simplifying workflows, but it's going to make people more profitable. There might be jobs that you would pay a virtual assistant or a full-time employee that now can be taken over by AI eventually with AI agents. You're going to be able to do things even in Helium 10 later that might have taken you 10 minutes or so to use four different tools to pull out the right keywords. Now, eventually, you're going to be able to just tell Helium 10, as if it was a person, hey, find me all the profitable keywords in this niche that I'm not optimized for. I think that's what's the future. Then the creatives, like Amazon is releasing finally an API for Being able to upload A-plus content, that's something that's always been missing. It's such a tedious process to one by one do your A-plus content and figure out the models. But now, if it's in the API, that means it's something that, hey, maybe it can be even created by AI completely, and then with a click of a button, go and be submitted to A-plus content. Staying ahead of these things that are rapidly changing and making sure to implement these new things that Amazon makes available, I think that's going to be key for sellers going forward. Speaker 1: Incredible. Is there anything within the AI space that concerns you, which is going to make things a lot harder or anything that you're worried about or you have on your radar to keep an eye on? Speaker 2: Just in general, I'm just concerned about hallucinations because that just never made... I'm not a programmer. I don't know anything about that kind of stuff, but to me, it's just kind of mind-boggling about how often AI gets it wrong. I'm like, how in the world, when this got programmed, Does it think it's okay to guess or to make up something? You see that with Rufus. You see that with ChatGPT. You see that with any AI out there. You'll easily be able to catch it lying. I've used Rufus before. I say, hey, what do the reviews of this product say? And there's no reviews. And they'll say, oh, the reviews said that. I'm like, there's no reviews here. Oh, I'm sorry. I made a mistake. I don't understand because as we rely more on it, we need it to not do that. I need to be confident that what I'm asking it, I'm getting 100% truth. And so that's the only thing that's concerning as we start relying more on AI. How can it get better so that it's not guessing, so that it's not giving you wrong data? Because when we start using it for our Amazon business more and more, that's our livelihood. We're doing it to make money. If it's giving us wrong information, it's going to do us more harm than good. But other than that, I'm kind of optimistic about AI as long as they can get that fixed. Speaker 1: Yeah, I know. And sometimes it just misses things, too. So it's like, it'll miss some crucial steps. And it's just like, oh, no. But yeah, no. OK. And that's good. Is there anything that you think we should have talked about that we haven't that's really important right now within the e-commerce space? Speaker 2: I think just, you know, I'll say it again, but it's no matter how many new shiny objects are coming, whether it's new algorithms, new AIs, The basics still matter and don't forget the basics. The basics of keyword research, the basics of product research, the basics of listing optimization. There is not going to be some overnight shift on Amazon on the way that customers buy things. And so stop trying to like jump 10 years ahead of things because you heard it's cool. Don't forget the basics. I think people are looking at the revolution of AI and things on Amazon similar to how it was on Google. Google search has changed for sure in the last couple of years. A lot of the answers are AI, but that's a different process. The shopping process is not going to change so fast. If I am searching for insulated water bottle, there is nothing That is going to beat the experience of me as a consumer typing in insulated water bottle and seeing the results. You cannot improve on that. It's going backwards if you think that we're going to go to a world of, I am looking for an insulated water bottle that is blue in color and might be able to hold my water at 30, like nobody's going to be tight. That is not a good experience. I'm going to type in three words I can do with one finger and there is nothing in the next 10 years, in my opinion, that is going to change that. Where AI is going to change in shopping is It might replace the Google side. Maybe I don't know I need an insulated water bottle and what do I do now if I don't know that? Well, I might go to Google and I have a problem with my tea losing its heat on the job after four hours. What should I do? I'll start looking for blogs or looking for things. I think Amazon might take some of that away because now that part of the conversation I can have now in Amazon instead of having to go to Google and do things. I think that part changed. If I know what I want, nothing will change it. You have to be indexed for the right keywords. You have to take into consideration the keywords and brand analytics, search group performance, and your advertising search term reports. That is not going away, guys, no matter what new shiny thing comes to Amazon. So don't forget that and stop losing money because I feel I see so many sellers are losing money because they're getting distracted by these other things. Speaker 1: Amazing. Thank you so much. That's kind of all the questions I had for you. Lots of amazing insights in there. If anyone here wants to use Helium 10, we're going to provide a link somewhere in the description, whether you're watching this on YouTube, whether you're listening to it on a podcast. Thank you so much, Bradley, for joining us and I hope you have a great rest of your day. Speaker 2: Thank you very much. See you later. Speaker 1: Bye.