Helium 10 Buzz 1/10/25: Amazon Retail Ad Service | TikTok Shop New Country

Helium 10 Buzz 1/10/25: Amazon Retail Ad Service | TikTok Shop New Country Bradley Sutton: Amazon changes the game for retail advertising. TikTok Shop is opening in a surprising new country. eBay makes a move to join with a popular social media network. These stories and more on this week's Weekly Buzz. 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 goings on in the Amazon, TikTok Shop, and e-commerce world. We give you training tips of the week and let you know what new features that Helium 10 has that will give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Let's see what's buzzing. All right, this is the first buzz of the new year or second buzz of the new year, I should say, let's go ahead and hop into it. The first thing I'm going to talk about is an announcement they made at CES this week. The one who's reporting on it is actually CNBC and the article is entitled Amazon Aims To Expand Advertising Business By Letting Retailers Use Its Ad Tools On Their Store. So some of the TLDR here is that Amazon is letting other retailers now use its own homegrown advertising tools to run sponsored ads on their own website. The service is designed to make it easier for other retailers to run targeted ad campaigns on their online stores. Alright, so as we know, ads has been big for Amazon over the years. We know that as Amazon sellers, but this is different. So basically, let's say I've got my own retail website. I can now use Amazon's advertising console to use the ad tech or the advertising technology that Amazon has to run ads on my product pages on my website on search. This is going to help Amazon build how it can anticipate buyer behavior and things, but it's going to help retailers as well because obviously Amazon's advertising system is very robust. I believe you don't even have to be selling on Amazon to take advantage of this service. So this is going to be interesting to watch as it rolls out and how this changes the game for retailers perhaps, like how many are going to adopt the Amazon advertising as opposed to whatever they were using before, how many might start advertising more because of what's going on. Be definitely worth taking a look at. Now, last week, we talked about the new title requirements. And there was an Ask Me Anything in the Amazon forums a few days ago that kind of clarified some things and even some things that I was confused about. I'm not sure if I said it wrong last week, but like I probably read it right. But for sure, I understood it wrong. All right. The way I understood the title was that you can't duplicate words in the title. Did some of you guys get that too out of what their announcement was? But actually, the fine print says, you can't have more than two. All right, it's not it's not you can't have two or more. It's more than two little bit of dyslexia there. So basically, that means if I have the word in the title, you know, coffin shelf for home decor, something, something coffin, blah, blah, blah, blah, that's okay. Last week when I read this, I thought that wasn't okay because I just must have switched the words when I was looking at it. But that's the first big thing that came from this AMA. But let's go ahead and open up some more of the questions and answers. There are some things that you guys might have had that I think are notable. Here is one question that I know a lot of us had. It said, are the plural and singular versions of a word considered the same and count towards the maximum? And this seller said, for example, If I had cake, pan, loaf pan, and muffin pans, is the word pans counted as the same as pan? And then that would make it three times, meaning that it's above two, meaning that that's against Amazon terms of service. And Jim from Amazon replied, plural of the same word would be considered redundant. In the example you provided, pan and pans imply the same and thus it would be considered duplicate. I know people are asking about that, how are plurals considered? That's the answer right there. Another question was from, what impact will it have if we don't update, change the title like this could significantly affect our search traffic? Jim says, if the title is not updated, Amazon will modify the product title to comply with a new policy while retaining all relevant information. There you have it. You're not going to get your listing suppressed per se, but Amazon's going to go in and change your title, it sounds like. Another question by PTC Tim. Do words that are part of the brand name count towards the count of reusing a word? For example, if the brand name is Muffin King, could they have a title such as Muffin King Beginner's Kit Includes Chocolate Chip and Banana Nut Muffin Mixes and a 12 Muffin Pan? All right, so muffin is there three times in singular version. So you might think, oh, that can't be allowed. But, Jim from Amazon says, no, this will not be considered a policy violation because the word or phrase is considered duplicate only when there are three or more instances in the same context but muffin, the first instance, is a brand name and the other two describe the product. So if you have a word that's part of your brand, like maybe my brand was Manny's coffin shelves, that first coffin doesn't count as the use of the word coffin in the title. That makes sense. Another person asked a question and says, you know, there were some punctuation marks that were listed like dollar sign, question mark, underscore, et cetera. And it says, are these the only special characters allowed? What about dash, colon, open parentheses, close parentheses, et cetera? Jameson actually answered, he said, hyphen, colon, and regular brackets are allowed as they often have functional value. There actually were some other characters not allowed that Amazon didn't announce, and these are the tilde, like the little ñ that goes over the N in Spanish when you say baño. The greater than and less than symbols, those aren't allowed. The semicolon is not allowed and the, I don't know how you describe it, but it looks like the top of a house, the roof of a house. That symbol is not allowed. There were more different kind of like specifications and questions that people had that you might want to look at. So make sure to check the link in the comments to see some of the other clarifications on this new title policy. Next article we have here comes from Retail Dive and it's entitled, How TikTok Shop Is Changing The Way Brands Reach Customers. All right. I brought this up because there's a lot of just interesting kind of like factoids here and one of them it says 70% of TikTok shop or TikTok users say they discover new brands and products on the platform. 70%, that's crazy. And 83% report TikTok playing a role in users' purchase decisions. I guarantee you we're not seeing that kind of stuff on Timu. The company also reports that three in four users are likely to buy something while using TikTok. Think about that guys. How many users of TikTok are there? And 3 in 4 are likely to buy something. You might think, well, that's not something that, you know, all marketplaces, everybody should be buying something. But remember, TikTok is not a marketplace. TikTok is a social media app. You think 3 out of 4 people on Instagram are buying something? 3 out of 4 people on YouTube are buying something? It's like, I don't know what the number is, probably like less than 1 in 10, 1 in 20. So, this is like kind of an astronomical number. Now, why is TikTok so powerful? One reason is here, it says nearly 3 in 5 Gen Z consumers say they trust recommendations by local or micro influencers per a survey. Over a quarter of U.S. consumers who responded to the survey reported buying a gift directly based on an influencer's recommendations. That's kind of crazy and that's what drives TikTok Shop sales is influencers and micro influencers. So guys, if you're not selling on TikTok Shop, get out and do it. We have some training on how to get started. We're going to have some more training. We're going to have different tools that you guys might ask for that would help you sell on TikTok Shop. I'm starting to ramp up. I launched a couple more products on TikTok Shop last night. I'm going to keep launching some products and let you guys know what I find, but I really think that TikTok Shop is going to be one of the major marketplaces moving forward. Speaking of different marketplaces, let's switch gears and talk about a marketplace that I barely ever talk about but I actually personally sell on. That's eBay. So this is articles from CNBC. It says, eBay shares soar after Meta allows listings on Facebook Marketplace in US and Europe. So in Germany, France, and the US, what's going to happen is eBay listings are now going to be able to show up in Facebook Marketplace. Alright, so that's going to give eBay listings a lot of visibility. So let's say I'm browsing on Facebook. I go to the marketplace or maybe who knows, maybe there'll be somewhere you put ads like in my Facebook feed. I'm going to be able to click on that product and then purchase it by signing in on eBay, I believe right there on the Facebook app still. So imagine being on Facebook, going to the Helium 10 members Facebook group because you're getting all the good information there and then you see an ad or something for an eBay product and while still on Facebook, you go ahead and purchase. I mean, if that's the way it's going to work, that's going to be I think I might be a little bit successful for eBay. I'm definitely going to look into it for my eBay listings that I have. How many of you guys sell on eBay out there? Let me know in the comments below. Going back to the Amazon marketplace, last week, in case you missed it, there was a new conversion path reporting, a beta program that Amazon has. It kind of like reminds me of how AMC is set up. But now you're going to be able to see the ad touchpoints on a customer's 30-day path to conversion starting with the purchases. So this is available in sponsored ads. And DSP, make sure to check the link in the article below for more links on where you can find it. But you'll be able to see, oh, they saw the streaming TV, then they went to a sponsored display ad, and then they went to a sponsored video ad, they saw a sponsored product ad. Now, this is good information, but there's definitely some things missing, like you can't see the ACOS. Like, all right, great, I see that. This kind of ad is what drove my sale, but my A cost on that exact ad was like 400%. It's not exactly viable, right? So, I mean, it's not perfect, but this is a great step in the right direction as far as visibility goes with your advertising. Going back to TikTok now, guess what? TikTok is opening up a new marketplace. And it's right here in North America. It is opening to Mexico per Yahoo Finance. It says TikTok expands e-commerce operation into Mexico. And it says that they've already started inviting merchants to open stores on the platform ahead of the expected start of transactions in February. Now, who can sign up for Amazon or TikTok Shop Mexico? Merchants with a locally registered entity are eligible to sign up. Now, that's interesting. Because what's the requirement for USA? As we know, you could have a local entity being a U.S. corporation, but if you're a foreigner with no U.S. employees and nobody with a social security number, you can't sign up. But if this is to be taken at face value, You maybe can be a foreigner, but as long as you have a Mexican entity or business, it looks like you might be able to sign up on the platform. And the first 90 days of activity for TikTok Shop Mexico, zero commission, zero commission fee. So in Mexico or have a Mexican entity, make sure to go ahead and consider starting up on the platform. Let's go into our new feature alerts. Now this one is going to be for I believe all plants, platinum, diamond. It's been for elite for a while because it was actually elite members who first asked for this, but this is going to be in magnets, cerebro, At the start, it might be in other tools, but what sellers were looking for was a way to translate keywords. This could be for, let's say you're in the U.S. marketplace and you see a whole bunch of Spanish keywords and you're just curious what it means. What people would do is they would copy the keywords from Helium 10 and then put it to Google Translate or something like that. Or let's say you're doing keyword research in a marketplace that is not your native language, like maybe you're trying to make a listing for Amazon Japan. Of course, you can use Helium 10 Listing Builder to make a listing in Japanese, but you want to make sure you're feeding it the right keywords and you don't know what the keywords mean in Japanese. Well, this is what you can do. If you go into Listing Builder or into Cerebro, there will be a translate button right here, all right? So if you've got the results in Magnet or Cerebro, just hit that and then you can go from like English to Spanish to German to Chinese. You're going to have an option like I'm going to pretend that maybe I'm somebody from China and I don't speak English that well. Well, I'm going to go ahead and translate these English results into Chinese. By default, it's actually going to show up right underneath the actual English keyword or whatever keyword or language you're looking at, but I can also change it where I can have it in a separate column, all right? So here now, all of a sudden, side by side, I've got the English keyword and the Chinese translation side by side. So this definitely helps English-speaking people who are doing research in other languages or are curious what kind of meaning some of the keywords that are coming up in your own marketplace that are in different language or if you speak a different language and you need just some quick translations, this is going to help. Now let's talk about the training tip of the week. I'm still going to stay right here in Cerebro. I want to show you guys something. Only Helium 10 has this. What it is is the Amazon recommended rank. Here in Cerebro I've got my Coffin Shelf here. Now this is especially helpful if you ever start getting ranking issues like you start losing your rank or if you maybe like lose indexing somehow or maybe there's some keywords that you know you're relevant for in your index for but you just can't get PPC impressions. This is especially helpful when you are first launching a product. As a matter of fact, you know like this is what I've been teaching for the last two years If you launch a product, I say that you almost should always do a test listing first that you're not really going to sell, but just to check this metric. This is Amazon relevancy. Everybody always uses the term relevant. We can kind of insinuate, hey, what is relevant for a product due to the keywords that are ranking for it, but until Helium 10 had this, you never knew what is really relevant to Amazon. What does Amazon think the product is? This Helium 10 is the only tool that's tying directly to Amazon to give you how relevant Amazon thinks a keyword is for your product. It's called Amazon Recommended Rank. It's listed from a score of 1 to 900. The number 1 means It's the most relevant according to Amazon, et cetera. Now, is the number one and number two and number three keywords always the top keywords for your product? No, but looking at the top 20, I always sort it in Helium 10 and I look at the top 20 ones and it will tell me, is Amazon confused about my product, especially if it's a brand new product, right? So let me just show you, for example, this is my coffin shelf here and if I go to this column, of Amazon recommended rank and I hit it, it's going to sort it by the top ones and look at this, number one keyword that Amazon says I'm relevant for, coffin shelf wall. Manny's mysterious oddities coffin shelf. Coffin shelf small. So just by looking at these top 10 keywords, top 20 or so, I can tell that, hey, Amazon pretty much knows what my product is. Now something concerning is, The actual keyword, Coffin Shelf, is only the 28th keyword. That tells me I might have some issues with advertising on my product. I might have to look at what's going on. But at the very least, Amazon isn't very confused about my product. Now let me give you a contrast here. I went to the search results of Coffin Shelf and obviously my product is on page one. But here I scrolled all the way down to page four. And then I saw just some random coffin shelf. Here's a coffin shelf very similar to mine. Pachyon Floating Shelves Coffin Shape Shelf Walmart. This is a terrible title. But you see their BSR is like 7 million. They are not selling any units at all of this. Even though this is one of the few coffin shelves, I mean, page 2 and 3 and 4 don't even have that many coffin shelves because there's not even seven pages worth of coffin shelves. So you might be wondering, why in the world is this product ranking so low? Well, outside of listing optimization, one of the reasons is the relevancy. Take a look when I run this product in Cerebro, and I sort it by Amazon recommended rank. Let's go to that column right here. Do you remember what mine was? Let's just look back here. Remember the top ones? Coffin wall shelf, coffin shelf small, spooky hanging coffin shelf, Halloween decor, indoor home. Look at the top keywords of what Amazon thinks is relevant for this poor selling coffin shelf. Floating shelf wall, floating shelf, wall shelf, shelf, shelves room wall. Do you notice something? These are just generic keywords. So for whatever reason, they must not have a listing optimized or maybe there's a category issue, but Amazon is not even picking up the word coffin in the top keywords that it is saying it's relevant for. This product is probably never going to rank very well for Coffin Shelf, nor are they going to be able to advertise if they wanted to. You can see right here with Helium 10, they're not advertising, but this just kind of like illustrates what can happen if Amazon gets confused about your product, you're going to have some issues. So make sure to check that out. All levels of Helium 10 can access that, Platinum, Diamond, and above. Go into Cerebro, run it on your own product, especially your brand new products, or if you ever have trouble ranking or indexing, and check sorted by the Amazon recommended rank. Take a look at those top 20 keywords and see, hey, does Amazon kind of like have a good idea about what your product is or is it confused? And then you can take action from there. All right, guys, that's it for this week's Weekly Buzz. Hope you enjoyed these articles and also these new features and training tips. We'll see you next week to see what's buzzing.