David 0:00
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Carrie Miller 0:46
You don’t have to have that in a variation, you can put the black one, the purple one and the pink one all separately. So you can take up all the advertising advertising space, you can take up organic rank, and you’re gonna you know, especially if you’re getting in early, you’re going to be able to kind of dominate those keywords that you want to dominate for. Okay, if it has demand on Amazon, I’m certain that it’s going to have demand on Walmart, I mean, even you know brand registry keywords, you can go and check and see what you know what’s going on Walmart with those do they even sell this product on Walmart yet you could be kind of one of the first ones to sell on Walmart. So there’s a lot of really good things that you can kind of think outside the box.
Intro 1:22
Welcome, everyone to the firing the men podcast, a show for anyone who wants to be their own boss, if you sit in a cubicle every day, and no you were capable of more than join us. This show will help you build a business and grow your passive income streams in just a few short hours per day. And now your host serial entrepreneurs David shoma and Ken Wilson.
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David 1:45
Welcome everyone to the firing demand podcast on today’s episode, we are joined by Carrie Miller, a senior brand evangelist from Helium 10. And a walmart.com. Expert Carrie has been in the e Commerce Industry since 2016. And has worked at both of the eCommerce software Gulyas, Jungle Scout, and Helium 10. We are very excited to have her as a guest on the show. Welcome, Carrie.
Carrie Miller 2:09
Thanks so much for having me. I’m really excited to chat with you guys today.
David 2:13
Absolutely. So first things first, tell us a little bit about yourself and your story and background.
Carrie Miller 2:18
Okay, so I actually kind of got into this whole thing by accident, which is kind of a cool story. But my dad actually took over a skateboard company in 2015, he was approached by a neighbor who said I need help my son was running as he kind of ran it into the ground. So there were a lot of things that needed fixing and kind of needed a revival, I guess you could say. And so I was actually working at a miserable job. And I think a lot of people probably can relate to that I was doing this sales job, that was awful. And it was in a cubicle and they wouldn’t let us even like, you know, leave our desks, they would even try to incentivize us by buying us lunch so that we wouldn’t leave our cubicle. And so I was just absolutely miserable. And then I quit that job and had this kind of opportunity to take a look at how to help with this business. And they were actually only selling about $200 a month on Amazon. And I was like, I’m pretty sure I could help you know, increase that that’s ridiculous. It’s like two skateboards if that. And so I started learning all about it, they were actually selling on vendor Central. So I went on YouTube, and I learned all about how to sell on Amazon and just you know the difference between vendor Central and Seller Central. So I moved all the listings over to Seller Central and started getting some more profitability, we started getting more sales. And so I did pretty well just optimizing listings, and then decided, well, I’m pretty good at this. And I’m gonna go ahead and become a freelancer. So I actually joined free up and was a freelancer for about two years. And it was funny because they asked him in an interview, you know, are you an expert? And I was like, Yeah, I had been doing it for like, a few months, you know, so I figured I was with all the info that I had learned. They did do some tests, you know, for me to so I did pass all the learning, you know, the tests of questions they had in terms of experts. So I didn’t consider myself an expert at that point, because I had done so much research. So yeah, I did freelancing for a few years. And I actually continued even just after that, and also just been working my business and work at Helium 10 as a brand evangelist now focusing on Walmart. So yeah, that’s kind of a small snapshot of what we do. i We also sell apparel now. So we’ve expanded out to apparel and a few other types of products. So
Ken 4:19
yeah. Awesome. So cool. So carry today, we’re gonna chat about Walmart a lot. And can you share with the audience like, what’s the difference? You know, David and I, we’ve done a lot of shows we’ve sold on lots of different platforms, Etsy, and eBay and all these other platforms. So what what makes Walmart different than those in Washington, you know, why should people really pay attention?
Carrie Miller 4:40
So Walmart is not accepting everyone. So I think that’s the first point is, you know, they want brand owners or basically established brands. So if you’re, you know, there are some drop shippers that have kind of made it onto Walmart, they’ve actually been trying to get rid of drop shippers and they really want brand owners on Walmart. So that’s an important factor. So they want to see that you Have a nice brand on other platforms that you provide really high levels of customer service that you can do fast fulfillment. So you really have to have everything in place. Whereas, you know, Amazon, Etsy, eBay, you can really start as a newbie, which is, I think, really cool on those. But once you’ve established yourself on those platforms, then it’s a good time to start moving over to Walmart, because there’s a bit more exclusivity there, they want brands, and at the same time, there’s less competition right now. So it’s kind of like Amazon was, you know, six, seven years ago, when you could put a listing up and start getting sales. So that’s the main, those are the main differences, I would see.
David 5:34
Very nice, very nice. Now I live in small town, Missouri. And of course, we have a Walmart. And when I think of what types of products are at Walmart, one, they tend to have everything, if you need some odd thing, it’s usually at Walmart. And I would also say that they have reputation of being the low cost provider. And so in terms of like assessing brand fit, if you’re selling products that you may not like envision being at a Walmart store, would Walmart still be a good fit for you? Or what would be the difference between brick and mortar? And online?
Carrie Miller 6:10
That’s actually a really good question. Because that’s the main reason I didn’t want to go into Walmart is like on my products premium, you know, it’s way better. But the online customer profile is a bit different than the in store shoppers. So you are actually going to see a lot more high quality products on the online marketplace, especially with the move of a lot of third party sellers in the marketplace. So there’s definitely you know, they’re trying to increase their customer base with you know, incentivizing Well, you know, joining the Walmart Plus Program, which is like prime, but you will see high quality even like clothing stuff, you know, I used to never buy stuff from Walmart, but I was actually searching and found some really nice, high quality women’s apparel that you can, you know, you can find similar stuff on Amazon. So it’s moving over and people are starting to notice Walmart and starting to buy things. I’ve noticed influencers recently saying, you know, doing, you know, they usually model like things that go off of Amazon, but they’re also incorporating Walmart now for apparel. So you can see a lot of that is changing in regards to the online marketplace. So and, you know, my product is, you know, priced a bit higher than others and they still sell I’m still selling on there are definitely there is demand still on there for more premium products, even from Walmart. So,
Ken 7:16
ya know, that’s a really interesting point. Yeah, it may or may not be a good fit for, you know, if you’re if you’re Gucci, maybe not a good mark. But you know, if you have like, you know, a standard or what David said, like, oddball items that you can find, yeah, now that’s cool. So let’s cover a little bit about what’s different. So a lot of you know, everybody, Walmart is a fairly new sales channel, right for online sellers are kind of exclusive and ramping up letting more sellers come in, like you said, you know, they weren’t brand owners. And so what are some of the differences, like someone’s listening, say, Hey, maybe I should check out this Walmart. What are some of the differences that they saw on Amazon versus selling on Walmart?
Carrie Miller 7:53
One of the big ones that I love is that PPC costs are much lower. So I don’t even manage the PPC and for our Amazon business, we have actually, you know, PBX PPC experts doing that for us, but I am actually managing the Walmart PPC myself. And I’m seeing just a really low cost per click for keywords that are really competitive on Amazon. So there’s just a lot of opportunity there for just yeah, it again, it’s kind of like Amazon was a while ago. So that’s a big, you know, I forgot the main question I was just rambling was yeah, no,
Ken 8:24
no worries. So what are some of the differences between, you know, selling on Amazon’s marketplace versus Walmart, like, listing optimization photos, at you know, things like that? Okay, so
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Carrie Miller 8:35
yeah, so you’ve got the PPC stuff, it’s actually really basic, though, I will say it’s, you know, you can’t do negative targeting, there’s no video ads or things like that, unless you’re, there’s some brands can do some bigger kind of banner ads, and things like that. But it’s very basic PPC, so keep that in mind. But you can, you know, get some good traction on some of these big keywords. And in terms of the actual listing itself, if you are an Amazon seller, you’re gonna have an easy time just assimilating to Walmart, because you already know how to create really good content, you already know how to create good images and kind of creating a story for your product in the images. So really, you just have to, you know, convert it over to the format for Walmart. So, you know, that means the description and the bullets are different. A lot of people you can actually tell when somebody just copied and pasted their Amazon listing over and Walmart doesn’t like that. They want you to format the title a little bit differently. And there’s guidelines on how you need to do your key features is what the bullets are your key features and your description. So they also don’t like keyword stuffing. So a lot of Amazon sellers still do this, where they just stuffed the title with a lot of keywords. And Walmart does not reward that. So the better that you follow their guidelines for their listing quality score, which they have, the better you’re going to do in terms of rank. So the listing quality score has to do with content. So how you write your title and make sure that you have all the information they want in the title in the description and the bullet points. There’s also fulfillment so quick fulfillment is what they really prioritize. So if you get into their Walmart fulfillment services, or WFS, which is kinda like their prime, Amazon’s prime delivery, then that’s going to speed up your fulfillment. And they actually prioritize that that helps with your ranking. And also reviews are also incorporated into that reviews are really quite simple. If you have a Shopify account, which is, this is one of the coolest things, you can literally syndicate your reviews over from your Shopify account. So basically, you just apply to this program through Walmart syndication, and then you get contacted, it takes them a few weeks to contact you back. But then you basically upload a spreadsheet with your reviews on it, and then they put it on your Walmart listing. And it’ll even say, syndicated from your website. So you’ve got your website, and even on on the reviews written on there. So lots of really, really good, I don’t know, just, those are kind of some of the differences, I’m trying to think of some more Oh, there’s also a plus content is a little bit different on Walmart. So they do have a plus content, but it’s called Rich Media, and you actually have to pay for it. So on Amazon, you can get that for free, right. So you get a free, you know, you can upload it for free, no, no cost. But on rich media per module, like if you do a video, you pay for that you pay for the hosting for, you know, any kind of infographics or anything like that, but the rich media, I think, for Walmart is actually really cool, and even better than Amazon. So I will say that’s different. But again, you have to pay per SKU per module, so it can really get expensive there. And you know, paying for that hosting, and there’s different third parties that allow you to host that rich media in there. So those are some differences. Hopefully, I encompassed all of them.
David 11:27
Yeah, there’s a lot, there’s three specific things that I want to revisit. The first is rich media. So what has been your experience with this? Is the juice worth the squeeze? Is it does your conversion rate go up enough to justify the cost.
Carrie Miller 11:40
So I don’t know if you saw this, but they actually had rich media down for probably almost a year, they actually had it going. And there was a lot of data that showed that there was some conversion increases with the rich media, but then they took it down and it you could only do the description and the key features. So they just recently re implemented it where you can do video and the the rich content with you know, the infographic or kind of comparison charts, you can do different infographics with videos, a lot of really cool stuff. So we still have to kind of test more on how much it’s going to increase conversion. So I think the jury’s still out. But I do think that, you know, the better you can enhance your listing, the more sales you’re gonna get, just because you’re you know, the prettier you make it. It makes it more attractive to people. But I think, you know, because they just, they’re just rolling out the modules again, now, I think we’ll have to kind of re revisit that and do some more testing. But if we look at the results that we get from Amazon, we can probably transfer that over to Walmart and say, yeah, it does help with conversion. Now in terms of how much that’s a question. I you’d have to you’d have to pay itself off. Right. So
David 12:45
yeah, absolutely. Point number two I wanted to revisit, we were talking about importing reviews from Shopify, I remember when I set up a Shopify store once there was a plugin that you could import reviews from Amazon. Yeah. And we’ve got, you know, we’re a lot of our listeners probably have some Amazon products that have a moat of reviews, four or 5000. Is that can you go from Amazon, to Shopify to Walmart,
Carrie Miller 13:09
I actually think you can. I personally didn’t. So I didn’t have as that many reviews necessarily on my Shopify site, but I put those reviews from my Shopify, like, verified onto the spreadsheet, but I think you just have to be careful, because a lot of times, it’ll say, especially when you’re bulk importing, right, because they’ll say, Amazon customer already mentioned Amazon, and the review. So if that happens, you know, you can get into a lot of trouble if they see that. So once you get kicked off of Walmart, you’re, it’s real, it’s just like, let me know, if you get kicked off here, it’s going to be hard for you to get back on. And so I would recommend just getting some reviews on your site, you can even have your friends, you know, order the product from your site and have put reviews up there that are verified, because it’s just not worth the risk. Really, in my opinion. However, there are sellers who do it. So I’m sure they’ll crack down and more. But again, you know, when you have these big sellers, there’s 1000s of reviews you’re importing, you don’t really look at the details of you know, what the names are, and you know, whether or not you want to do that thing is up to you. But personally, I just, I don’t want to get kicked off the platform. So
David 14:11
that makes sense. That makes sense. So even
Carrie Miller 14:13
in even I have products that don’t even have reviews, and I sell a lot of product on Walmart. So I don’t even think they’re as important as maybe Amazon. So that’s something to also keep in mind. So even if you have 510 20 reviews, you’re gonna be ahead of most competitors at this point. And so you don’t have to worry about quantity you want quality, and that’s what I would say on that.
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David 14:35
That makes sense. That makes sense. And then third point I wanted to revisit and then I’m gonna kick it back over to Ken, you were talking about PPC for Walmart. And you had mentioned that PPC tends to be cheaper on a cost per click basis. We have seen that but very moderately in the categories that were selling. It seems like CPC is like five to 10% less, but I’ve heard examples of people that are like much less and so it makes me think IS OUR Walmart strategy effective? Or are we in the minor leagues, and we need to get to the major leagues. And so are there. You know, one thing about their PVC is that bidding system it changed. It’s changed three times since we’ve been on the platform. And so if someone is listening, and they want to get to that majorly PPC, on Walmart, any pro tips?
Carrie Miller 15:22
Um, well, there is, you know, there are software’s that you can use that might bring you to the next level, like I use PAC view to help manage my PPC, which helps you to see better, it’s much easier to see the reporting and your conversion on different keywords. Because it’s a lot more manual work, if you just do it through the Walmart Connect platform, I don’t know if you guys have noticed that kind of finding, you know, where you’re converting, and it’s just kind of a more difficult challenge. So maybe using a tool, I think, would help I, I stopped using the auto campaigns too, because they were wasting a ton of my money. And I just used Helium 10 to do exact searches. And I’ve been doing exact campaigns, and then the successful ones, I moved to broad and phrase match as well with those same keywords. So I don’t know if you guys are losing out. But you probably you might consider as well as just like, Have you filled in all of your attributes on your actual, you know, listing that could be something that you could get more exposure by just filling those out? And are you in the right product type, I don’t know, if you noticed, you can’t really, if you’re in the wrong products, if you can’t really advertise on certain keywords. So I don’t know if you’ve seen that happening, maybe you need to, to do some split testing and choose a different product type for a little while and see, you know, based on what your competitors have, whether or not that product type is going to be better for your PPC to there’s things like that. But yeah, I don’t know, I found a lot of the keywords that are even longer tail, now we’re converting more that than they were before, before they changed everything because they’re focused more on relevancy. So I think that’s going to change a lot more so that you can actually capitalize on some of the long longer tail keywords now, because before it was like you really only did the general. And that’s pretty much where people search is just these general keywords, and then they kind of filter down. So I don’t, I think there are obviously some products like you know, vitamin C, or things like that, that you’re gonna have a higher cost per click, but I think in comparison to Amazon, you’re definitely gonna see a lot less even still with some of those. So you might be kind of in the, I don’t know, you’re just in an unlucky product group. But those are kinds of things I’ve, you know, been thinking about just like product type, you know, split testing and doing just things like that, where you can see if that has any effect on it. Also, I mean, if you’re at the top for some keywords, if you’ve ranked, you know, maybe see if turning off those keywords, if it affects anything, and if you can still do some conversion, you know, get some conversions up there, because you know that you can rank pretty easily in comparison to Amazon. So that might be you could be cannibalizing your own organic ranks there too. Hopefully, that was
David 17:49
good. No, that’s I there’s a lot there. I’m taking it all in. I have follow up questions, but I don’t want to nerd out on PPC. So I’m gonna kick it over to Ken.
Ken 17:59
Awesome. Yeah, so kind of staying on that note, really good tips here. Carrie, I’ve got some notes down here, too. So as saying on this keywords theme, you know, like for the listeners who are selling on Amazon, they’re wanting to switch over to Walmart? Are the keywords the same? Like, you know, let’s do like, what is it coffin lamp? Would it be the same, like, same search volume on, you know, Amazon as Walmart. And then the other? The second piece of this question is, you know, Helium 10 has some tools to help everyone out with those. Can you describe kind of that?
Carrie Miller 18:29
Yeah, actually, yeah. So that kind of answers both questions, if you actually use Cerebro, which is our reverse product ID tool where you can basically see you know, keywords where your competitors are indexing for and just, you know, you can get the search volume, we actually put side by side the search volume of Walmart right next to Amazon. So you can see that on magnet and Cerebro whenever you do any searches, you’ll see them side by side, and you will notice a lot lower search volume on Walmart, however, you know, that doesn’t necessarily mean there isn’t any demand for those products, they use a lot of filters on Walmart so the Walmart shoppers just have a different kind of way of finding products and a lot of like for example, when you go and you search say you search a I don’t know what shoe organizer or something like that. They’re gonna filter for different things like reduced is a big one. So if you put the reduced tag you’re gonna be more visible because you put that reduced tag now is your price really reduced? You know, it doesn’t necessarily have to be it could be you know, you price it higher and you put it as reduced because people want to feel like they have a deal you know, some of these shoppers still do want to feel like they have the deal is so I’ve seen so I’ve seen the reduced tag work you know a little bit better but they are looking you know, filtering by color. So making sure that you have all those different colors in there so that when you’re filtering down that you’re still showing up for some of these colors. So I think just also just realizing that they the shoppers search a little bit differently than Amazon Amazon will they’ll do like exact like you know longtail keywords like coffin shelf with you know soft handle and big strap, you know, like they’re looking for these big, you know longtail keywords, whereas that’s not the same thing as when we’re that’s why the attributes are so important because that’ll help you to show up on these filters when they’re filtering down. So search volume is important, but it’s not necessarily equating to how many people are gonna see your listing, if that makes sense.
David 20:18
Sorry to interrupt the episode, you may have heard Ken and I talking recently about a new tool that we’re using for Amazon refunds. Now I have used other refund tools like this. However, I can tell you in the first seven days, they scrubbed the back end of my Amazon account going back 18 months in found $5,000 of refunds. And the nice thing about this is, it’s my money, Amazon made a mistake, and they are just auditing my account. The other thing I really like about this tool is there is no monthly fee, they only charge a commission if they are successful in getting you your money. Go to github.com GE T ID a and enter promo code ft m for firing the man FTM 400. This is an awesome tool. I can’t say enough good things about it. Now back to the episode. So continuing on this conversation about keywords, there’s in my experience, there has been like two primary ways to get keywords, one would be run an auto campaign and see what ones you can vote for. And then the second would be using a tool. So it could be reverse Aysen lookup it could you could have your seed keywords, but those are kind of the two primary things. When you were talking about PPC, you said something I want to make sure I understood this correctly. You said I’ve turned off my auto campaigns. And I go to Helium 10. And I’m using I’m taking those and putting them in manuals. So what is how do we find these keywords? Like what’s the most efficient way to find the keywords? Because it’s kind of like the classic technique, run autos, farm keywords, see what converts, but is there a better way?
Carrie Miller 21:53
Yeah, so Well, there are some suggestions, I think like impact view, they do use some good data to like give you some suggestions. So there is that like, what if you have a PPC tool that way, but in terms of Helium 10, I do this similar like I’ll do the reverse ASINs or sorry, reverse product, Id search for my competitors. And I’ll find keywords and then I’ll kind of go down rabbit holes and just I do a lot of keyword research, I’ll look at all kinds of similar types of products that I could potentially rank for. I’ll go to magnet to find similar, you know, you put in one keyword and you’ll get a bunch of similar types of keywords. So that’s been more efficient. I’ve also been noticing within the helium 10 tools, there’s a lot of Spanish words. So we don’t have a filter yet for you know, filtering out those Spanish words. But that I did notice when I did have an auto campaign going that I was actually converting for those Spanish words quite more than I expected. So that’s something that you shouldn’t ignore on on Walmart, I’m not sure what the you know, the demographics are for sure for like the Spanish speaking population. But it does seem like something that maybe a lot of sellers are not capitalizing on right now. So you can find you will see the Spanish keywords within the helium 10 tools. And if you know a little Spanish, you can know for sure which ones are more relevant, or you can just look up so yeah, that the helium 10 tool is really been what I utilized to find those because I was finding that the auto campaigns were way off for a while, like, you know, I don’t know if you guys have seen that, but like not even in the ballpark. And I was like this is not what I want. So until they get that more dialed in, I’m not going to use the auto campaigns, I’m using helium 10 and some of the kind of suggested keywords in pack view that they recommend. So hopefully that answered your question. But yeah, I think those Spanish keywords are gonna be like those could be gold for a lot of sellers.
David 23:42
Where do you so you pull the this information out of helium? 10? What do you generally start your bids at
Carrie Miller 23:47
I always I start them lower and then in pack few you can increase them based on whether or not you get impressions. So you know, from not getting impressions, I’ll increase them 1010 cents by start at the lowest, and then just keep going from there to see. Because before before that, I mean, I was wasting so much money but bidding like $1 on something that was 35 cents. So it’s definitely improved quite a bit because I could I you know, I can just incrementally increase them and see you know, where the pricing is instead of just way overpaying. So I have seen my costs go down because of that, which I’m really appreciative of that change with the PPC is the second price auction.
Ken 24:24
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, definitely the we’ve seen the auto campaigns or, you know, Walmart, they’re getting better. I’m not gonna knock them they’re getting better month over month, we see lots of improvements, but the auto campaigns are super clunky, not being able to negate current, you know, IDs are Yeah, and we’ve seen some stuff coming through the some of the data coming through where they’re showing it for random stuff. And but yeah, they’re still working. They’re improving. So next question I’ve got is So David, David likes to refer this as the golden ticket, which like, what is it Charlie and Chocolate Factory, right? Yep, yeah. So David, do you want this one?
David 24:59
Yeah, yeah. So so I’ve heard and I don’t know if anybody, but I’ve heard of people that sell on walmart.com, they get a phone call one day and say, Hey, do you want to sell your product in 10,000 stores? Here in the US as part of Walmart brick and mortar that is exciting to me. That’s very exciting to me. And so curious, have you heard of this happening to anybody? And do you have any pro tips on how to stand out on walmart.com? To better position yourself to get that golden ticket?
Carrie Miller 25:28
That’s a really good question. Yeah. So I actually, it’s funny, before I even started selling on walmart.com, we were trying to do some retail. And so we’re, you know, cold calling, kind of, and they basically told us, we won’t accept you until you prove yourself on the online marketplace. So for anyone who’s hoping to get into WalMart, without going on to the onto walmart.com, there, you’re really not going to get there. So things that you can do to stand out is you know, just they’re looking really on sales volume, that’s a main thing for those people who get the you know, that golden ticket call. But for open call that they just had, they had an you had an ability, it was actually in June, you could apply to go basically showcase your product in front of the buyers. Now, the main qualification that they had was they wanted it to be made in the USA. So if you have products that are made in the USA, you’re gonna have a one app on a lot of people going forward, I think because that was their main kind of criteria for even being able to apply for open call. So anyone out there that’s, you know, made in the USA, that’s a really good thing for you. Now, some people kind of got around because they’re like, Oh, we assemble it in the USA, maybe they put the packaging together in the USA, you know, they kind of got around it different ways. But you know, obviously, if you have really high sales volume, you’re probably going to get a good nice golden ticket, right? That’s going to be an easier in you’ll probably have an account manager because you have higher sales. So you’ll have a lot more connection with with Walmart. But again, you know, those made in the USA products, if you have that very good potential, which I think is exciting, you know, just promoting the those USA brands. So, but yeah, I do actually know somebody who is in there, but that was the other part of your question.
David 27:04
Yeah. Do they drive a Lamborghini now, actually, yeah.
Carrie Miller 27:07
I mean, if you guys have watched, you know, some of our we have a freedom ticket Walmart in our Helium 10. It’s like a just a course I do with Michael Lebar. And David Milstein. And they are very big sellers. And they also have the Walmart agency. And so yeah, they’re definitely living large. But Michael just got some products into into the stores recently, just after this last open call. So very exciting there. I do know some others who went to open call, but I haven’t heard if they’ve gotten their products in so I guess they’re still kind of waiting to hear on that. But yeah, it’s pretty cool. Pretty exciting. I mean, Michaels like 23 or 24 or something. So you know, you can do this if you’re out there. You know?
Ken 27:47
Yeah, that’s exciting as super motivated to next question I have is, it’s a little bit a little bit deeper, a higher level. So if someone it’s more or less like structure on selling on Walmart, and how to like set up listings, and really market better, and so it’s because it’s a little bit, it’s a lot different than Amazon. So let’s use an example of coffin shelf, we have coffin shelf product, we have it in three sizes, and you know, small, medium, and large and three colors, right. And so on Walmart, the first one you enter is going to be your lead your main one and that is one that you run ads to and so as you’re building up these listings, do you have advice for our listeners on like, making sure you maybe use your alpha or you kind of build those out properly because otherwise you can’t go back and change those that I know well, what
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- English (Publication Language)
Carrie Miller 28:29
I kind of did is I actually Okay, so I have some apparel products, obviously I have to keep those in a variation. So what I did on those is I put the different colors in different variations and then just had the sizing as the variation so that I can take up more real estate so I can advertise all of those colors instead of just the one color with the parent basically listing or the kind of the base image or base listing that they talked about. So I kind of utilize that strategy because I learned that from Michael from his kind of strategies is just as real estate you know, when it comes to advertising or even just Amazon the more you take up, the better you’re going to do so I have another product that I have I could very easily put it into a variation but I didn’t I just kept it all separate and you know kind of like coffin shelf that would be a perfect example you don’t have to have that in a variation you can put the black one the purple and the pink one all separately so you can take up all the advertised advertising space you can take up organic rank and you’re going to you know especially get if you’re getting in early you’re going to be able to kind of dominate those keywords that you want to dominate for so other people you know they do put the variations all together but again you can only advertise that one base and you get to choose which one is the kind of like the parent listing so you get to choose and so obviously your best selling color would probably be the one if you did put them all in the same variation you want to choose that that best seller to do but I kind of did it strategically. So you’ll see on some of the keywords and bidding for you can see like all because I make there’s a bunch of campaigns to you. My back view account you can see it’s kind of getting messy to be honest but You know, when you see that keyword, you’ll see my product across the top. So, okay,
Ken 30:05
cool. Yeah. Yeah, taking them out of real estate, it makes sense.
David 30:10
I want to summarize this real estate with an example just to make sure I have this right. So you’ve got, say, small, medium, large, in blue, black and green. So you would set up three parents with three children, for each.
Carrie Miller 30:23
Yeah, so I have like, I do my one for blue. And I do a small, medium large, that’s one listing. And then I’ll do a green, small, medium large, that’s another listing. And then you know, purple, small, medium, large, that’s another listing so that I can advertise all those colors. Otherwise, you put them all in the same variation, you’re only going to be able to choose the one based listing to showcase. So there’s also color keywords, you know, so like, you know, purple t shirt, you can’t you know, if your base isn’t purple, it’s not going to stand out, right. So for me, that’s the strategy I think is most effective. Because I can take up more real estate and I can really dial in on those keywords to for better conversion.
David 31:03
That’s really interesting. I was kind of always have the Amazon mindset where you pile all your variations under one listing. So you can have a bunch of reviews. That’s really i but with the way PPC is structured, that makes sense. Wow. Okay. Wow, the wheels are turning this is. So final question before we get into the fire round Helium 10. We’re huge fans of Helium 10. And in all of their tools. And so for somebody with a subscription to Helium 10. If you’re building a Walmart toolbox, what tools are you using? How are you using them? Yeah, so on and so forth? What strategy would you build around Walmart, specifically as it relates to Helium 10.
Carrie Miller 31:40
So we have X ray for Walmart. So you can utilize that to see sales volumes, we actually have Amazon data in there right next to Walmart data. So you can see, you know, kind of the comparison if we have the ability to connect it. So you can see sales revenue sale units sold, you can see reviews, review averages review count, just like you can on the X ray for Amazon, something else that I like is that we have kind of a listing quality score estimate. Now it’s not exact, but it’s actually pretty close to what your actual listing quality score is. So you can take a look at your competitors listing quality score, estimate, and you can see, okay, they’re failing because they are not even in WFS, or they have terrible images, or, you know, their images aren’t up to snuff. And they’re, you know, they’re their listing copy isn’t great. So you can actually see, you know, the areas of opportunity, which is that listing the listing quality portion on there. So X ray is really helpful for that. And then we also have Cerebro, and magnet for the keyword research, I write those keywords into my listing. And I don’t do a ton of like longtail keywords, but I do the basic main ones that I really want to focus on. And then I also use it for, you know, my pay per click advertising. Going back to X ray, though, something that I think is key to if you’re looking at competitiveness, so say you’re trying to like say which ones which products from Amazon, should I move over first, or you can look at the percentage of wfs products. And if there’s a high number of WFS, you’re gonna know that’s more competitive, because you know, ranking is really like even Walmart has said that they’re really emphasizing using WFS, or Walmart fulfillment services. So if you get into that, you get some ranking juice. So that’s another key element that I forgot to mention on X ray. So those are all kind of key components. Cerebro magnet again, for those keywords, for your PPC for your listing, really all very important. We also have a keyword tracker. So keyword tracker, you can track up to 250 keywords, you can see the search volume in there. And now you can see organic and sponsored rank at the same time. Now, before when you could only have you remember this but on Walmart, you can only see either you’re sponsored or you’re organic for and then they changed that whole thing. So now I can see you can see a keyword tracker, your sponsored and your organic rank without having to turn off your PPC to see where you’re at organically. So you can keep track of all of that. And you can also do boost so you can track it every hour if you wanted to. You can track competitors and see where they’re ranking. So keyword tracker, we also have profits, which is going to give you an easy overview of your profitability on Walmart. So you don’t have to, you know, go to your accountant, every time you can kind of see a breakdown of your products, you can see maybe which ones are winners or losers or what where you might need to improve. So all of these are really helpful and we don’t have black box currently for you know, finding new products on Walmart but it doesn’t mean you can’t use the black box for Amazon and then go over to Walmart and use X ray to determine if it’s a good product I that’s kind of my strategy is just okay, if it has demand on Amazon, I’m certain that it’s going to have demand on Walmart, I mean, even you know brand registry keywords, you can go and check and see what you know what’s going on Walmart with those do they even sell this product on Walmart yet you could be kind of one of the first ones to sell on Walmart. So there’s a lot of really good things that you can kind of think outside the box and it’s kind of like the wild west in a way but then you know, it’s exciting. So lots of opportunity.
David 34:51
Very nice, very nice. Before we get fire round, it’s not every day that we get to talk to somebody from Helium 10 And if it’s alright with you, we we love you We obtained tools, and we came up with a wish list of things that we would love to see. And I’d love to share those with you. Very briefly. So would love to see refund Genie on Walmart would love to that big fan of that tool on Walmart. And I know wfs messes up because we found some on our own. So it makes me wonder what are we missing split testing for price on both Amazon and Walmart. And I don’t know, it would be awesome to link up to ad Tomic to measure your PPC and then link up to profits. So you can measure parent level profitability, and also link up to conversion rate and BSR. That’s all my wish list is very specific. But But anyway, those are, like I said, it’s for those of you who are unfamiliar with helium 10, go check them out. And we’ll leave a link to the show notes in the show notes for you to check that out. But yeah, that’s our wish list.
Carrie Miller 35:56
Yeah, I mean, that is a good point about the, you know, refund, Genie, because everyone should be keeping good track of your inventory and everything, because there are some mistakes. So you definitely want to keep track of all that as much as you can, even without a tool, but that I mean that that’s something that I’ll definitely take back to them because it’s important, and definitely an issue right now.
David 36:14
Well, yeah. Well, thank you for letting me hear that. So yeah, yeah. All right. Ken, over to you.
Ken 36:21
Yeah, absolutely. So carry it for every show. We do a fire round. Are you ready?
Carrie Miller 36:25
Yep. I’m ready. All right. What
Ken 36:27
is your favorite book?
Carrie Miller 36:28
My favorite book is The Count of Monte Cristo. We love that story. also love the movie too. So both of my favorites. I know it’s not an you know, a self help book. But there’s a lot of elements of life and just, you know, overcoming obstacles and you know, not letting difficulties hold you back for your future. So a lot of good self help within this story, I think.
Ken 36:52
No, absolutely. You know, too many self help books. You just go off in one direction. So you might have to, it might be time to level set. Right. So yeah, that’s awesome. What are your hobbies? I have quite
Carrie Miller 37:00
a few. I really like lying. That’s one of my favorites. But I love rollerblading, hiking. I live you know, I’m in Southern California. So we’ve got a lot of hiking, good hiking trails, and Boynton Beach. I have really liked to travel. Scuba diving is I’ve been scuba diving since that since I was 13. So been medical places doing that. So yeah, those are kind of my main. Oh, I like cooking too. So
Ken 37:23
that’s awesome. Yeah, you’re busy. That’s cool. Cool. So what is one thing that you do not miss about working for the man the cubicle,
Carrie Miller 37:29
I cannot tell you how much I hated being chained to a cubicle. But I mean, I was also a teacher for five years. So I was a teacher and I felt like kind of in prison. And so that’s kind of how I remember just because you can’t leave like you can’t Oh, I you know, need to go the bathroom. Like you have three hours so you can go out and you know, just be a normal human. So it’s just like a really challenging thing. But you know, like just being in a cubicle. I remember thinking like, I think it was probably a little over 10 years ago. I was like, I’m going to work from home or I’m going to I’m going to get out of this because I cannot do this forever. Like it was you know, not I’m did you guys work in cubicles?
Ken 38:10
Yes, yes. Prison. Yeah, it is.
David 38:13
I did. I did five years. Okay, yeah. I did a five year sentence.
Carrie Miller 38:19
Yeah. So that was like something I thought about all the time was like, How do I get out of this? And I was always looking for something like how do I get out of this cubicle? Because it is just not only that, like, your managers like watching you like you know just you know critiquing you make us united sales like oh, you should have said this. It’s like yeah, I should have coulda woulda, but that’s just okay, just moving on, you know, a lot of just like constant struggles in the cubicle. So I don’t miss the cubicle. So hopefully that was enough emphasis on the pain of the cubicle.
Ken 38:51
Yeah, yeah, I think I don’t know how many people we’ve interviewed on the show probably close to 100. And I think that’s probably the number one is like just being like locked down in that cubicle. So definitely agree. Alright, last one. What do you think sets apart successful ecommerce entrepreneurs from those who give up fail or never get?
Carrie Miller 39:06
I think that like, I’ve talked to a lot of big sellers. And there are challenges always, like there’s big failures, and they just keep going. And I’m really lucky because I work with my dad. And so I’m, oh my gosh, this is the worst thing ever. But he is one of those people who will sit down and like how do we work through this challenge? How do we, you know, make this an opportunity kind of thing. So I think that’s what really sets you apart. Because if you let every single failure derail you, you’re not going to you know, do well I think a lot of the most successful people turn those failures into a new opportunity. And some of the sellers I’ve even talked to, they failed on their first like four products. They I mean, they had a lot of reasons to quit, but they kept going and then ended up being multimillion dollar sellers. So you know, I think really that does set it’s the mindset and just the ability to work through issues and not let your emotions take over and and just you know doing the best you can to work through things that come up. Because there’s a lot that happens. There’s a lot that changes that just from being in the business from 2016 to now things have changed so much. So, you know, you could let that frustrate you. It’s like, well, it’s not as easy as it used to be, I don’t want to do this anymore. Well, that’s, you know, that’s what sets apart people or even just like, for example, getting on Walmart, it’s kind of challenging getting onto the platform, right? Well, that’s going to separate the people who are going to get on it, and those who aren’t, because then once you give up, they don’t, they’re giving up that opportunity. And that, that ability to get in there when you can literally get at the top of the search, and really capitalize on a low competition market. So hopefully that
Ken 40:34
was true. Yep, absolutely. David, you want to close out the show?
David 40:38
Absolutely. What would be the best way for our audience to get in touch with you or healing?
- Fishman, Charles (Author)
- English (Publication Language)
- 352 Pages - 12/26/2006 (Publication Date) - Penguin Books (Publisher)
Carrie Miller 40:43
So I actually have this Facebook group called Helium 10. Winning with Walmart. And in that group is where I’ll answer questions about Walmart. And I go live every Wednesday and I ask questions that you can just put submit them to me or you can just ask them live. So I’m there to support with Walmart. So I think that’s probably the best way to find me is just in that Walmart group on Facebook. So I hope a lot of people join and, you know, ask lots of good questions, so we can all get better.
David 41:11
Absolutely, absolutely. Well, I want to thank you so much for being a guest on the foreign command podcast. And I would definitely like to have you on again, I feel like on some of these topics, we just scratched the surface and really enjoyed it. So thank you so much.
Carrie Miller 41:25
You’re thanks so much for having me. I had a lot of fun. And I’m Yeah, I would love to come back and just dive in because there’s a lot more to some of these things that we discussed. So thanks again for having
David 41:34
me. Thank you everyone for tuning into today’s firing the man podcast. If you liked this episode, head on over to firing the man.com and check out our resource library for exclusive firing the man discounts on popular e commerce subscription services that is firing demand.com backslash resource, you can also find a comprehensive library of over 50 books that Ken and I have read in the last few years that have made a meaningful impact on our business, or that head on over to www dot firing demand.com/library Lastly, check us out on social media at firing the man in on YouTube at firing demand for exclusive content. This is David Schomer
Ken 42:15
and Ken Wilson, we’re out
David 42:32
before you go fun fact for all you Amazon sellers out there when you start selling in international marketplaces, all of your reviews come with you. At the beginning of this year, Ken and I sat down and talked of ways that we could double our businesses in size and landed on international expansion as our number one initiative this year. We partnered up with Kevin Sanderson from maximizing e commerce and he has made the process an absolute breeze walking us step by step through the process. If you want to grow your revenue and reach new customers head on over to https://maximizingecommerce.com/fire and connect with Kevin Sanderson today. Now back to the show.