Amazon FBA is a life-saving solution for online sellers: Just for a minuscule fee, Amazon does all the hard work for you. All that you have to do is ship your products to Amazon and let Amazon do the rest: Store, sell, and deliver your products for you.
The real challenge with selling online is to know which products to sell, and when – something that Amazon’s services don’t cover. This is why you need tools to support you for such purposes. Here are my recommended tools for Amazon FBA – premium and free.
Helium 10 – Any Good?
You read about Helium 10 all over the place (especially when it comes down to aliexpress dropshipping and amazon FBA) and I do have to say it is really expensive at 97$. I would not recommend it for everyone, simply because a lot of the features that Helium 10 offers can be accessed free of charge. Nonetheless, it’s still a very valuable tool and it’s something that I would recommend for more professional sellers.
In a nutshell, Helium 10 is a suite of a bunch of different tools:
It has a Product Research tool, Keyword Research Tool, a Keyword Tracking tool, and Refund Genie. With such various tools, it’s arguably worth that $97 a month price tag. However, I’d say that you don’t necessarily need this.
I use Helium 10 mainly for doing keyword research, figuring out what keywords I want to target, and then tracking those keywords. What I personally would do is to sign up for the product research tool for a month, use it for product research, and you can cancel it.
Here’s an overview of Helium 10 tools I use.
Refund Genie
The one reason it might be worth paying that $97 a month – month after month is because of the refund genie.
You see, Amazon screws up a lot. When someone returns an item of yours, Amazon supposed to give you some of your money back when they lose inventory on Amazon in the Amazon warehouse. Amazon is supposed to give you money for that lost inventory. The thing is, they don’t always do this, so what refund Genie does is it goes in and it looks for any kind of missing money for you.
Keyword Tracker
The other useful tool is the Keyword Tracker. It’s very helpful because you can see how your different marketing efforts are working. Obviously, on Amazon, you want to target certain keywords for your product. The keyword tracker tool will let you know: “hey you know what, last week you were ranked number 5, this week you’re ranked number 3, whatever you’re doing is working” or maybe it’s the opposite. It lets you know that your ranks fall and you need to pay a little bit more attention (and shopify dropshipping is no exception.)
Similar (Free) Tools
Once again, you don’t necessarily need Helium 10. You can get a lot of the features for free. The following tools I’m going to be talking about are those that you can get for free.
Google Keyword Planner
One example of a free tool that does something very similar to what helium 10 does as far as keyword research is Google Keyword Planner. This tool will let you know the search volume for different keywords. However, there are fundamental differences you should know about.
Helium 10 has advanced features that will let you know when people are searching a certain phrase – i.e. “keto butter.” 200 people are searching that in a month; so, maybe that’s a keyword you should target. The Keyword Planner will also let you know about that, but the difference is this: The Google Keyword Planner lets you know how much people are searching in Google, whereas Helium will let you know how much people are searching on Amazon.
Those two numbers should be pretty close and this is why I’m saying it may be worth it to pay for Helium 10, because it’s going to give you more accurate, better data. But if you’re tight on cash just use a keyword plan or the Google Keyword Planner it is a free option.
With the Keyword Planner, you can figure out what keywords you’re targeting. For such function, you can just open up an incognito tab in Google Chrome and search on Amazon for whatever keyword you’re tracking and figure out what your rank is.
Virtual Assistant
Another option that also might save some money is hiring a virtual assistant to do these repetitive boring tasks for you. While software like Helium 10 can do these tasks, hiring a virtual assistant makes sense, especially when you’re a smaller seller and you don’t have a lot of keywords that you’re tracking.
Hiring a virtual assistant was one of the things I’ve ever done for my business, it has literally tripled my productivity. When you hire someone else to do things for your business, a lot of the mundane, boring things you can pass on to them. Online job sites like Fiverr and Upwork allow you to hire virtual assistants in the Philippines for about two to three dollars an hour.
I personally have four virtual assistants. I have people that edit my videos, I have people that handle my Amazon FBA, I have people that reach out to influencers, etc; the point is if you really want to grow your business – you need to remove yourself from the day-to-day operations, as you are actually the bottleneck in the process. The way to get around this is to hire more people.
It just makes it more fun because, honestly, a lot of the tasks I give to my virtual assistants are boring – they’re repetitive, algorithmic, and just not something I necessarily want to do. That’s why I’d recommend you to hire someone online for that purpose.
Takeaway
Tools – premium or free – can help you in maximizing your Amazon FBA venture’s profits. Choose the right tools that fit your budget nicely, and make sure they’re exactly what your business needs.