Bonus: How to Scale Amazon in 2026 – 3 Data Plays DTC Brands Are Still Missing

0:00How are the smartest advertisers thinking about Amazon beyond it being a traffic source? What mature brands are realizing is... Talk to me about how you use Helium 10 to be more efficient.

0:11Bradley Sutton:Data analytics is key. We have by far the largest database of Amazon data out there. Success on Amazon is all about doing all the little stuff, even if it means moving the needle 1%, 2%. Most people who have never dealt with Amazon, they are just shocked at the amount of data that Amazon gives. They don't know what to do with it. On other platforms, they could just guess and just get by by doing whatever they think is best with their own internal teams. But Amazon gives so much data that it is absolutely insane that brands are not leveraging that to make their decisions.

0:50Bradley, welcome to the D2C podcast. I'm excited to jump into this. I was chatting with my Amazon team before. They've, at Pilot House, been longtime users of Helium 10 across the whole product offering. So cool to catch up with you.

1:03Bradley Sutton:Great to be here. Thank you for inviting me. Let's start a little bit. I'm just curious your perspective on the evolution of Amazon as a platform. How are the smartest advertisers thinking about Amazon beyond it just being maybe a traffic source? How it's changed is, first of all, for years, especially with peaking in COVID, Amazon was a place to launch a brand. If you've never been D2C or anything, just any mom and pop could launch an Amazon. And technically you still can. I know of people doing that often, but nowhere near the numbers as it was. But now what mature brands are realizing is that, hey, I can't just look at Amazon as, oh, it's a nice to have, let me go ahead and have some inventory there.

1:46Bradley Sutton:And if there's some spillover from people who don't wanna convert on my website or maybe they bought me in store and they're going to go search me on Amazon. No, like Amazon is just a behemoth just in retail as is. And so what a lot of huge brands that were ignoring Amazon for years, I think saw starting during COVID was, hey, first of all, the world can change at any time and stores, your brick and mortar just closes down. You can't go and the only place to go is online. And people only trust Amazon to get stuff so fast. And it's not just America, like in other countries too, There's like two hour delivery in three hours.

2:23Bradley Sutton:So, so I think, you know, brands are really looking to it as, Hey, this is a serious channel that it's not just a backup plan or let me get some spillover branded search, you know, on Amazon. But it's first of all, a place where people are shopping your brand, but also where you can get new to brand customers by advertising, not in your own brand and search. Maybe it's somebody who's never even heard of you, no matter how big you are. But millions of people are searching Amazon just generic terms like collagen powder and this and that. And this is a perfect way to get some lifetime customers where I don't think people looked at Amazon 10 years ago as a place to get lifelong branded customers.

3:02The other aspect, I guess, is in this fully omni-channel world where people are testing out CTV and TikTok Shop and building these into their growth plans, Amazon becomes that distribution layer in a lot of cases where even though people might shop on TikTok Shop, I'm sure a lot of people still see the brand go directly to Amazon because it's where they're comfortable with.

3:23Bradley Sutton:Absolutely. I mean, and that's been the case for a while, but that has just been accentuated with the launch of things like TikTok Shop and even Walmart. A lot of people didn't want to sell on walmart.com because of the distribution. They're like, okay, I'll have to fulfill myself or I have to go all in and send to WMF, you know, Walmart's version of FBA. And how do I even know this is going to be successful? I might just have sleeping inventory. But now with like, um, you know, with MCF multi-channel fulfillment, Amazon will fulfill your Etsy orders. Amazon will fulfill your TikTok shop orders.

3:54Bradley Sutton:Amazon will fulfill your Walmart orders in non-branded packaging. And so it's like if you're already selling on Amazon, now you can try out all these other marketplaces without a huge investment in your infrastructure or warehousing or inventory where you try it out. And then, hey, things start popping off on TikTok. Go ahead and use Fulfill by TikTok. Things start popping off on Walmart. Go ahead and do the more economical thing and send to WOMF. But even in Amazon itself, we see that shift because there's something called remote fulfillment because Amazon is not just USA. You've got Canada, Mexico, and Brazil for like North America.

4:27Bradley Sutton:And so let's say you've got inventory in Amazon USA. You just flip a switch and that remote fulfillment turns on. Somebody is searching in Amazon.br or whatever the URL is and they see, oh, it's Amazon Prime. You don't even have inventory in Brazil. It's pulling from your Amazon USA inventory. Now the shipping times are not great, obviously, to go to Canada from US or to Brazil or Mexico. But it's the same concept where you see which products are really popping off and then the ones that do. Okay, now you can go ahead and send to the actual Brazil FBA so you can get the two-day shipping. And so it's a really amazing system that Amazon's got going.

5:03You're in a pretty unique position on this podcast because you're a longtime team member, one of the first team members at Helium 10. But you're also an Amazon seller actively using the product yourself. How does that change the way you look at the growth tools versus your average SaaS operator?

5:20Bradley Sutton:It's important. like Helium 10 founder, who's no longer in the picture, he exited a while back, but he started as an Amazon seller. And this is how he started Helium 10, making stuff what he needs. Some of the most powerful companies in every space, especially SaaS, usually have founders or key operators who are the customer as well. And that's important. So like me, I'm not just some software salesman. I live this stuff. And a lot of the tools and things actually came from me, not because I have some like genius mind or something, but it's just like, I'm just in the game, you know? Like, so this is what I need.

5:54Bradley Sutton:And that's how Helium 10 was built. The founder, Manny was like, hey, I'm trying to build this million dollar Amazon business. I need this kind of automation or I need this analytics and let me just go ahead and build it. And so then as I'm managing my own e-commerce accounts, I'm like, oh shoot, I need this. And so I'll talk to the smart people at the company, like the engineers and stuff like, hey, how can we have this metric or how can I have this automation? It would make my life so much easier. So I think that's super important for any company out there. You can have all the smart people, but you need people who are actually in the game to really understand what's going on.

6:24I've been talking about Amazon ads with the Pilot House Amazon team for six years on this podcast. How has the ad landscape changed? Because I know it's one of the fastest growing regions of Amazon. Has it gotten more important than it was five, six years ago? Or has it just sort of always been super important?

6:41Bradley Sutton:It's critical now. and Amazon is a genius for making it, you know, like a seller is dependent on it. But obviously there's a line they can't cross. They can't just make it where you have to spend a ridiculous amount. But, you know, some sellers might say that it is a ridiculous amount what you have to do. But Amazon has this advertising system that in my opinion is unmatched anywhere online. It's just so intricate. There's so many different things. And now Amazon's like even going mainstream with, you know, like connected TV. And, you know, you could like advertise your product on Thursday night football and Amazon Prime TV and your favorite Korean drama.

7:15Bradley Sutton:And just like, it's crazy what has evolved from just like simple product placement ads and search results, you know? And so you really have to be careful as a brand though, because there's so many ways to advertise and Amazon's not gonna deny your money. If you turn on some budgets or auto things, you just let it go. Amazon will gladly take all the money you can. And so you really have to have a tight hold on it. But it's the only platform in the world where you can just instantly kind of just be shown in front of all your relevant customers instantly. And unlike other platforms like Meta, every customer you drive through ads is building the organic momentum of your product on the platform.

7:58Bradley Sutton:As Meta, you're just constantly reacquiring the same customers. Maybe it helps in the algorithm a little bit with your quality score or whatever, but you're actively building your profile. And it's kind of like if you're launching a new product on Amazon, which I hope to be soon, you need to be very strategic and you need to invest in some parts to get visibility at all, I guess, right? Yeah, absolutely. And this is, you know, like what I always said, like for true success on Amazon, you've got to be powerful in organic search results. You know, like you can't just pay to play for all of your sales.

8:29Bradley Sutton:You know, with all the other fees Amazon has, that's just, you know, unless you've got some ridiculous, you know, product that's$90 that costs you$1, you just can't, you know, have that kind of budget. But here's the thing. The advertising drawback of Amazon until recently, it's a little bit shifting, is that you, first of all, you don't own your customer on Amazon. So that's always going to be the advantage of D2C and running Shopify or your own website is, hey, once you have a customer, you've got their email, you've got their address, you've got their phone number, you can retarget and all this other stuff.

9:04Bradley Sutton:Historically, you can't do that on Amazon. Amazon owns a customer. You're not allowed to see their address. You cannot run lookalike audiences and stuff like that. And they're Amazon's customer, not yours. but now with stuff like amc that amazon has come out with and and audiences and and brand tailored promotions amazon still has got the data you can't just do whatever you want with it but now you can say like hey let me target everybody who has viewed my brand but hasn't taken action let me target people who have added to cart and and never checked out or let me target everybody who has been a customer but they haven't bought from me in six months these are stuff that three four years ago, you could not do it all.

9:44Bradley Sutton:So you still don't like own your own customer. You don't own your customer data, but now you're able to do a lot of the stuff that you've been able to do off of Amazon a little bit more. And that's going to be, that's going to be critical because a lot of, you know, brands, they're, they're not willing to invest so much in an advertising thing that they, they have such little control over. Talk to me about why Helium 10 was originally created and a little bit about how it's evolved over the years as the ad platform has evolved. The funny thing is, you know, we're on a podcast here. A podcast was created before Helium 10.

10:15Bradley Sutton:You know, the founder of Helium 10, he was like, hey, I want to document my journey of building a million dollar Amazon brand in six months through this podcast. And then he had also developed a lot of apps for like the Apple App Store and stuff before. So he's like, hey, let me make a couple of apps that are for my Amazon business, but let me offer them for free on the podcast in the hopes of growing the podcast. and it just completely went off. And he's like, wait a minute, I'm focused on the wrong thing here. Yeah, let's keep the podcast going. But the real potential here is in the software.

10:46Bradley Sutton:And that was the start of Helium 10, just somebody who was developing apps for himself. And over the years, we have focused a lot on newer sellers, but then we went and acquired other brands and other software companies out there like Packview who are focused on the enterprise side of things. And so now we're just this behemoth company of 800 employees now in multiple countries where we handle all kinds of retail media and we still take care of those brand new mom and pop sellers out there. And then how, like specifically maybe on your brands, what are some of the aspects of the tool that have really helped you become more efficient?

11:23I feel like you mentioned it earlier, like if you're not efficient on Amazon, just like any ad platform, it's set up to take as much of your budget as you're willing to give it. So many of the efficiencies that I talk about with our team come down to just being really efficient in how you target, how you categorize things. Talk to me about how you use Helium 10 to be more efficient.

11:45Bradley Sutton:Data analytics is key. And of course, I'm not just talking about the stuff you can get from the Amazon API to check my profitability and where my spend is going. But we have by far the largest database of Amazon data out there of stuff that we get ourselves and ingest through the API. So like for example, if I'm – or I am launching a product this month. It's like this – I have this weird niche of spooky stuff where it's like coffin-shaped shelves and stuff. And I'm launching this bat-shaped bath mat and toilet mat for the spooky people who need a little extra spook in their bathroom. but what I can do, you know, those people who have been selling these types of products, I can go in and put those products into Helium 10.

12:25Bradley Sutton:And anytime in the last two years, I could see every single keyword that they've shown up for in the search results, every single keyword that they've advertised for every single keyword that they've run sponsored video ads for, and just basically reverse engineer everything that my competitors who came around long before me and have been doing trial and error. I can just hop in today and see everything they've been doing things to Helium 10 and then just double down on what obviously has been working for them and stay away from what hasn't been working. I can monitor all my competitors and get notifications.

12:58Bradley Sutton:Hey, who's throwing a coupon up? Oh, I better throw a coupon on my listing during this prime week or something because I don't want to lose market share. And so that's our big differentiators. Number one, the analytics for once you actually launch a product, you can just basically see what any competitor is doing, estimate their sales, et cetera. Also on the flip side, even before this finding the actual product, you know, we have over 2 billion Amazon products in our database, even the ones that are not in stock. And that's how I came up with this, like bat shaped bath mat and some of these other products that launches, I'm looking for these pockets of, of opportunity, whereas like, Hey, show me where the top sellers are, you know, all have like less than 150 reviews, but they're all doing like, you know, over 5 ,000 units of sales per month or has, you know, they don't have a lot of images in their listing showing that they don't even know what they're doing as Amazon.

13:46Bradley Sutton:So it's like, I can just hyper focus my, my product research into launching these highly profitable and high opportunity niches where you would, you know, without software, you would never just be able to just like browse Amazon and find these things, you know, maybe you could randomly, but I could just, you know, find like 10 product opportunities in an hour if I wanted to, um, if I had unlimited funds, which I wish I did, but, but those are the, some of the things, you know, and then of course that the advertising, You know, like I, I, Helium 10 is my day job. I run my businesses kind of like as a, as a side hustle.

14:16Bradley Sutton:So I don't have that, that much time. And I don't have many employees. Like I've got my kids working for me in my, my warehouse, you know, back here, they handle all the logistics and stuff, but all the listing building and advertising, that's, that's all me. So I can manage over 300, uh, Amazon advertising campaigns in only 30 minutes, you know, uh, using Helium 10. Cause I use a lot of automation and automated rules and keyword harvesting. So that's the other, like the third biggest factor of how I'm using our own tool. So hypothetically, let's say I'm launching an electrolytes brand. I'm a big electrolytes fan.

14:45I think there's a big opportunity in Canada because Element is in the States and Element is one of the only brands that offers like, you know, health hackers, the full amount of sodium that you might lose in a workout. So they have a thousand milligrams of sodium, although other ones like BioSteel in Canada here, they have got 150 milligrams or something like that. So say I'm coming to market with an Electrolikes product. I want to use Amazon FBA. This might be too general of a question, but what would be your advice to me about using Helium 10's tools to launch that campaign properly?

15:17Bradley Sutton:The first thing I would do is analyze the demand. And that's the beauty about things. It's hard to do that if you're just making your own website, because everything is going to be based on ads. But on Amazon, yeah, of course, ads is going to run. but everything has to come from existing demand. And that's the beauty about Amazon. You've got the customers there. You don't have to go out and get the customers. They're already there. So what you would do is, hey, look at what you think are the key search terms and then check out the search volume on Amazon USA. Are people searching for this? If they're not, you might need to take a second look at this.

15:51Bradley Sutton:You might have the best product in the world that could change people's lives, but if nobody's searching for it, they're never gonna find you. That's a super important aspect. Like, you know, that's different than TikTok. TikTok, you can create demand. You make an interesting video. And that, by the way, could be part of the strategy. Maybe they're not searching for it on Amazon yet. That's not a, oh, let's just forget about this whole idea. Now you go to TikTok. Hey, is this like a TikTok-able thing? Like, can I think of hooks and things where there's no demand for it yet, but that's not how TikTok works.

16:23Bradley Sutton:TikTok works just on, you know, like videos that catch people's attention. Is there a campaign that I can create amongst my own brand and amongst creators that I choose that would absolutely make this something that is searched. Then you launch on TikTok before Amazon, but you kind of do it simultaneously where you're not making a big push on Amazon. You get all the inventory there. Then you create the demand on TikTok. What do people do? They're just going to go to Amazon and buy it. And now all of a sudden, guess what? Now there's search volume for some of these keywords because now all of a sudden people have been educated to do things like you can do that on TikTok.

16:56Bradley Sutton:You can do that on like Indiegogo or one of these websites, but that's important thing for all brands to realize when it comes to Amazon, Amazon is not for creating the demand. Nobody's searching for it. Do not go all in on Amazon without some way to funnel in this demand. I think that's super smart. And I guess when I'm looking for demand, like there's obviously going to be demand for electrolytes. The question is, is there a demand for high sodium grapefruit flavored electrolytes with no sugar or something like that. Right. So I imagine if I were looking into that, I'd really want to kind of go deep and figure out, you know, what exactly product niche I'm trying to hit and look at the competition and the volume there.

17:33Yeah.

17:34Bradley Sutton:So you could just like enter in some of those keywords and see, Hey, what are our people searching for high sodium? What you do is you go in to helium 10 and put those into the existing competition who might not have, you know, some of those metrics of electrolytes. And then you can kind of see what are people converting for? Because what their search volume, just raw search volume, you know, like a million people search collagen peptides a month, but how many people actually purchase on it? You know, like, so maybe it's a hundred thousand people. So that's like a 10 % conversion rate or buyer intent, like what I call it.

18:07Bradley Sutton:But you might see some other things where it's like, Hey, there's only 1 % purchase rate. What does that mean? That means that there is demand for, but people are not finding that in the existing products out there. I did that with one of my coffin shelves where I was looking at my niche and I noticed this keyword that came up coffin bookshelf, which had people searching for it, but it had like a 0.3 conversion rate, but the regular coffin shelf keywords were like about five to 10. And then I looked into, I was like, okay, I see what's exactly what's happening here. There are, there are no coffin bookshelves on Amazon.

18:38Bradley Sutton:So when people search this keyword, they're not finding what they're looking for. So then if you see some search volume on some of these like sodium related keywords and things like that, but you see a low buyer intent, that's a great sign that you have an opportunity to jump in and just kind of like take that market because people are obviously not finding that in the existing products that are out there. We've mentioned TikTok shop. You mentioned Walmart earlier. And I think people maybe, if they're familiar with Helium 10, they might think of you as an Amazon tool, but you guys now encompass all the different major marketplaces out there.

19:10Talk to me about how you think about this set

19:13Bradley Sutton:of partner opportunities. This is again, something new that I wouldn't have said. I've been doing this for a while and you would never find a video of me five years ago that said, oh, you absolutely have to be selling on Walmart. I mean, TikTok shop didn't even exist five years ago. But nowadays it's like, if you're selling online, you've got to do those three, Amazon, TikTok, Walmart. The TikTok is not necessarily a profit play. There's a lot of people who make profit on TikTok, but the TikTok is all about that halo effect when you get to Amazon. People don't trust TikTok shop. yet as a channel or a distribution channel or as a place where, hey, I'm safe with the money or as a place where, hey, I can get this product in two days.

19:49Bradley Sutton:You know, like there's longer shipping times. And so you create the demand on TikTok and some of it is gonna go to your TikTok shop. But the key thing is you're getting all this free traffic now, you know, that's not even going through your ads on Amazon. And so TikTok shop is vital. Walmart is a little bit different. Some products actually sell better on Walmart, very few, but some actually sell better on Walmart than Amazon. But on average, I don't know what the actual number is, but anecdotally, people tell me about 10 % of their Amazon sales can be done on Walmart. And if you can do that without any lift, it's a no brainer.