Welcome to my review of Helium 10, an amazing set of software tools to help you in every aspect of running a successful Amazon FBA business.
So, as some of you may know from reading my blog that I have always been interested in starting an Amazon business. I actually did start selling on Amazon when I first became aware of the huge potential of selling online but it was a failure and I eventually moved on to affiliate marketing.
However, I have always had the intention of selling on Amazon again either through private label products or wholesale. Hence the reason why I have always been interested in software tools that will make it easier to run an Amazon FBA business.
My last blog post was a review on one of the most popular Amazon product research tools called Jungle Scout. Helium 10 is a similar tool to Jungle Scout and comes with many of the same features that will help you with product research, listing optimisation, keyword research, competitor research, in fact, it probably has a tool to help you with every aspect of your Amazon FBA business.
There are 13 tools in this software suite, now, as I am not running an Amazon FBA business, there are a lot of tools that I don’t need to use. So, the only ones I am interested in are the ones that will help in me uncover profitable niches and products.
There are tools that help you with inventory management, fraud prevention, listing optimisation, dealing with refunds and Google keyword index checker, these are tools that I do not need at the moment, so I only read up about them but did not test them out.
The tools I will be elaborating more on in this Helium 10 review are the following;
Black Box – Product research
Trendster – Analyse the market demand for any product you want to sell on Amazon.
Chrome Extension – The Helium 10 Chrome extension contains a set of 5 tools, one is called X-Ray which will help with product research.
There are a whole lot of other tools but those are mostly needed once you start selling on Amazon and so I don’t really need them at the moment and so I will not be reviewing those tools in this article.
Helium 10 Review
Black Box
If you are thinking of starting an Amazon business, one of the most important tasks you will have to do is research and find a profitable product to sell.
Years ago, you would have to do a lot of manual research and guesswork and go through lots of products before you found a winning product to sell. There wasn’t a lot of data you could work with and it was a tiresome process, luckily, it’s now much easier to identify potentially winning products with dedicated Amazon research apps.
Helium 10’s Black Box is one of the best Amazon research tools I have used, it has a nice and easy to use interface and you can pull a ton of data that will help you analyse and pinpoint to profitable niches and products.
You can research product ideas for multiple Amazon marketplaces, but at the moment I am only interested in selling on the US and UK platforms.
So, as you can see from below there are several options you can use to research products to sell on Amazon.
There are a lot of filters that will help you narrow down the results, for example, if the product you wanted to sell was in the baby niche category, you would select the following options;
- Category – Baby (also maybe toys and games)
- Monthly Revenue – Assuming you are working on a 30% profit margin and want to earn at least $3000pm, you would select a minimum revenue of $10000pm, the maximum can be played around with as you see fit.
- Price – Set the minimum and maximum price you want the product to be selling for.
- Reviews – The minimum no. of reviews the products have.
- Review -Rating – The overall star-rating for the products
- Shipping size – There are quite a few options here, you should choose small standard size if you are new to selling on Amazon.
The results you will get will show you all the products that meet the filters you have applied, there may be a lot of results or there may only be a handful, it will depend on the niche category and the filters you have applied.
There are a lot of data points to analyse but one of the most important is to make sure that there is not a lot of sellers for the product that you may want to sell.
Other data you will want to check out is the price fluctuation for the past 3 months, how many units have been sold for the year to date, if sales are up or down in the past year.
There are also advanced filters you can play around with to narrow down the result even further.
X-Ray
This is part of Helium 10’s Chrome extension and I personally believe it’s one of the most fun tools to use especially if you like analysing product data.
It provides you with lots of data for any search term you use on Amazon, so for product research, it’s very useful.
It actually provides many of the same product data that is generated by Black Box plus a little bit more, also it’s far more convenient because you can research whilst browsing on any of the supported Amazon marketplaces.
Like most of the tools from Helium, X-Ray is free to use for a limited number of times per day, of course, if you sign up to one of their paid subscription plans, you get more searches available to you.
It’s an easy tool to use and most of the data is self-explanatory, for example, after doing a search for baby towels and clicking on the Helium 10 Chrome extension and then clicking on the X-Ray tab, I get the following results.
As you can see, there is a lot of data that can help you with analysing to see if a product is worth selling.
From the data you can find out stuff like;
- Sales history
- Monthly Revenue
- FBA Fees
- Number of sellers
- Price
- Sales Rank
- Overall Rating
- Reviews
And a few other data points, on the top is an average of some of the data and there is also something called Success Score. This is a score that is given out of a 100 and tells you whether a niche category is worth selling in or not.
It is worked out from all the data points within X-Ray and the higher the number, the better chance you have of succeeding in selling a similar product. As you will have notices, baby towels have way too much competition and hence the reason for its low success core.
Another useful feature of X-Ray is that if you go to a product page, it will give you a score out of 10 on how well optimised the listing is. This will help you later on when you start selling on Amazon and analyse where your competitors are weak and provide a more optimised listing for your product.
Trendster
This is a decent tool, as the name suggests, you will be able to analyse how well a product is selling over a period of time and also see the Google trends data for its search term.
It’s a little bit of a gimmicky feature because the data is available in the other tools and Google Trends is free to use.
Still, it is fun to play around with and you can analyse the seasonality of any product you research in a nice visual format.
So, those are the main tools for product research and as I said, for the moment, they are the only ones I am interested in using now.
Other Tools
However, Helium 10 is like a swiss knife for Amazon sellers and it goes far beyond product research.
These are the additional tools that will help you once you start selling on Amazon.
Magnet – This is an Amazon keyword tool that will provide you with lots of keyword data from just one seed keyword. It gives you data for related keyword volume, what product is ranking for the seed keyword, this tool is useful for finding highly relevant keywords for your product listing that will help you bring high-quality organic traffic.
Cerebro – I must say, this is a cool name for an app that can pull a lot of data for you, if you are a Marvel comics fan, you will understand the significance of the name. Cerebro is another sort of keyword research tool, you use it to find the terms that your competitors are ranking for. You can also spy on keywords for sponsored listing, you also get data for how easy or hard it will be to rank for keywords, this is called the Cerebro IQ score. Another very useful tool to use once you start selling on Amazon, its especially useful for PPC campaigns on Amazon.
Keyword Tracker – As the name suggests, this is a keyword tracker for your product listings. You can see where your products are ranked for keywords you are targeting and track the progress of your Amazon SEO strategy. You can compare your listing against your competitors and see where you need so that your products will be ranked higher up the listing.
Misspellinator – This is a great little keyword tool to help you rank better for misspelt search terms. We have all done it, whether searching on Google, YouTube or Amazon, we have misspelt certain words but still get the results we wanted, this tool will help you rank your product listings for those misspelt keywords so that get targeted traffic for search terms your competitors are not even thinking about.
There are a few other tools that I have not mentioned, although still very useful, these unmentioned tools will help you optimise your listings in bulk, help you manage your inventory levels, manage your refunds properly and protect your listing getting highjacked from other sellers.
Their paid subscription plan also includes a full Amazon FBA training course, so if you are completely new to Amazon FBA and want a full step by step guide on how to get started, this course will come in handy. Also, it will stop you from paying for overpriced Amazon courses that are all over the internet.
Jungle Scout vs Helium 10
Which one is better? I personally think both are more or less the same with a few minor differences. When it comes to product research, both Jungle Scout and Helium 10 provide some amazing tools to help you accelerate your research phase and both tools give you the same data.
Helium 10 may have a few more tools in their arsenal but Jungle Scout is always improving their product offering so I have no doubt that if they believe their customers need a particular tool, they will develop it.
Your decision may come down to price and Helium 10 has the more flexible pricing structure and maybe the best option for those who are just beginning their Amazon FBA journey.
Helium 10 Pricing Plans
One advantage that Helium 10 has over Jungle Scout is that they offer a free plan that will allow you to use most of their tool on a limited basis but it’s always free. Jungle Scout offers a free trial but after the trial period is over you will not have access to any of their tools even in a limited capacity.
Helium 10 even allows you to only subscribe to the tools that you want to use because when you are starting, you will not need to use all of their tools, so why waste money on tools you will not need to use. To find out more about their pricing plans, click here.
Final Thoughts
Helium 10 is a fantastic set of Amazon marketing tools that will help you in every aspect of starting an Amazon FBA business. These tools will allow you to carry out product research, keyword research, listing optimisation, spying on competitors, track your Amazon ranking plus much more. It is a must-have tool for any Amazon seller.