If you didn’t get that joke, there are probably two reasons. The first is that it wasn’t funny at all, so there’s nothing to really “get.” The second reason will at least enable it to make some sense to you. Manny Coats, one of Helium 10’s founders, launched twistedhumor.com, his first online business, in 1999. Several startups and 16 years later, Manny launched Helium 10 with his co-founder, Guillermo Puyol. These days, Helium 10 processes and analyzes over two billion data points daily, and serves them up to its one million users worldwide. Collectively, those one million users sell $4 billion worth of merchandise every month. That kind of money, just like the opening line of this review, is no joke.
Summary:
Pricing
Helium 10 consists of multiple tools—from product and keyword research to listing optimizations to strictly operational—to help merchants maximize their sales. Like most SaaS solutions, the higher the level of your subscription, the more access you get. There are a lot of tools included, many of them have been given their own brand names, and there’s a lot of variation in how much you can use each for each level of subscription. For that reason, our normal format for breaking down the pricing would look like a confusing, muddled mess. Instead, we’ll give you a high-level summary of the plans here, and you can look at Helium 10’s pricing page to see the exact list of features for each. And, of course, we’ll go into more detail on each of these tools in The Details.
The Details
Having gone through this training, the tools that Helium 10 offers become less mysterious. But just in case, each tool has its own How-To video you can watch to get an understanding how best to wield it. So what are these tools?
If you know you can’t devote full time hours to selling, or you only have enough money for a limited amount of stock, you can find something that doesn’t sell quite so many units per month. If you know how much profit you want to make, you apply it to your starting expenses and that number becomes your target revenue—you can then search products whose sales match that. Let’s say you know you’re going to be targeting an audience of college and graduate students—it can’t be too expensive, so you search for products that sell for about $20. These are just examples, but you can see how this tool works through them.
X-Ray does more than this, though. Click through the search results into a product listing you’ll be competing with. Just having the extension installed adds information to the listing itself for you to see. First thing you’ll notice is a listing score, on a scale of 1-10 of how well optimized this listing is. Click on the score and you get a breakdown of what the lister did right and wrong with the images and text (things like how many characters are in the description or how many images are included). It will also report on the inventory levels, in total and per seller, giving you an idea of whether there’s room for you to get involved. Once you’ve determined the product you want to sell, then you need to research the keywords for the listing you’re going to create. You see those first three or four listings that come up when you type “maroon hoodie?” They clearly are doing something right to get that high up in the results and, as Picasso said, “Good artists copy. Great artists steal.” Running Helium 10’s keyword research tool Cerebro, you’ll get a detailed and maniacally precise amount of information on the keywords they used. There are likely thousands, so you can filter down to find the most effective—the ones with the highest search volume, and ones that all the Page 1 results have in common, and make sure they’re organic/not paid.
You now have a list of very effective keywords, but it turns out you can do better. Feed those keywords to the Magnet tool, and it will give you a bunch of related keywords to choose from. When you start looking at the search volume of each of these keywords, you start to see some of them having a high demand. By virtue of the fact they didn’t show up in your Cerebro search, you know that your chief competitors aren’t using them and putting you in a unique position. The one criticism we have with this tool is: If you named the first one Cerebro, why wouldn’t you just name this one Magneto? Missed opportunity.
But all of this is just the research phase. Armed with your new product and a list of keywords, it’s time to create the listing. Enter Scribbles. Essentially it’s an editor to help you write the product description and optimize it for searches. The editor displays your list of all keywords and phrases, color coded according to search frequency, and crosses out each one as you use it. The goal here is that once something is crossed out you can move on to the next one, keeping the text natural/unstuffed with keywords. For as much data as there is, it should come as no surprise that Helium 10 has impressive analytics tools to monitor your listings. Nutshell descriptions: The Keyword Tracker reports on how well the keywords you’ve chosen are working. The Market Tracker shows you what your share of the market is for your products, and then also suggests new and related products you might want to track. The Profits tool gives a birds eye view of your sales, revenue, profits, etc. There are reporting tools for Inventory, Expenses, Refunds, and Returns. In addition, there are more than a handful of operational tools, each with some very specific use. The most notable of these is the Follow-Up tool, which allows you to automate sending post-sale email follow ups based on triggers and exclusions.
Conclusion
The depth and breadth of the tools available with Helium 10 is almost dizzying. Almost any good business tool worth its cost assumes you already know what your business is. Helium 10 has no such requirement, as it was built to figure that out for you, too. This isn’t to say that it’s some magic elixir that guarantees success—you still need to be smart about your research and be ready to execute. Helium 10 helps you stand out, so that you rise above the competition. I bet that’s why they call it Helium.
