How To Use Helium 10: The Ultimate Guide (2023)

If you’re an Amazon seller, then you know that finding the right tools to help grow your business is essential.

With so many options available, it can be difficult to know which ones are worth your time and money. That’s where learning how to use Helium 10 comes in. 

When used right, this comprehensive toolkit offers everything you need to optimize your listings, research keywords, track your sales data, and more.

In this article, we will review all the tools inside Helium 10 and show you how they can help you succeed as an Amazon seller!

Helium 10: What Tools Does It Offer?

When subscribing to the platinum plan and above, Helium 10 gives you access to a full suite of tools. We’ll break down what each tool does throughout this article, broken down into seven key sections:

• Product Research Tools
• Keyword Research Tools
• Listing Optimization Tools
• Marketing Tools
• Analytics Tools
• Operations Tools
• Learning Features

As this article is intended to be a full overview of the Helium 10 suite, in time we will be creating more comprehensive guides for each individual tool. To dig deeper into each tool with these guides, follow the links within the relevant sections in the table of contents.

Finally, before we dive into all the tools, the team at Helium 10 have been kind enough to provide us with an exclusive coupon code to get you started with a discount. Just head here and use code BBU50 for 50% off your first month, or use code BBU10 for 10% off for life!

Helium 10 Product Research Tools

The most important skill a successful Amazon seller needs to master is that of product research. Knowing what products to sell will make or break your business, and thankfully Helium 10 is the market leader in this field with a range of tools to help your master product research.

Helium 10 Black Box Product Research Tool

Black Box is one of the earliest tools to come from the Helium 10 suite. The premise is simple: punch in the criteria of products you’re looking to research, and the Black Box will search the entire Amazon database for product ideas that match the filters.

You can search by pretty much any metric you can imagine, but the core metrics include the monthly revenue a product is generating, the number of reviews a product has, and the overall star rating of the product. Setting price parameters within impulse purchase range can definitely help when starting out too – try $20-$60 to start with!

By setting these 3 filters you can find products with high demand, low competition, and clear opportunities to differentiate and improve on what’s already available.

If you’re looking to supercharge your black box research time, try the keywords tab. This won’t just analyze isolated products that could be anomalies, but will instead assess all products within the search results for particular keywords giving you a quick scope of an entire market making it a powerful niche research tool.

Of course, a tool is only as good as the user interpreting its data – so the next step is to analyse the wider market and do your due diligence on each of these potential product opportunities. But don’t worry, there are tools for that!

Trendster

The Trendster tool allows you to check the historical selling price and BSR of a product (BSR = Best Seller’s Rank – a number that reflects how well the product is selling, the lower the number the better it is selling). This helps you understand if it is a seasonal product, or is just selling a high volume due to a steep discount.

Within Trendster you can also enter keywords to see Google Trends data which helps you understand if this potential product could be a fad like the classic fidget spinner shown below. Ideally, you’re looking for a nice even line or a gradually increasing line over time.

The Helium 10 Chrome Extension

Another asset in your product research journey is the Helium 10 Chrome Extension. This doesn’t live within the web-based suite of tools, instead, this handy feature can be easily installed in your Chrome browser and is ready to be fired up any time you are browsing Amazon listings during a product research session. These are the three functions you’ll use most often:

The X-Ray Tool

Use the Helium 10 X-Ray tool on any search results page to effortlessly analyze the demand and competition of an entire market. You’ll be presented with revenue data, average price data, review levels, and a wide range of high-level data to help you assess product ideas.

This includes being able to click through into sales charts directly on the Chrome extension to see trends and ensure you’ve got the full picture of a product opportunity. X-Ray will also display a particular keyword’s search volume to see overall demand, and allows you to filter by all metrics in case you want to move certain results – sponsored products, for instance.

The Profitability Calculator

Another huge time-saver, the profitability checker gives you a snapshot of the key numbers for a product selling on Amazon to calculate its profit margins. Selling price, size, and weight data are all pulled from the Amazon listing to give you a full assessment of the different costs including Amazon referral fees, shipping fees, and boxes to add any extra fees you need to include.

The Review Insights Tool

In our opinion, a highly underrated tool within the Chrome extension. Use this tool as a review downloader to analyze the reviews of your soon to be competitors – especially the negative reviews. By understanding the frustrations customers have had with existing products, you’ll be able to quickly create a long list of ways to differentiate your product and stand out from the crowd – an essential aspect of success on Amazon.

With this robust range of accurate product research tools, you’ll have quick access to finding your first successful product ideas to kick-start your Amazon selling journey. The next step is to continue the research process and ensure you launch your product with success.

Helium 10 Keyword Research Tools

When selling on Amazon, we need to remember how we buy on Amazon. The first place every Amazon shopper goes? The search bar. We’re not sure if there’s a soul left on planet earth that still browses by category. So, you’ve got to do everything in your power to appear high on search results for relevant keywords, and that all starts with effective research.

Luckily for us, this is another area Helium 10 excels. Let’s take a look at the range of keyword research options at our disposal.

Helium 10 Magnet Tool: Conducting Keyword Research

Using the Magnet tool is the fastest and easiest way to compile a list of relevant keywords for your product. Simply enter the main relevant keyword you would use to describe the product, select the right marketplace and start the process. You can sort the output list by search volume to sort by the most used (and therefore most important) keyword ideas.

Helium 10 are always adding new functionality to the tools, and Magnet recently got an upgrade to be compatible with Walmart – a fast-growing alternative marketplace for Amazon sellers to explore. We’ve not seen this anywhere else with other keyword research tools – so it’s a big plus!

Helium 10 Cerebro Tool: Finding The Most Relevant Keywords

Cerebro is what is known as a reverse ASIN tool or sometimes called a reverse product lookup, and is an incredibly powerful tool when used right (ASIN = Amazon Standard Identification Number).

Cerebro will analyze specific products for you and produce a highly detailed keyword list made up of all the keywords that this product (or products – you can run up to 10 products in one search) is currently ranking for.

It will show you data like search volume, competing products, and title density – a newly added metric. This will show you how many listings on the first page have this keyword in their title in phrase form.

Having a keyword in your title is shown to make it easier to rank for that search term, so this provides clear insight on what to include in your title to rank fast. The Cerebro product rank also summarises this key information to make selection even easier.

Pro Tip: Search the main seed keyword that best describes the product you’re doing research for, then load up the Chrome Extension and run X-Ray. Next, select up to 10 of the most relevant and best-selling competitors and click ‘Run keyword search’ which will open up a 10 ASIN search in Cerebro.

Finally, open up the advanced filters and find one called Ranking Competitors, then set the minimum to 7, 8 or 9 (the higher the number the fewer the keywords, but also the more relevant).

This will give you a complete list of the most hyper-relevant keywords for your product, as it filters down to only the keywords that at least this number of products are ALL ranking for. Sort it by highest search volume and you’ve got your priority keyword list before your eyes. This is the starting process of our keyword research every time we write a new listing and is an incredibly powerful process.

If you’re looking into selling on Walmart as well as Amazon then the good news is that Cerebro’s reverse search functionality will work on that marketplace too.

Misspellinator: Covering All Bases

Before we move onto the next stage of how to use Helium 10 (creating an epic listing with the keyword research you’ve just done), one final keyword research tool is Misspellinator. This can be used to pick up any commonly miss-spelt words that aren’t autocorrected by Amazon. A lot of them will be, so this won’t be a huge volume tool, but it can help give your product that extra little bit of visibility which always helps.

Simply enter your keyword phrases into misspellinator, and select the individual words you’d like to process, and voila – you will have a list of the most commonly miss-spelt words and see which ones Amazon autocorrects.

The good news about all these tools? Helium 10 provides highly detailed tutorials on each and every tool inside the software. Sign up with a discount and check them out!

Helium 10 Listing Optimization Tools

Once you’ve got your keyword list, it’s time to put it into action and write a conversion-boosting listing. We’ll look at five tools in this section that help you do exactly that.

Helium 10 Frankenstein: Processing Important Keywords

Frankenstein is your keyword processer. It’s where you can take all the keywords you’ve found in your research to organise and de-duplicate ready to be used in your listing. The great thing about Frankenstein is that you can easily export straight from Magnet or Cerebro to this tool.

Use the export button in either of the tools, choose Frankenstein and you’re almost ready to process. Before you do, we recommend copying the 5-10 most important, high search volume keywords and saving them in phrase form – we’ll need those in the next tool.

Once you’ve done that, process your keywords and it will remove all duplicate words leaving you with a complete list of every word to include in your listing to gain as much ranking visibility as possible.

Helium 10 Listing Builder: Optimizing Amazon SEO

The new Helium 10 Listing Builder is a completely updated and upgraded version of Scribbles, the previous listing builder. You can still use Scribbles for now if that’s what you’re used to but be warned it will likely get removed at some point.

The Listing Builder will help you create a completely SEO optimized Amazon listing ensuring you’re covering as many related keywords as possible. Here are a couple of quick tips to get the most out of this tool.

Firstly, take the shortlist of the most important phrases we recommended saving in the last section and paste them into the Listing Builder.

Next up, take the full list of single words you processed in Frankenstein and also paste them into the Listing Builder. By using both phrases and individual words, the listing builder will keep two sections so you can see when you’ve used your most important phrases, and then also each individual word.

As you use each word from the list in your title, bullet points and description, they will get crossed off so you know you’ve used them. This process can actually become quite addictive as you search for more ways to include more keywords. A bit nerdy, but hey – an Amazon seller has to have some fun! 😉

Pro Tip: Don’t stuff your listing full of keywords making it read terribly. Try to find the balance between including all potential keywords to maximize search volume potential, but also make it read well so it converts browsers to buyers!

Helium 10 Index Checker: Confirm Your Visibility

When your product is indexed on Amazon for certain keywords, it means that it can be found in search results when people search for it. In order for your product to be indexed for certain keywords, it’s usually enough for them to simply appear in your listing (words in any order, exact phrase order is not essential).

However, sometimes there can be errors with your listing that stop this from happening. Thankfully this is very rare, but running the Index Checker ensures you’re able to appear for important keywords before running a launch campaign.

Helium 10 Listing Analyzer: Improve Your Organic Rank

Once you’ve created your listing, or if you’re looking to optimize existing product listings, then the Listing Analyzer is the perfect next tool. Enter your ASIN into the tool and it will assess your product detail page against best practice principles.

These include things like title length, image size, and review count. This will show you what are the key aspects you need to be working on inside your Amazon FBA business to grow your traffic and grow your sales.

Helium 10 Audience: Split Test Behind The Scenes

Audience is one of the newer tools in the Helium 10 suite, but arguably one of the most powerful. Whereas previously to split test aspects like your main image, you would have to run one for say a week, then change your main image on your live product listings and run for another week.

This was obviously not ideal. Now with Audience, you can use the intuitive Poll Builder to set up a real-life split test in minutes and get direct input from Amazon shoppers to help you make data-driven decisions with your listing optimization.

Helium 10 Marketing Tools

OK, you’ve researched your product, found all the best keywords related to that product and learnt how to optimize listings. The next step for Amazon sellers is to launch your product into the Amazon marketplace, and understanding how to use the marketing tools inside Helium 10 will help you launch with momentum.

Firstly, you can lean on tools we’ve already covered like Cerebro to review keywords again and target specific terms for your launch. Cerebro will show how many units you need to sell linked to a particular keyword to rank on the first page. One of the clearest and most recommended strategies to target these different keywords is with PPC – and Helium 10 offer a great solution on this front too.

Helium 10 Adtomic: Complete PPC Management

Amazon PPC is undoubtedly one of the more challenging aspects of being an Amazon FBA seller. Whereas in the past you could afford to launch an automatic campaign and watch profitable sales roll in, competition has increased and as a result, so have PPC expenses – so you need a more robust strategy to succeed.

Amazon PPC tools can greatly assist you in this area, and Helium 10 continue to deliver in this area with Adtomic. With the Platinum Helium 10 plan you can use Adtomic to study your PPC analytics, and by upgrading to the Diamond plan you can really unleash the power of this tool. You can create campaigns in minutes with best-practice structures and set up automation rules that make changes to your campaigns based on the parameters you set, and how the campaigns perform.

Adtomic does everything you would previously need to log in to Amazon Seller Central for (let’s be honest, the less time you have to spend there, the better!) and saves you hours upon hours every month when optimizing your PPC campaigns.

Like any potential “expense” in business, you have to consider it an investment and assess how much of a return it will give you – this tool alone can provide a huge ROI when it comes to both your money and also your time.

Helium 10 Portals: Landing Pages Made Easy

Over the years Amazon sellers have seen it become harder and harder to access customer data and interact with those customers on the Amazon platform. Yet as brand owners customers are the lifeblood of our business, and the ability to communicate with them a vital part of our strategy.

Enter Portals. The landing page solution provides easy-to-customize templates allowing you to send traffic to a branded opt-in page when launching new products at a discount. Offer a generous discount in exchange for a customer’s email when launching and watch your email list grow. Repeat this process using portals each time you launch, and follow up your customers with regular emails notifying of new products, and new promotions.

Portals has a number of integrations, including the Facebook pixel, that make it easy to get started with the process of building an audience for your brand, even if you’re not confident in building a website or have the budget to pay for one.

Helium 10 Analytics Tools

Once you’ve launched your product, you’ll want to keep an eye on the performance in a number of areas. That’s where the analytics tools inside the Helium 10 suite come in.

Keyword Tracker: Track Your Visibility

It’s essential you’re using Keyword Tracker to keep a close eye on relevant keyword positions. Enter a list of your most actionable keywords into Keyword Tracker and it will update your ranking position once per day. You can also click the rocket icon next to any given keyword to get hourly updates on ranking position which can be particularly helpful when targeting search terms in a product launch.

The Keyword Tracker page gives a helpful summary of the number of keywords you’re positioned in both the top 10 and top 50 for along with the aggregated search volume for each search term. This is super helpful and provides a quick snapshot update of how your organic ranking is performing at any given time.

If you want to spy on your competitors, this is the perfect place to do that too. You can enter up to 5 ASINs in order to be able to track your competitors’ rank and see how you compare at all times.

If you want to avoid the temptation to check Keyword Tracker too often, set up convenient email updates that will send you a report every 24 hours, perfect!

Market Tracker: Track Your Competitors

Another way to keep tabs on your competitors is by using the incredibly powerful Market Tracker tool inside Helium 10. Simply create a new market and enter the keywords you want to track the overall market for. The tool will continually update you with new suggestions of products to include in the tracking which you can either accept or reject.

Over time your product tracker list will build significantly giving you insightful data into the monthly volume of the overall market, and your share within it. You can use this information to study competitors with large market share and replicate their strategies to grow your own sales.

Profits: Track Your Income

We saved the best until last on an analytics front – the Profits tool is a beast of a tool in its own right. Enter your COGS (cost of goods sold, landed costs… eg product cost, shipping, and taxes) and Helium 10 will pull the rest of the data from Amazon to provide you with granular reports on units sold, revenue generated and most important of all – profit made.

Be sure to enter any external expenses that don’t come through Amazon (eg 3PL storage costs) to ensure you get the most accurate outlook on your finances. Another tip is to utilize the ‘Product Performance’ option on the side menu to see an ASIN by ASIN breakdown of your profitability. This specific tool is particularly helpful as you grow your Amazon business to a wider product line.

You can compare between periods and really get a handle on how your Amazon business is performing. Whilst the standard app most Amazon sellers use to track sales will only give a very limited view of performance, the Profits dashboard really helps you drill down and see how you are tracking on the Amazon marketplace.

More good news for those interested in selling on multiple platforms though – Profits now works with Walmart too!

Helium 10 Operations Tools

We’ve covered five core sections of the Helium 10 suite so far – but we’re not done yet. Number six on our list are the powerful operational tools within the software. Let’s take a quick look at each one.

Follow Up

If you want to drive more organic traffic to your product listings, it’s essential you have a good review generation strategy. Part of that strategy should always be following up with customers who have bought your products and asking them for a review. Helium 10 once again makes this a piece of cake by providing you with templates and automated functions allowing you to set and forget.

When testing the tool for ourselves, we’ve found the best results from automating the ‘Request A Review’ button that triggers a review request originating from Amazon themselves. You can combine this with a separate email that comes from you as the brand owner thanking the customer for their order, and letting them know you are available to support them should the need arise. Make sure you don’t ask for a review here if you’re also triggering the Request A Review button.

Alerts

By now you probably know just how powerful selling on Amazon can be. If you can gain organic rank for relevant words then the potential volume of traffic is enormous. But with any golden opportunity like this comes potential bad actors and black hat tactics. That’s why activating the Alerts tool on your listings is essential, and another huge value add.

Set Alerts up so that it notifies you should any changes take place on your listing, and you’ll be prepared should any funny business go down. The good news is that this isn’t a regular occurrence and you shouldn’t lose any sleep over it – especially if you have Alerts activated.

Inventory Management

The Inventory Management tool is one of the more under-developed features inside Helium 10. If you’re only using a spreadsheet at the moment, then it will be somewhat of an upgrade. But as you start to scale your business you may find you need a more robust inventory management tool. At present this tool only works in the US marketplace. Helium 10 say they have big plans for this tool in 2022 so we look forward to seeing what updates occur and we will update this post accordingly.

Inventory Protector

When running heavily discounted promotions was the go-to method to launch new products on Amazon, preventing coupon abuse was of high importance. If a seller failed to set a maximum order quantity within the listing settings, a buyer could use a steep discount coupon (sometimes up to 99% off) and clear out the entirety of your stock.

The Inventory Protector tool allows you to quickly and easily set this max order quantities in case you run a discount code promotion. It’s also seen as best practice to place some kind of limit (eg 10) at all times to stop your stock from being completely bought up leaving your listing inactive.

Refund Genie

There are a lot of random fees involved in selling on Amazon, and it can be hard to keep up with them. Sometimes Amazon will lose or damage some of your products whilst transporting them between or within warehouses which means you are entitled to a refund for your product costs and some of these fees.

Refund Genie taps into your account and automates the process of checking you have received all the appropriate refunds and notifies you if there is outstanding money to claim back from Amazon. As your sales start to grow, this tool alone can generate enough to cover the cost of your entire Helium 10 plan!

Alta by Helium 10

Finally, not so much a tool as a resource – Alta is a financial services solution that can help speed up how quickly you are paid by Amazon, or provide funding for expansion activities like new products launches.

Helium 10 Learning Features

It’s clear to see that Helium 10 are passionate about your success. They haven’t just created a market-leading tool suite, they also offer best-in-class training to help Amazon sellers master the game.

Freedom Ticket by Helium 10

Freedom Ticket is an in-depth step-by-step Amazon FBA course taught by Kevin King and the team at Helium 10. Kevin is one of the most well-known and well-respected voices in the Amazon FBA space, and Freedom Ticket is a very solid training option.

You need to be subscribed to at least the starter plan to access Freedom Ticket, and you only have access whilst subscribed to a paid plan, but it’s a great added resource to help grow your Amazon FBA business.

The Helium 10 Academy

Alongside training to help you as an Amazon FBA seller with Freedom Ticket, the Helium 10 Academy gives you all the help you need to master the entire tool suite. This is perfect when you’re just starting out, or as we have been doing in recent months – giving access to new members of your team so they too can learn how every aspect of Helium 10 works.

Bradley Sutton and the team at Helium 10 provide some of the best in-tool training we’ve ever seen and this is a huge asset. Any time you’re wondering how to get the most out of each tool – just hit the learn button to access a treasure-trove of detailed resources.

Extra Features

Alongside all the core tools inside Helium 10, there are also a growing number of extra value-add features.

The Helium 10 Mobile App

Want to check sales on the go? Or get notification alerts any time anything changes on your listing? Install the Helium 10 Mobile App and have a host of actionable data at your fingertips. Just try not to refresh the sales page too often – it can get a little addictive!

The Helium 10 To Alibaba Integration

Another recent integration that makes life so much easier, is the ability to run X-Ray on a search results page, and if the numbers look good you can click the ‘Find Suppliers on Alibaba’ button to instantly open a list of relevant results and options to filter further. This is a huge time-saver and a great new feature.

Helium 10 Gems: A URL Builder

If you’re looking to create a specific type of Amazon for a specific purpose, then Helium 10’s Gems tool is very handy. Buy together URLs and ASIN specific URLs can be helpful when sending customers to Amazon to ensure they find your product easy, and this tool simplifies that.

Helium 10 Pricing

Whilst you can access the free version of Helium 10, you’ll quickly discover that to unleash its true power you’ll want to upgrade to one of the paid plans. Here are each of the plans and their current pricing.

The Helium 10 Starter Plan costs $39/month and gives you base-level access to some tools and training and is enough for brand new sellers. The only tool you will really miss on this plan as a new seller is Follow Up, but you can quickly upgrade to include that.

The Helium 10 Platinum Plan costs $99/month and includes Follow Up, gives a wider range of access to most tools, but only limited access to Adtomic and doesn’t include access to some of the more advanced features like Portals.

The Helium 10 Diamond Plan costs $249/month and gives full access to all tools and monthly expert training. The Diamon Plan is a must for any serious, growing seller.

The Helium 10 Elite Plan at $399/month is a more significant investment but includes quarterly in-person events and further monthly training with Amazon experts.

Whilst Helium 10 isn’t the cheapest tool in the market, the sheer range of tools available within the suite not only save huge sums due to not needing other tools alongside but can also make a huge difference to your Amazon FBA business by providing a significant return on investment. All the top sellers in our community and the ones we speak to beyond use Helium 10 on a daily basis, and it clearly comes highly recommended.

If you want to give Helium 10 a test drive for yourself, don’t forget to use our exclusive coupon code BBU50 here to save 50% on your first month of the above prices, or use BBU10 to save 10% for LIFE! A fantastic deal, we’re sure you’d agree.

If you want to save even further, get 2 months free when you subscribe to an annual plan.

Conclusion: Helium 10, The GOAT Of Amazon Tools?

Helium 10 is one of the most comprehensive Amazon toolsets on the market and comes highly recommended by sellers for its ability to save time and money. The range of features available within the suite covers all bases and with prices starting at just $39/month it’s an affordable investment for any seller looking to grow their business.

Upgrade options are also generous, providing access to all tools and monthly expert training for those who need it, making Helium 10 a great overall value-for-money proposition. If you’re not already using Helium 10, we urge you to give it a try – you won’t be disappointed!