How Do I Activate Alerts for My Amazon Products?

Hijackers taking over your product page? Amazon unexpectedly changing your product dimensions, your price, or even the title of your product? A customer leaving a scathing review? Monitoring your products on Amazon can be more than a full-time job, especially as your product line grows. 

Helium 10's Alerts tool can ease the frustrations of running a private label Amazon Seller business significantly by watching over your products for you, and helping you respond to changes quickly. The list of actions Alerts monitors includes:

• Buy Box Won or Lost, or 'Amazon" winning the Buy Box
• Unexpected changes in the number of sellers, price, product dimensions, title, or category
• Changes in product or seller feedback ratings, positive, negative or neutral
• An ASIN getting identified as 'Adult' or a listing being suppressed
• 'Amazon Warehouse Deal' winning the Buy Box

To use Alerts, you need to connect your Amazon token in Seller Central. 

Once you've connected your Seller Central account with your Helium 10 account, you're ready to activate your products for monitoring.

1. Sign into your Helium 10 account, and from the main dashboard, click on Alerts, either from the left menu, or from the lower right corner of the main Helium 10 dashboard.

2. Helium 10 publishes an overview at the top of the dashboard, that allows you to see a summary of activities affecting your monitored products from the last 24 hours and the past week. 

3. To set how and when you receive alerts, and what changes will trigger those alerts, click on the Settings button in the upper right corner of the Alerts dashboard to open up your Profile window.

4. The Profile page lets you check your account settings. You may want to link a smartphone to Alerts so you can receive text updates for two critical changes: Buy Box Lost or a Suppressed Listing, but you'll definitely need the required email address for those and all the other alerts.

The email account data is usually autofilled for you when you link your Helium 10 account to your Amazon Seller Account. If it's missing, you can add or modify it on the Profile page.

Alerts give you the option of changing the email address completely or adding additional email addresses. To add other email addresses, click on the blue Add link located under Recipients, and type in any additional email accounts.

To activate notifications on your smartphone for Buy Box lost and/or a Suppressed listing, check the box next to SMS Notifications. You can set Do Not Disturb hours based on your time zone.

5. Alerts monitors a list of activities that can affect product sales. To activate the activities you want monitored, click on the box next to the activity. A green box with a check mark signifies an activated alert. An empty box signifies an inactive alert. Alerts will not track changes for inactive items.

When you've set your notifications, email address(es) and SMS notification according to your preferences, you can close the Settings window and return to the Alerts dashboard.

6. In the upper left corner of the Alerts dashboard, you'll see an Overview. The first set of numbers represent how many products you're monitoring over the number you have available. On the second line, the numbers represent how many products you are monitoring out of how many products you have in total. The number of ASINs you are able to monitor will depend on your plan, refer to the Plans and Pricing page for more information. 

The Buy Box faces represent how many products have the Buy Box (green smiling face) and how many do not have the Buy Box (red frowning face). The third, neutral, face represents products for which neither the product nor its competitors hold the buy box. 

7. On the right side of the dashboard, you'll see a small down arrow, next to the flags representing the markets where you sell products. Clicking on the arrow opens a chart with data about your Seller Feedback. Each chart details the number of customer reviews, including their change percentages of positive, neutral and negative feedback, for the last 30 days, 90 days, year, and the lifetime of the product.

8. When you initially set up Alerts, your products will appear in a list below the overview section of the dashboard. The data for a product will be incomplete until you activate monitoring. To initiate monitoring, click on the On/Off switch located on the right side of the product details.

9. Once you've activated a product in Alerts, it can take up to an hour for Helium 10 to gather all the data on the product. One of the special features included in this data are screenshots of your product and listing. Going forward, as long as you keep Alerts turned on for a specific product, Helium 10 will update the product information daily. The tool stores the screenshots, so that if something changes, you can trackback to see exactly what changed and when.

10. From the Alerts' dashboard, you can conveniently link to Amazon to see the source of some of the data, including the product listing page, the categories in which it is ranking, and the actual product reviews on Amazon.

11. Finally, if you want to track the number of competing sellers, Alerts posts Seller Count changes next to the product image. You can also click on the small trending graph icon to open the Sellers Count History to view more specific details, like changes occuring in the the last 30 days, last 90 days, last year, or for All Time, since the product's Alerts monitoring was activated.

12. At times, you'll see a red notification on the black bell in the top, right corner of the main Helium 10 dashboard. If you click on the bell, it will open up a window with recent change notifications. 

If, at any time, you want to deactivate Alerts on a specific product, you can click the On/Off button back to off (red) on the Alerts dashboard.

Alerts is a deceptively simple--but invaluable--tool that helps you manage and protect your product listings and rankings. To learn more, check out the PRO videos available under the Learn button, located next to the Settings button in the top right corner of the dashboard.