Welcome to my Helium 10 review for 2024.
If you're thinking about using Helium 10, I just want to start by saying that I've been in your shoes before. It's not easy.
I had so many questions.
“Is it worth the money?”, “Is it too hard to learn?”, “Do I even need it?”, “Is it accurate?”, “Can't I just get a cheaper alternative?”.
Honestly, it was a bit overwhelming.
It doesn't help that Reddit is a war zone full of bots screaming back and forth about “scams” and “best thing ever made”. Thanks for being of zero use, bro.
That's why I wanted to approach this review a bit differently. This is going to be a total deep dive covering my thoughts and experiences with all the tools inside (at least the ones that matter) of Helium 10.
I think once you see what Helium 10 actually does well and what it doesn't, you'll know if it's a good investment or not.
In this guide, I'm going to cover:
Important recent updates that I think add considerable value for new customers
If it actually helps you build a thriving e commerce business
What it does well and DOES NOT do well
How to decide whether you need it or not (it's pretty straightforward)
How to use the software to grow your store (with real examples)
My thoughts on their added Amazon seller training content
My thoughts on pricing and why it's not as expensive as Reddit bots claim
If you're interested in selling on Amazon FBA but don't know where to start, check out our review of Amazing Selling Machine – the best Amazon FBA course on the market.
Quick Overview– What is Helium 10?, Key Features, Pros And Cons, And Who’s it For?
Helium 10 is an all-in-one suite of 30+ tools for Amazon sellers designed to help start, grow, and manage an Amazon business.
With this software, Amazon sellers can:
Find products more easily using simple metrics related to demand and competition
Optimize product listings to rank on Page 1 according to Amazon keyword data
Compare their product listings to competitor's listings using the Index Checker, and use that data to outrank them
Check overall review sentiment and monitor negative reviews
Improve Amazon advertising by streamlining and automating pay-per-click campaigns
Manage refunds and inventory from a single dashboard
Track keywords, profits, and historical data using analytics insights
The reason I think it's one of the best softwares for Amazon sellers is that it has all the tools you need for every aspect of your business in one place.
On top of that, they also have great customer service, educational materials, video training, and regular updates.
Without Helium 10, you're wasting a lot of time and leaving money on the table.
One cheap(ish) subscription will cover learning how to make money on Amazon, as well as product research, keyword research, product lists, operations, marketing, and analytics.
Pretty much every other tool out there excels only at one specific thing.
Helium covers everything related to running an Amazon business:
Who is Helium 10 for?
Helium 10 is ideal for:
Private-label Amazon Sellers
Amazon marketing agencies working with medium to large clients
New Amazon sellers starting their first business (Freedom Ticket and Starter Plan)
Walmart sellers looking to take their game to the next level
Note: Helium 10's full suite of tools used to be overkill for new sellers. However, their new seller training (Freedom Ticket) and Starter Plan ($29 a month) have filled that gap nicely. Now, you can get started for relatively cheap and grow steadily without investing too much. You can also cancel at any time.
Helium 10 Pros and Cons
Pros
All-in-one platform (save money and 0 switching between ecosystems)
The best product validation, reverse ASIN (product number), and listings optimization tools available
Free and Starter plan for new entrepreneurs
Proprietary tools not found elsewhere (Frankenstein, Cerebro, Magneto, Scribbles)
Built-in SEO and marketing tools
Easy landing page builder
Hands-on Amazon training
Responsive customer support
Cons
No supplier database
Expensive(ish) for full access
Steep learning curve
The Truth About Helium 10 – Does it Work And Do You Really Need it?
Yes, Helium 10 works. I'm not sure where all this anger and disinformation comes from. I wouldn't be surprised if it were successful Amazon sellers just putting out fake news to discourage you from competing with them.
Do you really think that a company could get to 2,000,000 users worldwide if it didn't work?
Let me show you what it does, so you can see for yourself.
Say you want to start a store based around a product like hat stretchers. In two seconds, you can see if that's a good idea or not:
Here, Helium 10 shows you search volume, competing products, trends, and an overall product score. Now you know if it's a good idea or not.
Say you want to write a product listing that's perfectly optimized for search:
You now have a tool that shows you exactly what to do. Just fill in the bullet points with your keywords (that Helium 10 also gives you), and you're good to go.
If you're looking for a specific product with good selling stats, this is what Black Box shows you:
Boom, you've all the data you need to make an informed decision. Including reviews, monthly sales, and pricing details.
These are just 3 of the dozen plus tools that Helium 10 comes with. I think it's pretty clear that at the very least, Helium 10 significantly reduces your workload and improves your decision making.
But Do You Really Need Helium 10?
First off…
All of your following concerns are true:
Helium 10 is a bit pricey
The Starter Plan is a bit limited
There are free alternatives that do a reasonable impression of each Helium 10 tool
Some of the tools are buggy at times
You could just dO aLL tHe WoRk mAnUaLLy – god, I HATE seeing Reddit bots comment stuff like this. The whole point of having tools is to NOT DO THE WORK MANUALLY
But you're totally missing the point here. The key is time savings, optimization, and accuracy.
Instead of doing all the research, managing 13 different tools, playing guessing games with your listings and keywords, and hiring a team of VAs to monitor reviews and refunds, Helium 10 does a lot of the work for you and makes life way easier.
It's not about “if you could do it all yourself”, it's about “Helium 10 does it for so it gets done right and saves you 40+ hours a week you can spend that time working ON the business instead of IN the business”.
There's a reason serious sellers and agencies use Helium 10 – it works.
It gives you clean, accurate data and insights on your business to help you improve rankings, beat competitors, and manage your business.
It also streamlines time-consuming BS tasks like monitoring reviews, fighting Jeff Bezos for refunds, and monitoring product rankings. That's a major advantage in what's already a cutthroat game.
Without Helium 10, all of that hard work is on you. And if you're new to the game, you probably won't even know what the hell you're doing anyway.
I think it's pretty easy to see the value here.
So, you need to ask yourself “Do I want to learn this all on my own, do all the work, and manage all of the people/tools manually or do I want to speed it up and gain peace of mind”.
It's really not even that expensive. $29-79/month for something that saves you 40+ hours a week equals about $0.5 per hour of time saved. Plus the data is going to be more accurate.
How to Use This Review to Decide if You Need Helium 10 or Not
In this review, I've detailed all of the key features and some real-world examples of how Helium 10 can help make selling on Amazon easier and more profitable.
Go through them and assess whether or not you want to put in the time needed to do it on your own – including learning how to do it.
You can get your feet wet by trying out free tools in the Helium 10 Chrome Extension like X-Ray. Download it and check out some products for yourself. After that, you can determine if it's a good fit or not.
You should think about what your time is worth. Do you want to do hours and hours of work and learning, or do you want to shortcut the process for either $29 or $79? It's simple math.
At the bottom of this review, you'll find some alternatives to Helium 10 that could be better depending on your budget and what you need them for.
The Helium 10 Freedom Ticket – New Sellers Should Start Here
If you're new to the game, you don't need all of Helium 10's tools yet. You will eventually, but you probably don't know. I highly suggest you start with Freedom Ticket instead.
The Helium 10 Freedom Ticket is an over-the-shoulder walkthrough that guides you step-by-step through building a successful Amazon FBA biz.
It's a premium course that's now just part of even their starter plan ($29/mo)
It walks you through:
Branding
Picking a successful product
How to find suppliers and shippers
How to compete with bigger sellers
How to rank on page 1
How to create listings and make sales
How to advertise to scale to the stars
This 8-week training module holds a ton of value for new Amazon sellers. It's a “zero to success” blueprint, and it's now included with your membership, even with the Starter plan.
So, now not only do you get a great Amazon growth tool, you get a step-by-step blueprint for how to use it and crush with Amazon in general.
We've reviewed all of the most popular Amazon FBA courses and Freedom Ticket is easily in the top 3.
What is Helium 10?
Helium 10 is an all-in-one software for starting, growing, managing, and optimizing businesses for the Amazon marketplace. They've also recently added tools for Walmart sellers a well.
This software was designed to make life easier for entrepreneurs by putting all of the tools they need to make money and save time in one place.
There are currently 2 million users of the software as well as over 70,000 in the private sellers group:
There are more than a dozen tools available in Helium 10.
Including:
Niche selection
Product trend research
Competitor spying
Keyword research tools
Listing optimization tools
Refund management
Inventory protection
Amazon index monitoring
Fraud prevention
I believe if you aren't using Helium 10, you're leaving money on the table. Helium 10 can help you:
Find more profitable products and reduce the chances of investing in losing ones
Reverse engineer your competitors, see how you compare to them, and exploit their weaknesses as well as improve on your own
Optimize your listings for better rankings
Save time by automating tedious tasks like refund management and review monitoring
Improve on your business by using AI insights
Prevent fraud and abuse
Without Helium 10, you'd need a dozen different tools, personal expertise, or an employee who knows what they're doing.
Plus the support team has always been responsive and helpful. I can tell they actually care about customer's concerns.
They usually respond to my support tickets quickly, and I get someone who actually knows what they're doing instead of an AI bot who still somehow doesn't speak English.
The Helium 10 Web App – Where you Access All Your Tools
Helium 10's main website is where you'll find all of your Amazon tools for product research, listings, inventory, competitor research, etc. It's a pretty standard SaaS just like any you've seen before.
Helium 10 Chrome Extension – Improve Your Business From Your Browser
Helium 10's Chrome extension is a suite of 5 powerful time-saving tools available from your browser.
The Chrome Extension comes with:
Xray: Instant access to market data to find lucrative product opportunities.
ASIN Grabber: Copy ASINs in bulk to create targeted ads.
Profitability Calculator: Instantly calculate your profit margin based on weight, FBA fees, dimension, and freight cost.
Inventory Levels: Instantly view inventory for any product on Amazon.
Review Downloader: Gain insight into what customers are saying about products to improve your listings.
The Helium 10 Mobile App – Be Addicted to Your Phone More
Helium 10's new mobile app means you can take your business anywhere.
Now, you'll never be able to get away from your business.
EVER.
I can tell they've put a ton of work into this. The display is mint, and everything feels super intuitive IF you're already a Helium 10 user).
It's great if you're OCD and want to constantly check profits, sales, PPC, and inventory.
For me, it's awesome to be able to instantly see sales at the end of every day, week, or month at the swipe of a finger. And to pump my fist every time I make a sale (SCORE!).
Helium 10 Pricing (Major Update!) – Helium 10 is Not That Expensive
Helium 10 now has way simpler pricing plans, with each price varying depending on whether you pay monthly or annually:
Free
Starter: $29-39/mo
Platinum: $79-99/mo
Diamond: $229-279/mo
Again, worth mentioning that our readers get a big fat discount coupon, making this an even better deal – click here for access to the coupons.
BIG UPDATE: Starter Plan
I was stoked to hear Helium 10 filled the gap between their Free and Platinum plans with an affordable way to test the REAL Helium 10.
Before, you had to dive head first into the deep end and drop $79 a month. That, or settle for a free version of Helium 10 that was fairly limited.
The new Starter plan is ideal for:
New entrepreneurs getting their first ever Amazon tool
Customers of more affordable tools like Jungle Scout that want to test if Helium 10 is worth the extra money
Amazon sellers on a budget
Access is still limited, but it's enough to get you started…
$29 a month gets you:
Blackbox (20 uses)
Trendster
Xray Chrome Extension
Cerebro (2 uses)
Magnet (2 uses)
Frankenstein (30 days)
Scribbles (30 days)
Why Is Starter a Big Upgrade Over the Free Plan?
From what I can see, Starter offers 3 big advantages over Free that add value for new customers:
Freedom Ticket Training: Hands-on training for selling on Amazon from real experts that have been there and done that.
Profits (Financial Analytics): Unlimited access to profits analysis including sales, margins, and business trends.
Xray Unlimited: Unlimited access to the best Chrome Extension in the biz.
Here are my thoughts on the 3 main plans.
Starter: This is how you get your feet wet. It comes with minimal usage of MOST of the tools. For example, you get 2 uses of Magnet per day and can track up to 20 keywords. You also get 20 uses of Blackbox. Limited but if you're a newbie, you won't need much more than what they give you.
Platinum: Perfect for entry-level users with minimal selling needs. This is where most new FBA'ers get started. You get unlimited use of Blackbox, Magnet, and Trendster plus 5,000 emails a month and alerts on 300 ASINS.
Diamond: It's starting to get real. You'll need some serious helium if you want to scale to the stars. The platinum plan just didn't have enough gas to make us go supernova. Diamond lets you track up to 5,000 keywords, check up to 300 indexes, alert up to 600 ASINS, and automate 15,000 emails every month.
We recommend starting small and building your way up if you're new to Amazon. If you're already generating good revenue, then Diamond is perfect for helping you scale.
Helium 10 Features Breakdown (And How to Use Them)
If you're still reading this review, the tools that will matter the most to you are:
Cerebro
Blackbox
Magnet
Scribbles
Frankenstein
This is where your money will be made. So, let's keep it to just these for now.
What I'm trying to say is you shouldn't base your decision on buying Helium 10 on smaller features that return less value.
Think of the 80/20 rule: these 5 tools are the 80/20.
Helium Cerebro – Find Winning Product Opportunities
What is Cerebro?
Cerebro is a reverse ASIN lookup tool that tells you everything you need to know about a product's viability on Amazon (including high ranking keywords). Paste in a product URL and it instantly shows you thousands of keyword suggestions, including all of the keywords that the product ranks for.
This lets you see everything your competitors rank for and gauge the competition. The reason this is so valuable is because it takes out a lot of the guesswork. Instead of throwing darts against the wall and hoping for the best, you see if it's already working. That way, you know if it's a good product idea or not.
Let's use a gaming chair example again to demonstrate the power of Cerebro.
Grab the ASIN from the URL and paste it into Cerebro.
HACK: Experience has taught us to ALWAYS choose a product with a large number of reviews, even if it's not at the top of the rankings. This is a sign it's been on Amazon longer, and that means it'll rank for more keywords than a newer product.
Now look at everything Cerebro gives you:
And all this…
How to Evaluate Cerebro's Results
Let's break it down slowly. Here's what Cerebro gave us when we put in our gaming chair:
Now we'll cover the most important factors in detail so you can make sense of the madness.
Cerebro IQ Score
Cerebro IQ Score is a point system that indicates how good of an opportunity a certain product is. The higher the number the better. The rule of thumb in in FBA is to get a popular product with low competition – that's what this score indicates (it's search volume vs. # of competing products).
A high score means a large volume of searches with low competition (A great product opportunity). A lower score means fewer searches and high competition (Stay away).
For example here, “racing PC chair” would be a bad product to chase. Low searches and lots of competing products.
CPR 8-Day Giveaways
CPR 8-Day Giveaways is an estimation of the total units you would need to give away over an 8-day period to rank on page 1 for this search term.
In other words, it's how many units you'd need to sell for a deep discount at launch to get this baby to the top of results. For our gaming chair, it would be about 1 per day (8 total over 8 days = 1/day).
How can I use this feature to my benefit?
What we do is we take the amount we need to give away (8 here) and calculate the cost of that. Knowing how much it'll take to start up your FBA store helps you weigh potential products against each other.
For example, if two products are equally good opportunities, but one costs $1,000 to launch and the other costs $100, you've got another helpful data point to make the decision. When you're starting a new brand, this is the only way to get your name out there.
Here's a complete breakdown of what you need to know about the giveaways feature.
Competing Products
Obviously, you want to have fewer competitors in your niche. However, more competition sometimes means a niche is more lucrative. So, this metric can be a bit misleading at times.
Just because there's a huge number of competing products doesn't mean you don't have a winning product.
We see a lot of entrepreneurs make the mistake of being scared of a lot of competing products without taking into account other information. Don't fall into this trap.
If the IQ Score/Giveaways combined with your gut feeling are good, then it could be a winner.
Tip: Use Cerebro to Expand Your Keyword List
Use Cerebro to reverse engineer AT LEAST 3-5 competing ASINs and create a huge keyword list.
If you're missing even a single relevant keyword from your listings, you could lose front-page real estate to properly optimized competitors.
Check this example out. Remember our gaming chair?
1,000 results. Not too bad…
But look what happens when we modify the search by adding an extra related KW: “Footrest”
621 results now.
But wait, what if we go even deeper and add in memory foam?
118! It's going to be so much easier to rank your chair if you include ALL of these relevant keywords. If you miss them, you'll be competing against 1,000 sellers. Add in just these two words, and you knock out 90% of the competition for this term.
Once you've built this keyword list, it's time to expand it to even more products.
Magnet – Expand Your Keyword List
Magnet is a keyword research tool for Amazon sellers with the largest database of Amazon keywords on the market. You enter a “seed” keyword, and Magnet suggests related terms, helping you uncover even more organic traffic opportunities.
Magnet shows you:
All related keywords
High-volume keywords
Actionable keywords (think: Buy now)
Competing products
Top products
Word frequency
This is a key differentiating feature for Helium 10: All of this data comes directly from Amazon. That means no useless search traffic mucking up the works.
I've found that H10 generally returns better keywords and more of them, much faster.
You even get search filters to cut out the fat and leave only the most valuable keywords behind to add to your listings.
Using Magnet With Cerebro
Remember that big keyword list you made with Cerebro? It's time to use Magnet to add to it.
Once you've selected all relevant words from the list, click Get Keywords.
Notice all of the new keyword ideas we have now?
This opens up a whole new world of keywords and products like lumbar support, cushion, adjustable desks (found an unknown related term!), and desk accessories for girls (product idea?).
Is it weird that I'm enjoying this so much?
10,000+ keywords is a lot though, and not all are relevant to us. Let's do some digging.
How to Review FBA Keywords (Our Quick Process)
Export Your Keywords to a Spreadsheet
Pretty self explanatory here. Just click the export function and move along.
Insert a Column and Mark Relevant Keywords
We usually place an “X” next to relevant keywords and leave the others blank. This helps establish a baseline of keywords to work from.
OK, now that we have which keywords are relevant and which aren't, it's time to order them by relevance. This took our game to the next level.
Sort Your Keywords by Relevancy
Now that every relevant keyword has an “x” next to it, sort your spreadsheet according to the “X” column. Now, all of your keywords with X's should be in a row. Delete the rest.
Now, let's go next level.
Place a 1 next to every VERY RELEVANT keyword and a 2 next to LOOSELY RELEVANT keywords.
Like this:
Here's why – very relevant keywords should go in your titles when possible, and supporting keywords should be placed in the bullets and description.
Now that you've created this monster full of different keywords, it's time to clean it up.
Frankenstein – Create Cash-Generating Keyword Lists
Helium 10's Frankenstein is what we call a keyword list cleaner.
Your initial “dirty” keyword list is going to be full of a bunch of redundant or unneeded search terms like “for” or “with”, and leaves behind only the valuable parts of the search terms. This makes your keyword list a lot easier to deal with and perfectly optimized for Amazon's search algorithm.
Just copy and paste your KW list into Frankenstein, select parameters, and click a button.
Then IT'S ALIVE!
The new list now contains all of the words you have to mention in your listings to become completely SEO optimized.
Helium 10 Blackbox – Find Untapped Niches
Black Box is Helium 10's niche research tool. It lets sellers drill down to the granular details to find lucrative product opportunities based on strict criteria like competition, monthly sales, and search volume.
Say you want to find products with high search volume, decent pricing, and a lot of reviews.
Let's see what we get.
BOOM! Black Box has just done most of the work for you. You now have a list of lucrative products based on granular details. Instead of brainstorming niches then manually searching by volume, price, and reviews, Black Box gives you hundreds of product ideas.
Of course, YOU still have to evaluate the opportunities. The value here is that it does the manual research work for you, so you can focus on the higher-level things like evaluating the opportunities.
Helium 10 Scribbles – Optimize Listings to Rank on Page 1
Scribbles is Helium 10's Amazon listing optimizer that helps sellers ensure their listings are 100% optimized correctly.
Want a perfectly optimized Amazon listing without having to manually track which keywords you've used and where?
Scribbles does it:
It does this by tracking which words you've used and where, and removing words from your list as you use them.
Once you're done, you just go to your Amazon dashboard and copy/paste.
What Else is Included in Helium 10?
Helium 10 still has plenty more tools than what I just covered. The most important are:
Keyword Rank Tracker: Tracks your keywords so you see where you stand today as well as historically. Monitoring progress is the best way to stay motivated and keep your eyes on the prize.
Refund Genie: Refund Genie is a great tool that taps into your account and notifies you whenever there's a good chance of a refund. This put a few hundred dollars back in our pockets in a single year. It almost paid for Helium 10 itself.
Inventory Protector: The Cerebro Product Rank giveaway method is the best way to rank on page 1. But there's one disaster scenario that could tank your entire FBA biz: Inventory gouging. Say you're running a promo of 90% off. What's to stop someone from buying 100 units and cleaning you out instantly? Inventory Protector, that's who. This lets you set a product limit so your inventory stays safe.
Hijacker Alert: When scammers try to jump on your listing and sell knockoffs, H10's Hijacker Alert Tool tells you so you can contact Amazon and prevent any issues. The last thing you need is someone to buy a bogus product from a hijacker and leave you a bad review.
New Helium 10 Tools
One of the main reasons I recommend Helium 10 is because they're constantly updating their tools based on customer feedback.
A few times per year, they'll roll out something new that's a big help to your Amazon business. To date, they've added some very helpful features that I use regularly.
Recently, they've added:
Inventory Management: This is your inventory command center. With it, you can change reorder frequency, Manage purchase orders, get restock recommendations, and see supplies at a glance.
Seller Assistant: This Chrome Extension instantly requests reviews from all sales from a page for up to the past 30 days. Without it, you'd have to manually request reviews for every sale.
AI Insights: This feature does a lot of the work that you used to do yourself…sound familiar? Why did your keywords drop? What are competitors up to? Why aren't your listings converting? These insights save you time and money by showing you what's not working and how to optimize it.
Helium 10 Alternatives
1. Jungle Scout
Jungle Scout is a research tool and database that's been around since 2014. It's the most popular product and supplier database in the industry.
The key difference between the two is that Helium 10 is a suite of tools for managing and growing a business whereas Jungle Scout is primarily used for finding products and suppliers.
We've used both tools, and since switching to Helium 10, we've never looked back.
If you just want to find a product, you're fine just using JS. However, it doesn't do much else.
In general, I think people should use both tools. I'd use both H10 and JS to find products and compare the data. I'd also use JS to find suppliers if needed. Then, I'd use Helium 10 for the rest.
2. Viral Launch
Viral Launch is a tool that optimizes your product launches by helping you find buyers, offering coupons, and bringing in external traffic.
If you remember before I mentioned giveaways. This is what Viral Launch helps with. When you want to start offering a new product, VR helps you get it off the ground.
Again, I think you should use the tools in tandem. Use Helium 10 for everything. Then, when it's time to launch a new product, use Viral Launch to get it off the ground.
3. AMZ Scout
AMZ Scout is a Helium 10 alternative that helps with product research and business management.
It also helps you learn different business models such as dropshipping and wholesale. It pretty much does what Helium 10 does, just not as well. It has fewer tools and less data, plus I hate the interface. If you want to learn some different business model, it's not bad. For everything else, I would just stick with Helium 10.
Click here to get special Dreamgrow pricing for Helium 10 for a limited time. I really think it'll be the best decision you ever make with your Amazon business.
There's a reason we've listed it as both the best Amazon FBA tool overall as well as the winner of the JS vs H10 comparison we've posted in the past.
