Helium 10 Buzz 1/16/25: TikTok Shop Backup Plans? | Temu Advertising | Amazon Cancels Programs
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TikTok shop sellers are looking at backup plans in case it's banned. Teemu now is going to start charging for advertising. Amazon discontinues two programs. Plus one of the coolest updates to keyword research we have ever done. These stories and more on today's Weekly Buzz. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.

Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host Bradley Sutton and this is the show that is our Helium 10 Weekly Buzz where we give you a rundown of all the goings on in the Amazon, TikTok shop and e-commerce world. We give you training tips of the week and let you know what new features that Helium 10 has that will give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Let's see what's buzzing.

TechWar.com

China's TikTok sellers iAmazon and Sheen as U.S. ban looms. Now, you guys know we've been talking about this for a long time where, you know, nobody here at Helium 10, myself included, has any special information as far as, hey, is TikTok going to get banned or whatnot? You know, I've always...

made the like just assumption or prediction or my gut giving you guys my gut feeling that I'm not worried about tick tock going away. I think it's too big to go away. I've always thought like, hey, if it does get, you know, like like banned or a negative thing in the Supreme Court, well, you know, it's probably just going to get sold in a few weeks or something like that or somebody's going to take it over. They're going to open up their algorithm or something's going to happen. There's too much money at stake for this just to just up and disappear. That's

That being said, you know, TikTok shop sellers are rightfully and probably

you know, honestly worried about what might happen. And so, uh, some of them are, are looking into alternatives. And so this article talks about how some are, are looking into Sheen and, uh, mainly talking about, um, Chinese sellers. Uh, it says that Chinese sellers, uh, are taking precautionary measures to prepare for a looming TikTok ban. One seller named Can Lu, uh, who runs 12 stores on TikTok targeting us. So what the heck? Why do you have 12 different TikTok, uh,

It says, has been marking down inventories and delaying the purchase of new stock as she awaits the Supreme Court's final ruling. Profits from her U.S. business had been so impressive that she had planned to rent an office and hire local staff there, it says here. It says she also is mulling Spain and Mexico as potential markets. Another merchant, Shah, said his company started selling on Amazon.

but that makes Amazon sellers jump for joy that, Hey, we get more competition. It says Amazon Sheen and other platforms last year to hedge against a U S ban on Tik TOK. And this is kind of crazy. He said, well,

We have tens of millions of inventory items, so we won't put all our eggs in one basket. Another merchant from Shenzhen who operates on TikTok and Shopee for Southeast Asia said he had wanted to expand to the U.S., but was taking a wait and see approach after the most recent Supreme Court hearing. So what about you guys like those of you who are selling on TikTok shop USA? What is your plan if TikTok shop gets banned for just a short period of time or longer period of time?

What are you going to do? I'm sure you forecasted sales. Are you just going to try and push it to Amazon or are you looking at other platforms? Let me know in the comments below. Speaking of other platforms, the next article...

is from tip ranks.com. And this is about Timu because before I told you about Timu, how pretty much you set a price, right? That Timu buys it from you and that's it. You don't control your retail price, but there's like no fee, you know, for newer sellers and there's no advertising. Timu does all the advertising for you. Well, not anymore because now it says Timu is trials, Amazon killer search site.

ad business. I don't think anything is an Amazon killer, first of all. But it's basically styling it after Amazon, according to this article here. A report says that Timu launched

a trial program or a pilot program focused on selling advertisers space to merchants who ship locally from the U S all right. So it's targeting, especially not the Chinese sellers, but us sellers allowing them to promote products on the site and charging them on a cost per click basis. Sound familiar. And it says, furthermore, the scheme allows merchants to increase the visibility of their items through a mix of higher rankings and search results and display ads that appear on team. All right. So that is going to be interesting where the,

Who knows? How many of you Amazon sellers would be like,

What Amazon is going to make advertising available to only Amazon or U S based sellers and not allow Chinese sellers or, uh, overseas sellers to have access to it. You've got a lot of you guys would probably jump for joy, but that's kind of like what a team is doing right now. Now, remember we, we reported a couple of weeks ago, how, you know, if Amazon really is cracking down on team who, as far as price matching, uh,

You're kind of dead in the water if you're selling the same product on Amazon and Timu, if you're going to lose the buy box, if Timu prices it lower, because remember, unlike other marketplaces, you cannot control the retail price on Timu. So, you know, like there's there's one story from a couple of weeks ago where it's like, hmm.

Maybe Timu is not a goat, but then here's another story where it's like, wow, that's actually pretty darn attractive to know that if you're a domestic-based seller, you're going to be able to do advertising that other sellers from overseas aren't going to be able to. The next story is actually from Amazon. It's about sharp units. Now, at first, when I first read this article, I was like, wait a minute.

What exactly is a sharp unit? You know, like we have a coffin shelf, which has sharp edges because there's corners, right? Does that qualify as a sharp unit? Notice what Amazon says this is referring to. It says,

Sharp units are objects with an edge or a point that are able to cut or pierce packaging material or human skin. Sharp units when exposed are considered a potential safety hazard. Blah, blah, blah, blah. Some examples of what sharp products are. It says knives, blades, barbed wire. Who's selling barbed wire on Amazon? Um, yeah.

Saw blades, nails, pruners, scissors. Okay, that sounds like a reasonable product. Cutters, axes, pinboard pins, needles, razors, peelers, slicers, scalpels, swords. There's people selling swords on Amazon. So that's...

What kind of products are affected? Now, what is the actual announcement? All right. So Amazon says effective February or April 14th, we will no longer offer prep services for sharp products. All right. There's going to be new requirements for these. And to give you time to adjust to these new packaging requirements, a sharp product that arrives at our fulfillment centers before April will still be accepted as long as the sharp edges are boxed

or bubble wrap to meet our current minimum packaging requirements. But after April 14th, for example, you can't use bubble wrap anymore. So Amazon was kind enough to send us some more frequently asked questions on this that's not on their website. And so basically here are some of those frequently asked questions about this. It says, what's going to happen to Sharp products sent before April 14th?

It says, hey, we're going to continue to provide prep service in the same way we do right now. However, exposed sharp items still are not acceptable. But after April 14th, we will no longer offer prep service, and you have to send all sharp items in fully packaged, in cut- and puncture-resistant packaging materials, for example, a hardened blister pack, to prevent the sharp edges from cutting or piercing.

after April 14th, if you don't meet this requirement,

When they arrive at Amazon's FBA warehouses, the product will be immediately disposed of at your expense and you won't be eligible for reimbursement. All right. Another question says, why will you dispose of rejected products instead of just returning them to me? It says, well, items that don't meet our sharp packaging guidelines aren't in a suitable condition to be handled and returned to sellers. So we're just going to dispose of them.

Um, how will I know if my sharp product has been rejected? It says you'll be notified when your inventory has been rejected, uh, and it'll be in the inventory ledger report. All right. So, um, if you guys want more information on this stuff, uh, check out, uh, your seller central, uh,

There's some news articles on that. But thank goodness I don't have, I don't think, I don't have any sharp products that qualify for this. But if you do, make sure that you check this because this isn't one of those, oh, get your titles in compliance and maybe or maybe not we might send you a message and give you some time to edit your title. We might suppress it for a little bit. No, this is a pretty hardcore...

rule where they're like hey the instant that we receive something that is not compliant we're throwing it away and you're sol all right so again people who are selling sharp objects make sure that you guys go check what's going on there with the new requirements

CNBC is our next article. It says Amazon to shut down the try before you buy rival to Stitch Fix. All right. So this was a program that allowed Prime members to try on clothes, shoes, accessories and only pay for the items they wanted to keep. How many of you selling in the clothing category, accessories category, shoes, et cetera, were using this? All right. Is it a good thing? Is it a bad thing? Like.

This is one of the things that probably made me not want to sell in these categories where it's like, man, what's going to happen with all these returns of the products that people don't want? But by any means, this service is going to be discontinued on January 31st, a

according to a notice posted on Amazon's website. It says the notice then directs users to browse Amazon's fashion homepage. So that's going to be interesting. Let me know in the comments below. Anybody in the Try Before You Buy program, is this going to affect you negatively or positively? Next article from Amazon Seller Central. Just a reminder about the climate...

pledge friendly batch. All right. Now they did some research and it says that products enrolled in this program, climate pledge friendly has that badge and the search results and stuff could see at least a 12% sales lift within the first year of qualifying. Now that's, I don't know that that seems shocking to me. Like me personally,

I'm not trying to be a, I have never really cared about the climate pledge friendly badge. Like it doesn't affect my decision, but maybe that's true. Maybe I'm in the 88% who it doesn't affect, but Hey, there's, you know, across the board, there's a 12% lift. It says, so there's other people who good on them, uh, care about climate pledge, friendly products and want to support them. So guys, if you qualify for that, go ahead and do it. Like why

Why not? Like I highly doubt anybody chooses not to buy something if they see the climate pledge friendly. So if you qualify, you should definitely do it. So there's a lot of different sustainability certifications that might get you that badge. Check your dashboard and seller central to see, um,

maybe you don't even realize that you might even have one of those certification that qualifies. And then it's just a matter of applying to get that badge. Next article, another thing that is being discontinued by Amazon, and that's the, something's been around for years, the 300, the 360 degree image experience. All right. So helium 10 coffin shelf has always had that. I didn't put that on there, but Amazon did one day, you know, there's a lot of products that had that 360 degree image experience where you can just like, you know,

Put your finger on the image and look all around it. But it says here on January 20th, this image experience and product detail pages will be discontinued. All right. Instead, you can upload 3D models to your listing and experiences such as view in 3D, which is similar to view in 360, as well as view in your room and virtual try on.

If you're new to the 3D program, you don't know much about it. So in a couple of weeks, guys, or three, four weeks from now, we're going to do a deep dive about this 3D images and how you can actually submit to get this done. You know, like for 360 degree images before you couldn't submit 3D.

to actually do it yourself. It was just kind of like random that Amazon did it. So you're going to have a little bit more control with this new 3D thing, and we're going to have some experts on this topic talk about that in a few weeks right here on this podcast. Last article of the day is from Automotive Dive. It kind of has nothing to do with sellers, but the reason I brought it up is just because

It's kind of crazy to think about, but we actually talked about this on The Buzz last year, how Amazon Autos is going to launch online sales. You can buy actual Hyundais on Amazon. It's crazy. You can do that in 54 U.S. markets. Now, again, I don't think many of you are Hyundai dealerships who can just apply for this program, but five years ago, would you have ever thought that...

You can buy a brand new vehicle on Amazon. You can buy small houses on Amazon. I saw like those tiny homes and stuff. So Amazon really has come a long ways. And while most of this stuff doesn't affect us, it kind of shows that anything is up for grabs, right?

in the future for selling on Amazon. So there's always, guys, going to be new things and new categories that sellers will be able to sell, and selling on Amazon is never going to get old. All right, that's it for the news this week. Let's go ahead and hop into the Helium 10 new feature alerts, and this is like an amazing strategy in itself. It's a strategy and a feature alert almost in one, but this is probably one of my favorite new features

things that helium 10 has launched in years all right um right up there with the historical search all right so let me paint a picture of a couple of ways about how this can help so let's say you're analyzing the coffin shelf niche all right so that's the scenario we're going to paint and i'm like okay who's the top sellers all right look at me here here's my coffin shelf i'm the top three clicked from brand analytics and and i've sold 50 in the last month uh

Here's another one of my coffin shelves. That's the second most clicked, also sold some pretty good numbers. And I don't have the first, you know, number one here, but this is the number one coffin shelf right now. If you're going to do keyword research on this, or maybe you're a brand new seller,

who's just going to get into this, you might be basing your keywords based on these top three selling coffin shelves and think that, hey, I'm going to find the top keywords for these products and go ahead and go forward, right? And yeah, you'd probably get some good keywords. So maybe what you do is you go to Helium 10's Blackbox tool, Blackbox ABA top search terms. That's Amazon Brand Analytics.

But this is what you should do. First of all, let's go ahead and just look up the coffin shelf. And I like looking at who's been the top three clicked. And let me show you why. If I click the top three ace in click share, I'm going to see month over month. What were some of the top selling coffin shelves? And now all of a sudden I'm like, wait a minute. What is going on here? The top selling coffin shelf is.

is not the ones that are showing up on Amazon now. It is this other product. It had 22% of the conversions in November. It had 35% of the conversions in October. What is going on? I didn't see that on Amazon. Was it down the page? And then you click on the listing. You're like, oh, shoot. It says currently unavailable. So again, if you didn't have Helium 10, you might not have known this was out of stock. But here is where some magic happens. All right. Now what you can do

If you're doing keyword research on this or on any product itself outside of Cerebro, still keep doing your Cerebro keyword research. But now this is another level. And this is why I called it a game changer because the game is, hey, I'm just going to run Cerebro to find my best keywords and there's nothing wrong with that. But now the game has changed because this adds a layer to keyword research that you cannot do anywhere else. You can kind of do it in Seller Central, but it would literally take you

30 minutes to an hour to show you what I'm about to show you. All right. So what you do is you go back into the brand analytics tool. And by the way, who has access to this is diamond numbers and above elite has had access to, but we always bring stuff that started with elite and we bring it down to diamond. So now if you're a diamond, you can have this pace, the ASIN or multiple ASINs that you are looking at.

And now you can pick multiple weeks. So like, but first of all, let's just pick a week in November. We saw that it was one of the top sellers in November. So let me pick the week of November 10th through the 16th. All right. And let me just see, hey, what were the keywords that this product was one of the top three clicked in December or November 10th to November 16th? And what I see here is only one keyword, coffin shelf. Right.

Like, wow, did coffin shelf drive all of its sales? You know what? Let's go ahead and look at maybe November 3rd to November 9th. You know, were there any other keywords? Maybe, maybe, maybe that, that other week it just came out of stock. Yeah. We see coffin shelf and coffin bookcase. All right. So what shows up here is this is Amazon. This is not helium 10. This is Amazon saying this product was one of the top three clicked for that week. But now,

You know, and you can do this in seller central. If you put an ace in, Hey, this week, where was this product? One of the top three click. Now, the first thing that this is pretty cool. I'm looking at a product that is not even in stock right now. So if I were just to look at this in Cerebro or I had another tool, that's not a helium 10, uh,

I would see nothing, right? Technically, actually, you know, Cerebro, of course, has historical information. But let's just say you're using another tool out there that's not Helium 10. You would not be able to find any keywords at all. But in addition, the new thing, watch this, guys. This is going to blow your minds. What I can do is I can choose multiple weeks. So as those of you watching this on YouTube, I'm clicking weeks in October and September. I'm going all the way back to like August. And I'm just curious, hey, what...

are the keywords that overall this product at any of those last 20 weeks or so from going all the way back to August was one of the top three click. If I'm just looking at one week, which you've always been able to do in Helium 10 or even Seller Central, I could see two keywords, right? I forgot what it was. I think it was coffin shelf and coffin bookshelf. But what happens when I look at a wider range of dates, right?

Well, let's take a look. Look at this. Now, all of a sudden, there's 12 keywords. You know, these keywords would not have shown up. And so now I see coffin shelf, coffin decor, goth shelf, coffin wall shelf, glass shelf, coffin bookcase, et cetera. And I could actually see how many different weeks where it was one of the top click. Like, obviously, the most

The keyword that it was always almost one of the top three click was coffin shelf, but I see Halloween shelf. Also, it was one of the top three click for like two months almost. So this is like giving you great data. But then what is being worked on now, I'm not, you know, depending on when you guys are watching this video, I might be ready yet is I'm also going to be able to say, hey, show me where the entered ASIN is.

has at least 1% conversion. Because what happens is sometimes there's a keyword that maybe the product is one of the top three clicked, like it had 30% of the clicks, but it could have 0% sales. If that number of conversions, percentage of conversions or percentage of sales is greater than zero,

What does that mean? That's basically Amazon telling you and verifying this keyword literally brought sales to this product. And, you know, search query performance obviously has that. And it's not available in Helium 10 yet. It's not available in any API.

But this is basically kind of like almost just like search query performance, because this is not you making a guess or helium 10 saying, oh, because it's ranking high, it definitely brought sales. It probably did. This is verified information direct from Amazon saying, hey, these exact keywords brought sales to this product or group of products. I could put like 30 products in here and it'll tell me all of the keywords, right?

that brought sales to them. So guys, this has got to be a step in your keyword research. It'll take you like two or three minutes extra to find keywords. A lot of these keywords, are they keywords that Cerebro would have found anyways? Of course, because if you're entering filters in Cerebro, like, hey, show me where it's the top ranked. Of course, it's going to show up, but you never know because you could just randomly have shown up in an auto-

campaign for a keyword that you're not tracking and that maybe only one day out of a week or a month you were even ranking, but you got a sale that day. This tool is going to pick that up guys. If you were one of the top three clicked for that week, even on low search volume keywords. So this is like, this is like a gold mine guys of stuff. And it's not just looking what week by week you could do that in seller central today, right?

But how long would it take me to put my ace in and open up 20 tabs in seller central for brand analytics and one by one, check all the keywords and see where the duplicates, et cetera, et cetera. It would literally take me 20, 30 minutes. At least this takes less than one minute to do. And you're going to have a really valuable keyword list. So that is awesome.

Awesome new feature, guys. If you have the diamond plan, if you don't have the diamond plan, upgrade now. This is worth it just by itself. You've got the diamond plan. You've got access to this for free. Get in there. Go into Blackbox, ABA top search terms, and start using this and start checking what your product or your competitors' products have been one of the top three clicked and have been getting sales from. Super, super cool strategy here.

All right, for the strategy of the week, let's go ahead and keep it in black box brand analytics. Let me give you another scenario. Let's say that you're a company that you are a manufacturer of bamboo products, right? You've got a factory that does bamboo products. You're like, hey, I want to expand my line and find some new products in this bamboo niche, all right? What is one way that you can do that? It's probably a way that you've never done before in Helium 10. And let's go ahead and hop into it. It's in black box brand analytics.

Now, what you're going to want to do is just type in like bamboo, like, like, Hey, I'm looking for keywords that have the word bamboo in it. Now this strategy is going to be a pretty cool because basically in a nutshell, we're going to find keywords where people are, there's demand for their search volume. People are clicking on products in the search results because they think it's going to meet their need, but they are not buying it. All right. They're just like, nah, this is not for me. Um,

they're clicking to buy another product. Now, how would you know that with Amazon brand analytics? Well, think about it. Amazon brand analytics is telling you what are the click shares of the top three products. And then of those three products, what share of the conversions or sales do those products have? For example, let's just say that we're, we find a keyword here that had, you know, Amazon doesn't say, but let's just say there was 100 clicks, right?

Overall for this keyword. I mean, somebody searched this keyword a thousand times, a hundred people clicked it. And these top three products had a total of 50% of the clicks. I mean, wow, there's buyer intent there because they're like, Hey, this product looks good in the search results. They're clicking it. How many clicks is that? If it was a hundred, it was 50 clicks, right?

Now, what share of the conversions or what share of the sales do you think those products should have? Well, it should be 50%. Like if all things are equal, hey, if they got 50% of the page views and everybody's conversion rate is equal, they should have had 50% of the sales. But what would you say if all of a sudden the total share of conversions or sales of those top three click products was only 10%?

What does that mean? That means people are clicking onto it because it looks like in the search results that that's what they're looking for. But when they click on the product, they're just like turned off. They don't like it and they end up buying another product. Now you can actually find those keywords in seconds in Helium 10. So what I did here was I'm just looking at one week right here. I typed in the word bamboo and.

And then, wow, look at that. There's 2,183 keywords that are showing up here in the search results of brand analytics. Now, what I'm going to do now is I'm going to do a top three ASIN total click share. Let's go ahead and say a minimum of 50%, meaning everybody is clicking on it. But if I take the top three conversion share,

They are less than 20%. All right. So again, that means these products have a really bad conversion rate. And that means that could mean opportunity for me. Let's go ahead and hit apply filters and let's see how much we can whittle down that list of 2000 keywords. Look at that. It goes down to 215. Let's just take a look at some of these keywords here. If there's anything that looks interesting, let's

Uh, look at this one. No tools, bamboo shades. Don't know what that is, but look at that. This keyword has a couple thousand search volume, but look at the number one clicked product, uh, had 25% of the clicks. You know, we don't know how many clicks it was. Let's say it was a thousand, uh,

25% of it, but not one person purchased it. The number two clicked product, 18% of the clicks, not one person purchased it. All right. So there's something going on here where there's people who want to buy, but they're just not seeing what they want. Scrolling down here in these keywords. Another one, no tools required bamboo shades for windows. Same exact thing. Look at all these products.

high percentage of clicks, but people are just not buying this product. And so this is just one of many ways that Helium 10 has where you can find product opportunity. And it's a pretty unique way. I would venture to say 99.9% of you have never used this technique in order to look for ideas on products that may be underserving the market currently that you can go in and perhaps take up some of that customer demand.

All right, guys, that's it for the news this week. Uh, don't forget next week. I won't be here. There, there still will be weekly buzz, but the reason I'm not going to be here is I'm going to be in Berlin, Germany at the biggest conference for Amazon sellers that there's ever been in Europe. It's going to be called AMZ hacking live should be about 500 sellers or more. If you guys want to attend, I'll go, I'm going to be there speaking on stage. Kevin King will be there. Uh,

500 other sellers will be there. H10.me forward slash Germany. H10.me forward slash Germany for tickets. Use the code Helium10, no spaces, in order to get a 10% off. Now, most of this event is going to be in German. So first of all, it's open to anybody, whether you live in Germany, whether you live in Spain, whether you live in

you know, anywhere, Kazakhstan fly over, right. And come hang out with us. But if you can't speak German at all, well, Hey, at least my presentation, Kevin King's presentation will be in English. Or if you want a full half day event in English, we have our elite workshop that we are doing that we're opening up for a fee for other people. It's the day before on the 24th, next Friday. Uh,

So if you want more information on that, it's h10.me forward slash Berlin, h10.me forward slash Berlin, and you can attend our elite workshop for a fee. Kevin King will be speaking there. I'll be speaking there, and there will be other speakers as well. All right, guys, that's it for our news and new feature alerts and our training tip of the week. Hope you guys enjoyed this episode. Shivali will be here next week to let you guys know what's buzzing.