Helium 10 Buzz 1/3/25: BIG Amazon Title Policy Change | Temu Banned for Amazon Sellers?
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Amazon makes a big title policy change that could cause some of you to have to update up to half of your listings or more. Is this move that Amazon is about to make essentially not allowing sellers to sell on Timu? These two stories and more on this edition of the Helium 10 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'm your host Bradley Sutton and this is the show that is our Helium 10 weekly buzz. We give you a rundown of all the goings on in the Amazon, TikTok shop, Teemu and e-commerce world. We give you training tips of the week and let you know what new tools that Helium 10 has that'll give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Let's see what's buzzing. If you guys missed last week, I

We actually didn't have the news. We kind of preempted the news to give you the update on the top 10 new tools that Helium 10 has. So we kind of focus on the new feature updates. Sometimes we'll have only news. Sometimes we might have only new feature updates. So we have top 10 new feature updates from Helium 10 for the end of the year. So make sure to go back and check that one out from last week if you didn't see that. But

Because of that, we have a little bit extra news going on today. So let's go ahead and hop right into it. Now, the first article is...

Another doozy, it seems. Maybe for some of you, it literally doesn't affect at all. But some of you, you might have to change up to hundreds of your listings if you are to be in compliance with this new policy. What is the new policy? Well, yesterday in Seller Central, Amazon announced new product title requirements effective January 21st, 2025. It says that they're up

dating their product title policy. Now, you know, the first part of this is

Are we going to take this with a grain of salt? You know, Amazon has such a wide variety of product title policies that they haven't necessarily enforced. You know, sometimes they'll say, Hey, you should only have up to 80 characters and another place, the same exact listing. We'll say up to 250 characters in some places they say, Hey, you got to put your title at the beginning of the listing and other situations that actually put, take your title and stick it like at the end of the list. I mean,

They've been kind of all over the place with Amazon titles, but this is a policy they're going to announce. And the way I look at things is whenever they announce something, I kind of got to take it at face value, play

play devil's advocate and just assume that, hey, if they're going to enforce this, I might not want to rock the boat, if it were. But some of you might be like, hey, Amazon has said bullet points. You can't have emojis for years, and everybody still does it. So who knows? But this is the news. Let's report what's going on.

It says over time, we've observed that product titles have become longer and they sometimes include redundant wording or characters that can decrease customer confidence. These new policy changes will ensure that product titles are clear, concise, and consistent. Makes sense so far, right? These new effects is actually coming up pretty fast. It's going to take effect on January 21st. So you only got like a couple of weeks to kind of get in compliance with

First of all, it says for most product categories, titles may not exceed 200 characters, including spaces. All right. You know, for some of you might be like, well, hasn't always been like that. Well, you know, some, some places Amazon has even said like 250 or like you look at fine print, it'll say 400 characters. Well, it sounds like,

For most product categories, titles are not going to exceed 200 characters. Now, also, these special characters, exclamation mark, dollar sign, question mark, underscore, I don't know what these are called, ampersands, maybe? And then another, like, little arrow pointing up. And then...

Another kind of like two dots or kind of like not two dots. I don't know how to describe this, but two lines that people used to do to kind of like break up text and titles. I don't know. Guys, I haven't been in school in like 25 years. I don't know what the punctuation mark titles are called. But anyways, these things that I just mentioned.

Hopefully, if you're watching this on YouTube, you can actually see what characters these are. But these are not allowed unless they're part of the brand name. And now here's the one that I think is the big one. I don't think people are putting...

dollar signs in their title, but titles may not contain the same word more than twice. This applies to everything except prepositions, articles, that's like a and or the, I knew that, and conjunctions. Those are exceptions. Now, here's the thing of why I say it's kind of not new. Like if you look at my training videos from like 2018, I have always said, and I think a lot of people out there have taught this,

It's actually best not to repeat the same word in one field inside of a listing, meaning I've always said the title don't have the same word twice in one bullet point. Don't have the same word twice in like the search terms, backend search terms don't have the same word twice. So again,

This is not necessarily something new. It's best practice, you know, not to repeat the same word. That being said, I've probably done it myself. Like, I don't know, one of my coffin shelf listings, I might have the phrase coffin shelf. And then like towards the end of the listing, I'll say coffin decor. I think a lot of us have.

Some sellers, if you look at their listings, more than 50% of their listings, they'll repeat the same word twice in a title because they might have two separate words that are both relevant and they want to get that juice and send that relevancy signal for both words to Amazon. But

sellers if you're going to take this at face value you've got two weeks to kind of clear out all of your listings and decide hey which of those two phrases are you going to keep in phrase form because you're not going to be able to keep both anymore because if it shares the same uh root word all right so this is something that you guys might have to take action i'm talking with the team see if there's anything we can do to help like give you a list of the uh the listings that um

Might not be in compliance. But what do you think? From a buyer's point of view, it makes sense. Like people don't want to see a title where it says coffin shelf for spooky coffin decor lovers. I mean, it just seems a little bit

you know, keyword stuff, right? So this is going to be something interesting. How many of you sellers are going to go ahead and update your listings with this? And how are you going to decide what to take out? Let me know in the, in the comments below going forward, it says starting January 21st, these title changes will be subject to the updated policy. Now, what that tells me is that if you change your title later, there's

There's going to be this automatic bot that will not even allow you to change your title if you are not in compliance, right? And it's going to also provide override suggestions for non-compliant titles in review listing updates. Remember, Amazon sometimes is going to go change your title, whatever they want. And if you don't say, no, I don't want that, they're just going to push it through. So make sure guys, you bookmark review listing updates to know if you are going to be subject to a title update.

So you have 14 days in order to act upon those suggestions. Otherwise, Amazon is just going to go ahead and go with whatever their AI thinks that the title should be. Now, some other title notes. If you look, they reference the title guidelines. I'm not sure if this has always been the case.

Um, but just a couple, a couple of things that if you look at this page, it'll say, Hey, for products that have variations include the size and color variations, the title of the child aces and not in the title of the parent ace. And I think that's, that's always been the same. The detail page displays the title of the parent acin and the title of the child acin will only appear once the acin is added to the customer cart. I don't remember that like as a buyer, um,

If I click on the coffin shelf, it doesn't say black or pink unless I add it to the shopping cart. I don't know. That was just something that stuck out to me. I was like, in my buying experience, I don't remember that. It says don't use all caps. That's nothing new. It says capitalize the first letter of each word except for prepositions and articles. Use numerals. It says don't do two. T-W-O, do the number two. And I also see here that

I think I said ampersand for something. I must have chosen the wrong one because it's not an ampersand. So again, go back on YouTube to watch exactly which punctuations are not allowed.

Skipping gears, Channel X World had an article that says Amazon effectively bars sellers from Timu Marketplace. Now, there wasn't any announcement made. But, you know, like when I was in China a couple weeks ago, I actually heard about this story as well. And you guys all know Anchor, right? A-N-K-E-R, the power bank manufacturer. And what's happened is Anchor is no longer selling on Timu.

Now, what happened, we all know that Amazon monitors prices on other websites, you know, like Walmart and Shopify. And then if you go below the price, Amazon removes the buy box. But now, supposedly, supposedly, Amazon has added the Timu marketplace to the list of sites that they monitor.

All right. Now, this is pretty big news, as this article says, if that is the case, because Timu is actively recruiting many Amazon sellers. I'm trying to get on Timu myself. And I was planning to put the coffin shelf and other products at a lower price because until now, Amazon has not price matched Timu.

Right. And so, Hey, if I could sell my product for less, but still get similar profit due to Timu, no fees and things like that and no advertising. Well, sure. I'll go ahead and do it. Cause I really don't think Timu sales affect Amazon sales per se and categories, you know, like, like that aren't clothing and things like that. But a thing to keep in mind is you don't have control per se over the price that Timu offers. You can't put the price up and down like you can on Walmart or Shopify because

Timu decides the price. You can decide the price you sell it to Timu at, but then if Timu wants to go and lose money on it, they can. If Timu wants to give it to seller or to buyers at their cost, they can. If they want to market up 50%, they can. So that obviously would be an issue because like, let's say you lost the buy box because Amazon figured out that your Walmart price is less. You just go on Walmart and

then, you know, raise the price and then everything's hunky-dory. Right. But that is not the case with Timu. So that's going to be interesting. You know, like, like this, could this slow my role for, for selling on Timu? Absolutely. Absolutely.

You know, it pretty much means I'm going to have to go with like a different brand name and obviously not include the UPC or have a different UPC and everything so that Amazon does not price match, you know, maybe even using different images. So this is just something to think about. For those of you who have been considering selling on Timu, if Amazon truly is going to start price matching the same brands,

What are you going to do? Are you going to still sell on T-Mobile? Are you just going to forget about it? Let me know. Next article here is also from Channel X, and it's entitled TikTok Shop Order Cancellation Return and Refund Update. I probably could have given you guys this information from the emails I got, but I'm kind of lazy, so I'll go ahead and quote this article here because they kind of, you know,

summarize it here, but basically a tick talk sellers got an email that says, Hey, the order cancellation, uh, return to refund rate policy is going to change. If you are doing FBM or fulfilled by merchant starting on January 10th, anybody who does FBM, you have to reimburse the shipping fees. A customer has paid when customers request a return and refund.

Before, TikTok Shop would cover those fees. And that's no longer going to be subsidized anymore. Now...

This is almost sounding like Amazon. Some of the sellers are like, wait, that's not fair. Because the current policy is if customers return a policy using the change of mind return, you're like, hey, I just changed my mind on this product. The initial shipping fee has to be compensated. Now, TikTok shop before or currently could agree with the seller to cover these costs when customers choose this change of mind. But from January 10th,

anything done by ship by seller, sellers will always be fully responsible for reimbursing customers the initial shipping fee that they have paid for their order in all return and refund scenarios, including change of mind returns. Now, remember, this is a little bit different than Amazon because Amazon

TikTok shop, if I'm not mistaken, they actually charge customers even more shipping. Right. So that's why the profit margins are so ridiculously high on TikTok shop. And so, you know, on Amazon, it's kind of like free shipping. So so that's just something to keep in mind. It's like if this was on Amazon.

We're already used to that, right? Like we don't charge shipping. The customer doesn't charge or doesn't pay for shipping separately than the actual product, unless it's like an FBM item. So when we're refunding the whole thing,

It's like that kind of includes the shipping as well. So this is just I think is not as like impactful as it might sound because you're already like making out like bandits if you're doing FBM and getting that subsidy because TikTok was was, you know, like adding more shipping that I think goes to your bottom line. I'm not exactly an expert yet on TikTok shop. But again, this is this is something that that is a significant change for those of you shipping by yourself.

Next article is from Seller Central itself, and it's entitled Prime Exclusive Discounts Are Moving to the Price Discounts Tool. So this came out last week when I was in China, and we skipped the weekly buzz, but Prime Exclusive Discounts historically has been separate in

inside of your advertising menu in seller central. And then there was a prime or there was a price discounts. Now it's going to be merged. All right. Price discounts is going to have both prime exclusive discounts and all the other customer discounts. So if you already did a prime exclusive discount, it's going to run until whenever you had scheduled to end. But if you do new discounts,

discounts, you have to use the Prime or the price discounts page. So just keep that in mind if you're like confused and wondering why you can't add something in Prime exclusive discounts anymore. That's why they're just merging the two services.

Next article is going to Reuters, and I entitled this like New Mexico tariffs. But what I meant was not New Mexico as in Breaking Bad Albuquerque, but Mexico is putting a new tariff on products that are coming in from China like Sheen and Timu. Now, I would say 99% of you know.

No están viviendo en Mexico. You guys don't live in Mexico. So you're like, why, why do I, why should I care about this? But this is kind of like a preview. If this happens, this could be like, who knows eventually what United States has been talking about for a while. Could this happen in this country where the U S is going to close the loophole that Amazon hall Sheen team who are taking advantage of to get products in.

So basically, you know, in Mexico, there was a similar loophole, right? That T.U. and Sheen can deliver to Mexico and kind of bypass tariffs. But now what's going to happen is goods that enter Mexico are

originating from countries that don't have an international treaty with Mexico are subject to a duty of 19%. All right. So that, that takes away that loophole. And so it'd be interesting, like, like, is that going to affect companies like Timu and Sheen? And then like, it's kind of like a preview that ever happens here. If you think about it, that's, that's not much because let's say one of these Timu products is like $8 and,

or $7, well, if there's a 19% duty, you know, we're still talking, you know, like, like just a dollar 50, right? Dollar 52 dollars or something like that. So is that going to stop people from, from buying? Um, no, but, but definitely increases the, uh, increases the, uh, the prices and it's going to affect, uh, services like Amazon hall, et cetera, if, uh, this goes through. So something to watch if that happens, uh, down South of the border.

Another thing that was kind of new to me, this is an article from the National Law Review. And have you guys ever heard of Apex? All right, it's a service that kind of like...

is Amazon's solution, it says, to patent dispute resolution. Now, me, I don't have any patents or I've never gotten in trouble with patents, so this maybe is why I haven't heard about this. Maybe those of you who have patents, you know all about this. But this is news to me because it talks about this procedure called the APEX procedure, and it says, this procedure aims to provide patent owners with a fast and relatively inexpensive way to assert their utility patent rights against infringing products

listed on Amazon. All right. So to initiate this proceeding, a patent holder will submit an apex request with Amazon, which if it's approved will lead to an evaluation that takes place between the patent holder and one or more sellers of the alleged infringing products. All right. This, this kind of sounds like what we all know happens, but I just didn't know it was called the apex procedure. Okay.

But anyways, it says if the evaluator finds for the patent holder, the accused product will be removed from the Amazon marketplace and a final decision is typically issued 15 weeks from initiating an apex process.

uh, proceeding. So again, this might not be something that concerns you, but if you're interested to find more information, just Google or hit this article here, look up apex procedure. And then, you know, you could, you could hit up a, a professional, uh, patent law attorney, such as like rich Goldstein, who's been on the podcast. If you have more questions, uh, about this, because there actually are some limitations to apex that this article talks about as well.

Next up, going back to Seller Central, something new that, you know, sometimes you might have images that get slapped with a noncompliance, right? Or a listing might get temporarily suppressed. And sometimes you don't know what exactly is wrong with the image, right? Well, it says that Amazon has improved the notifications for image image.

issues so you can get more details on what exactly is wrong. So the main changes is you're going to get notifications for unannounced image issue and for each issue will provide guidance that explains how to fix it. And so if you want to get more information or see if you have any of these issues, go to a seller central, then hit menu catalog, hit upload images, submission status, and then hit content.

compliance issues. But that's good. You know, more information is always good. I know we all hate it when all of a sudden Amazon does something and we have no idea why they did it. The last article of the day is from Payments.com. It's kind of an Amazon v. Walmart. It says, hey,

the year of 2020, 2024 Amazon versus Walmart and a look into 2025. It had some interesting statistics here. It says like, for example, market share, Amazon strengthened its lead over Walmart in consumer spending. By the end of 2023, Amazon accounted for 10% of US retail sales,

and 4.4% of total consumer spending, while Walmart was 7% of U.S. consumer retail spending. But now, in 2024, Amazon had 3.5% of consumer spending in the second quarter compared to Walmart's 2.9%. Now, another thing that they had head-to-head information on was like the sale events, right? Prime Day versus Walmart Plus Week.

And Prime Day had new records, sales jumping 11% to surpass $14 billion. Now, Walmart Plus Week had way lower participation, but...

A lot bigger increase, 71% increase from the previous year. And interestingly, supposedly Walmart plus week shoppers outspent Amazon counterparts averaging $473 per person compared to $326 for prime day shoppers. What in the heck?

are people buying for almost $500 on Walmart. That, that was kind of a, an interesting thing. So if you guys want more information on this head to head Amazon versus Walmart, make sure to check out this article. I still think Amazon is, is the best, you know, opportunity for making money. I'm just not fully sold on the Walmart platform and the

kind of policies that they might have that'll make sellers successful. But, you know, you should definitely be selling, in my opinion, on both platforms, as long as you can be profitable around any platform for that matter. Right. All right. That's it for the news this week. Let's hop into a new feature alert from Helium 10. And this is a new alert. Now, this is a new feature alert, but it's something that we had before.

Six years ago, we used to have this alert that would tell you, hey, your product got classified as adult. Because like before, the only way you would know is all of a sudden sales go dead, and then you check and keyword tracker ranks have gone dead, and then you check index checker and most of your main keywords are dead. This could happen for a number of reasons. But one of the main reasons it could have happened was if you got classified for whatever reason as an adult product. Well, Amazon turned that feature off where...

tools like Helium 10 could notify sellers if they got classified as adult, but

Helium 10 found a replacement for that. So now again, make sure guys, you have got your alerts active, you know, go to alerts in Helium 10, make sure that all your products, all your ASINs have the on switch on because now you'll get notified. I'm not sure exactly where I got to talk to the team. I think it's going to come up here at the top. Now, obviously I can't show it to you because you know, knock on wood, my coffin shelf and egg trays have not been classified as adult products at one time in the past they had, but,

by mistake by Amazon, but you're going to get an alert either way if that happens to your listing. So this is a new cool feature. This is like should not be slept on. I had a product I was trying to launch on one of my accounts last week or two weeks ago. So I'm doing a case study to see how the Maldives honeymoon method is working, which spoiler alert still is. But

sales went dead. And I was like, what the heck happened? And then finally, after going back and forth to Amazon, they were like, oh yeah, your product got classified as adult. You know, this was like four days later. I would have much rather known the instant that it did happen so I could open up a case and tell Amazon exactly what the issue was. So,

this is, is kind of like how actually this, this tool came about. Cause I, I talked to the healing intent team. I'm like, guys, there's gotta be a way that we can bring, you know, like, like know if, if, if a product is being classified as adult and sure enough, uh, our grade a players, uh, on healing intent side, especially, uh, Svetoslav, my buddy, uh, there, he, he was able to find a,

a new data point that will tell if your product is classified as adult. So make the only way you're going to know those, if you have alerts turned on for your listing. So make sure to do that. Let's go now into our training tip of the week. And this is a couple of things I think are very unique to helium 10, but can give you insights, especially now considering what time we're in. Maybe some of you guys are like me who you almost sold out.

of all of your products on Amazon, or now you're in the process of replenishing, especially some of you couldn't even send your product to the West Coast. And you're wondering, hey, how is this affecting how Amazon has distributed my products? Are they spreading out still?

Well, everybody, make sure to go into your profits, all right? If you're located in the USA, go into profits and then hit the inventory heat maps, all right? Go into the inventory heat maps and then look. Like right now, because I'm so low, Amazon has consolidated all my inventory to like only like five or six locations and it's not spread out very well. Like I've got nothing going on in Florida, unfortunately. But then if I look at my sales heat maps,

I can see that the same exact product, let me go ahead and open it up by state. I could see that, Hey, look here how my sales lately have kind of reflected where my inventory is. So I obviously need to get more inventory to Amazon. If I want to be able to get a little bit more sales potentially in these other States, because maybe some of these States they're looking at my product and

And they're like, maybe it's instead of one day delivery, it's two or even three days delivery. Well, that's going to affect my conversion rate in some of these states. And so you don't really have that kind of visibility unless you go download your reports and you happen to know what each symbol of

a DC or distribution center in Amazon is, you know, like which actual city that refers to. Don't, you don't need to, to know those things. Helium 10 does all that work for you too. So make sure to check that out. In addition, what you can do, uh,

is look at your historical inventory levels, not just your historical inventory heat maps, but go into profits again and hit inventory levels. And then look at the details. This is, this is for platinum diamond or whatever plan of helium 10 you have. And you can see, Hey, when you sent inventory to Amazon, how long did it take to get checked in? Like for example, look at this. I had inbound on December 10th, 110 units, uh,

By the next day, a lot of them already went to reserved because I sent it to the West Coast. I happened to be able to send it to the West Coast during this time. And so I could see that, okay, wow, I didn't get a delay at all. And if you want to kind of see like, hey, how is your sales kind of stack up to how much inventory you had? And can you correlate like a spike in sales? Was it because your inventory was really high or hit a certain

mark and what has happened to your sales when your inventory goes down. Did any of your inventory get to reserved status one day? You didn't realize it. This tool will help you do all that. So again,

Check this out, guys. Knowledge is power and understanding what is going on with your inventory will allow you to be able to kind of like prevent things from happening in the future or potentially take action based on what you see as the results happening due to issues with your inventory. All right, guys, that's it for the news and new features and training tips of the week. Don't forget to tune in next week to see what's buzzing.