Weekly Buzz 6/19/25: Amazon Prime Day 2025 Dates and Temu Shipping From China Again?
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Prime Day 2025 dates are announced on Amazon, plus a similar deal day for TikTok shop. Is Timu back shipping direct from China? Free tickets to an exclusive AI workshop at Helium 10 headquarters next week. 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, Walmart, e-commerce world. We give you training tips of the week, and we let you know what new features Helium 10 has that'll give you serious strategies or serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Let's see what's buzzing.

All right, we've got tons of articles today, so let's go ahead and hop right into it. Now, the first one is something that might be already old news to you because Amazon announced a couple of days ago, but Prime Day is now announced for July 8th to 11th. Now, last year, I predicted it to the exact day. This year, I think I had thought it was going to be around July 14th.

15th around there, but I was off. All right. So the actual dates is July 8th to 11th. Now I swear the first prime day, I don't even remember when it was like five years ago or so. It was literally one day. Right. And then it went to like two days. Now it's four days.

Remember that stay to the end of the weekly buzz. There's another announcement about something else that Amazon is doing that seems like kind of crazy along these lines of like long deal days. Right. But again, Prime Day first year, it is now four days. This is the same thing throughout different marketplaces. I think in the UK, Prime Day was announced eight to 11 as well. So what do you think about that? First of all?

Four day prime day. Do you think that makes it better? Does that make it more difficult to get sales? Let me know what you think in the comments below. Now, a couple of differences. The article mentions that there's going to be a today's big deals that's coming out. And so, you know, like may hope, you know, maybe you are one of the ones who qualified for that. It's kind of like,

I think too late to schedule like deal days and deal of the day and things like that. So if you're interested in still doing something for Prime Day, you've got like the price discounts, you've got coupons you can do. But remember, as of this year, the structures for a lot of this stuff has changed. Check old weekly buzzes. We had like a deep dive into exactly how coupons are priced difference.

Also, don't forget price discounts. You can't just do like one per, you know, one per product. I think it costs something like $50 per discount. But what you can do is like you got 50 products you all want to do this discount on. You add that to one discount that you only like pay once. I hope that's still the case. That's what I'm planning on doing on my Amazon accounts. If I'm wrong or that's not available anymore, let me know in the comments below. So I know that I got to prepare something different. But again,

Important thing is we're less than a month away from Prime Day 2025, usually one of the biggest shopping periods on Amazon for sellers. I think last year I was like three, four X up compared to regular days. What about you guys? How was your Prime Day last year? What are you guys planning to do this year? Let us know in the comments below. All right, next article up.

Something concerning to me. All right. You remember a few weeks ago, everybody was happy with the de minimis tax laws. It meant that sellers from China, like on Timu, Sheen, other websites could no longer ship directly to the USA to customers because the $800 loophole was removed. Right. And so like it would cost like something ridiculous to have to clear through customs and this and that. And so like when you looked on Timu,

Every single order, every single product said local shipping. But this is something concerning now, right? This article is from scmp.com and it says Chinese-backed Timu resumes direct sales to U.S.,

After Washington, Beijing trade truce says some items that have been removed from Timu's U.S. marketplace last month have been made available for sale in recent days. So as soon as I saw this article, I'm like, what in the world? Don't tell me, you know, we have to compete with the Chinese sellers again. But this is interesting. Like, I'm not sure, you know, as we know, tariffs and rules and political things are changing like every day, it seems. So who knows what's going to happen next?

The time I'm filming this and five hours later, it's going to be aired. Something else might have happened. But anyways, this article, it says there was a local fulfillment was all you could see on Timu. However, one Chinese seller who sells women's clothing from Guangdong says two of his dresses were made available for sale in the U.S.,

But dozens of his other products were still offline. Now, this is the new thing I had no idea about before. It says Lou operates his store under the so-called full custody arrangement. Full custody? Well...

Are we talking about like divorce and kids? What is this full custody arrangement? Basically, what it says is this where Timu handles everything, including listings, pricing, logistics and tariffs. Now, a little bit more information in this article, it says under its full custody model, Timu would have had to bear the increased shipping costs. And so the platform was only accepting made in China goods if merchants handled the logistics and tariffs themselves.

All right. Which meant that like, you know, you're a seller, you got to cover all of those tariffs and stuff, et cetera. So like, I'm just like confused, like this doesn't make any sense to me. So if the other thing is under the full custody and Timo is taking care of it, how are they going to do the tariff thing if it's still shipping from China?

And the de minimis is still in effect. I'm just completely confused because, and this is just completely new. So who knows what's going to happen here, but this is definitely something to keep an eye on. We're going to have a podcast episode about selling on Timu, you know, like, because I was like, Hey, this is a great time with zero competition from China based sellers. Right. But what is this custody rule or what is, are the floodgates going to be open? Like I can't see that.

That's going to be the case unless the de minimis gets reinstated again, which I don't see happening. So again, something to keep your eye on in the coming weeks and days is what is going to go on with the direct to US model. Speaking of different platforms, we're going to go to our third platform and our third story here. Next one is going to be about TikTok shop.

All right. A lot of information here. Okay. So this is going to be interesting. First of all, this was like a press release made by TikTok. And the link is in the comments below. But the title of this article was TikTok shop is where shoppers come to discover. And part of that information there, there are some new stats.

that they release. It says, our community of sellers has expanded to 750 categories, all right? And there's 70 million products now on TikTok shop. That is insane. TikTok shop in the U.S.,

Sales have increased 120% year over year. So sales are growing by leaps and bounds. A couple of other stats, 83% of all shoppers on TikTok shop say they discovered a new product and 70% have discovered a new brand. What about TikTok shop live says last year in 2024, brands and creators hosted over 8,000

million hours of live shopping sessions in the US. And it said 76% of consumers who engage with TikTok shop bought something from a live stream in the past year.

Think about that, guys. Let me repeat that. This is a momentous time here on the Weekly Buzz. We have been talking about live shopping for four years. And every year, I swear I say like, oh, next year, live shopping is going to take off on Amazon or take off somewhere because it's so big in China, right? And every year doesn't happen, right? Think about that. All the people that buy stuff on TikTok shop, hundreds of thousands, millions of people, 76% of them bought something online.

on a TikTok shop live stream. Is that not news itself that should make you convinced that live shopping is here, guys? And it's something maybe hasn't taken off completely on Amazon yet, but it is definitely here on TikTok shop. Last week, guys, if you missed the episode, go check out the episode on Serious Sellers Podcast from last Saturday.

with Jared. He has sold a million dollars on TikTok shop live. All right. This is something that you guys who are selling on TikTok shop need to keep in mind. Now, more TikTok shop news. I announced Amazon Prime Day. Well, TikTok shop has deals for you days. All right. And they're like, all right, Amazon, you're going to do four days of Prime Day. We got you. They're going to do July 7th all the way to 19th.

is going to be their deals for you day. So they're going hard. They're like, Amazon's doing four days. We're going to like triple them and we're going to do 12 days of deals. Now, something new is TikTok shop is going to have a live price match guaranteed program.

So the people who are doing these deals for you days, if you see a cheaper price, even on other platforms, you are going to be able to get cash back on the difference. So sometimes you'll see TikTok shop prices might be inflated sometimes and you can find a cheaper one on Amazon. Well, guess what? Buyers are going to be able to get cash back. Now, I don't know how that's going to work.

Like, does that mean that the seller is going to have to pay that out of the pocket or is TikTok paying for it? I'm assuming TikTok is paying for that. But anyway, something to keep in mind, you know, like TikTok taking a little page out of Amazon where, you know, Amazon is very conscious about price matching other websites.

But I kind of like this model where it's not going to, you know, it's not like TikTok is going to take away the buy box or something, but they're offering buyers a chance to get the difference back. So that's kind of interesting. All right. Now for our new feature alert, this is a doozy guys. All right. This is something that is going to really be a game changer for some of you. And there's no tool in our space that does this. We launched before the

the Helium 10 Influencer Finder, both for Amazon and TikTok. And we know how important it is to find influencers in this day and age. I mean, when I first got into selling on Amazon, I was interested in talking to influencers. And that was before it was like really a thing, right? Now it's like almost a must, you know, to get people to do UGC content, to do videos for your products, right?

you know, to promote it on their storefronts, et cetera. Well, we have a cool update to our Helium 10 Influencer Finder. All right. So where this is, guys, if you've never seen it before, click on tools in your dashboard and then click on Influencer Finder. It's under marketing. All right. Now we've got two of them. We've got a Amazon Influencer Finder and

and a TikTok influencer finder. Now this one, well, what are the updates? Like what I would want to do, let's say that I, you know, I do sell coffin shelves, right? So I list, I go to the coffin shelf page and I want to see any kind of spooky products that show up on this page. I want to see is anybody making videos for these products and who are these influencers who have made UGC videos for any of my competitor coffin shelves?

And I want to reach out to them to say, hey, would you be interested in making a video for my product? All right. Now, first of all, a quick, easy way to do this. You guys probably don't even know this. We have an influencer version of our Chrome extension. So first hit the Helium 10 Chrome extension and then change the mode to influence. There's a dropdown menu there. Change it to influencer instead of seller. And then what happens when you run X-Ray on any storefront page or result page,

you have these new columns that show up where it says how many influencer videos come up. So I'm just going to fast forward this time right now. But what I'm going to do in the background here is I'm copying the ASINs from any...

any of these spooky coffin shelves or other products where I see at least a couple influencer videos. So let me do that right now. And then we're going to fast forward this. Okay. So I just did a few here. I didn't do all of them just for time's sake, but I entered in some ASINs here of some coffin shelves that came up and these were all ones that said they had influencer videos. Now take a look. Now, all of a sudden I literally have the list of

every single Amazon influencer who has done videos for these spooky products. Now, what I can do is if I click on their profile here in Helium 10, I'm going to see some information about them. I'm like, all right, how many videos have they made for any product? Oh, wow. This seller has or this influencer has made 42 videos. She's gotten 171 likes.

40% of her videos are in the upper carousel. She hasn't done lives. She doesn't have an email address. And I could actually see all of her videos and I can find the one that she's done for like coffin shelves and, and take a look. And then if I want to actually kind of like, Hey, is there any way that, you know, I can reach out to her, this person, I don't think she has put her, she hasn't put her like Instagram information, but I have a link to see her entire page right here. All right, let me, let's go back and take a look at some of these other influencers and

Now, if I want to see which influencers have email addresses, I could have used that as a filter. But right here, I can see one influencer right off the bat. I can see their email address right here. Here's a lady. She says she's a real mom of seven boys, real finds and must haves. Here's her email address. I can literally just click on that and contact her right away. For some of these other influencers, if I've checked them out,

I can actually go directly to their Instagram. Like those who have Instagram links in their Amazon profile, we are pulling that. And right here in Helium 10, I can click their Instagram and then boom, I can like slide right into her DMs here on Instagram and say, hey, are you interested in potentially making a video for my product? All right, guys. I mean, this would take hours to do.

And I just did it in like two or three minutes here. There's so much information I can see if they're a top creator. I can say, hey, what's the average video link? When did they start posting videos? How many lower carousel video counts? Like, look at this. This is an influencer right here who did a video for some coffin shelves. These people, oh my goodness gracious, they have made 4,000 videos that are in the lower carousel and 2,000 videos that have appeared in the upper carousel. So those guys, they are in it to win it.

Uh, they've also done 28 idealists. Here's another one that Meek Money, she made 676 idea links. She's even made 169 photos for, you know, products. So again, there's so many things right here that I can filter for that guys, this is going to help you, you know, talk to clients.

influencers, get people to make videos for your products, et cetera. So make sure that you are using the tip or the Amazon influencer finder. But while I'm here talking about this, have you used the TikTok influencer finder? This is not new. This has been around for a few weeks now. It's the same place. You just use the dropdown menu, hit TikTok and start looking for your TikTok influencers. All right. So this is for anybody with a diamond account.

And especially if you have your TikTok token connected to Helium 10, start finding influencers. We have

hundreds of thousands of TikTok influencers in our database. And I could search and filter by like, hey, show me only influencers who have generated like over $1,000 worth of sales and maybe have the word goth in their title or something. Probably not much is going to come out here. 11 products or 11 influencers come up. Here's somebody called Corporate Goth. Maybe she would like to do a product or a

product video for my coffin shelf. Here is alt style and home Nikki, and she's definitely very gothic, as you can see here in seconds, guys.

Whether we're talking Amazon, whether we are talking TikTok, you can find influencers that will be ready, willing and able to promote your products either on Amazon or on TikTok. So make sure to use the Helium 10 Influencer Finder either for Amazon or TikTok.

Speaking of TikTok, going back to the news, this article from social media today is entitled TikTok rolls out new badges to highlight seller performance. All right. So, you know, platforms, platforms,

All about badges. eBay was the first one. Remember, they had like a top seller or platinum seller or something like that. And then obviously on Amazon, you've got bestseller badge and top rated or all these different badges that come up. Well, now TikTok is also having badges and they are going to have official shop badges, authorized seller tags. The official shop, it says it's awarded to certified sellers of certain products.

Authorized seller is approved sellers of certain products.

Gold star seller badges are awarded to shops that meet customer service benchmarks based on the shop performance score and product feedback rate. Then there's also a silver star badge and then a top brand badge will be showing up for those brands that have certain qualifiers for popularity. All right. So if you guys want more information on what these badges are, take a look. I'm not sure how much.

TikTok buyers are going to care about these badges. It's not like they're doing search results and things like that, but who knows how they're going to show up. Imagine if you're doing a TikTok shop live and now you've got that like

platinum seller or whatever the heck, or gold or silver, you know, like that probably would influence conversions. So be on the lookout, make sure your shop performance score doesn't go low. So you can qualify for those badges. Next up, we are going to get into a training tip of the week. And this is one of our training tips that's exclusive to Helium 10. Maybe you've been using other tools where you only see like, you know,

one page or two page or three pages of search results for where products are ranking for Helium 10S, all pages, Shivali, show us how to get that information.

The strategy I'm about to share is another exclusive feature that only Helium 10 offers, and it revolves around one of the most powerful tools available, Cerebro. Let's start by looking at how Amazon search results work. When you type in a keyword, Amazon typically displays seven pages of results. This means that while thousands of products may be indexed for a keyword, only about 306 organic positions and roughly 110 sponsored positions are actually visible to shoppers at any given time.

This is where Helium 10's Cerebro stands apart. Unlike other reverse ASIN tools that only show rankings for page one, page two, or at best page three, Helium 10 captures all seven pages. That means if a product ranks anywhere in search results, you will see it, ensuring that no data gets left out.

So why is this important? Because of Amazon's search shuffle. That is such a tongue twister. The search shuffle means that the product rankings don't stay the same. Sometimes a listing that ranks on page one today can suddenly drop to page five or six for a few days and then bounce back.

If you're using a tool that only checks pages one and two, and it only updates once a week, you could completely miss key keyword movements. So this is really a huge problem, especially if you are tracking competitor rankings. You need to know if they are losing traction,

monitoring your own product so you don't miss when you drop in rank and running PPC ads to see if certain keywords are actually even worth bidding on. With Cerebro, this is not an issue. It tracks all of the keyword ranks. So even if a keyword temporarily falls off the first two pages, you'll still be able to see it giving you complete visibility into ranking fluctuations.

Plus another cool thing about Surrey Bro is that it doesn't just track keyword rankings, it also shows exactly where a product is appearing in Amazon's advertising ecosystem. For example, it reveals sponsored brand header ads, are they running banner ads at the top of search results?

whether they are utilizing video placements with sponsored brand video ads, as well as Amazon's choice and trending widgets, aka are they appearing in special recommendation sections? You know how they say time is money. Well, so is information in this case. Let's say you are researching a competitor's product. You might want to know which keywords are they running sponsored brand video ads on. If they are investing in video ads for a specific keyword, that means it's

probably converting well. And where are they not running sponsored brand ads? This presents you with a potential gap, a chance for you to outbid them and then steal their traffic.

Other tools will not show you this level of data particularly, or this level of detail even. They might give you partial keyword ranking data, but they won't tell you where a product is placing across Amazon's different ad placements. So here is why this gives you a competitive edge. Most sellers only focus on basic keyword rankings, seeing where a product appears organically, but top

Amazon sellers know that visibility in search results isn't just about organic rankings. It's also about paid placements. With Helium 10 Cerebro, you get the full picture, all keyword ranks across all seven pages. So you never miss a shift in rankings, all ad placements. So you can see where products are showing up in sponsored video, headline ads, et cetera, and competitive insights. So you can find gaps in your

your competitors' strategies and take advantage of them. This is why Storybro is the only tool of its kind. I know I sound biased, but it's true. No other software provides this level of detail, making it an absolute must-have for serious sellers looking to dominate their category.

All right. Thank you, Shivali, for that. Guys, make sure you are using Cerebro now. That is available for all levels of helium, platinum and up. Something new for sellers. This is going to Seller Central. If you're a reseller of a brand, like you're not the brand owner, but if you are an authorized brand,

And the brand owner from brand registry has authorized you, but you're not the brand owner yourself. Something you can do that you haven't been able to do. You can now use Amazon Vine to generate reviews for newly listed products. So basically Amazon,

Before you have to be the brand owner, the brand registered owner to be able to launch a product and run Vine on it. But if you are authorized now by a brand, like, I don't know, let's just say, what do I have here? I've got a Yeti water bottle here on my desk. If Yeti has authorized me as a seller to resell this product and even to make my own Yeti listings of real Yeti products, then

I can run Vine now on that. All right. So that's something new just announced in Seller Central. Resellers can use Amazon Vine. This week,

In Cannes, France, there are some Amazon announcements. And if you look at Jeffrey Cohen from Amazon Ads, his LinkedIn, he talks about some of them. One of them is a Roku partnership. Now, there is actually another article that went a little bit more into detail on this at adexchanger.com. It was entitled, Roku and Amazon's new deal will target 80%

of US CTV watching households. All right. So Roku and Amazon have this collab now and they say, hey, you know,

Both platforms, Amazon and Roku, require you to be 100% logged in, and there's going to be tons of first-party data parameters. So it's going to be easy to target and measure with a high degree of accuracy compared to other available methods. And it says the two companies expect that their combined data footprint will allow advertisers to reach 80 million users.

TV, uh, CTV households through Amazon's DSP. All right. That's 80% of the total CTV households in the U S guess what guys? I'm one of those 80 million. I don't have cable TV satellite anymore. Uh, I just have a Roku and that's where I used to watch my Vicky, my, which is where I watched my Korean and Chinese dramas. I use it to watch my prime video. I use it for my Disney so I can watch star Wars. I use it for my Hulu so I can watch welcome to Rexham. Um,

I have a whole bunch of apps where it's Paramount, JW, anything I watch right there on my Roku. I even went over my data last month on internet because I'm streaming so much on Roku. My family Netflix is also on my Roku. But anyways, by any means, I'm in Roku. Somebody in my household is on Roku like four or five hours a day. And now advertisers are going to be able to target me

using DSP and they're going to be able to cross like kind of like, you know, they see I'm logged in on Amazon Prime so they know who I am and they're going to know what my behavior is on Roku and know some of my data. And so they're going to probably be able to give me some interesting target of that. So again, this might not be for all sellers would be interested in this, but hey, if you are a bigger brand out there and you're going to want to start looking in

to DSP and how you can target this because this is kind of like opening up 80 million households that you're now going to be able to target in Amazon advertising.

Going to the Nippon Times, Japan Times announced that, hey, TikTok shop is launching in Japan this month. All right. So it's been rumored that it was going to come soon. It is now launching this month. So, again, it's a great time if you're in the Japanese market to go ahead and get a little bit ahead of the curve. Next story is not really a story, but when.

I saw yesterday that Amazon announced the prime. I went into Project X. I'm like, hey, did I schedule any deals of the days or is it still available to actually register for one of these? And the answer is no. But look what I found here. Take a look. Here's a live screen share from my seller central.

when you go and you guys do this too, and this is kind of funny because this tells me, you know, I was just joking about the length of the tick tock shop deal days and how prime day went from two to four days. But take a look at this. Uh, it says that for my, my, my egg tray here, I can do a black Friday cyber Monday event window. So if I hit select, uh,

Take a look at what it says. I'm not sure if this is a leak or what's going on here. It shows me all of the available dates. I can do a deal for this egg tray, but take a look all the way here at the bottom. It says Black Friday, Cyber Monday event. Common sense would be like Black Friday. Okay, that's Friday to Cyber Monday. That's Monday. It's a four day event, right? As we know, Black Friday is no longer just Black Friday. Cyber weekend is no longer Cyber weekend. Look at the date that it says here.

November 20th to December 1st. So I'm not sure if that's to be like taken at face value. Does that mean that Amazon Black Friday event this year is going to run? Was that 11 days, 12 days? But there you have it, guys. Check your dashboards. If you qualify for any deals and you're interested in doing a Black Friday deal, well, there you go. You can go ahead and set up your 12 day or 11 day deal right now in your dashboard.

All right. Some events coming up this week. We are having our Healington Elite workshop in person where we fly out experts from around the world that will give in person like at Helium 10 headquarters some advanced tactics. And we are bringing in.

She's come flying. We have one person we're flying in from Korea or India. I'm not sure where she's at. Ritu Java, who is one of the top minds in the world for advertising and AI. Andrew Bell, another top mind in the world for AI. We're having like an AI for Amazon seller workshop today.

This Thursday, June 26th, all right, at Helium Tenant Headquarters in Irvine, California. Now the price, depending on when you're listening to this, is $299. It's an all-day event. There's going to be mainly six, seven, eight-figure sellers there. I'll be there. Carrie will be there. We might have another guest speaker talking about TikTok Shop. This is going to be an all-day event. And

For now, I'm opening up some free tickets. You know, don't sign up and then not show up because I think your card might get charged. But if you're sure you're going to sign up, use the code Elite 100. All right. Elite 100. And you'll get a free ticket. All right. If you try that code and says we're sold out, that means by the time you're listening to this, we're sold out for that free ticket. But go to H10.me forward slash Q2 workshop.

h10.me forward slash Q2 workshop. Use the code elite 100 to get in for free Irvine, California next Thursday, the 26th. If you're not in the area, but you still want to learn, you can't watch that online. There's no recording of that for non elite members, but we have a couple other events that we have coming up. The first one is going viral. Take your Amazon success to TikTok shop. It's June 25th.

at 10 a.m. This is a live workshop. I'll be doing it with TikTok shop expert Paul Harvey. Make sure to join us. You can register at h10.me forward slash TT webinar, h10.me forward slash TT webinar to sign up for this 100% free workshop. If you want to get kind of like a mini version of that AI workshop that we're doing in person, Andrew,

who was one of the speakers, he's going to do a little bit more beginner, right? So if you're a beginner to AI, you haven't really used AI for your Amazon business, we've got another workshop that we're doing June 23rd, also online, entitled the AI Arsenal, Prompts, Predictions, and Product, Triple P, Playbooks that you've never seen before, hosted by Andrew Bell and myself. If you want to register for that, go to h10.me forward slash AI webinar.

All right, guys, that was a lot to go through today. Hope you guys found this informative. Make sure to tune in next week to see what's buzzing.