#663 – Temu Halts Chinese Shipments, Temu and Shein Boost EU Advertising, & Amazon Reports on Tariff Price Changes | Weekly Buzz 5/7/25
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Timu is halting shipments from China. Amazon is reporting on pricing changes on the platform due to the tariffs. And Timu and Sheen increased advertising in Europe. This and more on this week's episode of The 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. 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 let you know what new features that Helium 10 has, as well as give you a training tip of the week that will give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world.

Today's host is actually going to be Carrie Miller. So Carrie, take it away and let us know what's buzzing. Okay, let's go ahead and get into the first article. And that is about Timu halting shipments from China. Okay, so this is according to USA Today. So this is the article from USA Today. They're saying that Timu is halting shipments from China to the US and shifting to selling from American warehouses. Okay, so let's go ahead and take a little look into the article. If we scroll down a little bit,

It says days after a key trade loophole, which is de minimis, it closed e-commerce platform. Timu has overhauled its business model by halting shipments of Chinese made goods to the US customers. So basically they're saying instead of offering American consumers a plethora of discounted products from China, the company is now selling goods from warehouses in the US. Now, this is something that's interesting because I've also been kind of recruited as a seller to sell on Timu and we actually import our products from China and Turkey.

So I think it's kind of interesting that they are shifting. They've been trying to shift this way for a while to have more U.S. based sellers. But that I don't think necessarily means that these actual products are going to be from the U.S. If we scroll down a little bit even more, it says T-Moose basically was talking about pricing, which I thought was interesting. It says T-Moose pricing for U.S. consumers remains unaltered.

unchanged as the platform transitions to a local fulfillment model. The company said it in a statement to USA Today, all sales in the US are now handled by locally based sellers. So something to think about is most things that are made in the USA are going to be a little bit more expensive. So that's kind of an interesting thing. And then if you scroll down a little bit more, basically they said the company did not immediately respond to USA Today's request for clarification.

about whether product availability might be impacted by US manufacturer capability. 'Cause as we know, it does take some time for manufacturing to ramp up in the US and the majority of goods are actually produced in China right now. So I'm gonna be interested to see how this unfolds. I do know they are wanting to shift more to US sellers, but again, they're usually importing a majority of their goods

from other countries. So either they're going to, you know, slim down their offerings or they're going to have to kind of probably increase their prices because those U.S. sellers are having to pay the tariffs as they come in, as their products come in from China. So and it says even here, it even kind of confirms what I said. Timu has been actively recruiting U.S. sellers to join the platform in order to help local merchants reach more customers. So this is kind of an interesting development. I think, you know, a lot of businesses

big companies have actually halted their shipments from China currently just because of the tariffs until things kind of smooth out or they figure out what's going to happen with the high tariffs because they're so high that it's not really sustainable for platforms like Timu. So I think a lot of companies like Walmart and

even Home Depot halted their shipments for a while. I think they've also resumed, but we'll just kind of keep an eye on this. I think this is a very interesting thing to kind of consider that they're shifting, but that doesn't necessarily mean in my opinion that the prices are going to stay low. So we'll go ahead and get into the next article though. Sheen and Timo ramp up advertising in the UK and France as the US tariffs hit.

This is something we actually did a survey within Helium 10 for Amazon sellers. And a lot of Amazon sellers have said that they are looking at other markets because of the tariffs in the U.S. Something that's really kind of interesting about that is the U.S. market is the biggest market. And I'm wondering how much

there is, you know, how much opportunity there is for all the sellers in the, you know, to move over to Europe or maybe for Timu and Sheen to really capitalize on all that. So be interesting to follow as this kind of unfolds. But let's take a look at this article and see how their spend is increasing. So this article goes into detail about the spend of Sheen and Timu. And it looks like the spending rose in France, the U.K.,

compared to other European countries. So they are kind of zeroing in on those two countries. This article says that Sheen boosted spending 35% in France and the UK, while Timu increased by 40% and 20% month over month, respectively, according to a sensor tower data. So Timu's daily average US ad spend, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snap, and all those places in the US, it actually declined a collective average of 31% in the two weeks from March 31st to April 13th.

compared with the 30th the previous 30 days later in this article. It does also say that sheen and Timu are also shifting some of their digital advertising to Brazil. So that might also be another good market as that is one that is open for Amazon as well. So it's probably expanding looks like sheen has been manufacturing goods in Brazil for their Latin American markets. So already kind of there and they increase their spend by 140% in April.

So definitely these platforms are now kind of having their sights on other markets worldwide because of these tariffs. We'll see if this is temporary or if it's going to shift back. If things go go back to normal tariffs, we will see how that goes. OK, let's go ahead and get into our next article, which is basically Amazon addressing how the tariffs are affecting their sales and

in Q1. Basically, they're saying that they haven't really seen a downfall in the sales, but there are some kind of different interesting things that they do talk about within this article. It says Amazon sales grew 10% in its fiscal Q1, which ended March 31st with CEO Andy Jassy saying that online marketplace has not seen the average selling price of retail items appreciably go up yet.

as a result of the US imposed tariffs. So basically, people are not raising their sales price yet. I think a lot of sellers are probably looking at competitors and waiting and trying to figure out when they should raise prices. But it's probably something they're going to start doing soon, especially because you're going to have to kind of increase your cash flow. You want to be able to afford getting in more inventory for those tariffs. So that could change soon.

He continues on in this article saying no one knows exactly where tariffs will settle or when CEO Andy Jassy told investors on Amazon's Q1 earnings call. So far, he said Amazon has seen consumers buy more from certain categories that may indicate stocking up in advance of

of any potential tariff impact. And I do think this probably has a lot of the feel of something like COVID when that happened, people were really stocking up and you saw a lot of sales growth, even though we thought it was kind of shrink, it actually kind of expanded online. It was some of the biggest years we've had. And then he also continued, we've also not seen the average selling price of retail items appreciably go up yet. Some of this reflects some forward buying we did in our first party selling. And some of that reflects some advanced inbound opportunities

our third party sellers have done. But a fair amount of this is that most sellers just haven't changed the pricing yet. So meanwhile, he said in Q1, sales of items in Amazon's everyday essentials category grew more than twice as fast as the rest of Amazon's business.

So that's kind of an interesting piece of information that maybe essentials are kind of, people are buying a lot more essentials because they want to stock up and prepare for the tariffs and the price increases that are going to happen. And then it also addressed in here about basically when they said that there was a lot of speculation basically that Amazon was going to put how pricing was increased by the tariffs on the actual listings. And it says in this article says days before the retailer had reported its earnings, the

The White House criticized Amazon after reports emerged that it was considering a plan to display the impact of US tariffs on product prices, calling it a hostile and political act. Following the backlash, Amazon issued a clarification. A company spokesperson had said the discussions about displaying tariff-related costs were preliminary and only involved Amazon Hall, a separate discount platform the company is piloting. There were no current plans to display tariff impact information across Amazon's main retail platform. So that's...

Kind of interesting. So it sounds like there maybe were discussions about that specific thing. I know Bradley talked about that last week, but very interesting to kind of think about what's going on there. Okay, let's get into our next piece of news, which is that Amazon haul is actually launching in the UK.

So if we scroll down here, this is announcement from Amazon haul. And this actually was announced yesterday. Amazon haul has launched in beta in the UK with customers able to shop ultra low priced products across multiple categories, including fashion home and lifestyle on the Amazon shopping app.

And it's offering customers thousands of products for 20 pounds or less with the majority under 10 pounds and some for as little as one pound, which is so crazy to me. So that's going to be launched. And so, you know, obviously we've got some blocks for them to do Amazon haul really affordably in the US. So we'll see how that goes.

in the UK. I think that looks like they're going to expand that worldwide if it goes well. So we'll keep an eye on that. But if you are in the UK, you can go ahead and check that out if you wanted to sell or if you wanted to purchase products there. The next piece of news is that TikTok is sharing data on intellectual property detection and shopping safety.

This is a very big concern of a lot of sellers that have IPs or, you know, they're patented products and they'll see their products going viral on TikTok or other platforms where there's counterfeit sellers selling their products. So basically TikTok is...

explaining what they're doing to protect sellers in this situation. So it says as it continues to expand in its stream shopping push, TikTok is also looking to provide more assurance for brand that their IP is being protected in the app, while it's also looking to implement responsible approaches to product listings relevant to local laws in each region. Okay, so goes on further to say that in line with this TikTok has released its

TikTok shop safety and intellectual property reports, which highlight its ongoing investment to measures to protect both consumers and sellers in the

Okay, so it also says that they've increased their staff by 1800 people for just, you know, surveying or basically policing the intellectual property, making sure that they're enforcing that correctly. And so here are some stats that they gave. They said that more than 7.5 million products were proactively rejected from being listed for IPR violations.

More than 750K products were detected by TikTok shop and taken down for IPR violations. After being listed, TikTok shop proactively stopped more than 125K live streams and more than 550K short form videos globally due to IPR infringement concerns and more than 16K creators had their permission to sell on TikTok shop permanently revote.

where IPR violations and contributed to penalties. So basically, it looks like they're trying to crack down on the violations of the intellectual property so that sellers are protected on this platform. So we'll keep an eye on that. And hopefully that's actually true. And this does get enforced well on this platform as well. The next piece of news is

How Prime Video's new Shop the Show feature is allowing customers to discover products from their favorite series and movies and live sports. So this is kind of cool and something that you can think about when you're doing TV advertising through Amazon now that you can do that kind of stuff. Basically, it's good to know what this product

program actually is. So basically, the Prime videos new shopping experience lets you find products related to what you are watching. So this is how you actually find stuff. Now, if you wanted your products to be on this, or basically, I guess a show wants to promote products, they would have to allow this shopping experience. So the first thing you have to do is as a consumer, you're going to start watching a show or whatever it is on Prime video and then open

open the Amazon shopping app on the mobile phone. And then you're going to have to obviously be logged into the same Amazon account. And then you're going to shop the show in the search bar. And then you'll be able to see, you know, different products in there. They say that shop the show is available before, during and after the show, and it has to be enabled by the show. So really interesting, because there have actually been times when I've been shopping, and maybe somebody's wearing an outfit that I'm like, Oh, I really want that shirt or that jacket is a

I wish I could find that jacket. So this could be something that's really cool if you, you know, have, you know, home decor because a lot of there's a lot of home decor or clothing or things like that. This could be really interesting to be able to allow customers to shop your products within shop the show. So keep an eye on that for, you know, TV ads. Okay, next up, we have Amazon announcing that they have a new AI tool that's going to help you create compelling brand names for

Basically, they've used AI to help kind of generate ideas for company names that you can actually trademark. And this is something that's going to be based on your own products that are in your product catalog as you're using this tool.

And so, you know, it'll kind of basically be probably like ChatGPT where it kind of gives you some ideas. Now, you're obviously going to always have to check to make sure that that trademark isn't taken. You want to double check these things. And you can also, once you have your new brand name, you can

apply through the IP accelerator program if you wanted to start another brand on Amazon and make that process a lot faster for you to get the perks of having a trademark. So check that out if you haven't already checked it out. Okay, our last piece of news is about the road to open call. Now Bradley talked about open call last week, which is Walmart's basically where they allow you to get in front of their buyers and

And you can pitch your products and potentially get into Walmart stores, which is an incredible opportunity. So I wanted to share with you what the Road to Open Call is. And this is their kind of tour that they're going on. They've already been to a few different cities, but they're basically kind of pop-up pitch events that give innovators and entrepreneurs the chance to meet with Walmart buyers and

and get real-time feedback and potentially score a fast pass to the main event in Bentonville, Arkansas. So this is kind of like an American Idol where they're all kind of on those different, in those different cities and people are trying out and they get the ticket to Hollywood. This is kind of like that. So I think it's a really good opportunity if you are in one of these cities

It looks like Kansas City, Missouri is on May 9th. May 13th is Baltimore, Maryland. May 21st is Austin, Texas. Columbus, Ohio is June 18th and then June 24th in Atlanta. So then the final kind of open call is going to be in October towards the end of this year. So if you do get the opportunity to go and kind of fully pitch your products,

to the buyers, it's a really great opportunity to get into Walmart stores. It's going to really exponentially increase your business. I've seen people who have gotten into the stores and they just blow up like crazy. So it's a really good opportunity. The open applications actually start on June 24th. So that's when you can actually apply. But before that, we have these pop-up events where you could potentially get that ticket to Arkansas. So check that out if you haven't checked it out yet and you're interested in selling in Walmart stores.

All right. So last week we had a lot of new features in our episode. So we didn't have a training tip of the week, but this week we are actually going to have two training tips of the week. So we're first going to start off with Bradley, who's talking about how you can see sales estimates for trials ASINs. And this is something people have wanted for so many years. This is gold right here. So if you don't know about this, you need to watch it. Even if you do, you probably get some tips. So Bradley, take it away.

For years, Helium 10, along with all other sales estimation tools out there, they would give you and we would give you sales at the parent level. That means if there is a product on Amazon that had variations, estimated sales that Helium 10 gives in the past, it's all the child items put together. Like if you had a coffin shelving, you had a red, blue, green, purple one.

You see the number 100 for estimated sales, how many units a month it sells. Well, that 100 represents the red, blue, green, purple, et cetera, all put together because Amazon reports BSR at the parent level. All right. So, so there's not visibility on what each of the child items has, but helium 10 now is the only tool where if on the Chrome extension, you can see sales estimates at

at the child level. All right. So let me show you how you can actually see that. Uh, once you're in helium 10, let's say you're on a page that has a lot of variations like this queen size bed sheets. If I run x-ray, what is actually going to show up right here for this product? It says, Hey, parent level sales, 121,000, but the ACE in sales is exact product 13,000. And I can go and open up all of the child items and I can see right here,

I can see the exact amount that Helium 10 estimates for each of these colors and each of these sizes about what the sales are. So this is super beneficial guys, because

people who aren't using Helium 10, they're kind of blind. Sure, they can see the Amazon number, which is not very accurate as far as, you know, since it only shows you like 100 or 500 or 10,000 or 1,000, things like that. And sometimes it's off. But with Helium 10, now you can actually see which child items, which colors, which sizes are selling the most and get a really close estimate as far as how many it is selling. Thank

Thank you so much, Bradley. I know so many people love this tool. It's such a game changer. So especially when you're doing product research or looking at what your competitors are doing. So if you haven't checked out that tool, go ahead and check it out. And next up, we have Shivali. And Shivali has our second training tip of the week, which is about how to easily filter through brand analytics using Helium 10.

How to search and filter Amazon brand analytics keywords, why is this important, and how can it make you money? Well, if I'm exploring a new niche or trying to get a better understanding of what's happening within my own niche, whether that's for my product or competitors, this is one of the best ways to uncover top performing keywords that I might have been overlooking previously.

And if I'm just getting started with a listing, this gives me an edge by revealing keywords that are already driving real conversions for competing products. It's a simple data backed way to identify what's working before spending ad dollars guessing. Let's walk through how it works. And then we're still going to be inside of that ABA top search terms tool inside of BlackBox. In this case, I'm going to use a competitor's coffin shelf ASIN. I've already copied pasted it into the ASIN field, and now I'm going to keep the filters simple to start.

What this is going to show me is for the date range I've selected, every keyword where this ASIN was one of the top three most clicked products. Right away, I can see that this competitor showed up in the top three for keywords like coffin decor and coffin shelf.

That is incredibly useful. I can even zoom in and then compare the performance. For example, on the keyword "coffin shelf" I can see this competitor captured 23.8% of total conversions, but my own listing just got 4.8%. That tells me there's a real gap in performance. And I need to dig into why. Are they ranking higher? Is their price more competitive? Does their listing connect better with buyers? Here's another example: Gotch shelf.

our product doesn't even appear in the top three clicked. It's possible that we're just not ranking well for that keyword at all. And if that's the case, we're likely missing out on meaningful sales. But now you guys can use this tool in two main ways, right? You can enter a competitor's ASIN or your own ASIN or even multiple ASINs at once. Or you can enter a keyword, for example, just type in coffin and it'll return all the longer tail keywords that include that root phrase and meet whatever search volume minimum that you specify.

That's a great way to discover additional terms that shoppers might be using that you might not have even considered in your listing or in your ad campaigns. And remember, this is not Helium 10 estimated data. This is literally directly from Amazon brand analytics. And what makes using it inside of Helium 10 so much better than trying to sift through it on seller central

is now you can combine this raw Amazon data with Helium 10's unique insights like title density, search volume trends, and estimated sales. That combination gives you a much clearer understanding of which keywords are actually converting, who's dominating them, and where your opportunities to compete might be.

Thank you so much, Chevali. That was incredible. There is so much gold in that tool. So if you haven't checked out our brand analytics tool within Blackbox, go ahead and check it out. Okay. And last but not least, I wanted to let you know that we do have a new tariff hub that we are basically compiling information and helpful tips that can help you through these tariffs. So I'm going to put the link on the screen here so that you can actually click on it. You might want to bookmark this. We're going to be adding more and more as time goes by.

on. So if you haven't yet checked it out, check it out. We've got some of our past videos, we've got some blog information, a lot of good stuff that can help you potentially ideate on how to problem solve with the tariff situation that we have going on right now. So that link should be on the screen. And it'll also be in the comments on our YouTube channel. So go ahead and check that out. Thank you so much for tuning in to this week's episode of the weekly buzz. And we will see you again next week to see what's buzzing. Bye everyone.

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