#665 – China Tariffs SLASHED! and De Minimis Cut? | Weekly Buzz 5/13/25
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The China tariffs have been drastically cut, but was the de minimis tariffs cut also? How you can fulfill orders in Amazon Ireland without having to send inventory there? 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'm 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 a training tip of the week, and we let you know what new features 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. Hello.

We're releasing this weekly buzz this week, day or two early. That's because we've got breaking news over the weekend or late Sunday. The news dropped that an agreement was reached on the tariffs. So let's just go ahead and hop into it, get a little summary on that because I think that's been top of mind for us.

any Amazon seller who has been sourcing product, especially in China over the last few weeks. And so we've got a temporary reprieve, I should say on the tariff. So, uh, let's hop into this article. Um, I mean, every news outlet was talking about it, but the one I'm going to talk about was from time magazine. It says us and China agree on tariff pause in major trade war, uh,

rollback. All right. So it says, hey, the U.S. and China agreed on Monday to significantly reduce tariffs on each other for an initial 90 day period. All right. So this is not permanent. Something still should happen. It's 90 days for now. And it's going to affect in on Wednesday, May 14th.

And countries are going to be reducing the tariffs on each other by 115% for that initial period. So basically, the U.S. tariffs on Chinese exports, which is what I think is most of you listeners out there are concerned about.

is going down from like 145% down to 30%, while Chinese tariffs on American goods will go down to 10%. This article also mentions why is the rate higher for China? That's because the 20% tariffs that were applied in February and March, that was about like fentanyl. And so those are still in effect. So this is, I think, welcome news to all Amazon sellers who...

have been like pretty worried about what's, you know, how are you going to deal with some of these tariffs? Don't forget, we still don't know what could happen. And so we've actually got a webinar that we're going to do a workshop on tariffs next week, somewhere in the description, there'll be a link to it. Make sure to sign up for that webinar. We've brought in some experts who can talk about it because again, these tariffs could go back. It could go back after 90 days. We don't know.

Other tariffs that come out, I think what happened in the last few weeks has kind of taught Amazon sellers that you can't predict what's going to happen with tariffs, trade wars, things like that. It's important to be prepared. Now is the time to do that during this 90-day thing so you're not caught off guard again. So make sure to sign up for that workshop.

That would be, I think, next week or the week after. In more tariff news, we've got an article here from Yahoo Finance.

And now this is interesting. It says, U.S. to cut de minimis tariff on China's shipments from 54 or 254 from 120. So this was actually the tariff that everybody liked. Everybody's like, okay, this is good. We don't want de minimis. De minimis, for you guys who don't know or the first time you're watching this show, it's how...

and Amazon haul and AliExpress, how they can send shipments directly from China to

and get around the tariff, basically free of tariffs. And so you could send like a $5 phone case and it goes door to door, right? And the recipient nor the sender has to pay any tariffs. And that's why a lot of these websites could ship stuff so kind of cheap. Now, last week, Kerry reported that, hey, Teemu and Sheen completely stopped shipping

importing from China. And I had posted something kind of somewhat erroneously where I was like, I don't know why they did that. Like, why did they just completely stop? But this article kind of like talks about it, something that I didn't realize. It says here, a White House executive order said that the U.S. would cut the de minimis tariff on China shipments to 54% from 120%.

But here's the key with a flat fee of $100 to remain. Now, unless I'm understanding this wrong yet again, that means that no matter how much the product cost, the minimum fee to import direct from China, the hundred bucks,

Right. Is that how you guys are reading this? So now it meant now all of a sudden I understand. Oh, no wonder why Timo and Shane stopped having the option of shipping products directly and only shipping products from local warehouses in the US is because, you know, you could have a $30 product and forget the 100% tariff or 120% tariff.

I mean, you're going to have to pay $100 minimum fee if I'm reading this correct. So this is not something to be afraid of. The fact that these de minimis is going from $120 down to $54, it doesn't mean that the market is going to get flooded with Chinese cheap products again because that $100 tariff is in place. So maybe this might be an effect for like a...

$700 product like a sofa or something like that, which wouldn't qualify because it's not a small product anyways, that might actually make a difference than this tariff going from $120 to $54. But for now, if I'm reading this correctly, it looks like we don't have to worry about these cheap Chinese products coming in directly to customers anymore.

Speaking of Timu and Sheen, though, here's an article from Reuters, and it says U.S.-China trade reprieve buys Sheen and Timu time to restock U.S. inventory. So, again, this is not about they're going to start shipping directly from China again, but this is about how Timu and Sheen are now storing product locally. The sellers are storing product locally in U.S. warehouses and stores.

And so the product still comes from China, but it's going to come just like Amazon products, you know, and in containers. And obviously nothing has been coming in or most things have not been coming in lately because of the tariffs on regular shipments. Right. So,

Now, maybe their inventory is a little bit depleted. So this article talks about how now with this 90-day pause, maybe some of those TikTok and Timu and Sheen sellers can send their products like through traditional ways to the U.S. warehouses. And then you might see inventory on those websites beefed up again. Now, switching gears away from this tariff talk, let's talk about something interesting. This is like TikTok news.

pulling a page out of eBay. Now, I guess in the U.S., this has been the case for a while. I didn't realize there was such a thing as TikTok shop secondhand products, kind of like eBay, where it's like you can sell used appliances or resold luxury goods or baseball cards, things like that. What does that sound like? Sounds like eBay, right? So TikTok shop is kind of like has this eBay thing going on. I did not realize that for the U.S., but now this article from Ecommerce News

EU says that now that TikTok had launched this in the US and the UK, they are now going to be doing it elsewhere in Europe. So they're like recruiting people for this program. So, hey, if you're a seller on eBay, I sell on eBay. Yeah.

I sell thousands. I sell, oh my goodness, I sell almost as much on eBay these days as I do on Amazon some months. Hey, TikTok shop is a place that you can consider selling your baseball cards, Pokemon cards, used goods, etc. So keep that in mind. All right. Speaking of EU, next article comes from ChannelX.World and says,

we had talked a few weeks ago about how Amazon opened up the Amazon Ireland website, right? Now, what basically is being announced now is that Amazon remote fulfillment is now available from UK to Ireland. So for those who don't know, remote fulfillment is this program where you can have your inventory stored in one country and then you can have your listings open in another country. And then if somebody buys it from that other country, the inventory comes from your FBA account.

in your home country. So for example, I have a remote fulfillment set up for Canada, Mexico, and Brazil. Basically that means my, I have my inventory in Amazon USA warehouses and, but I have my listings open in Mexico, Brazil, et cetera. And then if somebody orders a product,

it ships directly from Amazon USA FBA all the way to the customer. So now if you have inventory in Amazon UK, you don't need to necessarily yet send inventory into Amazon Ireland warehouses.

you can turn this remote fulfillment on and fulfill the orders in Amazon Ireland from your UK inventory. All right, next article is announcement from Seller Central and Amazon sent us a lot of information on it. And it's basically upcoming changes to Seller Fulfilled Prime. So Seller Fulfilled Prime is like if you've got some crazy good

you know, shipping speed that you can do on your own. You could have the prime badge, even though you're shipping product directly. And there's tons of changes. Like I don't think anything like game changing for it, but there's like six pages of information about changes, about applying it. Like what's the probation period who qualifies, what happens if you fail, how many times you're allowed to reply or retry, I should say what,

are the thresholds are to qualify a lot of information if you've never sold in or never had seller fulfilled prime and you're interested in make sure to check it out or if you are selling seller fulfilled prime there could be some changes that might affect your eligibility so make sure to check the link below in order to get some information on that next article is also from seller central and it's entitled fee adjustments for partner carrier shipment measurements

So for those of you who use like UPS or Amazon, other LTL carriers to ship your replenishment to Amazon, now they say, hey, if the measured weight dimensions or freight class differs from what you provided in the shipment creation, you're going to see this notification, the inbound dashboard. This is starting in June 12th.

uh, 2025 and it could adjust in a fee adjustment. So like sometimes maybe some people are trying to cheat, you know, like you're going to send, um, via SPD, like UPS, all your replenishment to Amazon and the box measures 24 by 24 by 24. But you're like, all right, I'm going to put 24 by 24 by 18 to try and save some money. Well, you're going to get caught now. Uh, if you do that now, something, something really funny, um, I saw here, it says, uh,

these measurement differences will result in a fee adjustment including a credit to your account if you provided measurements that were so high so first of all i doubt anybody's been like oh let me increase the measurements on this but amazon is saying that if it does ups or whoever is going to catch it and refund you money like give you money back because you paid too much yeah if you believe that i've got a bridge to sell you but anyways let's take it for what it is i'm i'm

I'm not confident that UPS is going to be like, hey, let me return some money to you guys because you paid us too much. But Amazon is saying that's going to happen. But I think the more important part here is you might get charged extra if you are not being completely honest about your dimensions.

an article from Yahoo and Royers, uh, announced today that Amazon signs up FedEx for residential delivery. So Amazon kind of exclusively exclusively was using USPS UPS for like the last mile shipments. But now Amazon, it says here has hired FedEx to handle some of its large package deliveries. Uh, weeks after UPS said it was, uh, halting, it's less profitable deliveries, uh,

For Amazon and cutting 20,000 jobs. So I don't think this is going to affect sellers too much. But basically, now you're going to notice some of your products being delivered by FedEx to the Amazon customers.

Yesterday was the Amazon upfront. And so they had a few announcements at Amazon upfront. Here's a ad week kind of like summarize. It says Amazon drops three new CTV ad formats ahead of its upfront presentation. They announced that 130 million people see prime video ads each month, 130 million. So what's,

Maybe you're not that big of a seller yet, but I think it's becoming more and more accessible or something that smaller sellers, relatively speaking, where it's not, we're just talking about nine figure brands.

smaller sellers can consider now, perhaps more than ever, sponsored TV, because the sponsored TV seems to be getting more and more mainstream. Now, the new formats that were announced were contextually relevant pause ads, shoppable ads for products on Amazon, and shoppable ads for products off Amazon. That pause is pretty significant. So like, let's say you're watching Thursday night football, you're watching some kind of...

Game of Thrones or whatever Prime Video has. I watch some Korean dramas on Prime Video. I hit pause because I got to go check something, right? I got to pause when I watch Korean drama because I use the subtitles and I can't just like look away. If I get distracted, I won't be able to understand because I don't speak Korean. So I might hit pause. But now what's going to happen when I look back at the TV and it's paused, there's going to be ads.

that sellers are bidding for where there's going to be a product right there front and center on that pause screen before I hit play again. Now, these aren't just random ads. It says that they're using AI to make sure that's kind of like relevant to the show that you're watching. It says, for example, if you're watching the series, The Summer I Turned Pretty, a viewer could see an ad for beach vacations when they pause the show. Or it says here's their second example that they gave. It's kind of funny. It says,

If it gets paused in the middle of a steamy makeout scene, maybe there'll be an ad for Hershey's Kisses. All right, whatever. The second one, the second new ad type is you're going to be able to add products to your Amazon cart while an ad is playing on a streaming device. All right. So like, for example, let's say there's an ad for shampoo. There's going to be a button where you can actually click add to Amazon cart in the corner of the screen without even pausing it.

And then the last new format, it says it allows viewers to take action during an ad, even if it's for a brand not sold on Amazon. So instead of being able to add it to the cart like you can with those other ones, viewers can click a send to phone button online.

Uh, so like, for example, it says if a travel brand is advertising trips to the beach, right, the viewer can opt to have more information sent to their phone. So, you know, like I said before, you know, maybe a couple of years ago, most of us sellers were like, ah, sponsored TV. That's not something I'll ever get into, but Hey, I think it's becoming more and more, uh, democratized. All right. Last up is just, uh, three events I'm going to be at over the next couple of weeks. Um, leaving in, uh,

about an hour and a half to the airport because I'm going to be going to Turkey. So I'll be speaking at world F Istanbul. All right. So world F Istanbul is going to be from the 15th through the 17th. So make sure that you guys get your tickets. H10.me forward slash Istanbul. I'll be speaking on stage there. If you're in Turkey, make sure to join. If you're in Korea, I'll be next week on,

May 21st in Seoul, Korea at an Amazon ads event. Go to h10.me forward slash ads Korea if you'd like more information. And then a couple of days later on the 23rd, I'll be in Tokyo, Japan for a tech partner day. Again, also by Amazon ads. So if you want information on that, go to h10.me forward slash ads.

Tokyo. All right. That's it for the news articles this week. Now, before we get into our training tip of the week, let's go over a couple of new feature alerts from Helium 10 that will help sellers out there. The first one up is a enlisting analyzer and listing builder. You are now able to create or analyze listings online.

in the Amazon Australia marketplace. All right. And also for Listing Builder, you can now create listings in Listing Builder for Amazon Australia.

And next up, this is right now only for elite members, but it'll soon come to diamond members. A pretty cool update for Helium 10 ads, the artist formerly known as Helium 10 Atomic, and it's called the budget manager. All right. So this is pretty cool because it kind of like controls your budgets at like your, your whole account level and allows you to go above and beyond at

the monthly level and the daily level, your whatever daily budgets you are putting for your campaign. So for example, what you can do is you can set your daily budgets setting, right? So you can hit the settings button on one of your accounts and

optimize how it's distributed. All right. You also have campaign budget limits. All right. You're going to be able to set minimum and maximum budgets for each campaign. So you can have some flexible control. Next, we've got auto pacing.

All right. So the system is going to allocate budgets based on the campaign performance. All right. So like, you know, you might have a campaign for every or a budget for every campaign. But because of this pacing, like let's say the the your campaigns aren't spending as much as you wanted or it's going to overspend. Well, the next day you'll do the opposite so that you can keep pace to what you really want your overall spend or budget to be.

Another button that is new is going to be the stop overspending. So it allows you to adjust your budget at any time to stay within your limits and prevent overspending. And so how this basically works is you're going to go for elite members can do this. Now, diamond members are going to be able to do this soon. You can hit, for example, settings right here next to your profile, and then you've got to activate it like the auto pacing and the stop overspend. But basically,

You can actually set up right here what you want your daily budget to be like. For example, for June, I can click here and I can edit my whole monthly budget. Let's say I can just put like 400 or $400 total for the month across all my campaigns. And then basically now it's going to allocate it completely dividing it by the day of the month.

but then I can go in here and then now I can actually change what's happening on a certain day by a percentage or by a budget. So like, for example, if I'm doing this for July, maybe I've got like a full, like I want to spend $10,000 in July. I could have that. But then during prime,

week or prime day, right? I might go into like the 17th, 18th, if that's when prime day is going to be. And I'll be like, you know what? I need this budget on these days to be like a hundred percent more. And then what's going to happen, it's going to allocate more budget to those days and then take away some budget from the other days, the non prime days in order to keep pace with my full monthly budget. So, so guys go in there and start playing, uh, with this stuff. I think it's going to help you, um,

be able to have a little bit more flexibility. Those of you who use Helium 10 ads, especially, uh, during, you know, time, uh, during certain months where you want to allocate more spend, but you don't want to have to go in to all of your campaigns and one by one, like increase the budget for a couple of days, or even for the full month. Like some of us do that right for, for November, December, but now you can be like, yeah, you know what? November, I just want,

to take my total budget from 1000, let me go to 1500, let me go to 2000. And then it's going to go in and increase each of your campaigns accordingly. And then whether you're like not not hitting that, it'll go ahead and increase, you know, the rest of the month, like, let's say, I've only been spending like 70%, 80% will be like, you know what, let's go and give 120% of the budget to make up for those days. So a lot of

things that, you know, use ads users, Helium 10 ads users have been asking for is going to be implemented in this. Let us know if this is what you guys were looking for. Those of you who are asking for this and, and how we can tweak it even further to, to help you guys out. Like I said, right now it's elite members only, but soon it's coming to a Helium 10 ads dive members as well.

all right last up we've got shivali with our training tip of the week and this is something that you know i've been speaking at different events like this year and i always ask when i am on stage i'm like guys this is one of the most powerful features that helium 10 has um and i bet 99 of you are not using it and sure enough like without failed 95 99 of whoever's in the audience

does not raise their hand when I ask who is using this regularly, but this is something that allows us to have a look into Amazon, what they think our product is relevant for. So super important. Shivali, show us how to use it.

This next strategy is something we predicted years ago that other tools would eventually try to copy because it's just that valuable. It's called Amazon Recommended Rank and it's a direct connection to Amazon's API that tells us how relevant a keyword is to a specific product. Essentially, Amazon assigns a relevant score to each keyword based on how well it aligns with a particular listing. And Helium 10 takes that score and converts it into a ranked list of keywords.

If a keyword receives a 999 score, it means that Amazon considers it the most relevant keyword for that product, giving it the Amazon recommended rank number one. If another keyword scores 996, it falls into rank two and so forth. This feature is extremely useful because it allows sellers to understand exactly how Amazon perceives their product. When looking at the top

20, 30 keywords that Amazon associates with the listing, sellers can immediately tell if their product is being categorized correctly or if there's a relevancy issue that might be preventing it from gaining visibility. This is really important for brand new listings. If a product launches and struggles to get impressions on PPC campaigns, the issue is usually related to keyword relevancy.

Even if that listing is properly optimized, Amazon may still misunderstand what the product is, which can lead to low visibility in search terms and ad campaigns that don't perform well. We personally experienced this when selling socks that had a novelty message printed on them. One sock said, "If you can read this," and then the other one said, "Bring me coffee." Naturally, we wanted to target coffee-related keywords like "gifts for coffee lovers" because that's exactly what the product was designed for, right?

However, since the product was technically listed in the clothing category, Amazon failed to associate with coffee related terms. When we ran Amazon recommended rank on the listing, we saw that all of the keywords Amazon thought the product was relevant for had nothing to do with coffee. Instead, it treated the product as generic socks,

which explained why PPC campaigns weren't getting impressions. Without Helium 10's recommended rank feature, we would have never known that this was happening. But once we identified the issue, we were able to make adjustments and improve the listing's relevancy. Let's look at a real-time example using one of Helium 10's coffin shelves from many mysterious oddities. When we run it through Cerebro and sort the results by Amazon recommended rank,

we can immediately see what Amazon believes the product is. Right at the top of that list, we see terms like coffin shelf wall large, coffin bookshelf large, coffin bookshelf, and gothic bookshelf.

All highly relevant keywords that clearly indicate Amazon knows exactly what this product is. There's no confusion here, and the listing is properly optimized to match what shoppers are searching for. But let's compare this to another coffin shelf product that we found on page 4 of the search results. This is already a red flag because there aren't even that many coffin shelves on Amazon, yet this one is buried deep in the rankings. When we ran it through Cerebro and checked the Amazon recommended rank, we immediately noticed a problem.

Unlike the Helium 10 shelf, this product's top ranking keywords have nothing to do with coffins or with gothic decor.

Instead, Amazon has categorized it incorrectly, meaning it will never rank well for a coffin shelf related search until the seller fixes the problem. This is a perfect example, you guys, of why Amazon recommended rank is so powerful. The seller of the struggling product likely has no idea why they're not ranking well, but if they were using Helium 10, they would immediately see that Amazon is not associating their listing with the right keywords because of this. They need to go back and re-optimize their listing, adjust their backend search terms, or even check

If there's a category misalignment, if they don't take action, they'll remain stuck on page four, missing out on potential sales. This is exactly why Helium 10 users, whether they're on platinum or diamond plan, never have to be in the dark about how Amazon perceives their listings. No other tool gives them this level of insight into keyword relevancy, making Amazon recommended rank an absolute must have for any sellers looking to dominate their niche.

All right. Thank you, Shivali, for that tip. All right, guys, that's it for the news this week. I believe Carrie or Shivali next week is going to be here while I'm away for the weekly buzz. So make sure to tune in next week to see what's buzzing.