#667 – Amazon’s $2.5 Trillion Seller Report, TikTok Shop Shifts, & Audio AI Hits Your Listings | Weekly Buzz 5/22/25
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Amazon's new small business report reveals exactly how the marketplace is doing for independent sellers. TikTok users reveal who's really shopping on TikTok shop. Spoiler, it's not who you think. And Amazon is issuing surprise refunds dating back to 2018. 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. We give you a rundown of all the goings on in the Amazon, TikTok shop, e-commerce world. We let you know what new features that Helium 10 has and 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 Shivali Patel. So, Shivali, take it away and let us know what's buzzing.

Let's kick today's weekly buzz off with a headline that is a major flex from the small business side of Amazon. According to Amazon's brand new 2024 Small Business Empowerment Report,

independent sellers have officially crossed $2.5 trillion in lifetime sales on Amazon's store. This is over the past 25 years. That's trillion with a T. And if you're still wondering whether Amazon is still a place where small businesses can win, well, this report should clear that up pretty fast. This news report outlines just how much small businesses have reshaped retail through their presence on the platform.

And in 2024 alone, over 55,000 independent sellers generated more than $1 million in sales on Amazon's store. The average seller was seeing nearly 290,000 in annual sales per year up 6%.

16% year over year. The way that I see this is this indicates even in the middle of economic uncertainty, small brands are thriving. And here's the kicker, small towns and rural areas are seeing success with sales increasing 30% year over year, outpacing their big city counterparts. So if you've been thinking you need a warehouse in LA or a studio in Brooklyn to grow, the answer is no, you don't.

You just need a great product, a smart strategy, and some serious hustle. It's also not just about the money, it's about impact. Sellers now support over 2 million US jobs, you guys, tied directly to their Amazon business. And we're talking about fulfillment centers, small town warehouses, product development teams, you name it, from Colorado to Kentucky to Atlanta. The stories are the same, real people building real businesses that support real communities.

All to say, if you are one of the sellers contributing to that $2.5 trillion number, pat yourself on the back. And if you're just warming up, you can use this report as your motivation. You can check out the full write-up and spotlight stories at the link in the description. Keeping the stats going and switching over to TikTok shop for a moment, let's chat a bit about what real US shoppers are actually doing on the platform. You have recently conducted a case study and reports show that 30%

of TikTok users said they bought something on the platform. So there you have it, three in 10, 30% reported that they've purchased something from TikTok shop in the past 12 months.

What is surprising, would you believe that it is not Gen Z that's driving this? It's actually shoppers who are between the ages of 35 to 54 that are most active in this study. Now, granted, I did not see this coming, but hey, who doesn't love a life of convenience, right? As for what they're buying, if we just scroll down on this article, you'll notice that it says

Fashion, electronics, and home goods seem to be topping that list at about 38, 35, and 33% respectively. With of course, influencers being the leading cause of why these purchases are being made. Only 12% said that celebrity endorsements matter. Instead,

good old fashioned discounts and promotions followed by TikTok ads and ease of purchase being the leading drivers. So really it's less about who's wearing it and more about the costs. Same for me. While most people are still spending under a hundred dollars total, a solid 20% dropped between 251 to $500 in the past year. So if you thought that TikTok shop was just for low ticket impulse buys,

Maybe it's time to think again because bigger cards are clearly also in the play. I want to pivot this convo to you. If you are a seller, I've definitely encouraged this on previous weekly buses when I run them, but here I'll do it again. If you've solely been on Amazon or Walmart as a seller up until now, this report I think serves as pretty good proof that

of why TikTok may serve as a good platform to try and diversify. At Helium 10, we've actually launched multiple tools to help sellers transition over and to ensure that that process is easy for you. Our TikTok shop listing converter lets you bulk transfer your Amazon listing straight to TikTok. And if you're wondering whether it's profitable, well, we have our TikTok

profitability calculator for that to break it all down for you. However, bear in mind that we're just getting started in the next week or so. We've got even more Tic Tac Shop tools on the way. So get ahead of the curve. What are you waiting for? Heading back into Amazon news. If you have been getting some random Amazon refunds lately, you

Here's why. According to PCMag and Bloomberg, Amazon is quietly refunding customers for unresolved returns that date back to 2018. Now, if we scroll down on this report, you can see that one Reddit user shared the email and it read that following a recent internal review, they've identified a very small subset of returns.

And we're talking about items that Amazon couldn't confirm were actually returned. They sat unresolved in their system. And now years later, Amazon has decided to just give customers the benefit of the doubt and issue refunds. Anyways, one Reddit user even said that he got nearly

$1,800 back for a TV that he bought in 2018. Can you see this? Yeah, there you go. Now that's what I call a sweet throwback bonus with no action needed. If you're eligible, you'll get an email and then the refund will just show up automatically. This is a really nice move to solidify just how much Amazon cares about providing a

positive customer experience. But if you're wondering whether this includes third-party orders and what that could mean for us as sellers, or if you need to worry about a potential clawback, as of now, nothing's been announced in Seller Central. And given how old these cases are, it's unlikely Amazon would come after sellers for reimbursement. Of course, that's wishful thinking. Still, it's worth keeping an eye on just in case. Naturally, we'll tell you about it on the

the buzz. In other news, it looks like Europe is finally catching up to the tariff tea party that the US kicked off earlier this month. According to Reuters, the European Union is proposing a two euro handling fee per parcel for low value e-commerce shipments. Yes,

the kind that Timu and Sheehan have been flooding into the block by the billions. Sound familiar? That's because just a couple of weeks ago, Bradley touched on this briefly during the buzz. France was throwing major FOMO over Trump's de minimis crackdown here in the US, asking the EU

EU to speed up its own plans. Currently, the EU's full removal of duty free treatment on parcels under 150 euros isn't scheduled until 2028, as you can see here. But clearly that wait is feeling a little too long for some member states.

This proposed handling fee is likely a sign that pressure is mounting to act sooner. And who's feeling the squeeze? You guessed it, Timu and Shein. Not only are they getting hit in the US with tariffs and the end of the de minimis loophole, but now their pivot to Europe might be a little bit less profitable because the two euro fee per parcel for direct to consumer deliveries

could really start adding up real fast when you're moving millions of $5 items. And even more interesting, the proposal includes a smaller 50 cent fee for parcels handled by warehouse within the EU. If you're taking a look at the European logistics

As a global seller that's already having product over there, you might get a slight break, but smaller businesses could end up paying more, which has some folks like Polish e-com player Allegro raising concerns about fairness. So the takeaway here is clear. Timu and Shein's race to dominate both US and European e-commerce is running into resistance on both sides of the Atlantic. If you're a domestic seller who felt the heat from ultra low cost imports,

This could be a sign that the playing field is slowly but surely being leveled up. Up next, we have an article coming to you also from Reuters. Now, you know I can't get through a buzz episode when I host one without talking about new generative AI features. And while we won't get too deep into it, here's the gist. Shopify just dropped a new generative AI feature. The AI store builder lets sellers spin up

an entire store just by typing in a few descriptive words. I think that's crazy. I want to go test this for myself, but if any of you have tried it, can you drop some comments in the chat to let me know what you think? According to Reuters, the tool,

has outputted a three-store layout option complete with images, copy, making it easier than ever to get a shop off the ground without having to drag, drop, or design from scratch. And it's Shopify's latest push to become the to-go, well, go-to platform, I should say, for aspiring e-com brands. And part of their broader bet

on AI to attract merchants, especially those that are overwhelmed by the setup process. Like if you're just getting started, you've transitioned over from a different walk of life and now you want to build your own brand. This could be the sort of thing that really

gets you going. Not exactly groundbreaking for seasoned sellers, but definitely worth noting if you're keeping an eye on how AI is shaping the e-commerce onboarding experience. Continuing the convo about sexy generative AI features, Amazon just dropped a test feature that could literally change the way that people shop and it's not visual, it's audio. According to

into Amazon news, they've been rolling out AI generated product audio summaries right inside of the Amazon shopping app. As you can see here, it says here, the highlights above my head, you can kind of think of it like having a chatty, Kathy and knowledgeable friend who's narrating key highlights about a product pulling from descriptions, reviews info from around the web. So you can hear the highlights without having to scroll squint or skim the product listing page right off the bat. I will say I'm excited about this.

because it not only makes life and shopping efficient, but also inclusive for users. Right now, only a subset of US customers will see the here, the highlights button on select products like Ninja Blender and the headphones that they have listed on this article. Tap it and Amazon's AI will give you a conversational style audio breakdown of the top features, kind of like a mini podcast that helps you detect

determine if you want to buy that air fryer or waterproof mattress protector. It's built on large language models and it pulls from Amazon's own product catalog, customer reviews, and third-party data to generate the script, which is then turned into a short audio clip. I will say it raises some interesting questions. Will it improve conversions or create new friction if the summaries oversell or misinterpret product details?

And could this be something that sellers need to optimize for in the future like audio SEO? Clearly, Amazon is investing into this experience. I mean, check this out. Look at all these AI features they've rolled out over time. So whether you are excited or you're curious or cautiously skeptical, one thing is clear.

And that is the age of talking product pages is officially beginning my friends. Okay. Next up, if you have been staring at slow moving inventory, like it owes you money, I get it. Amazon just gave you a prime excuse to clear it out with some front page spotlight. According to a news update, this is inside of seller central, but I'm looking at sellers with excess inventory can now gain special payment placement and

on Amazon's homepage through Memorial Day outlet event that is running through May 26th, 2025. So here's the deal. If you've got active or upcoming outlet deals with 30% off or more, Amazon will feature those products on the dedicated outlet landing page. And they're even placing a homepage banner that funnels shoppers directly to it. Translation, you

your discounted items get better visibility during one of the year's biggest shopping weekends. For sellers, this is a golden opportunity to move old stock by converting visibility into momentum so long as your listing is in tip-top shape

And whether you've got aging inventory, tying up capital, or you just want to run an aggressive promo, this program could help you turn shelf sitters into Memorial Day wins. To qualify, simply increase your outlet deal discount to 30% or higher and make sure that your time lines up before the May 26th deadline that is listed right here. You can find and edit eligible listings underneath advertising deals or create a new outlet deal straight from your FBA inventory tab.

A secondary news piece from Seller Central for any of my sellers who have been using Send to Amazon to prep your FBA shipments. There's a small quality of life update now live that can make things just a bit smoother. Amazon's rolled out two new features designed to make shipment management more efficient. You know, I love efficiency, though nothing earth shattering here. So I'll just keep it really brief. First, as you create shipments, both domestic and international, you

You'll now be able to see if they qualify for Amazon optimized splits as you create them. That means clear expectations upfront regarding requirements for individual units, case packs, and pallet templates. You'll also now see that the total estimated costs on step two confirm shipping of the send to Amazon workflow. This includes both the FBA inbound placement service fee and shipping estimates via Amazon's partner carrier program, PCP or send rates.

The system will also auto select the most cost effective shipping method between small parcel and LTL standing for less than truckload, but only for domestic shipments. These changes will not impact your bottom line directly unless you are using Amazon's partner carriers, but.

For those managing frequent shipments, it's one more step towards transparency and automation. It's not flashy, but it is helpful. And as a closing news piece, the third and last super quick one from Seller Central, Amazon's quietly removed the ability to mark a message as important in buyer-seller messaging to override a buyer's opt-out preferences.

If you are using that to sneak through when a customer had messaging disabled, I'm sorry, that is no longer an option. That said, if your message is actually critical to completing the order, it will still go through even if the buyer opted out. The best move is to stick to Amazon's built-in message templates. They handle translation, include order IDs, and will flag as important automatically when it truly matters.

With that, it is time for this week's new feature alerts. Let me pass it off to Carrie to show you how you can optimize your advertising Google impressions for certain goals. All right, so let's talk about our latest Helium 10 feature updates. And the first one that I want to talk about is our new sponsored display audience targeting in Campaign Builder. Okay, so this is a little screenshot of it. You can now optimize for viewable impressions, page visits, or conversions that align with your campaign goals.

You can also choose from multiple ad formats, now including video, so you can decide the best way to showcase your products and brand. And you can also expand audience targeting beyond basic demographics to include remarketing audiences, contextual segments, in-market, interest, and lifestyle groups. So that is quite an exciting feature update for Helium 10 ads. So if you are not using Helium 10 ads, we basically make it so much easier for you to manage your ads

within Amazon, giving you all these kind of easier ways to save you time and make it more efficient for you. And the second feature update is I'm very excited to share with you that we now have a brand new Ads Academy. We did have an Ads Academy before, but we've updated it completely, and our hosts this time are Bradley Sutton and Destine Wishon. So I'm gonna just share my screen and show you where it's at. So you wanna go to the Tools menu, and you wanna go to the Learning section,

and it's under Ads Academy right here. Now, if you have a Helium 10 paid subscription, you get access to this course, and it is an incredible course. It goes from A to Z all about ads, and it's great for anyone from beginners all the way to advanced. You're gonna learn something here from Destiny and Bradley. They've got incredible strategies,

And as you can see, we've got kind of the outline over here. We've got some fundamentals, ad targeting and placements, keyword research and planning, campaign structures and organization, software versus ad console. So, you know, whether or not you should use Helium 10 ads or if you should use a, you know, the Amazon ad console, bid optimization strategies and negative targeting and exclusions. So,

It is jam-packed with a lot of information. I definitely learned a lot from it going through the course myself. It is so good. Destiny does a really good job of laying out everything and making it very easy to understand. So if you're not very good with ads and you want to learn how to manage ads, especially even if you're having somebody else manage your ad campaigns, you want to understand how

how ads should be managed. And I think this is a very, very good way to do it. And again, it's just very well done. Destiny is very clear and concise and helps you really to understand from the basics all the way to advance. So if you haven't checked that out, go ahead and log into your Helium 10 account and check out the new ads Academy.

Thanks, Carrie. Yes, definitely. If you want to understand how ads should be managed, make sure you go check out our new ads Academy. Carrie actually don't sign off. Could you also go ahead and give us a strategy of the week to a really cool one that can maybe show sellers how they can identify every single keyword that has brought them a sale in the last 10 months from Amazon itself. Take it away.

How would you like to know every single keyword that brought you a sale in the last 10 months? And yes, this is straight from Amazon itself. So I'm going to show you exactly how to do this using Helium 10 and why it blows Seller Central completely out of the water. So I'm going to go ahead and share my screen here. This is our search query performance analyzer. So what we're going to do is...

To get here, you need to go to this tools menu here and you're gonna expand that and then basically you're gonna go over to the search query analyzer and that's where we're at right now. So the cool thing about the search query analyzer is you can actually sort by weeks or months and you can actually do more than one. So I'm gonna do months and I wanna see the last 10 months. So I've actually got the last 10 months here checked off and you can basically see all of this data if you want to. But I'm gonna go ahead and choose just the last 10 months to see what sales I've gotten for what keywords.

And then the next thing you're gonna do is you want to make sure that you choose a product. So let's go ahead and choose the egg shelf. Okay, so I'm gonna also be able to choose multiple, basically multiple products in here as well. So I'm gonna choose, actually I'm gonna do the egg tray. And so I'm gonna just choose the egg tray. I'm gonna choose these two egg trays here.

And so again, you can choose multiple ASINs, which you cannot do on Seller Central. And I want to see where I at least got one sale. So one purchase, I'm going to put that in the filters. Now you can filter with all of these different things that you absolutely can't do that on Seller Central. Makes it so much faster and so much easier to filter through this data. I'm going to hit apply filters, and then you're going to be able to see

all of the keywords here that you basically got a sale on. So if I scroll over here, I can see my purchases right here. So I can sort this column as well for the highest. So the highest one was wooden egg holder. I got 43 sales. And you can basically go through all of the different keywords and how many keyword sales you got for each different keyword.

which is absolutely incredible. This is straight from Amazon. And so something to note though, if your data doesn't come in right away up here when you're doing this, it might actually take a little while for the data to actually load. So once you open up your search query profile,

performance analyzer, you're going to want to just let it give it some time to load. But once it does, then you're going to have all of this data and you can filter and sort through all of this great information to see where all of your sales are coming. So this is really a goldmine of information because you really want to see, you know, where your sales are coming from. And it's not as easy to filter through in seller central. It's not as quick and easy as this

So if you haven't checked it out and you haven't started playing with this, you definitely want to do that because with Helium 10, you can get this laser focused data straight from Amazon across products, across months, across keywords. And it's so much faster. Again, you can't even do these things in Seller Central. You have to kind of create a bunch of spreadsheets and do a bunch of graphs and all these things yourselves. But we made it so much easier and faster so that you can find and see the data that you want very quickly and efficiently. So check it out.

Awesome. Thank you, Carrie. So guys, remember, this isn't just data we're speculating and pulling from some random place. This is directly from Amazon and it just takes a few minutes. So go make use of it. That wraps up this week's weekly buzz. We'll see you next week to see what's buzzing.