#673 – RIP Amazon Posts | Inventory Based Ads Rules | Weekly Buzz 6/11/25
16:39 Share

Amazon officially shuts down posts, Timu's US traffic nosedives nearly 50% after the tariff shakeup, and Amazon quietly waives a major Walmart fulfillment fee for sellers. 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'll 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. Well,

Let's kick this week's weekly buzz off with the official funeral notice for one of Amazon's most underused, but once promising marketing tools, posts. Can you believe Amazon posts is officially being sunset? So if you've been holding out hope that posts would become the next big organic content play inside of Amazon, it is time to let that dream go, my friend.

According to Amazon, the posts API was deprecated as of June 3rd and new post creation will no longer be possible after June 16th. Full shutdown happens on July 31st. So if you've got some assets in the pipeline or content you want to post, now is the time to wrap it up and archive what you want to keep. After that, it will be gone. This probably is not the biggest surprise. While it was a great tool, some brands used to repurpose Instagram-like content,

and build shoppable media experiences, it did require some upkeep before AI came into focus as it had a very particular set of rules. The official statement from Amazon recommends shifting to sponsored ads and exploring new creative formats of their testing, but no word on what those actually are just yet. So stay posted to find out.

do you see what i did there moving on from my corniness this next update is directly from seller central news for my promo happy sellers out there especially if your catalog's got more skews than you care to count amazon just dropped a new bulk upload feature that lets you create up to a hundred coupons at once inside of seller central that means no more building them one by one like you're playing coupon sudoku this new uploader covers standard coupons subscribe and save and reorder all from a single bulk

templates. So if you are the kind of seller who likes to run flash sales, product launches, or frequent S&S pushes, this should save you a ton of time. All right, it's time to talk about our new feature alert of the week. Let me pass it over to Bradley so he can tell you guys all about ads inventory rules. All right. So for this week's new feature alert, this is actually something that I think a lot of advertisers have been asking for. And

And people are going to use it in very different ways. And some of the ways I actually don't even agree with, like, for example, you hear out there sometimes when people are getting low on inventory, they're like, oh, man, I got to slow my sales down so I don't run out or I got to like I don't want to run out too soon.

My philosophy has always been, no, you don't want to do that because you're going to hurt your conversion rates. You increase your price or you turn off your ads and now all of a sudden your sales velocity on certain keywords are not as good as they once were or not as good as your competitors. Well, that could actually end up doing more lasting harm than the harm of going out of stock, which we all know is, of course, harm. But some people do that and they're fine with that strategy. No problem. It's not like it's terrible or anything. Other people like, hey,

If I'm overstocked, I don't want to pay storage fees, right? Or hit my limitations. I might want to move some inventory a little bit faster. So if I'm like to have too much inventory, I might want to increase my advertising because, you know, I want to kind of like maybe push through some more of my inventory. And then there's just in between, like, hey, if I run out of stock, I'm going to

I don't want my advertising to turn on. I want to pause all my campaigns because you know what happens if you run out of stock, you don't close your listing. All of a sudden, Amazon finds one unit

or five units here or there. Now your listing goes live again, your advertising goes live and it's not optimized because the people are probably seeing like, you know, 25 day delivery time or something ridiculous like that. So you don't want to have to, you know, what most people do is that they'll go and pause all of their campaigns or targets, right? Until their inventory comes in, but then they got to remember to put it back. So because of all of these use cases and many more, we now have rules in Helium 10 ads, artists formerly known as Atomic,

where you can do things with your bidding, pause targets, increase by a certain percentage, decrease by a certain percentage, do all kinds of things based on the inventory number of the units that you have in stock of the one that you're advertising. So here's how it's going to work. I believe this is for elite members now. If it's not to diamond members yet, it'll come to diamond members soon. Basically, when you go into your rules, you can set up a new rule or add it to your existing rules.

where you can say, hey, if my inventory number

And this, by the way, if you have multiple SKUs or multiple ASINs in one campaign, which personally I don't recommend, but it's going to combine all of the inventory of all of them. All right. So I personally like only doing one target or one ASIN per campaign. That's just me, though. So if your inventory is greater than or let's just say it's less than or equal to five. Right. Then let's.

Let's see, what can I do? Pause targeting. Maybe I just want to pause targeting, all right? So if my inventory drops below a certain number, I know my conversions rate's not going to be good. I want to stop. Or maybe if it's equal to zero, I only want to do that if it gets to zero. You can decide that, all right? Let's say you normally have like 1,000 units in stock and you just want to start slowing down stuff, slowing down sales if you know your inventory is coming in. So if it's less than 100,

Then maybe you're like, you know what? Decrease my bid by a percentage. Let's say decrease by 50%. All right. So like, hey, that means all of a sudden my coffin shelf, less than 100 inventory. I'm like, you know what? My bid is a dollar. Take it to 50 cents.

Me personally, I'm not going to use this, but this is specifically what some customers have asked for. And so, you know, go ahead and use it. That's why we make it. We don't make stuff here just for me or for what I use. We do it based on what everybody else does. All right. So or what everybody else asks for. So here I can decrease my bid. But hey, my inventory. Oh, my goodness gracious. All of a sudden, I've got more than 1000 units in stock. You know what? I want to increase my bid by 23%. All right.

All right. To try and like push through my inventory more. OK, so this is going to be interesting. Note that it says here the inventory criteria has the highest level hierarchy. All right. So, you know, you could put other rules based on a cost and a whole bunch of other stuff. But this is the one that's going to take the highest priority.

you know kind of like rights right it says if if the inventory conditions not met the other ones aren't going to be triggered so if i later on add another rule here and say hey if a cost is greater than 50 do this well this is not going to happen because it's going to it's going to be based on um on the inventory here so guys this is something that that oh my goodness countless users have been asking for um to to be able to take into consideration their inventory numbers and advertising some people are going to use this me personally i'm not sure like i

I'll tell you right now what I'm going to use this for immediately in all my campaigns is if my inventory gets down below three, you know, meaning I'm pretty much ready. I've run out or maybe even zero. I think I might do it to zero. Pause on my targets because I don't want I don't want that thing to happen where it's not going to, you know, kick in. I could do it less, you know, like like for those of you who who just like send inventory in and you didn't pause your actual inventory.

product, right? Well, if you're sending inventory in, you want it to be distributed across the country a little bit more. Maybe I don't want it to kick in until there's 50 available units or 100 available. So there's so many different ways that you can use this. So let us know, guys, what you think of this new feature, how you're going to use it. Do you manage your inventory or your advertising bids and rules based on inventory? Would you use this? Let me know in the comments below. Back

Back to you, Shabali. Thanks, Bradley. With Prime Day around the corner, make sure you guys go check this out and implement it for your businesses. Now, something else from Amazon News as of this week,

Amazon-partnered carrier program now supports floor-loaded shipments for full truckload and intermodal inbound deliveries. You can load your products directly onto the trailer, no pallets, no forklifts, no problem. This update offers more flexibility, especially for bulky, oddly-shaped, or high-volume products that aren't exactly pallet-friendly. And it could also mean lower prep costs and a smoother process if your team is doing the loading too.

To use it, head through your usual steps that are listed right here. Hopefully you can see them above my head. What you're seeing is you want to go to Amazon, send to Amazon, start your shipment creation, complete steps one through three as normal. And then under step four, you're going to select Amazon partnered carrier. To use it, head over to send to Amazon, walk through your usual steps and under step four, choose Amazon partnered carrier, then select floor loaded as your freight carrier.

method. Simple, fast, and maybe a little less backbreaking. You'll love to see it. From there, we also have something for those of you who are multi-channel sellers out there. If you've been using Amazon's MCF to fulfill your Walmart orders, but always skipped the block Amazon logistics checkbox because of that annoying 5% surcharge, good news. That fee has officially been waived.

through January 14th, 2026. It's quite some time. And this is also another way of me telling you that you can now use alternative carriers to ship your Walmart Marketplace orders without coughing up that extra fee. So long as you check only ship with blank boxes and block Amazon logistics in your MCF settings.

This little change can make a big difference if you are trying to keep their Amazon branding out of Walmart packages to stay compliant while still getting the speed, reliability and inventory sync MCF is known for. So whether you are automating through a supported order management app or submitting manually in Seller Central, now's the time to take advantage of this waiver. Think of it as Walmart and Amazon playing nice for now. Now let me pass it over to Kerry, who will go ahead and tell us about how people can track rankings

for their keywords every hour of the day with the click of a button. Today, I want to share an advanced strategy that is only available on Helium 10, and that is using Keyword Tracker with Boost.

So let's start with the basics. At its core, a keyword tracker monitors your rankings on specific keywords, typically at least once a day, and that's pretty standard. Pretty much every tool out there does that, and it's not useless data. It's very helpful to track your rank day by day to make sure that you're not trending down. You want to make sure you're trending up or staying up. Most of the time, especially with higher search volume keywords, your rank won't change much from day to day.

But occasionally there is something called a search shuffle that happens. And what's that? Well, depending on where someone is searching from, what browser they're using, or just whatever Amazon's algorithm decides to do that day, keyword rankings can look very different. So someone searching from your exact address could see your product on page one, position five,

while someone across the street might see it at page one position seven. Now that's not a huge deal like it's a small fluctuation that's usually expected. But what if you're seeing page one position five and then someone across town is seeing page three position 150. And that's a problem, especially if you are

tracking one browsing scenario per day. Even if the tool rotates devices or browsers like Helium 10 does, you still might miss those ranking gaps. So this becomes critical when you're launching a product or managing sponsored ads. You might need to know like, is my bid high enough? Am I even showing up where I think I am? And that's where Keyword Tracker with Boost comes in. This is our Keyword Tracker and I've expanded down. We've already added in all of these keywords to the Keyword Tracker and you can actually see where our organic ranks and our sponsored ranks are.

So what you want to do is you actually want to click on this rocket ship button. If you want to check this every hour on the hour, let's see, I have to find something with search volume. That one doesn't have search volume. So, so coffin shelf has a lot of search volume. We'll search, we'll boost that one and coffin gift book.

So we'll boost those. And once you do this, you'll be able to see every hour on the hour. And when you click on the graph, it'll actually show you hour by hour. So it'll be a much more detailed graph that you can actually see all of this information that is really, really helpful for just

So it's just making sure that you stay visible on the Amazon search results. Helium 10 is the only tool that allows you to see keyword rankings hourly up to 24 times a day and it gives you a true zoomed in view of what's happening in real time across different browsing conditions so that you can make smarter decisions faster. So if you haven't tried Boost, you need to go right now, add in those keywords and click the Boost button to see what's going on with your products.

Amazing. Thank you, Kerry. So go find your primary keywords, the ones you absolutely want to keep a pulse on and make sure that you have boost turned on. Continuing on the tone of shaking things up, if you've been wondering whether the end of the de minimis loophole was actually going to shake things up, here's the answer to that. According to Sensor Tower, Timu's daily US user base just dropped 48% between March and May. 48%.

And the timing is no coincidence. The White House officially ended the de minimis exemption on May 2nd and tariff free shipments from China. Well, those are gone. And Teema's U.S. playbook basically evaporated overnight. They've pulled back on spend, reworked their fulfillment strategy and are now asking merchants to tackle tariffs and custom forms on their own if they want to ship to U.S. warehouses.

And while Shein is still managing to squeeze more spend out of its shoppers, Teemu's momentum seems to have stalled a little bit.

For now, at least one analyst said Timu's competitive threat is fading. So if you've been playing defense against $2 earbuds and $5 phone cases, keep your eye on the space. The winds might actually finally be shifting, but honestly, only time can tell, right? So make sure you keep tuning into the buzz to see how it all unravels. Something else in the news from Amazon that might not affect everyone, but if you sell battery powered products in the EU, listen up.

Amazon has just issued a new notice about the updated EU batteries regulation, which introduces extended producer responsibility or EPR requirements for anyone selling batteries or products containing batteries in certain EU countries.

You can take a look at this screen that I have pulled up. This includes Germany, Sweden, Poland, Ireland and the Netherlands. And the deadline is August 20, August 18th, 2025 is what I meant to say. If you don't have valid registration numbers submitted by then, your listings will be deactivated.

Yeah, no battery, no beeps, no sales. Meaning if you've got a flashlight, a toothbrush, or even something that just happens to come with a battery, you'll want to make sure that you get your registrations in ASAP. You'll want to submit them through your compliance dashboard inside of Account Health.

And if you're not the actual producer of the battery, Amazon still wants your suppliers info and a signed declaration. For sellers in Italy and Belgium, Amazon might be able to handle some of this on your behalf, but just go and take a look at all the information associated to this. All in all, point being, this is one of those compliance things that can sneak up fast, especially if you assume your upstream supplier is handling all of it. So don't let it slide. We recommend checking your inventory and reaching out to Amazon support for guidance.

on submitting registration. Better safe than delisted. Oh, and one last thing to add before I wrap up this week's weekly buzz news segments. If you are getting ready for Prime Day 2025, don't forget we've put together a full Prime Day prep checklist to help you stay on track and maximize your momentum. You can grab it now at the link in the description and we'll also drop it directly below the video if you're watching this on YouTube for easy access.

Go download it. It'll walk you through pricing, listing updates, strategies, inventory timing, and more. So go find your primary keywords, the ones you absolutely want to keep a pulse on and make sure you have Boost turned on. That wraps up this week's Weekly Buzz. We'll catch you next week to see what's buzzing.