Helium 10 Buzz 12/5/24: 2025 Amazon FBA Fees | Biggest Black Friday-Cyber Monday Ever | Bundling Policy Updates
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New Amazon fees for 2025, the results of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and reimbursements for coupons for some sellers. All of 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. 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 news stories that are going on in the Amazon, Walmart, and e-commerce world. We highlight the latest new feature alerts from Helium 10, and we review a training tip of the week that will give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Now, today, our host is going to be Kerry Miller. So, Kerry, take it away and let us know what's buzzing.

All right, let's go ahead and get into the first article, which is about Amazon fees that are starting in 2025. So there's some more fees that have come out and there are some increases and there are some discounts in fees. So let's go ahead and go over what was posted in Seller Central. Now in this first section here, they actually talk a lot about all the things that they've done to improve all these different services over the last year. And so you've got all that information, but

then if you scroll further down, it gets into the nitty gritty details, which is what I wanted to share with you today. And so the first thing that they talk about is AWD, which is Amazon warehouse distribution, which they seem to want to incentivize sellers to use AWD. And so here is the update. A new AWD smart storage option will provide a 10% discount on your AWD storage fees. If you maintain sufficient levels of inventory, this discount brings fees down to as low as 43 cents per cubic foot per month.

And Amazon will also separate the AWD processing fee into inbound and outbound processing fees rather than the current approach, which is charging both together. So these changes are effective April 1st of 2025. And for details, you can actually go and there's a link there. And so this should be in your seller central. There's a link to more of details about the fees.

All right, so the next one is MCD, which is multi-channel distribution. So MCD outbound transportation fees will move from a fixed fee to a distance-based fee. And this will lower fees for shorter distances and increase them for longer ones.

Inventory replenished into Amazon though will not be affected by this change and will continue to be charged a fixed transportation fee that they were before and it will not be distance-based. So these changes are going to be effective April 1st of 2025 and then there's also a link still in Seller Central that will give you a little bit more details on all of that if you need more information about that. Okay, and then the next part here, it says we're updating...

The discounts for sellers who choose the supply chain by Amazon managed services to include 20% off of AWD storage fees and 10% off of AWD storage or transportation fees from AWD to FBA. The managed option for supply chain by Amazon provides a simplified experience where Amazon coordinates the end-to-end supply chain logistics, warehousing, and fulfillment. And these changes are going to be effective April 1st, 2025 also, and then you can go in and get more details on that.

as well. And then MCF multi-channel fulfillment. I know a lot of people use this. They're actually going to increase their fees by 3.5% on average. And

and they say this is less than the average of 5.9% that some other carriers use. For units with shipping weights of one pound or less, the fees are actually going to remain unchanged for standard delivery speed. And for units that exceed one pound, the fee increase will vary depending on the unit size and weight. And these changes are effective January 15th, so a lot sooner of 2025. And for details about the changes, you can actually go to the little link there that they give in Seller Central as well. And then

The finally, we're gonna talk about buy with Prime and any fees there. And it looks like buy with Prime, there's gonna be no increase to the buy with Prime service fee and fulfillment fees for some large standard size units. It actually is going to decrease. So they're gonna continue to offer the one to two day delivery at rates that are comparable to the three to five day standard delivery rates on other carriers.

And so it'll still kind of all be the same, but maybe there will be some discounts. So that change is going to be effective January 15th. So you can check for more details in the link that they provided in there as well. All right, so let's go ahead and get into the second article of the day, which is about Black Friday, Cyber Monday for Amazon. And this is pretty exciting news. And I'll just go ahead and share this article. And that is that Amazon's Black Friday week and Cyber Monday deals, it was their biggest deals event ever.

ever. And if we scroll down, we can see a little bit more details in this actual article. And it said Amazon announced that it's Black Friday week and Cyber Monday holiday shopping event from November 21st through December 2nd was its biggest ever compared to the same 12 day period ending on Cyber Monday in prior years.

The deal event saw record sales and a record number of items sold. And then it actually, if you go further down in this article, here it says the Black Friday week and Cyber Monday holiday shopping event was also the largest ever for independent sellers in Amazon's store, most of which are small and medium-sized businesses, more than 60%.

of sales in the Amazon store during the event were from independent sellers. So third party sellers, anyone out there who sells on Amazon, was this the story for you? Did you see a huge increase this year in your sales? I think that's pretty interesting to take a look at. And then if we go further down, it goes to talk about some maybe contributing factors that might have contributed to this being kind of one of the biggest events ever. And it basically has to do with their AI features for customers.

They're AI powered assistant Rufus that helps you kind of ask questions and find things quickly. And then they also have AI shopping guides that make the decision making process a little bit easier by consolidating the details of the products and breaking down technical terms. And then also Amazon Lens, a visual shopping tool that allows you to just identify products with a photo, a screenshot or a barcode. And then Find on Amazon feature that lets shoppers discover comparable products well,

browsing online. So I think that, you know, they're pretty happy about the things that they did here for, you know, just boosting Amazon sales during this time. So I'm really interested to know if you're an Amazon seller, was this Black Friday and Cyber Monday, your biggest sales you're

ever for me it certainly was we actually did 32 more than we did last year on black friday cyber monday weekend so we really just calculated that that time frame so i'm curious to know if you put it in the comments that would be great did you do better or worse this year in for cyber monday and black friday

Okay, so let's go ahead and go to the next article. And that is actually kind of related and it's Walmart Marketplace. So Walmart Marketplace actually also had record sales in this last Black Friday Cyber Money. Walmart Marketplace saw its highest ever sales day and also set a single day conversion rate record during the period between November 25th and December 2nd.

Walmart goes further on and they say in this article, if you can scroll and see it's at the top here, Walmart says that this record comes as the company's e-commerce business is experiencing substantial growth. During its most recent quarter, that side of the business grew 22% with Walmart marketplace sales increasing 43%, marking the fifth quarter in a row with more than 30% sales growth. So they're definitely growing. I'm curious to know if any of you are actually selling

on Walmart and you've seen this growth as well. And you saw a huge increase in what happened on cyber Monday and black Friday. In addition, the company, if you can read, just scroll down a little bit more. Uh, the company says that the marketplace is also getting more high income shoppers during its last quarter, around 75% of the company's market share gains came from households earning upwards of a hundred thousand annually. And that's actually interesting to note because I do have people ask me quite often, uh,

if they should put a higher price item on there. And it looks like the demographics might be changing for the online portion at least. So you might be able to sell some higher priced products as well on Walmart. So that should be something to keep an eye on. So for any of you who have kind of like those premium products, it looks like they are selling some of those.

And then they further kind of said into this article, they said that these gains create exciting opportunities for premium brands and categories on our marketplace because higher income customers are showing a higher propensity to spend on both discretionary and grocery purchases. And I think that's really, you know, kind of convenient for a lot of people. They want to buy things kind of all at the same time. So very, very good on Walmart's part to kind of work on combining those. I think it's only a matter of time. You'll see a lot more sales there.

All right. So the next thing is, was also kind of a feature update in seller central, and this is the coupons. Okay. So now the new feature update is that you can actually edit coupons and you weren't able to do this before, but you're now able to increase the discount amounts for active coupons without the need to recreate the coupon. This feature makes it easier for you to manage your promotions and it helps you to adjust to the changes in inventory levels. So if you're selling out, you know, you can

kind of work on that. But you have to note to maintain customer trust, you can only edit coupons to increase discounts. So I don't know how helpful that is for some of you, but that's really the way they made it. So you don't have to kind of recreate the whole thing. So the next step

that we want to share about. And this is also in seller central that was talked about, um, in seller central and it is a limited time coupon fee reimbursement for new FBA selections. So from now until January 31st, 2025, you're going to receive an automatic reimbursement for the 60 cent per redemption coupon fee for coupons on newly launched fulfilled by Amazon selection. So this is especially helpful for anyone who's like

seasonal and you launched a bunch of new things and you did some coupons on there so you can get reimbursed for those. The promotion applies to FBA offers on products that first became buyable after November 2nd, 2024 and reimbursements will automatically be dispersed to your seller central account by February 28th of 2025. So anyone who is seasonal and kind of just launched products in this last November, this would be a great thing to take advantage of. And I think it actually is automatic. So that's pretty cool information right there.

Okay, and then the next thing, and this is the last kind of piece of news, but not the least. This is about the Amazon bundling clarification. They kind of put a clarification out because when they announced this in October of 2024, there was a lot of confusion around. So basically during that time, Amazon updated the product bundling policy for consumables to ensure bundle products are safe, authentic, and meet stricter handling standards. And

And this change reflected the higher safety requirements for items like food, skincare and products for children or pets. And Amazon heard a lot of feedback from sellers that the new policy was really confusing. So we're gonna go into the nitty gritty details of this. All right, so the first thing, clarification that they're clarifying is all bundles must be product configurations packaged by the original manufacturer for the brand.

For example, you can list a bundle that includes Dawn dish spray and dish spray refills, which was originally packaged by Dawn. However, you cannot list a bundle of Dawn dish spray and dish spray refills that you yourself have repackaged, okay? You also cannot create your own bundle combining Dawn products with gloves, sponges,

and anything else from other manufacturers. And then the next one is about products. Products may be reconfigured and repackaged as bundles if you have a letter of authorization from a brand owner or manufacturer granting permission to repackage.

All products in a bundle must belong to the same brand and the bundles must be branded with the same brand name as the products. Okay, so that's something to note. Now, we actually had Ashlyn Haddon Insurance. She did a module in our Freedom Ticket 4.0 where she talks more in detail about this topic and you know what not to do because it is a liability and somewhat against the rules. So if you wanna learn more about

repackaging stuff and you can actually go check out our bonus modules in freedom ticket 4.0 in that course or actually it's in our regular modules in there so you can actually see that and then the last thing but not least in here that we want to point out about this bundling is that gift items listed within the gift basket category may contain products

from multiple brands that are physically bundled together for customers in a manner suitable for gifting. So there are some exceptions and so I can see how this could potentially be a little bit confusing. So definitely good to kind of check out this information if you are bundling, especially, this is especially helpful for anyone who's kind of a wholesaler or reseller, so you know what the rules are.

So the next thing that I wanna do is I'm actually gonna show you some feature updates. So Helium 10, we're always improving and always coming out with new tools and new support for sellers. And one thing that we are recommending is that sellers diversify to other platforms. So we have a lot of Walmart content and a lot of Walmart tools.

we obviously were amazon but then also we wanted to give you some tools for tick tock and so i'm going to go ahead and show you in here this is our our actual our coffin shelf listing right here but

Say you wanted to actually start selling on TikTok shop. And sometimes you wanna know what the data is for TikTok shop. And so what we actually did is we created a profitability calculator for TikTok shop. And this is gonna help you to take your Amazon products and kind of calculate and see if you could be profitable on TikTok shop. So when you go onto your Amazon listing and pull this, you can see that it pulls in the price and all of the dimensions here. And then you can put in your manufacturing costs, you can put in your freight costs.

And then it gives you a spot here for the commission. So this is what you would pay for influencers to share your products within TikTok shop. And so we put it at 20%, but you know, it depends. Sometimes people start at 30%. Some people will give 10%. And so you just put that in there to calculate your profitability. You would also want to put your estimated time in storage and kind of storage fees for fulfillment by TikTok. And

And then you can put any duties and tariffs in here and other costs, and you can calculate pretty easily your profit on TikTok. So that is something that you should check out if you haven't started on selling on TikTok or even if you are and you want to kind of add more products and you want to just see how they would do on TikTok shop. That is a great place to take a look.

And finally, we are getting into our strategy of the week. And I wanted to do the strategy of the week in the listing builder AI. We have a lot of really cool features that are in the listing builder AI. So I've actually already pulled it up here for you to see. And this is just an example of all the amazing stuff that we have. Just kind of one example.

And that is keyword performance. So we put in our list here and you can see that you have the root words and then we also have keyword phrases. So you put in the keyword phrases and then it kind of automatically kind of divvies out these one root words to kind of show you what those are. But if you want to go in even more detail to see what the keyword performance is, you can actually pull up the keyword performance by clicking on that.

And it's going to show you all the root words here. So you can see all the root words there. And then you can also see over here, say for example, if we check, we want to see all the keyword phrases that have Gothic in it. And so we can kind of check that and hit the filter button.

And then what you're going to see is all of the phrases with coffin in it. And then you can see exactly where it is. It's in the exact phrase, exact phrase. You can see it's plural singular field broad. So it's kind of a broad match there. So not in the exact phrase form. So you can basically check any of these and

and kind of filter any of these different words that you wanna see more details about and how you've used it and where you've used it. And you can also, what's something that's great about Listing Builder is you can also go ahead and you can pretty much put any listing in here. And so you can put your competitors in here and you can analyze their keyword performance and see where they're putting their most important keywords

and the exact phrase and all that. So it still gives you search volume here, the keyword sales, the click share, the title density, and the organic rank of that listing. So it's definitely very helpful and just a good place to kind of see where all of your placements are. And it gives you just kind of a good overview to see how well you're optimizing your listing. I think this is an amazing tool that you can use and filter and kind of just see where everything's at.

So if you haven't tried it out, you should definitely try out our Listing Builder AI. That's just one of the amazing features. There's some other competitor kind of comparison features in there as well.

All right, so that is all that I have for you this week on the Weekly Buzz. Hopefully this was very helpful. I think we have a lot of great information in here today that you can kind of take a look at and just monitor. But next week, Bradley Sutton should be back. So we'll see you again next week to see what's buzzing. Bye everyone.