Helium 10 Buzz 11/14/24: Amazon Haul Launched | Black Friday News | LTK Integrates with TikTok

We’re back with another episode of the Weekly Buzz with Helium 10’s Principal Brand Evangelist and Walmart Expert, Carrie Miller. Every week, we cover the latest breaking news in the Amazon, Walmart, and E-commerce space, talk about Helium 10’s newest features, and provide a training tip for the week for serious sellers of any level.

Introducing Amazon Haul—a broad selection of products $20 or less, with most under $10
https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/retail/affordable-products-amazon-20-dollars-and-under

When is Amazon’s Black Friday sale? Here’s everything you need to know.
https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/retail/when-is-black-friday-2024

Share shoppable videos across global Amazon stores
https://sell.amazon.com/blog/shoppable-videos-feature-update

TikTok is integrating with influencer shopping app LTK, videos show
https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/12/tiktok-is-integrating-with-influencer-shopping-app-ltk-videos-show/

Sellers in Your Community just launched and is dedicated to connecting and championing small and medium-sized businesses like yours that sell in the Amazon store.
https://www.sellersinyourcommunity.amazon/?utm_campaign=launch&utm_source=Helium10

Walmart Slashes 50% Off Its Walmart+ Membership for Black Friday
https://www.ign.com/articles/walmart-plus-membership-black-friday-deal-2024

TikTok kicks off Black Friday Nov. 13; Nicki Minaj to host livestream
https://chainstoreage.com/news-briefs/2024-11-12?article=tiktok-kicks-black-friday-nov-13-nicki-minaj-host-livestream

Walmart Black Friday and Cyber Monday: Dates and times you need to know
https://www.al.com/shopping/2024/11/walmart-black-friday-and-cyber-monday-dates-and-times-you-need-to-know.html

Lastly, listen to Helium 10’s new tool updates, which empower sellers with valuable data insights from Cerebro’s historical data, and check the sales in your variations with Xray. Our training tip of the week also shows you can create festive holiday images for your Amazon brand using Helium 10’s generative AI feature. Tune in to get the inside scoop on the transformative trends and tools shaping the future of e-commerce.

In this episode of the Weekly Buzz by Helium 10, Bradley covers:

• 00:53 – Amazon Haul Launched
• 04:54 – Amazon Black Friday
• 05:59 – Share Shoppable Videos Globally
• 07:59 – LTK launches on TikTok
• 08:41 – Amazon Launches SIYC
• 10:31 – Walmart Black Friday Discounts
• 12:47 – TikTok Black Friday Deals 
• 13:34 – Walmart Black Friday Dates
• 14:23 – New Feature Alerts
• 18:49 – Training Tip: Festive AI-Image Generator Inside Helium 10

Transcript

Carrie Miller:

Amazon launches their new haul program to compete with Shein and Temu Walmart, tiktok and Amazon announced their Black Friday sale dates and LTK is now partnering with TikTok. This and more on this week’s episode of the Weekly Buzz.

Bradley Sutton:

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’ll give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Now, today, our host is going to be Keri Miller. So, keri, take it away and let us know what’s buzzing.

Carrie Miller:

Okay, so let’s go ahead and get into the news today. The first article is about the Amazon Haul program and there is so much buzz today about the new Amazon Haul program. I actually talked about this a few months ago when Amazon announced that they were going to be launching this program. It’s really kind of a competitor to Temu and Shein. Basically, factories can ship directly from their factories in other countries to US customers through Amazon.com, and this is kind of what it looks like. You can see there’s a lot of different kind of low-priced items here and if we scroll down here a little bit more, it says that the US beta program actually launches today in the Amazon Shopping app. So if you haven’t checked that out, you can check it out. There’s a lot of things with fashion, home, lifestyle, electronics and other products and the delivery times. This is kind of the difference between this and Amazon Prime is the delivery times are one to two weeks, so it’s a little bit longer because it’s coming directly from the factories. One to two weeks, so it’s a little bit longer because it’s coming directly from the factories. And it says further on if we go down into the article, let’s see it talks about all the items and how they’re priced. All products are priced $20 and under and backed by Amazon’s A to Z guarantee, which protects customers when they buy in Amazon’s store, whether or not they’re sold by Amazon or one of the selling price partners. So you can see that and this is kind of what it looks like in the app. There’s a lot of emojis and things like that. So it’s my kind of a fun experience. I wonder if there’s gonna be a lot of kind of kids and teenagers mostly shopping and looking at this. But if we scroll down a little bit more, we can see it says you know low prices. You get extra savings and free delivery on any orders over $25. So they’re definitely incentivizing buying more in there and I mean even some of these products. It says they’re as low as a dollar. So that’s a pretty big change from you know. Most products are not a dollar on Amazon right now. So where can you find this? You can actually find the Amazon haul in Amazon in the Amazon shopping app by searching haul in the search ball. So how can customers find Amazon haul in the Amazon shopping app? By searching haul in the search bar. So how can customers find Amazon haul in the shopping app. You can find it by searching haul in the search bar and then you’re going to navigate to Amazon haul from the main menu icon or you can go to www.amazon.com/haul on a mobile device and you can shop that way and look at these crazy low prices that they have.

Carrie Miller:

I actually want to talk a little bit more about this A to Z guarantee that Amazon talks about. Amazon says that they screen products sellers offer in-hall so customers can be confident that they’ll receive products that are safe, authentic and compliant with applicable regulations. All items available in Amazon Ha haul are covered by Amazon’s longstanding A to Z guarantee. The A to Z guarantee protects customers when they buy an item in our store and covers production product condition, including if the item is damaged, defective or is not as described. So they basically kind of outlined that all there, and so I just I mean, I do have some questions about this.

Carrie Miller:

I actually talked about imports to the US for small packages and customs either a few weeks or months ago on the Weekly Buzz, and there are definitely concerns about quality of products coming in in these small packages, knowing that even the US customs has been overwhelmed and unable to properly screen products coming into the US and, as many of you know, this is also a way to avoid import taxes with Chinese sellers, and Chinese sellers are able to use this program, not the US sellers.

Carrie Miller:

So it’s going to be it’s kind of an interesting question on whether why not? US sellers are not allowed to be in this program, and because you know, obviously it would save them on taxes as well by shipping directly from the factory to the customer. So I’m interested to know what you all think about this, this program. I actually heard that Temu is kind of doing the opposite. At first they get all these kind of cheaper items, but now they’re doing a lot of recruiting Amazon sellers based in the US because they want to focus on quality. So they’re actually kind of reversing, according to just some inside sources that I have on that. So that’s kind of an interesting spin here, whereas you know, everyone’s kind of looking at what everyone’s doing and we’ll see how this kind of all plays out.

Carrie Miller:

All right, so let’s go ahead and get into the next piece of news, which is Amazon announced their Black Friday dates. Okay, so it seems like Amazon’s Black Friday, and just Black Friday in general, just keeps expanding more and more. It used to be you had to wait in line, you know, on the night after Thanksgiving and you’d be there. Some people would sleep in front of the stores and it would only be one day, but now it just seems to be kind of expanding more and more. There’s a lot of competition amongst the different marketplaces, so Black Friday on Amazon is going to be expanded a little bit more. So they said Black Friday is always the Friday after Thanksgiving. This year it falls on November 29th, so it’s only a few weeks away, and Amazon customers can enjoy Black Friday week deals from November 21st at 1201 PST through November 29th, so it’s basically all that time up until Black Friday. I know they will also be doing some Cyber Monday deals as well. If you actually scroll down a little bit more in this article that they put out, it talks about Prime. So if you aren’t a member of Prime, where you get the free two-day shipping, it might be a good time to do that, and I wanted to highlight that they actually also give discounts to students. So if you know any students that need to get Prime, there is a discounted student rate. So that’s a good deal to do.

Carrie Miller:

Okay, let’s go ahead and get into the next piece of news, which is Amazon sellers can now share their shoppable product videos across global Amazon stores. Okay, so let’s go ahead and take a look at the article here, and I’m going to scroll up a little bit so that you can see it. It says that, uh, amazon has enhanced their shoppable video service and this, uh, the videos that you upload to the main image blocks on your product detail pages may now be automatically displayed on shared global listings. So that means when you upload a video to a listing on Amazon.com, it might also appear on Amazon.ca, it may also appear on Amazon.co.uk. So it’s basically going to be expanding all these out with no additional effort for you. So, in order to do that they actually show you how to do this To display videos on shared global listings, go to the upload and manage videos tool and follow the standard upload process. When available, your videos automatically display in multiple Amazon stores and you can find a list of stores where your video is displayed in the video library on the upload and manage videos page. So that’s where you actually find that. So that’s kind of a really cool thing where it can automatically get all of that expanded out.

Carrie Miller:

Okay, let’s go ahead and get into the next article, which is that TikTok is integrating with LTK, which is formally known as like to know it. Now, as a consumer, I actually use this tool a lot. I follow a lot of influencers that do show fashion and things like that, and then you can basically click on their link in the bio and it shows all the videos. You can click on the videos where they show the product and it’ll show and list out all the products and it’ll take you to Amazon or wherever they’re being sold. So it’s a really, really great tool for sellers and I think this is great that it’s going to be integrated now with TikTok.

Carrie Miller:

Okay, so let’s go ahead and take a look at the article here so you can see a little bit more. So it says an integration with LTK, an app that lets consumers shop from creator and influencer recommendations, is rolling out on TikTok, according to videos by select creators viewed by TechCrunch. The collaboration could boost fashion creators ability to earn affiliate commissions via LTK, while also making it easier for consumers to locate clothes and accessories that creators are talking about. And I really do believe this is a lot easier because I’ve been on TikTok and a few times it’s been hard to find what people are talking about if they’re doing these kinds of videos. So I think this is going to be really, really good, and I’m just going to go scroll down a little bit more and it says linking the TikTok and LTK apps together only makes that experience more seamless and boosts TikTok’s reputation as a shopping app, not just an entertainment destination, so I think that’s a really cool thing. If you’re a seller, go ahead and take a look at this. I’ve actually seen my products in these LTK apps because a lot of people, especially during the holidays, have promoted my products and they just link them in LTK. So take a look at that.

Carrie Miller:

Okay, so let’s go ahead and take a look at the next article. Well, this is actually kind of a site that Amazon provided, but basically Amazon is launching a new program and it’s called Amazon Sellers in your Community. Amazon is taking another step forward and just supporting small business owners across the country with the launch of its new Sellers in your Community program, and this initiative aims to amplify the impact of local Amazon sellers who are already contributing in their communities through job creation, philanthropy and business engagement. I know a lot of you sellers out there are creating jobs in your community, and through this program, sellers will have the opportunity to showcase their stories, connect with local decision makers and engage their communities in meaningful ways. Amazon has recognized a gap for many sellers, who may not have a physical storefront but are eager to get involved and be visible in local discussions about small business. So this program offers several key opportunities for participants. The first one is attendance at local events with business leaders and policymakers, providing a platform for sellers to share their business stories and priorities. Invitations to speak at panels, media interviews and community events, giving sellers a chance to showcase their expertise and passion. And it also features Amazon marketing campaigns, including social media, blog posts and even local ads, boosting visibility and helping sellers reach new customers. So the Amazon Sellers in your Community program is set to create a stronger local tie and increase visibility of small businesses across the nation. So if you’re an Amazon seller and you want to get more involved, you can express your interest. You can actually go to this site. It says sellers in your community, amazon, and then basically up at the top right when you click on get involved at the top right, you can actually fill out an interest form here and it’ll give you more information on how to get involved with that. So go ahead and do that if you want more details on how to get involved with that program.

Carrie Miller:

Okay, the next story is about Walmart and they are cutting the prices of Walmart Plus, which is similar to Amazon Prime. So basically, they said Walmart is slashing the Walmart plus program prices by 50%. Okay, that’s pretty awesome because it gives you a lot of different perks. It says the best Walmart black Friday deal has kicked off early. Walmart is slashing the price of its Walmart plus membership by 50%, which means you’re only paying $49 instead of 98 for the whole year, and this is only available, you know, for people who have not actually started in a current annual plan already. So this is for new people. But this is pretty exciting because this is a really, really good deal. It also helps to encourage more shoppers. So if you are a Walmart seller, this is encouraging more shoppers, one of the things that they’re doing to get more shoppers involved.

Carrie Miller:

But here’s some of the perks. So you get free shipping with no minimum. You get free returns, including free pickup from your house for a lot of the items. Ten cent discount on select gas stations I don’t have a gas station near me, but if you do, that’s pretty cool. Free tire repair and road hazard warranty at the Walmart Auto Care Center’s Mobile scan and go checkout in retail locations, which is pretty nice. You also get access to Black Friday deals earlier and then also complimentary Paramount, the streaming subscription. So that’s pretty amazing.

Carrie Miller:

And here’s some other limited time offers that they. That’s coming with this particular one. You can get up to five free months of Apple Arcade. Subscribe to Sirius for XM and you get six months free. You get 25% off four months of Hallmark and $5 of Walmart Cash. Get $20 off live events and $5 Walmart Cash with tickets for less. Get up to three months of Apple News and get a $10 Walmart Cash with your bus or train trip. So that’s pretty awesome to have all these perks. It really pretty much pays for itself. So if you haven’t gotten that, you might want to check that out. Another thing is you actually get it for free If you have the AMX Platinum business card. It actually pays for itself, so I would get that if you have that business card too, because a lot of sellers I know do have that for different perks. So go ahead and check that out. Really great perks with the Walmart Plus program.

Carrie Miller:

Okay, so let’s go ahead and get into the next article, which is about TikTok’s Black Friday. Okay, so they’re actually expanding it way more. So TikTok is actually launching Black Friday this Friday, which is November 13th, with a special live stream event hosted by Nicki Minaj. And then this early start. It precedes the traditional, obviously Black Friday on November 29th and Cyber Monday on December 2nd, and it’s going to go until the day before Thanksgiving. The event is going to feature exclusive deals and interactive content marking TikTok’s significant entry into the holiday shopping season. I know a lot of Gen Zers are actually saying they’re going to be shopping on TikTok, so we talked about that before in the past. So this is something that you should take a look at if you haven’t already. And then they’re also TikTok is going to be having their normal Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales after Thanksgiving as well, so something to be aware of and take advantage of.

Carrie Miller:

Okay, so the next article here is about Walmart Black Friday. So lots of Black Friday information. So the Black Friday event for Walmart is actually already even started now, and they have another event that actually starts on Monday, November 25th at 11 am for Walmart Plus members and 4 pm for everyone else. It also is going to be in stores Friday, November 29th when stores open at 6 am local time. So that’s pretty exciting. And then they’ll also have the Cyber Monday deals as well, starting Sunday December 1st at 4 pm for the Walmart Plus members and then at 7 pm for everyone else. So that is some great information about all the stuff that is happening with Black Friday and all the different promotions and things like that. So lots of exciting news going on right now.

Carrie Miller:

But we have even more exciting news with Helium 10, and I’m very, very excited to showcase this, and that is basically that we have some new feature updates, and I think these feature updates are pretty incredible. I’m going to go ahead and get into the first update here, and that is in Cerebro. Okay, so I want you to go to Cerebro and this is with our historical trend tool that we have, and I am just super excited about this new feature that we have and it is basically that you can go back and compare months in the past. And I am just super excited about this new feature that we have and it is basically that you can go back and compare months in the past. So I’m going to show you how this works. I’m going to hit, I’m going to do it. You basically do a single ASIN search and that’s what I have done right here, which is our coffin shelf, and I’m going to click on show historical trend and then, once this show historical trend shows up, we can actually choose up to three months now. So I’m going to just choose three months here and then I’m going to hit compare the three months. And so what we can do now is I can scroll down and I can actually compare the search volume based on those three months and again, you can do any three months. You can also compare organic rank and sponsor rank.

Carrie Miller:

Now this is something that’s really interesting to take a look at, because sometimes your sales might go up or down and there’s a spike and maybe there’s something kind of going on with your listing, maybe you lost your indexing for important keywords. So this tool if I go back here you can actually see where maybe some issues might have happened. We have these preset filters. So, for example, you can say display keywords present only in the first month and not the second and third. So if we click on that and hit apply, we can see all of the keywords that were present here, but not in months two or three. So that is pretty helpful.

Carrie Miller:

You can also, you know, sort different ways. You can say, hey, I want to see where I was ranked. You know one to 10 in this month, but then I fell. You know where I was ranked. You know one to 10 in this month, but then I fell. You know, to 30 to 50 in this month. Or you know 11 plus. You can kind of, you know, do whatever you want here and you can filter through this to make sure that you get all those results. So I’m going to just clear this and I’ll show you what I mean. So I’m going to say minimum search volume, I’m going to say minimum of 200, and a rank between one and 10 in first month, but then in the second month I went from 11 to 50. Okay, and then I’m going to hit apply and then you’ll be able to see those keywords that we actually lost rank on in here. So pretty interesting stuff coffin shaped display so that might be kind of interesting. We little black coffin, we lost rank there. So really, really cool way to kind of find those important pieces of data without having to, you know, pour over spreadsheets. We basically filter it there for you and you can again, you can compare any months that you want. So you can say, hey, you know, where did I, why did my sales go down? You know, in January, what was, what was I losing ranking on? Or why did I lose sales in June? What keywords were important in May, before where I had a higher month? So very, very exciting tool. I’m very excited for everyone to try that out. So go ahead and take a look at that.

Carrie Miller:

Okay, and the next really amazing feature update and I think this is something that people have been asking for a long, long time and that is data on the child ASINs. So we used to kind of do sales data for just the parent and you wouldn’t be able to see what variations were selling the most. So there were a bunch of colors or sizes and you’re looking to sell a product. You were like looking at your competitors and you’re saying which one of theirs is selling the most. You wouldn’t be able to do that, but now we actually can do that. So you’re going to go to Amazon and you’re going to pull the extension like usual, and then basically what you can do is you can take a look here, and I’m going to just scroll over just a little bit. You can see the parent level sales here and then you can actually see the child ASIN sales and you can see the parent level revenue and the child ASIN revenue. So you can actually kind of take a look at what the actual sales are for even those child ASINs, and it really is definitely helpful because, for example, maybe these are both the same. It means there’s going to be no variation. But, like for this one, you know, this particular ASIN right here is selling 29,000. And the total variation is selling over a million. So this one is 29,000 of that million in revenue, or 1.2 million in revenue. So you can kind of take a look and see a lot of great information. I think this is something that everybody has wanted for a lot of time. We’ve actually brought in our data from some of our other tools and it’s amazing that we have this data available now. So go ahead and check that one out. If you haven’t, okay, and so let’s go ahead. And to get into our serious strategies for serious sellers. Now we’re in Q4.

Carrie Miller:

I wanted to bring something up about ads. Okay, so I have actually heard that you can increase your click-through rate by quite a bit by just simply creating a holiday background for your products. Now, it doesn’t have to be fancy, it can be very simple, and so I want to show you how you can do that using Helium 10. So the first thing you’re going to do is you’re going to go into listing builder, and usually you’re going to use this to kind of create a listing. But on this third section, you can just click on this and that is where you can create AI images.

Carrie Miller:

Okay, so this is where you go and you can put the size of the image that you want right here, and then you just need to upload the actual product with a white background, and then you can just choose. You know a theme? I actually chose here a holiday theme, Christmas magic. But I basically said you know, put this product amidst a cozy Christmas kitchen setting, with a beautifully decorated festive kitchen, twinkling lights, snowflakes and warm ambience. So we’ve got this is kind of it’s kind of basic stuff that comes out so, um, but this is kind of a way to kind of decorate and, uplevel your images. I actually did another one that was really I just wanted kind of a background. So for this eggshell I would probably do something like this, where I have just kind of stuff in the background, um, or this one right here, um, where it’s just kind of like a festive background. You can actually keep playing with the prompts here to get just a, you know, holiday themed background. But that is pretty much, you know.

Carrie Miller:

Something that you should look into is making sure that you update your ad creative for the holidays, because that can make a huge difference on click-through rate, and we have actually seen that with our sister company, Pacvue, as well as Helium 10. So if you haven’t done that, go ahead and do that. So that is actually all that I have for you today on this week’s episode of the Weekly Buzz. I hope this was very helpful for you. I know we had some incredible things that we talked about, especially those Helium 10 feature updates. I think they’re going to be super helpful for everyone. So go ahead and check those out, and then we’ll see you again next week to see what’s buzzing. Bye everyone.

Enjoy this episode? Be sure to check out our previous episodes for even more content to propel you to Amazon FBA Seller success! And don’t forget to “Like” our Facebook page and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to our podcast.

Get snippets from all episodes by following us on Instagram at @SeriousSellersPodcast

Want to absolutely start crushing it on Amazon? Here are few carefully curated resources to get you started:

• Freedom Ticket: Taught by Amazon thought leader Kevin King, get A-Z Amazon strategies and techniques for establishing and solidifying your business.
• Helium 10: 30+ software tools to boost your entire sales pipeline from product research to customer communication and Amazon refund automation. Make running a successful Amazon or Walmart business easier with better data and insights. See what our customers have to say.
• Helium 10 Chrome Extension: Verify your Amazon product idea and validate how lucrative it can be with over a dozen data metrics and profitability estimation.
• SellerTrademarks.com: Trademarks are vital for protecting your Amazon brand from hijackers, and sellertrademarks.com provides a streamlined process for helping you get one.