Helium 10 Buzz 7/4/24: Temu / Shein Crackdown? | TikTok Shop Prime Day | Amazon Brand Tailored Promotion Update

Will Shein and Temu lose the tariff loophole they take advantage of? TikTok Shop has its own version of Prime Day. Amazon Brand Tailor Promotions has an important update. These buzzing news stories and more in this episode!

We’re back with another episode of the Weekly Buzz with Helium 10’s Chief Brand Evangelist, Bradley Sutton. 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.

EU plan to impose import duty on cheap goods could dent Shein and Temu
https://www.theguardian.com/business/article/2024/jul/03/eu-plan-to-impose-import-duty-on-cheap-goods-could-dent-shein-and-temu

TikTok Shop to discount ‘thousands’ of items during sales event
https://www.retaildive.com/news/tiktok-shop-july-sales-event/720155/

Walmart+ Subscribers Break the 30% Mark
https://www.pymnts.com/subscription-commerce/2024/walmart-subscribers-break-the-30-mark/

Amazon Discontinues Security Robot for Small Businesses After 8 Months
https://www.pymnts.com/amazon/2024/amazon-discontinues-security-robot-for-small-businesses-after-8-months/

Virtual Stores are now showing up on some Amazon Storefronts. LinkedIn post by Liran Hirschkorn

Save 25% on Amazon Warehousing and Distribution storage costs
https://sell.amazon.com/blog/amazon-warehousing-and-distribution-promotion

But that’s not all! Take advantage of our tips on maximizing Prime Day sales using Helium 10’s Insights Dashboard. Many sellers are sleeping on these features. This episode is packed with essential updates and strategies to keep you competitive in the ever-evolving e-commerce landscape.

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

• 01:03 – Temu & Shein Crackdown?
• 04:23 – FBA Shipment Feature
• 06:05 – TikTok Shop Prime Day?
• 07:58 – Walmart+ Milestone
• 08:42 – Brand Tailored Promotion Update
• 09:49 – Amazon South Africa PPC
• 10:24 – Amazon Robots
• 11:38 – Amazon VR Stores
• 13:06 – AWS Discounts
• 14:03 – Pro Training Tip: Helium 10 Features You Should Use This Prime Day

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Will low-cost marketplaces like Sheen and Temu lose their tariff loophole they take advantage of? TikTok Shop has its own version of Prime Day. Amazon Brand Tailor Promotions has an important update. These news stories and more on this week’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 news stories that are going on the Amazon, Walmart, TikTok shop and e-commerce world. We also give you training tips of the week that will give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Let’s see what’s buzzing, all right, well, today is July 4th of July, national holiday in America, but you guys know me, I work 365 days a year, so I know no holidays. You guys need the news and I’m going to bring it to whether it is a holiday or not, so let’s go ahead and hop right into it.

Bradley Sutton:

To start off, we actually have a news article that’s not based on USA but actually based in Europe, and it’s entitled. It was actually from the Guardian and it’s entitled EU plans to impose import duty on cheap goods could dent Sheen and Temu All right, so they’re making this move. Now, as you guys know, the reason why you know Temu and Sheen can offer such low prices, regardless of what country they’re shipping to, is they take advantage of this kind of like loophole, as it were, like, for example, an EU. The threshold for this tariff is like 150 euros. In UK it’s 135. And then there’s also some other like threshold at 39 pounds or less. It doesn’t involve VAT. So basically, what this means is that you know you can ship from China to the country uh, you know in EU or even America, uh, and the sender nor the recipient are charged like import duties and taxes, as opposed to if you’re getting like a you know $200 item or something where you got to, you know fork over 20% or whatever it is, and in addition to that, you know to send from China that they take advantage of like these subsidies where they can get, they can ship things really, really cheap. But the one of the biggest advantages that the Chinese sellers have over European sellers or American sellers is that advantage of shipping things one at a time directly to customers so they can get around that import tax.

Bradley Sutton:

So what an EU Commission’s spokesperson said is hey, what we have proposed is that there’s now no exemption anymore for packages valued at below 150 euros. So this is not, like you know for sure, going to happen, but this impacts a lot in Europe, you know. It says imports from online retail retailers have more than doubled year on year to more than 350,000 items in April. Now this is like I said this is still in the preliminary stages. We don’t know if this is going to pass or go through or not. But if you’re in the US, you know this is impactful, I think, because you know Temo and Sheen are really attacking those low price kind of market there. Mainly it’s been in the clothing like for Sheen and stuff like that. But I was just looking the other day on Temo there’s coffin shelves all over the place and like a lot of the same products that amazon has and it’s like super, super cheap. Now, thank goodness, not as many not nearly as many people shop on that platform as opposed to like TikTok shop or amazon and things. But you know this is something that maybe us sellers might want legislation on. I’m not sure you know like. Would you like the United States to crack down on these no-fee imports, because, remember, it’s not just Temu and Shin anymore. What did Kerry talk about in the Weekly Buzz last week? Now Amazon has entered this game where they’re going to offer these kind of direct shipments that’ll get to buyers in like 11 days at a very low price. That’s kind of like exclusively for those shipping from China. So this this will help, you know, maybe alleviate some of those imports if this loophole is kind of closed. So it’ll be interesting to watch in the coming months what happens with this legislation.

Bradley Sutton:

Now the next news article is actually directly from Amazon Seller Central, a cool feature, something that you never see on Amazon. You guys know those announcements that we sometimes get news from, or you see it on your dashboard and you see how there’s like a thumbs up or thumbs down. Have you guys ever seen one that had 66 thumbs up and only one thumbs down, like usually? It’s like mostly thumbs down not usually, but a lot of times. A lot of sellers are not very happy with the updates that Amazon is giving, but this one is like 99% positive.

Bradley Sutton:

Now what is it? It’s very simple, but it’s. It’s beneficial for sellers like myself who do similar shipments all the time. So if you’ve got your own 3PL and you’re sending shipments in or you’re sending shipments directly from out of the country, this feature is called a send it again feature, replicating previous FBA shipments with one click, all right. So basically, let’s say you have this shipment you’re selling, you’re sending in 10 boxes of five coffin shelves each. Well, if that’s usually what you do, like you just do that every two weeks or you do that every four weeks or whatever Now, instead of having to build that whole shipment over and over again from scratch, you can just hit this button and now it’s going to duplicate that shipment. Now that doesn’t mean you’re locked into that SKU. It says you can still manually add or remove SKUs or modify the number of units, but at least you’re not having to start from scratch again. So if you want to play around with this and see how it works, hit inventory in Seller Central, then hit FBA inventory, go to the shipments dropdown menu and then select manage shipments under the next steps column select send it again. If you want to see how it is to repeat a certain shipment, all right. The next article is repeat a certain shipment, all right.

Bradley Sutton:

The next article is from a retail dive. I’m not sure if I’ve ever quoted them before, but this is a article entitled TikTok shop to discount thousands of items during a sales event. So you know, we know, amazon has Prime Day, Walmart has Walmart plus day or deal or week, I think it’s called, and then they actually have another one going on right now on Walmart before Prime Day. But now TikTok shop has its deals for you days that’s coming this July it’s actually going to be coming on July 9th and there’s going to be exclusive discounts that I’ll have with some major brands. Doesn’t really say that everybody is has access to offer this. But what about you guys who are selling on TikTok shop? Did any of you guys get access to this deal for you days? Let me know in the comments below.

Bradley Sutton:

Regardless, it could be a way to boost traffic on Amazon. The deal for you days is a week before Amazon Prime, so there’s a couple ways you can do it. If you’re selling on TikTok shop, maybe you don’t even have access to a deal for you days, but maybe you just go ahead and discount your products or do a big push on TikTok shop to influencers around that time. Well, that might boost some of your Amazon rankings before prime day, because you know, if you, the more outside traffic you get, you can get your ranks increase. Another strategy could be, during Amazon prime day, to run certain deals or run influencers on TikTok shop. And, you know, maybe your TikTok shop sales will have a boost, which you probably like, because there’s a lot less fees on TikTok shop. But your Amazon sales might get a boost too, because people there’s still people who might see something from an influencer on TikTok shop, but then they’ll they prefer to go buy it from Amazon, right? So then again, during prime Day, you might be able to have some benefits there by getting that outside traffic from TikTok. So just something to keep in mind with Prime Day coming up.

Bradley Sutton:

Next article is from payments.com and it’s entitled Walmart Plus Subscribers Break the 30% Mark. So they did a survey of about 8,000 different respondents and it said 30% of consumers had a subscription to Walmart Plus account. All right, Walmart+ is getting more market penetration, guys. And then, interestingly though this is the one I found fascinating is that among those subscribers, 87% also had an Amazon Prime account. So it’s not just a matter of oh, they have to pick Walmart+ or they’re going to pick Amazon Prime. A lot of people, myself included, have both Amazon Prime and Walmart+ accounts. Next article is back to Seller Central Dashboard, something that was announced this week Brand tailor promotions kind of a pretty good update, especially with prime day coming up.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, now there is an ASIN exclusion feature, all right. So before brand Taylor promotions, you can go to custom audiences. We announced this months ago when it first came out, and you know you can. You can like target all of your cart abandoners, but it’s at the brand level. So maybe you have like 30 products in your brand but you don’t want to everybody to get this discount that you’re trying to do. You just want a few products or you don’t want a few products in there. Well, now you know. Before you had no choice. You had to allow everybody who goes to any of your brands page to get access to this discount, but now you can exclude certain ASIN, so that it’s almost as if you can just specify this promotion for a single ASIN. If you want to, so go into brand tailored promotions, check that out. Might be something to run during prime day If you have a lot of people who have abandoned the cart or you’ve got some repeat purchasers. You want to maybe drive some more conversion to keep brand tailored promotions in mind.

Bradley Sutton:

Next article is going to Amazon advertising and it’s as you guys know. A few couple months ago we announced that Amazon is launched Amazon South Africa All right, but now Amazon ads is launched All right. So, believe it or not, there is a marketplace where there is no PVC until now. So now sponsored ads and brand stores have launched in South Africa. So if you’re one of the very few I don’t know anybody yet selling on the Amazon South Africa marketplace, go ahead and get your PPC up and running.

Bradley Sutton:

Going back to payments.com, this is kind of an off-topic thing, but I thought it was kind of interesting because I bet you a lot of you don’t realize that Amazon made its own robot a few years ago. All right, now one of them they relaunched last year we talked about this in the Weekly Buzz, I think how it was for businesses, where it was kind of like a security guard of sorts, you know, for 24 hours, a 24 hour, uh, you know, like vigilance, like kind of like a ring camera if you were. But Amazon discontinued the robot for small businesses. This is kind of crazy. I’m showing a picture of this robot here for those who are watching on YouTube, but they’re going to concentrate their efforts on the household robots. I mean, it’s hard to believe there’s robots in houses. Now it’s called the Amazon Astro, all right. Now the reason I’m bringing this up is there is one person in the whole world who I know has one of this. Who do you guys think it is? Who’s on cutting edge of different things? It’s Kevin King. So I saw this in Kevin King’s house when I went to his house there in Texas and I was like what in the world is this? So he didn’t have it set up at the time. I wonder, Kevin, if you’re watching out there, let me know how is your Amazon Astro? It’s now maybe a collector’s item, since Amazon is discontinuing it for the businesses.

Bradley Sutton:

Anyways, next up, not really an article, but something from LinkedIn. If you look at Liran Hirschkorn, last week he posted about how he saw that Lego had this virtual reality storefront in their Amazon store, where it’s like a virtual store, where you can just go in there and walk around the. You can see shelves and you see the different Lego sets and you and it’s. It’s fake because it’s like 3d, but it looks like you were in the Lego aisle in target or something like that, and then you can click on the actual products. It’s actually quite wild. I tested it on my phone Um, my Amazon app. I have access to it too. So go to the Lego store. Just go to any Lego product on your phone in the Amazon app and then there’ll be a button on there on the storefront that says Lego virtual store or something like that. Click that. It’s kind of wild, and we’ve talked about here on the Weekly Buzz in the past that there’s different companies that are moving towards this. Walmart is doing something in the meta, that there’s different, you know companies that are moving towards this. Walmart is doing something in the metaverse, right? Who knows, maybe there’ll be a day where you can go into the Manny’s Mysterious Oddities you know our Helium 10 account, you know store it and then see all of our spooky stuff coffin shelves and bat-shaped bath mats and coffin bookshelves and things. I’m not sure if I would shop doing this Like I have virtual reality devices, but that just seems too weird to shop in that kind of environment. But who knows, maybe five, 10 years from now we’ll be talking about this. It’ll be like commonplace.

Bradley Sutton:

Last article of the day is again from Amazon, and they’ve got a special they announced just this week where you can save 25% on Amazon warehousing and distribution storage costs. On Amazon warehousing and distribution storage costs. That’s AWD, all right. So from July 1st all the way to September 30th, anybody using AWD you get 25% off the base rate for storage costs and 15% off the base rate for processing and transportation costs. So this applies for people who are new to AWD or if you’re already using it. You are going to get this discount. How many of you out there are using AWD? You know a lot of people well, not a lot, but I do know some people who switched to that, you know, a few months ago, you know to try and avoid some of those Amazon new fees that are coming for, like inventory placement and low inventory fee and things like that. For those of you who have done that, how is it working for you? Let me know in the comments below if you’re watching this on YouTube. All right, that’s it for the news this week.

Bradley Sutton:

Let’s go ahead now and move into our training tip of the week. As you guys have been seeing the last couple of weeks we’ve been doing a long series on Prime Day. We’ve been trying to get everybody ready for Prime Day. We wanna make series on Prime Day. We’ve been trying to get everybody ready for Prime Day. We want to make sure you guys have the best Prime Day. I’ve got some strategies here that I have not talked about anywhere else, and none of our live broadcasts for Prime Day have we talked about.

Bradley Sutton:

It’s a couple simple things that I think some Helium 10 members are sleeping on. So those of you who have the Insights dashboard in Helium 10, this is what I want you guys to do. All right, so go to your dashboard and then, on the left-hand side, I want you to hit insights. Okay, now, when you hit insights, there’s a lot of insights that you know maybe have come up here. I want you to go to the settings and preferences for all the insights and then what I want you to do is look for the keyword based insights. All right, now there’s a few that I think can help you this prime day.

Bradley Sutton:

It’s kind of like for post prime day, but, as you know, you know you might start losing your keyword rank, your sponsored rank or your organic rank. You know, if everybody starts converting way way better than you, or if they’re doing a higher bid, you want to get notified. Now, I’m sure what you guys are probably doing is, you know, maybe refreshing your search results or checking keyword track or something. But instead of that, add insight for that where it says hey, my, our increased sponsored keyword rank or increased organic keyword rank, all right. So then what you can set is like hey, you can say, Helium 10, if my keyword rank goes up or down by this much, please let me know. If my sponsor rank goes up or down by this much, please let me know.

Bradley Sutton:

Another thing that could happen in Prime Day, especially if you’re going pretty heavy on some of your auto and broad campaigns, you might start getting sales on keywords that you didn’t even know you were relevant for, and then what’s going to happen if you’re getting some organic sales on these keywords? Well, after Prime Day, your organic rank might go up, right. So another one that you can do is you know those other keywords. By the way, what I was mentioning, if organic rank is going up or down, sponsored keyword rank going up or down, those are keywords already on your radar, like the ones that you’re tracking in Keyword Tracker right, but remember I said there could be new keywords. So what I want you to do is I want you to go to the my Product Keyword, suggested Insight or Alert, and then you hit Edit.

Bradley Sutton:

Right Now, what you’re going to be able to do is like say, hey, if there’s a keyword out there that has minimum whatever search volume and all of a sudden my organic rank gets to X or Y or Z right, and it has two words you know you can add a whole bunch of filters here Then give me an insight, in other words, give me alert. So a lot of people after prime day are like, looking at their PPC reports, are like, oh shoot, I didn’t know I was getting a sales from this keyword and they weren’t even tracking it. But this way, instead of having to look at all your search reports, just look, maybe all of a sudden you’re going to get ranked for keywords that you didn’t have on your radar. This is going to give you an alert. There’s nothing like this out there in the industry. We’re unique in offering this function. Another thing that we are unique in and it’s important for Prime Day is we allow you to add competitors that you can track for Alerts.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, so this was about your own products, right, but maybe you want to know, leading up to Prime Day, which one of your competitors is lowering their price. Is any of the competitors raising their price? Are any of your competitors adding coupons? What about after Prime Day? At what point do they take their coupon off? These are things that you might be tracking. Guess what? You don’t have to track it. Helium 10 can do it for you instead of you going and refreshing pages and this and that. How can you do that? What I want you to do is again go to your Insights Dashboard. If you’ve got the Diamond plan, hit this like two swords crossing button. That’s the icon that we have for competitors. All right, hit competitors and this is going to open up If you’ve got any competitors. If you don’t have any competitors, guys, you need to add it. The way that you can add the competitors is by hitting the add competitors button, and then you have an option of hey, do you want to add just competitors individually? You can just track whatever products on Amazon Maybe it’s not even something related to your product or you can link your competitors.

Bradley Sutton:

I highly recommend doing that, like if I have coffin shelves, I want to go ahead and add, like the other coffin shelf, so I can compare it directly to my coffin shelf. Like, for example, you can see here I’m tracking five different coffin shelf competitors. Now what do I mean when I say I’m tracking? I’m tracking? Hey, are their sales increasing or decreasing? Is their listing quality score changing? Like, maybe they updated their listing? Is their BSR changing? So what you guys can do for the competitor insights there’s a lot of them. You can see when they added a coupon, when they removed a coupon, when their price has changed, when their price has gone down, if they changed their title or their main image or their category, if their BSR changes.

Bradley Sutton:

Basically, guys go into each and every one of these, hit the gear button and then set the alert. That what you want to be notified by. All right, I mean, I think that no brainer is like is my competitor running a coupon? Let me know if they start running a coupon. Maybe I’m going to start my coupon, but then you don’t want to keep running your own coupon and they stop running their coupon. So set an alert to tell you when they stop running their coupon. They turn it off so you can turn off yours.

Bradley Sutton:

This is again something that nobody in the industry has. Guys, helium 10 has had this for over a year. I think a lot of you have been sleeping on this, but a lot of the work that you’re doing or maybe you’re not doing because you don’t have time can be automated by this dashboard and setting these insights. All right, guys, so please go into your insights dashboard. Those of you with a diamond plan, I mean this is almost worth it just to have the diamond plan to be able to have this. But go in there If you’ve got the diamond plan set. Your competitors, set your alerts for your products or your insights. Set your alerts or insights for your competitors products, and then now going into prime day during prime day, going out of prime day, you are going to get the best data possible without having to go search 17,000 different places on Amazon every single day to try and track these things. All right, guys, that’s it for this week’s Weekly Buzz. Thank you for tuning in. We’ll see you next week to see what’s buzzing.

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.