#480 - Alexa Plus Web Browser, New 3 Euro Duty & Tools for Saudi Arabia | Weekly Buzz 12/19/25

Amazon launches a new Alexa Plus web browser. Europe is adding new fees to small imports. And Helium 10 has more tools for the Saudi Arabia market. These stories 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 AMM podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host Carrie Miller and this is the show that is our Helium 10 weekly buzz where we give you a rundown of all the goings on in the Amazon Tik Tok shop and e-commerce world. We let you know what new features Helium 10 has and we also give you a training tip of the week. So, let's get started and see what's buzzing. Okay, so let's go ahead and get into the first article, which is Alexa Plus is now on a web browser. Now, back in February, we announced that there was a uh new Alexa Plus that basically was going to be kind of your assistant where it would help you to plan things, help to schedule trips, schedule appointments, help you to find products, all kinds of things. But now, Alexa Plus is on a web browser. So, I think this kind of takes it to a next level. And I'm going to show you what this browser looks like. So, it looks kind of like this. Um, if you go if you go to Alexa.com, it actually redirects you to this site. Um, and it has kind of a little chat box there. And they want to make it more conversational. So, they're saying it's still an all-in-one planning tool. Um, and they're saying you can dive deep into topics and pick up conversations anytime and anywhere. And Alexa keeps all the context across all of your devices like Echo and Fire TV. Says allin-one planning. So, it's an all-in-one planning tool. You can create checklists, help write invitations, all doing this from your browser. So, um, and again, it's going to go across all of your devices. So, something that is up and coming in the Amazon world. Not everybody. I think it's in beta. I'm not sure that everyone has access to it. Um, but if you scroll up, you can actually request access at the top of this browser. Um, and if you have eligible devices, you do get early access for free. So, um, that's something if you want to check it out how it works, you can request Alexa Plus there. But that is pretty interesting um knowing that this is um kind of up and coming that they're really trying to improve it. And to me it looks a lot like chatbt or just some of the other AI tools. So I'm not sure if they're wanting to kind of be the all-in-one like where you shop, where you search for information, all that kinds of stuff. So really interesting to consider and you know think about maybe optimizing for Alexa. I know we've talked about uh optimizing for voice and things like that in the past. So something to keep in mind. Okay. Next up, we have something that I think is very interesting. I think that the European Union might be following in Trump's footstep in regards to the dimminimus. When a few months ago, or maybe it's been at the beginning of the year, basically Trump closed this dimminimous loophole where you could ship in small parcels under $800 and not have to pay any taxes. So, people were ordering things from Sheen and Teimu directly from those sites and they were being shipped directly from the factories in China and they were not having to pay any duty on those. And even another thing that was a kind of a burden on our our system was that the post post office service would have to continue shipping that product. So when it came into the United States, we were actually footing the bill for the rest of the shipping. So really interesting kind of situation there, but we've kind of fixed it, I think, quite a bit with this um closing this loophole so that these small parcels can't come into the US without being taxed. So, I think that kind of levels the playing field when especially, you know, when a lot of sellers are bringing in, you know, big containers and they're having to pay these big tariffs. Well, then all these, you know, Chinese sellers are shipping directly and that was, you know, kind of a difficult thing to compete with because they wouldn't weren't having to pay these taxes. So, um, the European Union now has decided, and I'm going to show you this article, they are going to impose a€3 duty on e-commerce parcels. So, these are the small parcels from July 1st, 2026, and it's going to be in place until a permanent solution is found to eliminate the dimminimous duties exemption from online purposes below €150. Um, this is really uh an effort to crack down on cheap Chinese e-commerce imports. Um, there's a lot of things that go on when you import these things and there's no regulation on it there. You know, there's safety issues, there's, you know, quality concerns, there's all kinds of things that are going on. Um but this temporary is measure is just really in response to all of this. The health and safety risks, the high levels of fraud and the environmental concerns and there's also the unfair competition. So there's a lot of things that they're concerned about and Europe does have very strict environmental concerns, but these parcels are able to just kind of slip right in through there without any of those same regulations. So that is why I think they're doing this. Um a council source said the duty would appear per product type based on six-digit tariff codes. So that means for example, and they give you this example in the article, that if you have, you know, 10 pairs of socks of the same type, um, you would incur a€3 charge. But if you had five pairs of socks that were made from wool and five from cotton, that would count as two item types, and that would incur a€ 6 charge. Due to the customs waiverss, the number of low-v value e-commerce packages arriving in the block actually doubled last year to 4.6 6 billion which is more than 90% of them from China. So this is definitely an issue that um they want to take care of and make sure that it they even the you know playing field and then also make sure that these products are safe. Um and I think a lot of the retailers are probably pretty excited about this because now it's going to help them to uh you know if they're having to pay these duties now um China also and these these Chin and Timu type companies are going to have to pay some tariffs as well. So curious to know what you all think about this. Um I think you know I remember when the dominism happened everyone kind of jumped all China and Timu kind of jumped all their advertising over to Europe and they were really focused on Europe because they're like oh we can just keep going with Europe but now Europe is like uh you know what this isn't working out too well for us so we're going to impose these taxes. So curious to know what everyone else thinks about that. Okay so the next thing is our new feature that we have in Helium 10. And this is a shout out to Crystal from Amazon Seller Society from Dubai and her community because they're the actual reason they're the reasons why we did this. If there's ever a tool that we don't have yet and you want it, you really need to um go ahead and write us and give us a reason why we should do this. And we a lot of times we actually review these things every week and we decide what we're going to implement. And so she actually um gave us you know a lot of feedback on this and we had a lot of people qu uh asking for this. So, if we are in Helium 10, um if you wanted to request a feature, you see these little quotation marks. If you click on those, it will actually um show you these boxes. They're going to pop up and it says give feature ideas. And that's where you're going to click and give those feature ideas. So, if we have enough people requesting certain features, then we can go ahead and create those um and make sure that we expand and help all the e-commerce sellers. But, let's go back to Saudi Arabia. And you know, thanks to these people who are requesting this market, we have the Chrome extension which we announced back in July. But now we also have all of the Blackbox tools. So for keyword for product research, we have the products tab. We have the keywords, brand analytics, the ABA top search terms, competitors, niche, and product targeting all um for the Saudi Arabia market. So this is really big news. It's really awesome that now um you know sellers can utilize all these tools for those markets. They're kind of emerging markets. And I have talked to sellers one-on-one saying that they have actually seen a lot of good sales within Saudi Arabia. So that is something, you know, to to keep an eye on if you're interested in selling in that market or if you're already there, these tools are available for you to help you to find new product ideas to sell. And you you can use these tools for a lot of other other things as well. So um check those tools out for the Saudi Arabia market. Okay, let's go ahead and get into our next article, which is the brand story quality rating that now reflects sales performance. This is actually from Amazon. They're saying that your brand quality rating now is going to show your sales performance. So, the brand story quality rating now uses sales metrics to help you understand store performance. The updated experience provides a rating which is high, medium, or low based on sales attributed to your storefront rather than visitor engagement time. So, you can also compare your sales performance with similar brands in your category. While you can still see how long customers spend in your brand store, which is the dwell time, and how your peer group is doing, the quality rating now focuses on sales performance, the optimization recommendations also show potential impact on sales in addition to dwell time to help you make more informed decisions about your storefront improvements. So, these sales insights are going to be able to help you to identify opportunities to enhance your brand store performance. And you can also use these insights alongside the optimization recommendations to help you um create engaging shopping experiences for customers browsing your brand store and help increase sales because the quality of your brand store can help you to see more sales. So high-quality brand stores can see up to 97% more sales than lowquality ones and up to 39% more sales than medium quality ones. So brand store does actually matter and so that is something that you should be taking a look at. And I'm going to just scroll and show you the little dashboard here so you can see all this information. So this is just another tool in your toolbox to help you to increase your sales and also to increase your brand awareness as well. So if you haven't checked out this, go ahead and check it out. All right, next up I'm going to pass it off to Bradley and he's going to be giving you the tip of the week and he's going to be talking about an 8 in1 tool that Helium 10 has to help streamline your optimization workflow. So, this strategy is completely unique to Helium 10, and it's about having eight different keyword research data points that you can instantly access within seconds um for your product and your competitor's products. Now, why is this important? How can it make you money? Keywords are still important to Amazon despite what people might try and tell you that all everything is about AI. No, we we've run countless proofs that so far keywords are still the most important thing for like indexing, getting you searchable, sending those initial relevancy signals to Amazon. And you want to know all the keywords that can potentially bring you sales. And what happens is if you're just using maybe not even a tool like product opportunity explorer for to to find keywords or maybe just search grid performance, you're limited in what you can do. If you're just using search performance, you can only do that on existing products. If you're just using product opportunity explorer, you're only going to find maybe a maximum of 10 15 keywords. There's potentially hundreds, if not thousands of keywords out there that are relevant to your product. At least hundreds that are highly relevant. And with Helium 10, you can find eight different resources of keywords in just seconds. Here's how. Go into our listing builder tool. And when you go into the add keywords section, now you guys have this new section where you can create your keyword bank. and it finds eight different keyword sources. The very first one here is something very unique and that is ABA converting keywords. This is Amazon brand analytics. This is the only tool where instantly you are going to see for your pro uh for your products if if you had chosen your own product here out of like a whole half year of data. Um I actually was just doing something for a Halloween product and I didn't want to look just at you know the middle of the summer. I was looking at October and November of 2025. I did 2024. I did 2023. I did 2022. I was going back in time to all of the brand analytics data that Helium 10 has to say, hey, what had a conversion share of at least 1%. This this goes back to before there was even such a thing as search performance. And this is a way you can find out what were the keywords that Amazon is saying brought you sales. the same thing. What are the keywords that Amazon says your competitors had sales from? What keywords? Anytime I can pick up to a half year, 26 different weeks of brand analytics data. I can search in sec uh in seconds that had over a 1% conversion share. All right. Uh search performance instantly. I like to look at the months. I'm going to look back at the last 12 months. any keyword that brought me sales from search grid performance. There's top keywords, opportunity keywords. Uh that's not unique to to Helium 10. We've always had that. You can do that uh in Cerebro. Another one that's unique to Helium 10 though is right here in this same search. I can find historical keywords. Hey, what were the keywords in the last two years that these products were ranking for? Either my product or these competitor ones. Um I can look at the sponsored rank. I can look at organic rank. eight different keyword research sources and then I hit apply and instantly I have got a list of keywords that hit one or more of these factors like what is the most important ones to you maybe it's my search query performance keywords right well now I can see hey coffin letterboard that's an important keyword let me star that and where did this one come up wow coffin letterboard came up in my brand analytics uh competitor keywords it came up in my search create performance keywords it came up in historical keywords. It came up in sponsoring keywords. Obviously, this is a super important keyword. All right. Um, what if I want to find the ones that were only Amazon brand analytics keywords? Look at this keyword here, Halloween party decor. If you're using any other tool, you never would have seen this keyword. Why? It's only showing up in two different data points that only Helium 10 has. The brand analytics converting keywords and historical top keywords. So, here's a keyword that you never would have found if you weren't using Helium 10 and is very relevant to this product. Halloween party decor for this coffin letterboard obviously is important. So, I can star the ones that are important to me. And then once I go ahead and make my listing now, I can see, hey, which keywords did I star? Or, hey, where are all the keywords that brought me sales from search create performance? Let me make sure I have those keywords in phrase form. So, this is like probably one of the coolest things that Helium 10 has launched in years is the listing builder 8way keyword research tool where you're going to find keywords that literally nobody else can find because you're using the best data with Helium 10. So, make sure that you guys are using the listing builder 8in1 keyword research tool to find all of the relevant keywords for your listing. >> Thank you so much, Bradley, for that tip. So, if you haven't checked out the listing builder, go ahead and check that tool out because it is absolutely incredible and made we made it so much easier to do everything all in one place. Next up, we have an article about Tik Tok Shop and that is that Tik Tok shop is driving social commerce growth. Now, this is not a surprise because really there are the leaders in this market. In this article, it talks about some some actual stats and it says that Tik Tok is driving social commerce growth with Tik Tok shop making up nearly 20% of social commerce in 2025. According to a new report from e-arketer, Tik Tok shop sales are forecast to exceed 20 billion in 2026 and surpass 30 billion in 2028. In 2026, half of the US social shoppers are projected to make purchases on Tik Tok. So, that's pretty amazing. If you have not gotten on Tik Tok shop, we actually have some tools that will help you to literally in one click to convert your listings over from Amazon to Tik Tok shop. So, if you haven't utilized these tools in Helium 10, it's really a great thing to do, especially if you want to increase your sales. Super easy. And we use kind of an AI um to help convert your listings so that they're optimized for Tik Tok shops. So that is something you should definitely consider because not only are they growing this um you know social commerce like this article is saying it's social commerce really is the future. Um so a lot of people are buying on Tik Tok shop but a lot of sellers are actually seeing a a lift on their Amazon sales when they're promoting products on Tik Tok shop. So if you're promoting on Tik Tok shop people are like oh I want to buy this on Amazon. They'll look for you on Amazon. It's helping to increase your organic rank and your presence on Amazon. So that's not even included in this number. So, that's something to really consider if you want to expand and increase your sales in the e-commerce world. Okay, let's go ahead and get into the last article of the day, which is that Amazon updated customer service insights in Feedback Manager. So, customer service insights on your feedback manager page actually helps you to better understand your customer service performance. So, you can also use it to compare your performance to other sellers. To help you understand your customer insights more easily, Amazon has made the following updates and they have them listed in here. Um, the preventable contact rate has been renamed to buyer contact rate to make the insight clearer. This metric tracks contacts related to product quality, fulfillment or shipping problems and is now calculated as a percentage instead of a fraction. And the second thing is your average contact response time now includes only the contacts you've responded to instead of all the contacts received helping you to identify when you can make changes to your process if this number is too high. So basically if you u want to keep up to date on this customer service uh feedback manager it is really important to make sure you're up to date on this because you can get your account shut down if things go ary with this. So it's it's important to keep up to date and on top of all of this. And that's all I have today for you on this weekly buzz episode. I hope you enjoyed all of these articles and we'll see you again next week to see what's buzzing. Bye everyone.