#484 - Will Amazon Keep Blocking AI? And Big TikTok Shop Shipping Issue | Weekly Buzz 1/2/26

Is Amazon finally going to allow chat GBT to shop its website? There might be something that you have to change rapidly if you're using the postal service to ship Tik Tok shop. These stories and more on today's 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 Bradley Sutton 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 a training tip of the week. So, let's get started and see what's buzzing. All right, guys. Today, uh from where I am at, it is New Year's morning. I'm actually in the UK recording this in a hotel room, but hey, the news doesn't go away just because there's a holiday. Uh, so I'm going ahead and recording the what's been going on the last week or so in e-commerce. And uh, let's go ahead and hop right into it. The first news story I want to get into is from CNBC. And this was an article a couple weeks ago or about a week ago. And it's interesting because it's entitled, "Amazon faces leaders dilemma. Fight AIS shopping bots or join them." Now, this is interesting because, as you guys know, there's been some different stories out there about how Amazon's kind of like blocking certain AIs from accessing the website. As you guys know, part of this crackdown actually affected Helium 10. Um, Amazon wanted us to remove our very popular review insights tool because even though it's not necessarily AI driven, it kind of like has the features of something that they're trying to block. And so, they're like, "Hey, take that down." We had to take it down. much to the chagrin of of our customers out there and myself. But this article is interesting because it talks about Amazon's kind of at a crossroads. They're going to have to like make a decision soon. Andy Jasse uh said that hey, Amazon expects to partner with third party agents and has engaged in conversations with some providers although he didn't offer names. Now, this is going to be interesting because a lot of people out there are saying like this is not sustainable. like if more people are going to start using AI agents to shop for them to discover products etc. Amazon is gonna kind of shoot itself in the foot if it tries to continue to block them. You know, agentic browsers and like on the flip side though, you can kind of maybe sympathize empathize with Amazon a little bit why they might want to block it. You know, a big part of Amazon's revenue is being able to, you know, run advertising. What what happens to the whole advertising ecosystem if bigger chunks of orders start coming directly from uh AI? Amazon has an amazing search algorithm. What if these AIs kind of bypass that? Uh in Amazon's viewpoint, it might be giving a worse experience for customers uh because it's not going to be based on Amazon's very advanced uh algorithm for search. So, so there there's two sides to this, right? But as this article is saying from CNBC, hey, we might have some more clarity soon as far as what direction Amazon is going to take. Are they finally going to like maybe make a deal uh with Open AI and allow ChatGpt and other um you know browsers perhaps in the future, Agentic browsers to shop? What do you guys want as Amazon sellers and brands? Let me know in the comments below. Do you want Amazon to keep blocking these other things because you don't really trust how AI might generate people to your listings? Like maybe you have the Amazon algorithm and Amazon advertising locked down and you're like, I don't want to throw a wrench in this. I have to learn something else. or do you think opening Amazon up to AI um is going to actually increase your sales? Let me know in the comments below. Now, next up, I'm actually going to rehash an article that we dropped here on the Weekly Buzz way back in November. And it was an article entitled Tik Tok Shop Tightens Postal Service Shipping Options for sellers. It said this article that we had brought up a couple months ago said, "Hey, USPS shipping labels are going to start to have to be purchased through Tik Tok shops starting January or face rejection." Well, guess what, guys? It's January now. All right. So, a lot of um Tik Tok shop sellers out there, you know, I saw a post from Jared, our friend Jared Mortonson um on LinkedIn are like, "Hey, something that sellers haven't thought about perhaps is what if you're using MCF, Amazon multi-channel fulfillment to fulfill your Tik Tok shop orders, which is 100% okay, but as you know, a certain percentage of MCF orders is fulfilled through the USPS. So, what happens if the integration you're using, obviously Helium 10 is one of them where you can tie your Amazon listings to Tik Tok shop. What if, hey, 10% 20% of your orders that you tie to Amazon MCF are actually being fulfilled by USPS and then when Amazon sends that USPS tracking number to Helium 10 or whatever tool you're using and then Helium 10 sends that to Tik Tok shop, doesn't that mean that Tik Tok shop might reject it because it's not a USPS shipping label? that is purchased from Tik Tok as their requirements are as of today. Well, nobody knows for sure. We reached out to Tik Tok. This is obviously something that's concerning to us because we provide that service and they said, "No, no, this does not apply to Amazon MCF orders. Those are still going to allow to be pushed through." But still, you know, Jared and and others out there are expressing concern because they're rightfully asking, "Wait a minute. How would Tik Tok even know if this USPS tracking number came from Amazon? Tik Tok said, "Hey, they're going to, you know, check the origin and if it matches like a warehouse." But again, this is all kind of hearsafe for right now for me, for myself, like I'm not changing my MCF orders. I'm going to see what happens. But what you should be doing, regardless if you're using Helium 10 or another service or just doing things manually from MCF, check your portals and see, is Tik Tok rejecting any of your orders that are that have a USPS shipping label because you're going to want to take different actions because if Tik Tok shop rejects these tracking numbers, it's going to treat it as if it didn't ship and obviously that's going to kill your metrics. I had like one maximum two orders go unfulfilled due to some issues or or undelivered I should say and my Tik Tok one of my Tik Tok accounts got shut down. So this is like not something that you should you know just think is not very serious. All right along those same lines uh speaking of Tik Tok shop let's go to our strategy of the week. And if you're not selling or if you haven't yet started selling on Tik Tok shop and you want to get all your Amazon listings to Tik Tok shop. How can you do that in a matter of seconds? Shioali, show us how. >> Now, we've been talking about it for a while now. Tik Tok shop offers a massive opportunity for Amazon sellers, especially in the USA. Some sellers are able to match their Amazon sales within a couple months, you guys, or even surpass them. That could be you next. But the big complaint in the early days of Tik Tok was, I don't know what makes a good Tik Tok listing. I don't want to have to download all my Amazon images one by one, listing per listing, and upload them to Tik Tok. And I don't know how to optimize my listing. Tik Tok doesn't even do bullet points. So, what the heck do I do with my Amazon bullet points? Well, that is where the Tik Tok listing converter from Helium 10 comes in. What we do is we take all your Amazon listings and in seconds publish them to Tik Tok shop. That's right. We completely got rid of a reason for you to complain. So, here is how you can do that. Go inside of the tool. This is for any Diamond members and up. Go to listing optimization and then listing converter. It's going to show you all the listings that are in your Amazon account. And after that, hit the next step. Once your products show up, you just want to select as many as you want to actually convert over and then select bulk convert. And there you have it. Within 30 seconds or less, your listings are now up on Tik Tok. That doesn't guarantee sales. There are other tools from Helium 10 to help you with that. But imagine all the time that we just saved together. It takes 30 seconds to do what would have taken 30 minutes or more in any other scenario. And we're even using AI to optimize your listing for Tik Tok shop. We're not just copying and pasting your Amazon title or bullet points, which Tik Tok does not even use. We're using AI to optimize based on best practices for Tik Tok shop listings. So, make sure you've got your Amazon listings converted and I'll catch you on Tik Tok shop. Thank you very much, Shali, for that. Now, one extra thing, uh, that's actually the the new feature alert for this week. We don't have too much going on. our engineers are on holiday right now, but they right before they left, they did actually um add something to that where you're going to now be able to select multi-AS inside of the Tik Tok shop uh Amazon conversion uh listing conversion and a couple other features have been released as of this week for there. But if you haven't used it yet, go in there, connect your Tik Tok shop token, get your listings migrated from Amazon to Tik Tok shop so you can uh get started. Speaking of Tik Tok shop, uh the next article from Digi Day is entitled uh Tik Tok Shop offers incentives to new sellers as US uncertainty is finally over. So this was an article from a couple of weeks ago. Uh but there's there's a lot of perks now that you can get with Tik Tok shop. Like uh one of these says, "Hey, earn up to $6,000 in coupons, etc., etc., according to this article." Now, this is critical because if you haven't started yet, first of all, shame on you. you know, you should have jumped on this bandwagon a year ago, if not more. But now is the time. All right. Uh Tik Tok is back to offering a lot of incentives like they did a couple years ago when they were trying to get more people to use the platform. So, if you haven't gotten started on Tik Tok shop and you're based here in the US, I don't know what's going on in in UK or other uh countries, you're going to have to check uh what incentives locally, but if you're in the US and you want to sell on Tik Tok US, uh go to h10.me/tart. T as in Tom, T as in Tom start or I should say T as in Tik Tok, right? H10.mettart. That's a special link where you can get some of these incentives and actually get some access to um a different level of customer service because you're signing up through Helium 10. So, make sure to get your account started now. Now, another article from E-commerce Bites from a couple of weeks ago. You might have missed. This one kind of flew under the radar, but it but it's it puts an interesting uh idea out there. Amazon is always testing different things. You guys have noticed recently how in the last couple of months, you'll see multiple child items show up in the search results for one keyword. That wasn't a thing before. Now, Amazon is testing that out. But another test that they were doing, uh, according to this article, it says Amazon hid FBA listings regionally for 2 months. Now, what this article talks about is is from the Amazon forums where somebody's like, "Hey, my my my products are showing up in in like Texas, but they're not showing up in New York or Miami, and it's really impacting my sales." And somebody said, uh, from Amazon support, "Our technical teams have confirmed that your AS is no longer affected by the region related restriction. The issue has been resolved as of November when your products were dreionalized from an experimental program that we are still investigating. Your listing should now be properly visible across all US regions. Now, we know that having different browsing scenarios and having different ranks has been a thing for what 10 years almost. You know, like I could be on a Google Chrome browser and see my, you know, product rank five, but then at the same location, I could be switch to a Safari browser and I'm on page two, right? Maybe two people with the same Chrome browser. One person is on this side of the street, one person's on the other side of the street or on the other side of the country. You might see different ranks. Sometimes it might disappear from the first couple pages of search results altogether at different times. That's why, you know, eight years ago, Helium 10 keyword tracker developed our boost technology, which allows you to check 24 times a day rotating browsing scenarios. No other tool has that, but it was because of this is because you you don't have just one rank, right? But this is something interesting that that Amazon says it was testing. It was like sounds like it's like hiding completely your product from being indexed or searchable in certain regions. Be it a city, you know, be it a state, they didn't really specify, but you know, it's kind of curious why would they be doing that? You know, people have incorrectly postulated in the past where it's strictly because of where Amazon inventory is. No, it's not that. Especially when you you can disprove that when you have FBM inventory or I've run tests that show where you have inventory in a certain, you know, DC distribution center right next to a certain address and it still gave the same, you know, like rank or the same, you know, delivery time as opposed to an address where there wasn't, you know, FBA products nearby. But but it it it's kind of like logical that sometimes, you know, there there might be some kind of like optimization based on like Amazon doesn't have enough inventory around. And plus too, depending on the delivery time, that's going to affect it. That's why I've always said, hey, when you're launching new products, don't turn your listing live until it's distributed across the country. Because if it's all if you send all your inventory like to a California DC, your listing goes live. Somebody in New York or Florida, they still will see your product in search results, but it might say like 4 weeks delivery time, right? And is anybody going to click through that and purchase it? Probably not. And so that's that could affect, you know, your ranking as well. Not necessarily just because your inventory is not there, but because people in that region are like not even clicking on your product or or clicking through, but now what if there's just a random test being done? Like this obviously had nothing to do with that. This was a person who was selling 300 units uh a month. So obviously they had, you know, probably hundreds and hundreds of units spread across the whole country. It sounded like a separate test that Amazon was doing where they just decide to turn off your listing in certain regions. I'm not sure I fully understand it. You know, like you could say, hey, you know, beach balls in winter in North Dakota might not be relevant. So maybe they're going to hide, you know, certain results. But but still like like what if you're trying to buy a beach ball for your niece who lives in Miami Beach? If you're in North Dakota, you still want to see those in the search results. So, I'm not exactly sure what the reasoning or uh what Amazon is going for by having this test about regional restrictions. What do you guys think out there? Do you think this is something that they, you know, might do? And if so, how would you react to that? I'd be pretty pissed off if I didn't have control uh over it. Hopefully, there would be something you could tie with advertising or something or at least being able to control your inventory being sent to more places. I really don't know, but this is just something to be on the lookout for. If you see something like this, maybe open up a case to Amazon, say, "Hey, Amazon, make sure that I'm not in this experimental program here or something like that." But, um, it's another reason to make sure to use Helium 10 keyword tracker with the boost so you can see if something like that could be potentially happening to you. All right, last up is a special invite to some of you. Uh, as you know, this this weekly buzz used to be on the Serious Sellers podcast. Now, it's on the AMA podcast, which is what you're probably listening to this on. But now in the serious sellers podcast, we are focusing on seller stories, brand stories. Uh we're not doing like the trainings, the weekly buzz, things like that. Every week we are interviewing a real Amazon, Tik Tok shop, Shopify brand. Um not an agency, but but somebody who actually runs a brand in order to kind of like, hey, get to know their seller story a little bit more. So with that in mind, we have an open casting call. Are you interested in perhaps being on the Serious Sellers podcast? um have you reached some level of of success? Doesn't mean you have to have be a $30 million brand, but hey, you you're doing a quarter of a million dollars a year since you since you started. It'd be great to talk to you. So, if you'd like to uh submit your story to be considered to be on the Serious Sellers podcast, uh write my assistant. He's actually the uh podcast producer for the show, Mel MHL. D as in dog at helium10.com. Mel.d d helium10.com. Let us know your story. Also, let us know if you're willing to share your brand on the program. I know a lot of people aren't willing to share the brand. That's not a complete deal breaker. Like, maybe you'll still get uh a chance to be on on the show, but it'll be more of a chance if you're like open enough to go ahead and talk about your actual brand. We can take a look at some of your listings on the show. Maybe you can even be part of a case study and get some added uh benefits. But either way, make sure to submit it if you are interested in uh being on the show. So again, mel.del10.com mh eel and uh tell us why you'd like to be on the podcast. All right, guys, that wraps up this special New Year's edition of the Weekly Buzz. It's been a great year of stories. Hopefully 2026, we're going to have a lot of great stories and not too many of those kind of like sad stories about raising fees or loss inventory or things like that. But here is to another full year of weekly buzz. Don't forget to tune in next week to see what's buzzing.