#490 - Major TikTok Shop Update and Amazon Prices Are Moving | Weekly Buzz 1/23/26

Tik Tok just changed its fulfillment rules. But what does that mean for Amazon MCF? Amazon prices are moving under tariffs and we've got two live workshops for those of you who are serious about unlocking even more profits. These stories and more on today's Weekly Buzz. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. [music] Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the AM PM podcast by [music] Helium 10. I'm your host Shioali Patel 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, let's talk about the biggest Tik Tok shop update of the week because it is causing some confusion among sellers. I'm also seeing sellers with divided takes of whether it's a good move or a bad move. And the abridged version is Tik Tok Shop recently announced that it's phasing out traditional seller fulfilled shipping in the US. So starting February 25th through March 31st of this year, which is 2026, sellers will be required to fulfill orders through Tik Tok shop logistics services. That includes fulfilled by Tik Tok, upgraded Tik Tok shipping and collections by Tik Tok or approved system integrated solutions. Any sort of seller shipping labels are going to be discontinued. And for sellers who are onboarding on or after February 9th, fulfillment through Tik Tok shop logistics will be required from day one. That announcement sparks one big question and that is can you still use Amazon MCF? Upon diving deeper into the resources they've provided, the short answer to that is yes. Nothing is changing if you are using Amazon multi- channelannel fulfillment. All right, Amazon's created a Tik Tok specific USPS tracking number that meets Tik Tok's tracking requirements and Tik Tok has also confirmed that the removal of seller fulfilled shipping does not apply to MCF. So, say that you've been using Amazon MCF to fulfill Tik Tok shop orders, including through Helium 10's MCF integration, then no, you do not need to change anything just yet or right now. This also addresses concerns from earlier this month around USPS tracking that I've been talking about with some of you. That issue has already been solved at the Amazon level. Now, let's talk about why Tik Tok is doing this. Tik Tok is beginning to show a desire to be a marketplace that wants control over delivery speed, tracking accuracy, refunds, and buyer trust, especially during live shopping spikes and viral moments where hundreds of orders can hit in minutes and the platform's reputation might be at stake. I know we can all agree that manual fulfillment at such a time has the potential to break under pressure, especially if you can't really keep up, which I hope is a great problem that maybe you run into. But this move is raising that bottom floor to try and meet sellers with systems, integrations, and operational discipline. Even if that's not what it really feels like. The caveat being it's simultaneously pushing out sellers who have been relying on manual workflows on drop shipping or fragile 3PL setups. Now, I've seen some sellers are pushing back, denoting this to be a bad idea, especially around fulfilled by Tik Tok performance during Q4, while others are taking a look at this and seeing it as Tik Tok building the same operational mode that Amazon has built with FBA, just much faster and with less tolerance for chaos. Whether all categories will be treated the same, well, maybe, maybe not. Only time's going to tell. But it goes without saying that some items, for example, custom automobile parts or one of one items might see some exceptions cuz they don't really fit cleanly into the automated fulfillment. The real takeaway is this. Tik Tok is naturally optimizing just like any other business who wishes to grow. They're setting up the systems now for what they anticipate will deliver in performance later on. But if you're using Amazon MCF today, this announcement does not shut you down. So don't panic. plan instead because brands that get ahead of this are going to dominate Tik Tok shop in 2026. And if you're not yet selling on Tik Tok shop, but you are a Helium 10 user, then this is the time where I tell you that you should log into your Helium 10 dashboard. And at the very top, you can click sell on Tik Tok to learn how to bulk convert your Amazon listings into Tik Tok shop listings within minutes. And then you can just fulfill automatically with your Amazon inventory. All right, then we've got some Amazon news. Amazon is starting to see tariffs show up in product prices. Speaking to CNBC, Andy JC Jazzy, I'm probably pronouncing that wrong, said to Amazon that he's now seeing some sellers raise prices in response to higher costs tied to US tariffs. If you are looking at this via video, you might be reading it with me from rooers behind my face. And last year, Amazon was really encouraging thirdparty sellers to pull inventory forward and bring in stock early to avoid tariff driven shipping cost spikes. And according to Jazzy, that buffer has now run out. And as a result, sellers are responding in different ways. So some of them are passing higher costs directly to the consumers. Some are absorbing those costs to protect demand. And then others are splitting the difference. All right. So just three different takes, all three pricing strategies playing out at the same exact time. And yet so far anyways, consumers are still shopping. Shoppers continue to look for deals, but they're becoming more hesitant when it comes to the higher priced discretionary items. And overall, essentials are holding up better than premium purchases. This is notable because for most of last year, Amazon said tariffs weren't meaningfully impacting prices or behavior. But gh talk about jinxing the luck, right? We knew this was coming though. I definitely did. Anyways, we are now seeing shifts as costs move through the supply chain. And for my sellers and agencies who are listening in, this kind of feels like the right time to pause and ask, have you raised prices yet? Have you noticed your competitors raising or lowering theirs? Because pricing changes don't happen in isolation. And if you don't know, then inside of Helium 10, the insights dashboard lets you track competitor pricing trends across your market. So you can see when prices move and get alerted when they do instead of guessing or reacting too late. You just need to add your competitors from the lefthand pan link. go to competitors, add them in, and then what you're going to do is you're going to click insight settings at the very bottom to fix what sort of parameters you want to see and be in the know for which shoppers becoming more price sensitive, especially at higher price points. Being in the know and staying aware of how your competitors are adjusting, can and will make all of the difference between protecting margin, protecting volume, or just finding the right balance between the two. That awareness is becoming just as important as the pricing decision itself. Speaking of schmoney, let me pass it over to Carrie who's going to tell you all about the refunds and heat maps inside of a profits tool. In this video, I'm going to go over three different parts of this profits tool. I'm going to talk to you about the expenses, the refunds, and the heat maps. So, let's go ahead and get into the profits tool. Okay, so this is our profits dashboard. And if you go to the left, you can actually see that there's a left-hand toolbar here. And so, what we're going to do is we're actually going to go to the expenses section here first. And I'm going to show you how to add these expenses. Now, this is expenses that are related to your business so that you can really get a good idea of your true profits. You can choose the calendar year here, but I'm going to just choose to add a new expense here. And this is where you're going to fill it out. You can say what the service is, the date, you can say the put in the as if you want to that it applies to. A lot of times these things might might just across the board. Like for example, a Helium 10 subscription would be, you know, a monthly thing for all of your products. You put in the amount and then the currency and then you can say, "Hey, is this onetime or is it monthly?" And so you can choose either one of those if it's a onetime expense or a monthly expense. And then you can set that up. Now, say it's a weekly expense, you might want to just um you know, add that up times four um for a monthly expense and uh and kind of do it that way. But that's how you can add in your expenses. And then you can take a look and you can see your monthly totals here. You can see see your expenses by month. So for example, we have an Amazon storage fee. We've got, you know, some other things that we've done here that we've added in in here. So, maybe you might see Helium 10 subscription or you might see different advertising, you know, agency costs that you have. You can put all of that in one place in order to uh keep track of all of your expenses and really showcase your true profits within this tool. The next thing you want to look at is refunds. Now, this is really important that you make sure that you're keeping track and making sure you're not getting too many refunds for your profits. Um, if there is one as that's getting a ton of refunds, you want to figure out why that is. You can go in and look at the reviews um or you can just kind of, you know, see what um on in Amazon seller central, it actually shows you some feedback as well of what might be going on with those products. So, we can see here we've got five returns. That might be kind of a red flag for us. Hey, why are they returning these? Um, but if you see something a product where there's a lot of returns, then you're going to want to kind of check that out. You can again, um, you know, filter these things down. So you can do it grouped by, you know, marketplace, region, brand, all of these different things. Um, is how you can group it by I'm just going to do the whole account there. You can do it by, you know, parent, child, skew. You can choose the marketplace, the seller account. So if you wanted to say, hey, I just want to see my how cool is that refunds, then you can take a look at it there and it'll only show you the how cool is that. If you wanted to look at it just by brand, like, hey, I want to see how many, you know, egg trays or I want to see how many coffin shelves I'm getting returned. You can just hit apply and you'll see only the coffin shelves. And then you can also see by fulfillment method and by currency. So, this gives you a really good indication of maybe something could be going wrong. So, this is the refund rate here. And then it'll show you the exact products down here with a little picture and then the refund quantity that gives you just a good understanding of, hey, this this is something that I need to look at. Heat maps is the last tool I want to talk about in this video. And this is a really cool vid uh tool that's historically only been available in the US, but now it's actually available in Europe, which is really awesome because we've been having a lot of customers ask us for this for a long time. Unfortunately, I don't have a heat map for Europe because we actually don't have anything. We're not selling in Europe, but I wanted to show you based on the US. So, you can see the inventory heat map here. And again, you can you can filter this down. If you wanted to look at a certain brand or a certain product and you wanted to see, hey, I want to know where only my coffin shelves are, I can just check that coffin shelf. And I can hit apply and it's going to show you only where that one product is. So, I'm going to see in this inventory heat map only where the coffin shelves are being dispersed throughout the US through FBA. And I can see there's a good concentration up here, which is interesting. So, that's the inventory uh map. And again, you can filter it down. And then you can also do a sales heat map. So you can see where your most of your sales are actually coming from all throughout the US. So we can see, hey, maybe if it was like the the Northwest or something, maybe there's, you know, in California looks like there's a lot. Maybe you could take a look and say, hey, I can maybe do some Google ads because maybe people in a certain area like your product or say it's a seasonal item or like a an item for warm places. You might want to sell something more in Florida. for example, like pool things. Maybe they use those year round, but on the rest of the country, they don't use anything pool-wise. Um, so you can you can kind of get a good understanding of, you know, the different areas that like your product a little bit more, and then you can maybe kind of focus on those particular areas with, you know, outside advertising outside of Amazon and things like that. So, that is a a quick overview of the expenses, the refunds, and the heat maps. Again, heat maps are available for Europe now, which is really exciting. So, if you haven't checked out any of these, definitely check them out. You want to add in those expenses so you can get those true profits and then you also want to keep an eye on those refunds. So, we'll see you in the next video. Thank you so much, Carrie. And next up on our agenda today is Tik Tok Shop is eyeing Europe with new logistics strategy. This week, Tik Tok Shop announced a new crossborder e-commerce option called local fulfillment, launching first across Europe. And under the setup, sellers ship inventory to Tik Tok shops local European warehouses. From there, Tik Tok is going to handle storage, delivery, and returns. Sounds exactly like FBA, doesn't it? It's true. Tik Tok shop will now be a lot closer to the FBA style model where sellers are giving up some control in exchange for faster delivery and simpler operations. But logistics are only half of the story because Tik Tok shop is also pairing this with creator infrastructure which I think is pretty cool. Sellers are going to be matched with local creators as you can see from my page if you're watching this on video as well as with agencies. And because inventory is already inside of Europe, creators can receive those samples immediately and then start filming as soon as the products arrive. Why does this matter? It matters because Tik Tok isn't just selling products. It's selling products through content. Europe has historically been difficult for crossber sellers, especially those that are shipping from China and long delivery times, complicated returns, VAT compliance can quickly turn a viral product into a customer service disaster. Now, most of us, I don't think, are located in China that are watching this, but that sort of friction can kill conversion fast in general, regardless of you are shipping from China or elsewhere. And that's a problem for a platform that's built on instant demand. So by localizing inventory and standardizing fulfillment, Tik Tok shop is trying to remove the biggest reasons that social commerce breaks after the click. European consumers already shop on Amazon, Timu, and Shien. Do you think that Tik Tok shop can win by bundling marketplace logistics with creator-driven marketing in a way that traditional platforms can't really easily copy? As for sellers, something you should know is this is invite only. I definitely just read that right here. Okay, cool. Entry is invite only for now. Sellers need local European inventory and the ability to ship to designated warehouses in Spain, Germany, or Italy, and the valid VAT registration in those regions. But Tik Tok Shop does say that once you're a part of the special beginning, it will support sellers end to end from listings to content creation, content execution, including the subsidies and boosted commissions. Now for a quick update for my elite and diamond members. Trainings that were previously hosted by Kevin King are now going to be led by Leo Seovio, who is very well known and well-versed in scaling Amazon and Tik Tok brands. And Diamond members now have access to this additional perk of being able to hop on a live ask me anything call with Leo as well. This happens once every month, giving you direct access to advanced strategy, ads insight, and realworld problem solving. And actually, next week, Leo will be hosting a special session with two guest experts. So, expect deeper dives, multiple perspectives, and very tactical takeaways. This is all part of continuing to level up elite education inside of Helium 10. So, keep an eye on your calendar invites. You don't want to miss this one. Back to our news bits, more on Tik Tok. Tik Tok shop just launched shoppable photos, which lets creators and brands turn photo carouselves into shoppable posts. Sellers can upload two or more images, tag products directly, and then let users purchase through Tik Tok's inapp cart like so. If you are seeing this on video on YouTube, let's say, or on the Helium 10 page, you can see behind my head, you've got this little ad link section. Click the product and then click post. Just like shoppable videos, these photo posts can appear in the for you feed, search, and the shop tab. That means that that discovery stays high even without video. And why this matters is the production effort. Photo posts take far less time and resources to create than video, which lowers that barrier to entry for brands that don't necessarily want to film constantly or rely on creators for every piece of content. I get it, trust me. Shoppable photos also make it really easy to showcase multiple products in one photo, which is especially useful for categories like fashion and beauty and lifestyle, toys, pet products where bundles or full looks matter. And even in the let's say holiday season where gift giving is a really big thing and you want to provide even more products together. You want to present them together so people buy more naturally. Early performance data is strong. Shoppable photos are generating over 170% 172% more average views per post than shoppable videos. and they act as a customer acquisition engine with over 70% of sales coming from top posts coming from users who don't yet follow the seller. All right, so really great numbers that are attached to it. The platform appears to be giving sellers more flexibility, not just more features. And this comes right after Tik Tok also added scheduled shoppable videos, making it easier to batch content and plan campaigns ahead of [clears throat] time. With that, do you want to learn more about Tik Tok? If the answer to that is yes, we've actually got a workshop coming up for you. So, we are back with Tik Tok Thursday. This session is going to be called the non-negotiable foundations for milliondoll Tik Tok shops. Our guest will be breaking down the exact workflows profitable Tik Tok shop sellers like you in the future, right? Fingers crossed. Use whether you're testing your first product scaling towards seven figures. I am talking way too fast as usual. topics, cover how to choose the right products, set up listings correctly, and avoid the fulfillment mistakes that quietly kill margin visibility, and account help. We're also going to be walking through how Tik Tok actually rewards promotion. And finally, we'll show a repeatable content and ads engine that feeds the algorithm because creating viral content without relying on luck is probably one of the hardest parts I've come across as a seller. If you are serious, this is foundational. So, register for Tik Tok Thursday at h10.me/t261. Again, that's h10.me/ me/tt261. If you're not ready for Tik Tok yet, but you care about optimizing what you've already got on Amazon or you're getting listed in a way that ranks, come to our keyword research master class part two. This is going to be for people who have wondered which keywords actually drive sales for competitors. We're going to show you how to identify the exact search terms converting for competing asens and how to cut your search query performance research from nearly 1 hour to 1 minute. Does that sound good to you? I think it sounds good to me. Then we'll show you how to turn that data into faster listing optimizations and smarter PPC decisions. You can catch part one on the AMM podcast. Seriously, go subscribe if you haven't already and go listen to it. But if you want something to go deeper and move faster, join us live on Tuesday, January 27th at 8 a.m. PST and register even if you can't attend live cuz that's how you get access to the replay. This is at h10.me/kwmc2. Again, that's h10.me/kwmc2. That is it for this week's weekly buzz. I will catch you next week to see what's buzzing. [music]