#492 - 2026 Amazon Big Spring Sale Dates & Sponsored Brand Ad Update | Weekly Buzz 1/30/26

2026 Amazon big spring sale dates announced. You don't have to have custom titles or creatives in sponsored brand ads anymore. Are sellers leaving Tik Tok shop over the new shipping change? 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, let's go ahead and hop into the news. And first article is about it's actually not an article but more of like a subtle date announcement that Amazon did. Um, we all know about Prime Day, right? You know, usually in the summertime there's like couple years later, you know, prime big deal days, you know, towards the fall and then last couple years there's been the prime big spring sale, I should say. And last year it was March 25th to 31st. This year the dates March 25th to 31st. Shout out to Josh who was the first one who I saw post about it. But if you look into your seller central, what you'll see if you go to like your lightning deals in your deal section under advertising, some of your products might be eligible. Here I'm in one account, uh, Graceful by Design, and and they got a offer for a lightning deal. And if you scroll to the bottom, it says right here, big spring sale, Wednesday, March 25th to March 31st. So, uh, did any of you guys do anything special during that day? Like, did you run a lightning deal? Did you have a Prime discount, Prime exclusive discount? Let me know in the comments how do they work for you? How are your sales during that week? Are you just going to ignore this or are you gonna, you know, try and do some kind of uh promotion this year? If you want to, you know, you better start locking in that uh lightning deal or, you know, you can kind of like wait up until the uh last second to do one of those uh Prime exclusive discounts. Keeping it to Amazon. There was an email that Amazon sellers got this week. Here's a copy of mine. It says, "Dear advertiser, this is an update on sponsored brands product collections. Starting January 28th, all right, just a few days ago. Sponsored brand collections will replace product collections in the ad console. Your existing product collections campaigns will keep running. You can still optimize them, but you won't be able to add new ad groups." So, there's a few bullet points here. Not too much has changed. Like for example, you're going to be able to uh feature three to 10 products, but a minimum of three required just like it always has been. But here we go. You can now scale and optimize your campaigns and let the Amazon AI curate and show the most relevant products dynamically or pick them yourself. In addition, you can now eliminate creative dependency. What does that mean? No custom image or title needed. Obviously, you know, like AI has kind of made that easier, but if you're not an AI person and you're like, I'm not a graphics person, that's why I can't do these sponsored uh brand ads and stuff, you know, I don't I don't know what to come up with for the the custom creative. I don't know what to do with the title. Guess what? You're not going to have to do that anymore. All right, so this for the most part has rolled out already. So, check your email if you want to get details uh a little bit more on that. All right, let's get into our uh strategy of the week. And this is an interesting one. You guys know that in search create performance, you can see what keywords are driving sales for your products. However, it's not telling you what your uh competitors drove sales for. But did you know that there's a way to get actual Amazon data to see this? It's pretty much only available in Helium 10. Shioali, show us how. >> It's no secret that search query performance is great for your own products, but it doesn't exactly tell you if your competitors are getting sales on certain keywords. Historically, you'd probably have to run Cerebro, and that is great for estimates. But if you want confirmation directly from Amazon data, you'll want to use brand analytics inside of Helium 10. Here is how. Go into the Blackbox tool and click on ABA top search terms. That is going to be a tab up at the top. Then input all of your top competitors. And from there, you'll want to select multiple weeks where sales are likely to spike. This for the coffin shelf can be a time like Halloween or Christmas for us. So, I'm going to use November to Decemberish, somewhere in between that frame. Now, set a filter to only show products with more than 1% conversion share. If a competitor has more than 1% conversion share, you guys, what is it really telling us? Amazon is literally confirming that they generated sales from that keyword. And that is where things get really fun and powerful. You will uncover the obvious keyword, sure, but you'll also find those random hidden gems that you might have missed. And instead of downloading massive reports from seller central and spending hours merging pivot tables, things that we all love doing, Helium 10 can now do it for you within seconds. This is one of the most reliable ways to discover money-making opportunities using guaranteed Amazon data, and I recommend you go check it out. >> All right, thank you very much, Shioali. Uh, next article is from Modern Retail. And I'm not sure about this. Uh, that's why I I wanted to bring it up. It says exclusive. Some Tik Tok shop sellers are pulling back as the platform moves to end independent shipping in the US. So, we we reported on this last week or the week before, right? How yes, this is a move that Tik Tok has announced everywhere. It does not affect Amazon MCF. So, you can still do that, but basically now you can't do have your own postage, right? uh you can't buy like stamps.com or shipstation and and things like that. You have to either use fulfilled by Tik Tok or you have to use um Amazon or Tik Tok shipping. Now, this article talks about a couple of anecdotes which I'm sure are true that there's a couple people who are saying, "Oh, I can't sell on Tik Tok shop anymore because of this. I don't like to use fulfilled by Tik Tok." But but here's where I take not offense, but like here's where I'm like, "No, this kind of rubs me the wrong way. This should not be a reason, guys, that you stop selling on Tik Tok shop. Nobody's forcing you to use fulfilled by Tik Tok. I don't use fulfilled by Tik Tok for the same reason that this person mentioned the article. But guess what? You don't need to use fulfilled by Tik Tok. You can still buy the shipping from Tik Tok shop. And in some situations, that's actually better because now Tik Tok is responsible for the shipping. There's a problem with the tracking. It's not your fault. You got that you got that tracking number from Tik Tok shop. The the postman um you know, loses the the shipment. Guess what? Not up to you to have to file that claim and do everything. Tik Tok Shop is the one, you know, who did it. Now, obviously, in the account that I run, it's going to be more expensive than the special deal that we had with FedEx. You know, I was shipping out of my warehouse here at Tik Tok or was like 100, sometimes 300 a day. Obviously, we had a pretty good FedEx deal, you know, for that that we're not going to be able to use anymore. But t, you know, customers on Tik Tok shop, they're not as like price sensitive in the in the sense that everything that happens on Tik Tok shop is like huge discounts anyways and that's what they're looking at. So like let's say before you're like, "Hey, it's not $50, you know, the price is going to be $30, right?" But now you can be like, "Hey, it's not $60, the price is going to be $35 or something like that." And people will be like, "Oo, this is still a good discount." Like, I don't think you need to raise your price $5. That's not how much the shipping price is going to go up. You guys get my drift. Like you should not be using this as a reason to like exit from from Tik Tok shop. Uh this new change. There's a few weeks. Who knows what's going to happen as far as you know what deals Tik Tok shop is going to make for softwares to be able to you know still leverage the the Tik Tok shopping uh in a like a shipstation stamps.com kind of way. We'll see how it rolls out. But whoever this this person is Modern Retail article who is giving up on Tik Tok for this. I think you're making a mistake uh sister. So, um, hope you guys, not not other people are making that same mistake, too. Speaking of Tik Tok, we have a couple updates here to Helium 10 ads for Tik Tok. All right. Uh, some of you guys might not have realized we even have that. And now we actually have a few features that is kind of unique compared to Tik Tok seller center. So now we have rules in our Tik Tok ad. So, you know, when you're doing GMV Max ads, maybe you thought, oh, all I can do is, you know, set it and forget it. But now you can do the can of campaign where you can like add and remove certain videos and creatives that your affiliates are doing. But look at this. I can actually have a rule that says, "Hey, if there is a video that is getting this many views or this many clicks or this much gross revenue greater than this, then add it to a certain campaign." But on the flip side, this part is almost more valuable in my opinion. Now it's almost like a negative match. I could be like, "Hey, if a video in an ad has rorowaz less than two or something like that, you know what? Remove the video from the campaign." So, this can really help your your control your GMV Max ads a little bit more than you can do in uh you know, seller center in Tik Tok. So, make sure to check that out. We also have a new page called creative insights inside of Helium 10 ads for Tik Tok where uh you're going to be able to see tons and tons of data on any video that was made for any of your products and be able to see, hey, is this an ad, but it's doing well. Let me go ahead and just manually add it to a certain campaign. Uh what about my ads? What about the affiliate post? What about authorized posts? What is going on here? And do I want to take action based on what I'm seeing? So, so a lot of cool things coming to Tik Tok ads. Let us know, guys. Are you a Tik Tok shop seller? What would help you to run your GMV Max campaigns a little bit more? Now, the next thing I didn't even have a bullet point here on my on my news. It's it's almost an afterthought, but to me, I got really excited when I saw this. This is in Keyword Tracker, guys. And I'm going to show you something that we just added. They did a whole bunch of like faceelifts, like really minor stuff to keyword tracker this week, the the team. But watch this, guys. For those who use keyword tracker, you notice anything different? Yes. Thank goodness. The boost feature in keyword tracker now is red again. I don't understand why it was blue for like the last year, but we finally changed it to red. Guys, if you don't know what uh boost is, boost is the feature in keyword tracker where if you turn it on, it's going to check 24 times a day in rotating browsing scenarios, rotating addresses, etc. to see where you're ranking at for organic and sponsored. But for the last year, the button was blue. It used to be red, and I was like, "Guys, please make it blue." And this kind of they they or please make it red. They kind of slid this under the radar and I was like, "Yay, this is a cool new feature." Or maybe you guys aren't as excited as me. But let me know. Shout out in the comments below. Were you one of the ones wondering why we had blue rocket ships instead of red rocket ships? Okay, I digress. Let's get back to the news. Last article of the day is uh an advertising update from Seller Central and it's entitled new section level shopper engagements insights on brand store. So you guys, you know, hopefully you're running or you have brand stores, but you know how your brand store has all these different, you know, sections like your front page and you maybe your product selection or or different things like that. You had no visibility before like, hey, what was working, what was getting clicks, what what were people, you know, uh, interacting with. Now you are going to be able to see that. And so check out the the uh link in the article or in the in the comments below to be able to see more of exactly what's coming for your stores. If you don't have a store yet, it's about time to really set up your store. I'm about to do that for for Project X. Actually redoing the store. Speaking of Project X, next week on Monday 800 AM Pacific time, we have a live AI workshop that we are uh doing with an expert um about how to prep AI for images. You know, we've had workshops on like all right, how do you try and you know produce AI images yourself? But what about the step before that? How do you make sure you're prompting AI in the correct way to really get the right output? Because you know AI can do its own crazy stuff. How can you give your like brand image to AI? If somebody else is doing the AI for you, how can you give them some prompts that would help you get better output? If you guys want to register for this free workshop, go to h10.meim Feb. Aim as in AI monthly, Feb as in February. H10.meim Feb. uh you'll be able to register for that free live workshop on Monday. Uh the following week I will be in Dubai. All right. So I'm going to the world F conference h10.me/ Dubai. I think the conference might be free. I'm not sure. Um if you're anywhere in the area, please come by. If you'd like to be interviewed for the podcast, you know, reach out to me on my Instagram. Go to serious sellers podcast. if you're going to be there in Dubai, I'll be filming some uh some individuals for doing case studies and also I'll be filming some individuals for case studies and potentially some podcasts as well. And what our guest expert is going to be doing too is taking the project X images that haven't been updated in a long time and showing how to prompt AI and actually showing you some of the results, the initial results of what came out. So, we're not just like showing you guys what to do, we're actually doing it. Uh and you guys will be able to see that. All right, guys. Thank you so much for tuning in this week. We'll see you next week to see what's buzzing.