#496 - Amazon Surpassing Walmart Revenue? TikTok Customer Expectations | Weekly Buzz 2/13/26

Tik Tok shop sales are booming. Will Amazon surpass Walmart in sales? And a big announcement from Helium 10. This and more on this week's episode of the weekly buzz. 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. All right, so let's go ahead and get into the first article, and that is that the US Tik Tok shop continues to scale rapidly with 68% year-over-year growth, reaching 15.1 billion in sales in 2025, up from 9 billion in 2024. That's pretty incredible year-over-year growth. But today, I also want to go into this article a little bit more. This is really a report that I have here, and they actually go into more statistics. There's actually a breakdown by country here that you can see. There's a graph of of actual sales. And then if we go down a little bit more, we can actually see some more details of this report. And I thought some of these things were really interesting for e-commerce sellers. So I wanted to share. So the first thing is that Tik Tok shops global GMV actually reached 64.3 billion in 2025, which is a 94% year-over-year growth. And that's across 16 markets. Now, Southeast Asia remained the core growth engine with regional GMV doubling year-over-year to 45.6 billion. That's pretty incredible. I think, you know, we knew those markets were pretty big. And that kind of goes into the next thing, which is the sales mix continued to shift towards live and the shop tab. In 2025, live commerce increased its GMV share from 10% to 14% while video and shop tab created 50% and 36% respectively. And I think this is something we should always keep in mind that big market in, you know, Southeast Asia, they actually do a lot of live selling. So I think that they're kind of the the leaders of the pack here and we're going to follow behind them and start with, you know, doing some more live selling. So, I think we can see well, we're going to see more live selling um opportunities this year or just just a lot more people tuning into those experiences, I guess you could say, on Tik Tok. Um, and then there's a ton of influencers on Tik Tok. So, Tik Tok Shop counted 15.4 million influencers and 803.5K stores in the US in 2025. And more than half of those stores recorded no sales. So, a lot of people are on there and not making any sales while more than 2,000 of those stores stores stores exceeded 1 million in GMBB. So, I think that there's definitely still some more opportunity and it's kind of hard, I know, for a lot of people to kind of figure out how to make your stuff go viral. And I think it's just being consistent. The the people that I've seen that have succeeded, they're posting every day. They're consistent. They're reaching out to influencers consistently, giving out a lot of samples. So, that's really the way uh to to win on Tik Tok shop. And then the last thing I wanted to talk about is beauty and personal care. Okay, so beauty and personal care remained the largest category. So I know I see a lot of skincare stuff being sold, but I didn't realize that that was actually the biggest category, but yeah, that's kind of an impulse buy on Tik Tok shops. So then they follow that by women's wear and underwear and sports and outdoors. So those are really good categories to be in. Meanwhile, kids fashion, baby, and maternity and Muslim fashion actually recorded the fastest growth from smaller bases. So, that's really quite interesting information. If you're in any of those categories, definitely Tik Tok Shop is going to be a good opportunity for you. But going along with this, I'm going to go ahead and get into the next article because I think it it goes a little bit along with Tik Tok Shop. And this was actually kind of uh interesting for me to see. And that is that Tik Tok shop buyers, they basically have a lot bigger expectations than on Amazon for customer service. So, in this article, it says that Tik Tok shop buyers expect four times faster response than on Amazon. Now, this was kind of interesting to me, but I it really does make sense because a lot of people are on Instagram and Tik Tok and all these, you know, social media platforms and it's really kind of an instant gratification type of platform and they want really an instant response. They kind of gotten used to instantaneous responses. So along with the amazing sales numbers that Tik Tok shop, you know, has, it comes with a lot of customer expectations. And this article, by the way, is based on edesk data. And it's due to the fast-paced environment on Tik Tok shop that consumers are really looking for a quicker response rate. Edesk actually reviewed thousands of exchanges between customers and sellers and found that the average customer expects to hear back from a Tik Tok seller within 1.1 hours of making a purchase while the average response times on Amazon and eBay were approximately 4.2 and 6 hours respectively. So customers who do not receive timely responses to their inquiries have become less forgiving and therefore more likely to abandon their purchases. 47% of customers will abandon their purchase if they have not received an answer within 30 minutes after they ask a question and 60% will have given up on their purchase entirely if they have not heard back from the seller within 60 minutes. So, this is just something else to think about for Tik Tok sellers as you know your videos go viral um there's going to be kind of a a flood of need for you know customer support. So, that's something that's kind of hard to gauge, especially when you don't know a video is going to go viral, but at least having some customer service in place. You know, a lot of people use um virtual assistants to do this and make sure that their customer service is on um just basically a quick response time. So, that's that's really another thing to plan for if you are planning on selling on Tik Tok shop to make sure you've got those customer response times really really quickly. All righty, let's go ahead and get into the next thing, which is Bradley with our new feature alert. So, go ahead and take it away, Bradley. >> All right, so this first new feature alert is an alert that could or an insight that could really help you out short-term and long-term. For a while, Amazon has had long-term storage fees. In addition, there are low inventory storage fees that that were added just, you know, a year or two ago. Well, how do you know if you're about to get hit or are getting hit with some of these fees so you can take action? Well, that's where this new insight comes in. And if you have the diamond plan with Helium 10, you are going to be able to get a notification instantly. You don't even have to turn it on. You should probably already see it in your insights bar. And I'm going to show you in one of the accounts. I've never even looked at this. I'm going to look at it for the first time uh just with you guys. But let's go ahead and hop into seeing how it looks. All right. So, if you have the diamond plan on your left hand side under insights, you might see something at the top that says your inventory is at risk of Amazon's low inventory fee and or longterm storage fees. You've got seven SKs. This account has seven SKs with it. Let's take a look. Go ahead and hit open once you do that. And it's going to take you to our inventory management page. And you'll see two new columns. Um, they're titled LIF risk, low inventory fee. It shows if a product is below Amazon's minimum inventory threshold and long-term storage fee risk. And so you can like sort by them and you are instantly going to see uh how many days of inventory you have and which ones are pretty much going to cost you money. And the same thing of the long-term storage fee, like for example, what is over 90 days. And so instantly you can start digging in here and seeing, all right, hey, I I've got some some issues here where I don't have everything in the green. I need to dig into, you know, making sure I'm sending more inventory over there. Um, you need to have these tracked in your uh restock suggestions. All right. So, make sure all of your products are stocked uh and forecasted under inventory management restock uh suggestions and you will know if you are getting this kind of longterm storage fee or low inventory fee. All right, next up is something for elite members. Eventually, it'll go to our our diamond members, but it's in beta. Um elite members always get first crack to try and test things out. But just to give you the rest of you guys kind of like a heads up on what's coming, this isn't our follow-up tool. All right. So you guys know you can set up request to review templates, right? So now we have something where you can actually set the time that it come like let's say you know that your customers are morning people. All right? Or or you don't want this message just going at a random time or in the middle of the day. You want to get it at like 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. because you want to get uh you know when your when your you know customers are perhaps you know sitting on their sofa at night or you want to do it in the morning whatever the case is. If you have a specific time you want your review request to go out now you can specify that. All right you don't just have to it's not just a matter of automating it and then like leaving in Amazon's hand when during the day it's going to go out. So uh take a look here. This is what's in beta right now. If you were to edit your automation or make a new automation for request review, you go through the everything the same way that you normally would, but under the wait tab, you hit the three dots and hit edit. And now you can select time range. So you're like, "Hey, I want this request review to go out Pacific time between 9:00 a.m. and let's just say 2:00 p.m. on 12 days after the shipment ships out. Now you can add that specification. This is something that you know customers have requested like hey we want to specify when these messages go out. So this is kind of like in test right now just to make sure that Amazon's going to do it exactly when we uh we say but if you're an elite member go in test it out let us know what you think and if everything's good diamond members this one's coming to you real soon. >> All right thank you so much for that update Bradley. So, let's go ahead and get into the next article, which is Amazon versus Walmart. Now, Amazon said on Wednesday that it brought in 716.9 billion in revenue for 2025, up 12% from last year. So, not only did Amazon's annual sales exceed 700 billion for the first time, but Amazon is also on track to overtake Walmart, which is often referred to as the world's biggest retailer by revenue. So, there's definitely a battle going on here back and forth with Walmart and Amazon. And Walmart is actually expected to announce annual revenue of about 712 billion uh when it reports its earnings later this month. So, basically Amazon surpassing by 4 billion. Um, and this wouldn't be the first time that Amazon has really kind of taken over Walmart um in some shape or form. Amazon actually overtook Walmart in quarterly revenue a year ago. So, that is, you know, they're definitely going back and forth and battling with this whole thing. Now, something that's really interesting about the entire revenue um is that it's not actually all um revenue based on retail for Amazon. So, it's basically saying in this article that it's not really an apples to apples comparison since a larger part of Amazon's revenue is from a AWS or Amazon Web Services and they are betting that AI will drive the company's future growth and it expects capital expenditures to reach 200 billion in 2026. So those expenditures predominantly will be AWS. So it's not really apples to apples comparison, you know, when when you really think about it. Walmart's still really in terms of retail the biggest retailer in the world, but in terms of revenue, it looks like Amazon is going to be surpassing Walmart this year for the first time. So very interesting, curious to know what all of you think and also interested to know, are you all both selling on Walmart and on Amazon? What's your strategy there? Um, I would love to hear if you're actually selling on both platforms. All right, let's go ahead into the next thing which is Shiovali and she has the strategy of the week. So, go ahead and take it away, Shioali. All right, here is another strategy that is exclusive to Helium 10. Setting custom rules for your advertising. This can save you up to 95% of the time that it normally takes to manage Amazon ads. And honestly, the value here should be really self-explanatory. It's a direct way to make more money while saving time. Think about how we used to do PPC management without software or agencies. We would download search term reports from seller central, run pivot tables, and vlookups, and then sift through multiple weeks of data. We had to manually find things like which search terms had 25 plus clicks but no sales, and then go into seller central, track down the right campaign, and pause or negative match those targets one by one. Or let's say you had a rule like if a cost is between 100 and 120% bring it down closer to 70%. You'd have to build formulas in Excel to find those targets. Then create more formulas to figure out how much to lower those bids and then manually adjust every single one in seller central. Maybe that's manageable if you have one product and five campaigns. But if you have hundreds of campaigns across multiple products, I know there's quite a few of you out there that do cuz I've spoken to you before, it's impossible. And that is where Helium 10 Ads really changes the game. We have rules-based campaign management. And you're not stuck with a one-sizefits-all AI. You can actually create rules based on how you want to run your advertising. So maybe that means you want to optimize by a cost or you want to check out your return on ad spend, maybe by day parting. Whatever rules that you currently manage by hand, Helium 10 ads can automate that for you. For example, in one of these campaigns, we have set rules like if a cost is between 50 to 60%, lower the bid to 40 cents. If it's between 40 to 50%, drop it to 30. On the flip side of this, we have if the a cost is super low, say 3 to 5%. Then we'll have the system raise the bid to capture more sales. We've also set rules that say if a target gets 25 clicks and zero orders in 60 days and we want to pause it out, basically a set it and forget it mentality. We can even add in schedules. For instance, we noticed that the ads were performing terribly from 10 to 11. So, we set a rule to automatically lower bids by 75% during that time. Before, our a cost was 172% at that hour. And now, it's practically abysmal. It's zero wasted spend cuz the system follows the rules that we set. And the best part is Kelium 10 doesn't just automate blindly. It also gives bid suggestions that align with the rules that we've created. For instance, on our coffin shelf keyword, our cost per click was 29. And since the rule was to bring a cost down to 20%, Helium 10 suggested lowering the bid by three cents. I then had 58 suggestions like that in a single day, and I could implement all of them with just one click. What used to take hours with spreadsheets now takes minutes. We manage over 250 campaigns across three accounts, and we can optimize them all in about 15 minutes a week. That's at least 5 to 10 hours saved every single week. Helium 10 is the only all-in-one tool that gives you full rules-based ad management. And it's going to save you time, save you money, uncover optimizations you would never find manually, and if you're on the diamond plan, you already have access to Helium 10 ads, so you'll want to start using it today. All right, thank you so much for that strategy of the week, Shioali. All right, let's go ahead and get into our final article of the day, and then I'm going to go ahead and share a huge announcement with you u from Helium 10. So this next article is all about selling globally. And I know this is a big question on a lot of people's minds is whether or not they should expand globally especially because the US marketplace has become very very competitive and the fees are kind of higher and there's a lot of incentives in other marketplaces that Amazon's been giving to kind of expand and there's a lot less competition. So it's something that a lot of people are thinking about and so Amazon is trying to simplify the international expansion. Okay. So, what they've done is they've added this to the dashboard. And the expansion basically breaks it down into four key phases. And the first one is register and verify your account, then list your products, ship your inventory, and then drive growth via advertising and promotional tools. And you're actually going to receive automated guidance tailored to each store that you're entering with real-time progress tracking and compliance checks, all of which you can manage on the expansion steps dashboard. And this feature streamlines all of your international expansion by helping to ensure that you're meeting all the required steps for each country. There's a lot of different things you have to do, especially for, you know, Europe. It's different with that. There's different product compliance things that you have to, you know, abide by in Europe. So, that'll all help you with this um dashboard. So, definitely check this out if you want to start expanding globally. And finally, let's go ahead and get into this big announcement. And this is basically that we are doing a huge educational webinar and we have not done one of these in a very very long time. And this is going to be some very very highlevel strategies and tactics and it's going to be hosted by Leo Segoio and Bradley Sutton. And what they're doing is they're taking a lot of things that they've heard in you know private discussions, roundts, all kinds of things like that. They're actually going to share some really insanely awesome strategies and tactics, especially for 2026 where it's gotten a lot harder to sell on Amazon and just other e-commerce platforms. And so, they're going to bring be bringing you pure gold. And this is going to be on February 23rd at 10:00 a.m. Pacific. And if you guys remember back in the day, and this is when I wasn't even working at Helium 10, I used to really love joining these webinars and Manny Coats or Bradley Sutton would be hosting them and they were just really really intensely good um strategic webinars where you get a lot of really good juicy information and Kevin King has also hosted these in the past as well. And so um definitely something that you want to join if you haven't and we're going to have a way for you to register in the description. So, make sure if you want to attend that that you register for that because it's going to be such an awesome webinar and there's going to be so much gold. I've actually kind of seen and outline a little bit of the the strategies and details of this webinar and I think you're going to absolutely love it. So, we're kind of bringing back that old school Helium 10 with these really cool tactics that are usually only shared kind of behind closed doors. So, this is going to be a great one for you. So, go ahead and check it out. So, that is all for today for the weekly buzz. We will see you again next week to see what's buzzing. Bye everyone.