#507 - Amazon Prime Day 2026 Dates Announced + Big Prime Day Deal Fee Changes | Weekly Buzz 3/25/26

Amazon announces 2026 Prime Day dates. There's a lot of new fee structures for this year's Prime Day. Walmart giving up on Chat GPT for commerce. 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 hop into the news. Sometimes there's not a lot of news. This week we've got a plethora of things to go over. So, let's hop right into it. The first thing, let me admit, guys, a little bit of clickbait. All right, I put in the title, my intro. Hey, Amazon has announced 2026 Prime Day dates. That is true, but it's not the dates you're thinking of. They have announced the dates of when you need to get inventory in and when you get deals in, etc. That being said, I think I know when Amazon Prime Day might be. Here are some hints. Now, first of all, I could find out when Prime Day is. You know, I I obviously have a good relationship with Amazon, but I purposely have not found out so I can talk about it because I'm under NDA with Amazon. So, if I did find out, that means I wouldn't be able to tell you guys, but I can speculate it on here because I literally don't exactly know when Prime Day is going to be. However, we have some clues based on these dates where I'm pretty sure I have it locked down to at least a oneweek period of time. The first clue we have has been in news reports the last few weeks. Maybe you guys have seen it here. It says Amazon is reportingly moving its Prime Day, annual Prime Day sale this year. All right. So, a lot of articles are talking about, hey, there's rumors that instead of July like it's always been before, it is going to move to June. All right. So, that's the first uh bit of news. Now, the second bit of news is what came out in seller central. And these are the actual dates that Amazon has announced. All right. It said that hey, you have to get in your deals for Prime Day between March 24th and May 26th. All right. remember that uh date of May 26th. Another thing is here it says you've got to get your AWD inventory in by May 27th. You uh as well as FBA shipments with a minimal shipment splits. All right, that's like if you're just sending it to one or two places, right? You got to get that in by May 27th. They also announced a date of June 5th as when you need to have the Amazon optimized shipments uh splits sent in. for those who don't regularly send inventory and that's when you like send it to like six different places uh to lessen your fees. If you're do using that method, you've got June 5th. Now, that being said, I am taking a guess or an educated guess at that at when Prime Day is going to be based on the history of when Amazon announces these dates what Prime Day ended up being. Uh that coupled with this clue of June, you know, a June Prime Day, I think that it's going to be June 30th. All right, that's just what I'm going to throw out there. First of all, Prime Day usually has started on a Tuesday and the 30th of June is a Tuesday. Also, there's usually between 25 and 35 days between when you have to get your inventory into Amazon with when Prime Day has historically been. Now, that being said, if we're sticking to the Tuesday, it doesn't work out as perfectly it has in my previous predictions in other years. So, is there a chance it could be the 23rd if it's going to be Tuesday? 10% chance. I'm like 90% sure it's got to be on the 30th, but yes, it could be on the 23rd. Why I don't think it's on the 23rd is that's too tight of a window historically from when you have to get your inventory in. You know, that means uh there would have only been like 18 days have passed. It's possible. All right. So, I think 23rd or 30th or somewhere in between like there's always a chance that Amazon might make it more than 4 days. And so, who who knows? Maybe it'll start on a Monday or a different day of of the week, but I do believe it's going to be sometimes in that last week or last seven days of June, but what is set in stone are these dates of when you have to get your deals in and when you have to get your inventory into Amazon. Now, there are a lot of new updates on this seller central report, guys. All right, that might make advertising on Prime Day more difficult and or more expensive. We're going to take a few minutes here to go into this because I've got some extra information that I did get from Amazon that you guys might not have in Seller Central that might clarify some of these things. Okay, so the first thing is that there's a upfront fee of $100 per promotion. Now, you guys remember like 3 years ago for uh Prime exclusive discounts, there is no fee. And then last year was the first year you had to start getting a fee. Every Prime exclusive discount I believe was 50 bucks if I'm not mistaken. But now it's going to be $100. In addition, not only best deals, not only lightning deals, but now the Prime exclusive discounts will have a variable fee also of 1.5%. All right, capped at $5,000. 1 and a half% of the promotional sale. So that might be new uh to some of you. Now, to offset that $50 extra dollars you're having to pay, if you submit your deals early by April 30th, you can get a $50 discount. Woo! All right. But unless I'm reading this wrong, it's only on the best deal or lightning deal. It sounds like unless this is wrong, uh the Prime exclusive discount, you're not going to get that $50 back on. Now, another thing you guys know, I I keep it real when it comes to Amazon, and I've always called them out about gaslighting in some of these messages. They haven't done in a while, but whoever was writing their previous messages last year, when I called them out, I think they're back. All right, they came back to Amazon because here is where they're again painting something in the light of, hey, we're doing you a favor uh here with this price increase. Take a look here at what it says. It says here, um, we've simplified promotion fees to better align your cost and set FBA inbound dates to ensure your products are primary. Okay, that that part's good, but we we've simplified it, you know. Oh, oh, thank you Amazon for increasing my my fees and because it it's I really needed that simplification. But anyways, I'm just having fun, you know, like Amazon still is the best place obviously, guys, right, to to sell on. But what is this new simplification? Uh, I don't think you guys are going to like this. All right. You're going to have to be now priced at the lowest sales price. All right. Now, here's the thing. That's that's never changed, but it's going to include promotional prices from previous deals, coupons, and price discounts over the last 60 days. Did you get that, guys? Coupons. So, what would people would do in the past? You would um have like let's say a $50 price point, but maybe you had a a 30% off coupon, but your regular price stayed at $50. Well, you could go in and do like a deal uh you know, Prime exclusive discount for $40 or or let's say 45 bucks because it was cheaper than the price that you had your product at $50. But now, if you had a coupon there, that now counts. All right. Another thing, offer at least 5% off of the lowest sales price, including promotional prices from previous deals, coupons, and price discounts over the last 30 days. All right. So, now there's this 60-day and 30-day um kind of like tiers that you have to know what you have and have not done as far as lightning deals, um you know, regular price changing, sale prices, coupons, previous Prime exclusive discounts, etc. All right. Um I don't think anybody's thanking Amazon for this simplification, nor this new these new fees, but whatever. I I think these is kind of straightforward and and we're going to have to make sure that starting what end of April, I guess, you got to really know what your product price was at because now you've got this 30-day window to look at and this 60-day window to look at. Now, now that you have to get your deals in earlier, there's some FAQs. Now, this is some extra information that you guys might not see in Seller Central. Amazon wants me to uh convey this. So, thank you, thank you, you know, credit where credit is due. Thank you, Amazon, for providing this extra information for us. Um, a question you might be wondering is, hey, what if I submit a deal by April 30th, you know, super early, but then I edit in in May? Do I lose that $50 discount? No, you don't lose that discount. One more clarification. Can I get that discount for Prime exclusive discounts or is it only best deals and lightning deals? Only best deals and lightning deals scheduled by April 30th. I had mentioned that there's the promotional sales for that 1.5% variable fee. What exactly is promotional sales? Uh what does that refer to? Amazon says this refers to the total ordered product sales generated by the promotion during the scheduled promotional period. They would use the discounted price for ordered product sales. All right. So if your regular price is $100, you got a prime exclusive discount of 40% off. Well, the 1.5% is going to be charged on $60, not your $100. All right. This also excludes uh shipping and gift wrap. When will I be charged these uh fees for these discounts? During while it's going on or after it ends? Answer, these promotional fees are charged 10 days after the completion of the promotion, which is obviously whatever dates Prime Day uh is going to be. Question. If deal recommendations refresh weekly, which is almost an answer in itself, that's giving you guys some information. FYI, if you go there right now, you don't see anything. Go there next week, you might see more recommendations. So, if these refresh weekly, when should I submit to get the best time slots? Answer, you can choose to create a deal from the list of eligible asens and in the select products tab of the deals dashboard. And since it's refreshed every week, an eligible as you see this week might not be there next week. Interesting. So, in other words, if you see one and you think you might want to do that deal, better jump on it. Don't be like waiting on it. Can I edit my deal pricing after submission? You can edit your deal pricing before or while your deal is running to match or improve the maximum deal price threshold. Once it's in running status, you can only correct deal price related issues or you can cancel it. So, you can't be like, "All right, day one of Prime Day, I'm going to do a 10% discount. Day two, 15% discount. Day three, 17." No, like only if Amazon is saying, "Oh, you have to update it because you don't hit the threshold correctly." Where can I find the lowest 30 or 60-day price of an AS? This is the first time this has ever been an answer, but guess what? The answer is Rufus. All right. Amazon says, "Hey, you can see the featured offer price from the past 30 and 90 days using the Roffus price graph on Amazon." What that doesn't show though is like the coupon price. All right? So, if you're doing coupons on top of that, you got to uh calculate that in. Now, which brings us to the next question from Amazon and says, "What's the difference between the featured offer price that is reflected in the Roffus price history compared to the lowest sales price? Where can I find this?" Well, the answer is is hey, the the the buy box price is what shows up in Rufus. All right. However, it could show a price that was briefly displayed during a 30 or 90-day period, but never resulted in a completed purchase. So, the lowest sales price reflects the actual transaction price at which a sale occurred. Right? That actually is a little bit confusing to me. I'm just reading that, you know, uh as as it comes out. Speaking of which, next question. If I ran a coupon 45 days ago, does that count toward my 60-day lowest price? Yes. The 60-day lowest price calculation includes coupon prices. We've said that like five times now, but Amazon really wants to make sure they get that point across cuz this is new. All right, so guys, you know, there there is some more details in seller central. Make sure to check it out. But what do you think? What do you think of the new price requirements? What do you think of some of these new fees, the 1.5% variable? There's also one more point I'm going to bring up in the next article that has to do with Prime Day, a little warning that's different. Um, so stay tuned for that. Um, now for a new feature alert from Helium 10 completely switching platforms is Tik Tok Shop. We've had a lot of tools for uh Tik Tok shop, but it's all been Tik Tok shop USA. But now we have launched for Tik Tok Shop UK, our listing converter tool, which allows you to take your Amazon listing and copy it from Amazon UK and not copy it completely, but take your images and then uh transfer via AI because you know what makes a good listing on Tik Tok is not the same as Amazon. Using AI, transfer that listing to Tik Tok shop. So, what you guys can do is connect your Tik Tok shop token for UK if you're shipping there or if you're selling there. And then what you're going to be able to do is connect all your asens uh to, you know, from from Amazon and create uh in seconds your Tik Tok shop listings. This is available uh platinum plan as well as diamond plan. By the way, guys, I've seen some misinformation that that comes out there. There are some new different limits on on platinum. It was not uh necessarily a price increase. Actually, we have added more way more things to the platinum plan than taken away. Um the Tik Tok being one of them, right? So like this, you know, Tik Tok UK is available in platinum until a couple months ago is only available in diamond. Uh all of our other Tik Tok shop tools uh is available in limited amounts also in the platinum plan. And just another one quick thing I wanted to throw out something new for platinum members is you can now use up to five times our new listing builder AI tool. couldn't use that one before. So, a lot of uh you know, fun new stuff for platinum members, including Tik Tok shop UK listing conversion. All right, next up today, depending on when you guys uh are watching this, the Amazon big spring deals has gone live. That's like the Prime Day for spring, right? And there's some interesting things I wanted to point out, and this also has to do with Prime Day. Before you could do Prime exclusive discounts like up until during the event or the like the day before. And so I they had said, "Hey, there was a limit on when you could get it in for these prime spring deal days." And I didn't do it kind of on purpose. I wasn't sure if I was going to do it, but I wanted to see what would happen, how it's going to show up different. Take a look at what is going on now. So I just did a Prime exclusive discount yesterday. There was not the option to say, "Hey, this is for big spring days." All right. So, now take a look at what somebody who did do it in time has. They've got this big spring deal page and and now their product potentially could be featured here in the big springale. But look at my products. All right. You see here, I don't have that badge of big Springdale. I just have a big red badge of 16% because I I do have a discount going on. So the question is which one, you know, like is that really a big bad thing? Because now this is what we're going to do for Prime Day. You remember, did you remember that article I talked about a few minutes ago how it said, "Hey, you've got to get your deals in by this date." Well, if you don't, you're just going to get this red badge. But the question is, is this really that bad of a conversion thing? A big huge red badge that says save 16% as opposed to a big red badge that doesn't even say how much you save. It just says big spring deal. I'm not sure that one is guaranteed to be better than the other. So, this might be something you you can think about when you're thinking about those uh deadlines. Uh a couple other new things when you search like collagen peptides. Uh yes, you can see some people aren't doing spring uh deal days at all. Other people have big springale, but take a look at this. I don't think I have seen this before. Now earlier in addition to big spring deal there was a couple of hours where on this very page of collagen peptides instead of big springdale it would say lowest price in 90 days. So that's something I hadn't seen before. But when I refresh this page right now it it's all gone. So and only the lowest price in 30 days is back. So I'm not sure. You know maybe Amazon was doing some kind of uh experiment. But that would be interesting where instead of this red big Springdale why do I keep say saying Dale? Springdale. Is that like a That's a That's a city, right? In Iowa or something like that. Anyways, uh big spring deal. Instead of that big red badge and instead of just the save thing in a red badge, it was saying lowest price in 90 days. But now that seems to completely have disappeared, at least in my Amazon, I don't see it anymore. So, anyways, what are you guys doing for the big spring deals? Did you guys do a Prime exclusive discount lightning deal? Uh we're in day one. How's it going for you? Let me know in the comments below. Next article is from martekch.org org and it's entitled Walmart says chat GBT checkout converted three times worse than its own website which should come to a shock as a shock to absolutely nobody unless you've been drinking Kool-Aid thinking that everybody's going to be trying to order things from chatbt where you can't see images and stuff like that. Now guys I'm not going to be here and say oh there is nothing going to be shopping related for chat GBT and e-commerce or you know chat GBT is complete out of game. Of course not. But it didn't take a rocket scientist to know that, hey, if you knew what you wanted to buy from Walmart, if I wanted a 64 ounce water bottle, that it is not advantageous to go into Chad GBT and start having a conversation with chat, you know, trying to find this product at Walmart. No, I'm just going to go to Walmart, type in 64 ouncez water bottle, take a look at some nice images without even scrolling. There will be 10, you know, 15 there. I can see the price. click on one and buy one like like nothing beats that yet. I still think AI is going to going to, you know, change the game even more as far as even in the shopping cart experience. But Chad GBT was never, you know, the the instant checkout thing was never meant to be something that's going to, you know, replace traditional search. So now, you know, Chad GBT is going back to the drawing board. Uh Walmart's kind of just like doubling down on its own AI things like like Sparky uh this article is is talking about and and let's see what is the next phase of what Open AI Chad Chubet is going to do to try and um kind of like change that shopping experience. This is one of the things I'm talking about when I go on stage this year is about how there's discovery commerce and there's like product searches, right? a product search, it it's just much better to just type into a search bar on Amazon or Walmart and and do the traditional thing if you already know what you want. But when you don't know what you want yet, like you don't know the solution, uh this solution or discoverability search, that's where I think Chad GBT and other, you know, even things like Rufus and stuff could potentially have a big impact and change on the way that people shop. you know, instead of going to Google or instead of trying to, you know, look up videos or blogs on trying to figure out, hey, what's the kind of gift I need, you would do that in Roffus, Sparky, ChatGBT, etc. But anyways, if you were putting a whole bunch of money into, hey, hey, let me make sure my Walmart product is is recommended in in chat GBT, if somebody makes a search, put a little pause on that because that is, you know, is not what the direction Walmart's going in at this time. All right, next up we've got our strategy of the week and Shioali has that. It's going to be about search query performance. >> What if you could instantly analyze up to 12 months of your Amazon search query performance data using Helium 10's search query analyzer and AI analysis? That would save you a whole lot of time, right? Your search query performance data tells you exactly which keywords are driving sales, which keywords convert better than the market, and where your click-through rate outperforms competitors. That's direct revenue insight. When you know which keywords are generating purchases, which ones are giving you low a cost, and where you have high conversion but low visibility, well, you can optimize your listings, adjust PPC bids, and double down on profitable traffic. That is what makes you money because instead of guessing what to scale, you get to make decisions based on one full year of real conversion and sales data instantly. And with Helium 10, you can do it in seconds. Now, even if you don't have Helium 10, you can technically do this inside of Seller Central. It'll just take a few hours. But if you are using Helium 10, here's how you analyze up to a year's worth of data in seconds. Go into search query analyzer, select month of and the last 12 months here of your account. if you wish. Then go in and choose the products. Let me go ahead and type in coffin shelf here and put on our main product. We select it. We also are going to have AI analysis on. That's going to give us some other options here. And we're about to show you. Once you've hit apply AI analysis, the first thing it's going to show is all 12 months of search query performance data. All the keywords that have ever come up in any of those months. So we can see here for example we can sort by our purchases and we can see oh my goodness we've got 50 purchases for the keyword coffin shelf. We've got six purchases for coffin box. We've sold for coffin shelves. We've sold for coffin bookshelf etc. But then if we go ahead and look at the AI analysis we hit this button view AI analysis here. And now we can instantly see what were the best conversion rate keywords for us. What were the market top sales keywords? what were the top search volume keywords here in our keyword performance matrix. We can even see, hey, what got us low a cost, right? Because that ties to our PPC data. We can look at funnel analytics and see, hey, how are things going overall? How do things progress between the impression all the way down to the purchase for our product? What are some of our highv value, low visibility keywords? In other words, where might we not be showing up at the top of search? But we've got really good data. AI summarizes a lot of what you need to look at when you're looking at your search query performance data because sometimes it might be a little overwhelming and I get that. That will help you kind of laser focus on what actions you need to take. So again, if you want to be able to look at 12 months of search query performance data almost instantaneously, then use Helium 10 for that. Even if you don't have Helium 10, well, just go to Seller Central, go to search query performance, download the 12 different reports, do a pivot table, and then put all that data together. It's still some of the most important data that you can have. It'll take a little bit more time. So again, if you want to be able to look at 12 months of search query performance data almost right away, then use Helium 10 for that. Even if you don't have Helium 10, well, guess what? You can go to seller central, go to search query performance, download 12 different reports, do a pivot table, put all the data together because it's still valuable information and then yeah, use some sort of outside AI to give you some summaries, but with Helium 10, you can do it all with just two clicks inside of your dash. >> Thank you very much, Shioali. Uh, you need the diamond plan for that. So, if you guys want a special discount, uh, use the code SSP20 to save up to, uh, 6 months, 20% off the diamond plan. Uh, anybody who signs up, you can get a one-on-one call with me if you sign up to that diamond plan, SSP20, to be able to do that search query performance along with all the other cool stuff our diamond plan has. Next up is a reminder. Uh, this is something we reported on the buzz months ago when when it first came out, but now it's the date is finally here. Coming is ending next week, guys. All right, March 31st. No more coingling, which I think every Amazon seller is like, "Hey, this is a great thing." Meaning you don't have to put if you don't want to if you're a brand owner FN skew barcodes on your product if you already have a UPC on it. You could just go by the UPC and only like resellers are going to have to use that FN skew. That's might change the way you guys label your products now. Now you don't have to put that FN skew on. You can just print the UPC which is what you you've been probably doing for Walmart and and Tik Tok etc. But then you you you have to do these extra labels for Amazon. That's no more as of 31st. So check out the link if this is new information to you um in seller central and you know this might be something that you need to take some action on. Next up um article from qz.com. It says Amazon is going to make things a lot harder for the post office. All right. So the this article talks about Amazon supposedly planning to slash USPS post office in United States delivery by 2/3 represents billions in revenue. Now you might be wondering why does this even matter to me? I don't care who Amazon uses to deliver the products. Well, guys, you should care about this because, you know, post office is handling millions of products for Amazon to deliver. So, if this all of a sudden goes down, what's that does that mean? That could potentially mean a difference in delivery times for the products and what your buy box says, you know, especially in these rural areas where Amazon or the post office is the one who delivers it. Like also what about like uh military addresses, APO, FPO addresses? Only the post office can deliver that. You know, there's not going to be this Amazon Prime drone that's going to deliver your product to this military base in in in Guam or something like that. That's only the post office that can deliver there. So, so there might be impacts uh if this kind of like fight or negotiation, you know, keeps if they keep being at odds over what is going to happen with with this relationship. It's something that we should monitor and uh let's see how it affects our businesses. Hopefully Amazon's got some backup plans if they do pivot away from the post office. All right, last up uh I'm doing a special workshop with uh Shioali next week on Tuesday, March 31st, and it's at 11:00 a.m. and it's entitled 10 strategies that could mean 10K for your brand. All right, these are Helium 10 strategies that are moneymaking. All right, it's not just like, oh, isn't this a nice little tool? I'm showing you stuff that has made me money or other people money, including like one where this one move that somebody did, and they're not even like that. They're not like a $1 billion seller or a hundred million seller or anything like that. One small move, one of these 10 things represented $11,000 difference in a profit for a company. And I'm going to show you exactly what that is. There's nothing that special. Any Helium 10 member uh is going to be able to to take advantage of that. So, this is one of 10 super cool things that Shiovali and I will be uh promoting. So, next week, if you want to register, go to h10.me/10 tips 10 tips and you will be able to register for that awesome workshop. All right, guys. Thank you very much for tuning in. Make sure to tune in next Wednesday to see what's buzzing.