#509 - Your Amazon Payout Might be SLASHED?! | Weekly Buzz 4/1/26

Is your Amazon payout stuck in account level reserves? Meta rolls out an Amazon affiliate integration and how to manage 300 campaigns in 30 minutes. This and more on today's episode of the weekly buzz. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the AM PM podcast by 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. All right, let's jump into the news. First up, we've got this post made from Nolan inside of our Helium 10 Amazon FBA high rollers group where he asks if anyone's looked at their payments page or statements recently and noticed that Amazon is starting to hold more and more money for their account level reserves. Now, DD plus7 has become the standard on all accounts. If you don't know what that is, it's basically a seller payment policy where funds from sales are held in reserve for 7 days after the item is confirmed delivered. This is mostly so Amazon has some money to pull from if a customer makes a return or has some sort of claim, but it does affect the cash flow of your business. Of course, it effectively lengthens the payment cycle for sellers. And so on this particular account, as we can read from this post, it says 50% of the sales are now on account level reserve for them despite generating $75,000 in sales revenue in 3 days. Now, it's really normal for their net proceeds every bi-weekly period to be just about 200,000 around there. And it's been frozen for them at 75,000 for 3 days. During the payout day, they still have 75K on net proceed, but the sales didn't slow down. They increased and yet the hold was there. As you can see, if you're looking at this on YouTube or any sort of video platform where we publish this, then you can tell it's quite a bit of money that's just held by Amazon. Now, have you guys noticed this yourself? I know even when I was speaking to Bradley, he's got a smaller account which has never had a hold and he still has some money that's being held now in reserves. And when he sent them a message, seller support responded with this right here. Starting March 2026, all reserve policies other than base reserves DD plus7 are migrating to DD plus7 as well. This alignment ensures that the base reserve policy applies worldwide. This is not a policy change. It's been the standard since 2016. It supports both sellers and customers by releasing funds after the delivery date plus 7 days. Hence, it's called DD plus 7. And this timeline allows for confirmation of order delivery to customers and provides time for customers to evaluate their orders and process returns or claims if needed. Account level reserves are a normal part of selling on Amazon. This this is an amount that's reserved to ensure that you've got enough funds as I said before to fulfill any sort of financial obligations. And if you look down here in the chat section, this is one of the things we love about the Helium 10 Facebook groups. If you're not in it and you are a Helium 10 user, make sure you are a part of them. Go join. We'd love to have you. As you can see, the comment here shows kind of the the rolling window of how that payment works. So, from day zero to day seven, no orders have really completed that full cycle. You would not be receiving the the payment that is being held in escrow. And then from day seven forward, you start to see a little bit of a drip down of those funds until you're between the days of 14 and 20 where you've got a equilibrium state, a steady state where daily inflows and outflows balance out. You still have to use all this to predict what's going on with your cash flow in your business cuz of course the last thing you want is to not have enough where you need it. So make sure that if you're a seller, you're keeping a pulse on this and taking a look at your account. Let me know in the chat. Do you guys have something going on with your account level reserves as well? What's the situation? And hopefully it's working out all okay for you. Next up, we've got the Meta rolling out Amazon affiliate integration. This is a massive news piece for this week, especially cuz social commerce hasn't really been Facebook's top tier thing that they've been known for. I guess Tik Tok does a lot of discovery. You've got YouTube for long-term conversions. You've got Instagram handling brand positioning. And now Facebook is finally rolling out the Amazon influencer integration, enabling shoppable reels and posts with direct affiliate links if you hit the 5,000 follower threshold. Again, you do have to have a 5,000 follower threshold if you're an influencer listening to this. But in any case, even as a seller, guys, this is massive because you can now tell your creators that yes, you know what, you can actually, if you've got the 5,000 follower threshold limit checked off, then go and begin publicizing, integrate your links from Amazon affiliates over to Facebook where you can now build content and be one of the first creators, maybe even for your category or your niche, to publicize and take advantage of a whole new audience. Early access is quite spotty, but real creators are sharing first impressions, best practices, and naturally this decreases that space that was there before for actually taking the consumer on Facebook from content to purchase. Before you had to have things like, you know, the the link in bio and the comment links and the external landing pages. I've done this as a seller even where you run an ad just to direct it to a landing page where you might be able to make a sale. And now instead of all of that, you can have your creators link their Amazon influencer account to Facebook, tag products, like I said, directly inside of reals and posts, as well as display a clickable shopping banner within the content, and send users directly to Amazon with affiliate distribution. The only eligibility really being that the creators need to have a Facebook business page or professional profiles, an active Amazon influencer account, and 5K followers. So, very, very cool. I'm looking forward to seeing how those of you who are listening in leverage this. I'm looking forward to leveraging this myself because I do both selling and Amazon influencing. And so, yeah, we'll we'll see where things go from here. And now it's time for this week's new feature alert on a new way of how to do product research. Over to you, Bradley. >> All right, guys. Super excited for our new feature alert of the week. It's in Blackbox, and this is a fun one. I call it the zombie listing hunter. Now, why is this important and how can it make you money? Now, the idea for this tool came from me. One day, I was remembering about how back in the day, we had a really big competitor for our coffin shelf, and it wasn't really a direct competitor, but because it was a coffin makeup shelf, and this thing was just crushing it. It had thousands of reviews. It was selling hundreds of units uh a month. Uh here is the listing here. And as you can see, it went out of stock like about a year ago and just they never, you know, put it back into stock. And so I was like, "Wow, there there hasn't been another coffin makeup shelf that has really taken over its position. Maybe I can go in and sell this product, right?" And so I actually went and developed something. I'm doing a case study right now where I'm launching a product very similar to it to take its market share because this seller for whatever reason just decided to stop selling it. You know, we don't know if they were got suspended or or they just gave up on Amazon or what the case is. And I was like, you know what, this is something that happens a lot. Another use case I was thinking of, I was like, at different times there have been products that have done really well, crushed it even recently, and just for whatever reason, they're out of stock right now. So, if I wanted to do keyword research at top sellers any time in the last year, um, you know, as well as seasonal products that maybe are out of stock right now, I wouldn't even know what are the seasonal products that are out of stock. Like, for example, if now in in April of 2026, I want to see what were the top selling Christmas tree ornaments in December, I wouldn't be able to research them because those products aren't even in stock right now. So that's why we launched the zombie hunter, zombie listing hunter here in Helium 10. How does it work? It is in blackbox under products and it's under this new tab called find out of stock products. I could select a certain category, right? Like let me go ahead and select home and kitchen. And then I can say, you know what, I want to see products where sometime uh in it it last year that it was active, it was selling like at least 200 units or let's go a little bit bigger. Let's say 500 units. And I can say, you know what, the last time that it was active, let's just say, you know, maybe I am looking for, you know, Christmas stuff. So I'm looking for uh from November through January 15th, right? And then I can even say, you know, something in the title ornaments. All right. Now, let's see what comes up here. Now, look at this. Look at all of these products that have come up. Uh here's newborn elephant ornaments. All right. If I click on this, you guys can see this product is not in stock right now. It hasn't been in stock in a while, but last year, look at this revenue. He was making $25,000. So maybe I wanted to see, hey, what's the main keywords? Well, now, you know, thanks to Helium 10, I can actually take this product, analyze it in Cerebro. Take a look at this. I'll open up Cerebro and uh by the way, these are all features that are available in our Helium 10 diamond plan. If you're unable to see this, make sure to to get that diamond plan. Uh I can run it here in Cerebro, and I can look at the historical trends going back in time, maybe to when it was in stock, 2024 or whenever. Let's take a look. December 2024. What were the money-making keywords for this $25,000 selling product? And look at this. Now, I just went back in time and I can see the uh keywords that were making sales for way back when. But how would I have ever discovered this product that's been out of stock for like more than a year without this tool? The answer is I wouldn't have found it. So, this is a a great way, guys. You know, start playing with it. start playing with all these filters that we have where you want to maybe do like I did and jump in and relaunch a product that somebody just gave up on not on the same as of course I started my own as or you want to look up seasonal products and see what was selling before and then go and do historical keyword research on it. Uh this is what is the definition guys of game changer because this changes the game. This is something you never can do. You can't even you can't do this with AI, you know, you can't do this with any other tool. Only Helium 10 can you go and find those zombie listings. >> Thank you, Bradley. Next up, we've got upcoming improvements to the reference price. Reference prices like list price, the manufacturer suggested retail price and typical price are the things that allow customers to understand the value of what they're receiving. Sometimes they take a look and see, oh, what was that product at before or what is it getting strike down to now? And this is what helps them create that urgency to purchase right then and there. However, there are some changes that are going into play now, this month. So, effective April 23rd, 2026, we've got a few days here. The list price you provide must meet one of the following criteria to be validated. The product has been offered at this list price at another retailer recently and the product has been purchased by customers as a featured offer on Amazon at this list price. Meaning what? You can no longer set a really high manufacturer's suggested retail price anymore. Instead, you have to make sure that it was actually sold at that price, either on Amazon itself or listed at that price somewhere else. So, be that on Shopify, on Tik Tok shop, it doesn't matter. To see examples and how to update your list price, you can go to seller news inside of your seller central account, which is where I'm reading this from, and click show a reference price on your products by providing a list price to get further details. Ask for typical price, which is a median nonpromotional price that customers have paid for a product over the last 90 days, effective May 18th, 2026, about a month and a half out from now. If more than half the days in a product's 90-day price history are below the non-promotional median price, then they're going to start calculating the typical price using all of those sales, including the discounted ones. Meaning, if your discounted prices are occurring far too much, say you're offering a lot of coupons and a lot of markdown sales are occurring, then you're going to end up having that equalize out where your discounted price now becomes your typical price. Price discounts are not advertised to customers as promotions. They are still treated as nonpromotional sales and included into the typical price. You can read up more about this again inside of Seller News. But guys, more important than ever before, your pricing strategy is going to matter and not just what you're listing it at or trying to make it look like, but really where you are achieving your sale. So, the positioning of your brand needs to be tip-top shape. Speaking of strategy, let me pass it over to Carrie now so she can come on to tell you about another strategy you can use. As we all know, search query performance is great, but it's only great if you use it for your own products because it doesn't tell you how many sales happened per keyword for your competitors. And that's why search query performance is limited to your own asens. Okay, so how can you find historical keywords that actually generated sales for your competitors? And of course, u you know, we've been able to use Cerebro inside of Helium 10 and that's more of an estimation or a process of elimination. So, for example, if a keyword has over 500 searches and a product um yours or your competitors ranks between positions 1 and 10, you can assume that it generated some sales. But is that a direct data from Amazon on actual sales like search query performances? No, not really. So, how can you access Amazon provided data that confirms a specific product, even if it's not yours, generated sales for a given keyword? And the answer to that is brand analytics. Um, and Helium 10 offers a completely unique way to access and analyze this data. And honestly, this is one of my favorite tools. It's it's a way to easily filter and sort through brand analytics data. So, uh, let me just show you how this works. So, the first thing you want to do is you want to go into Helium 10 and you're going to go into Blackbox. Okay? And then you're going to search where it says ABA top search terms. This is where this tool is located. Okay? And, um, what you're going to do is you want to search weeks. So, I actually already pre-selected some weeks. So, I did some weeks that are kind of close to right now. And then also, if I scroll down, I went to um Halloween and Christmas because it's really good for Halloween and Christmas gifts. Actually, this is a a bat bath mat. And I already selected some of my competitors and put them in here. Show me where products that I input here has more than 1% of the conversion share. Okay, so that's what this is all setting up and to show. So, once we put um apply filters, you're going to see a bunch of keywords. And this is kind of like a poor man's search query performance, but it really works. Uh why does it work? Because it's a competitor. You know, if a competitor as has 1% or more conversion share for a keyword, Amazon is telling you that that product definitely made sales for that keyword. And that uh isn't Helium 10 data. This is actually directly from Amazon. So in order to use this tool, you actually have to connect your Helium 10 account to Amazon because it's pulled in directly from brand analytics. So let's give you a real example. So, like some of these keywords might be really obvious, like bat bathroom decor, bat rug. But if we scroll down, maybe we can find some kind of less off uh obvious maybe gothic goth bathroom might be less obvious. Halloween bath rugs, spooky rug. So, there's a few different ones that, you know, maybe you might not find um that could potentially, you know, help you to make more money. So, this kind of data really helps you to make more money by identifying keywords that no other tool can really surface. um not even Helium 10 unless you use the specific this specific feature because this is directly from Amazon data. Um it's all thanks to brand analytics showing exactly which keywords led to actual sales for your competitors. So now could you manually replicate this process through seller central? Uh technically yes, but it would involve downloading, you know, 17 different brand analytic files each with millions of rows and then building a pivot table, filtering it to am uh filtering it by as and calculating which keywords had over 1% sales share and that would take a long long time. I know this for a fact because I tried before we had this tool to download this information and it was taking hours. So um this is an incredible way. So using Helium 10 Blackbox um and our brand analytics feature, you can do this in seconds instead of hours. So make sure you're using this tool to find Amazon verified keywords that brought in sales for your competitors so that you can capitalize on those keywords as well. Awesome. Thank you so much, Carrie. And again, guys, if you don't have access to this feature, then make sure that you sign up for Diamond with the code SSP20 for 20% off the next 6 months. Again, that code is SSP20. Keeping it moving along, another news piece, last but not least, actually is from Seller News inside of Seller Central. We've got MCF and Buy with Prime packaging updates for US start April 1st. So, starting in April, they are making changes to MCF and Buy with Prime, including how orders are being packaged and shipped in the US to help reduce packaging waste, as well as to align MCF and buy with Prime more closely with existing FBA packaging practices. As you can see, some of those updates include the following. Packaging slips will no longer be included by the default. Items already certified for the ships in product packaging program on Amazon.com will ship without an Amazon overbox by default. So, whatever product packaging you've got is exactly what it ends up shipping in. And I have had a situation where I ordered a gouacha kit and it was a magnetic box and I ordered it three separate times only for me to receive an empty package. That is not something you guys want. So please make sure that your product packaging if it is following underneath SIP's program then you ensure it is something that will actually get that product to the customer as well as won't arrive damaged. I think that's a really big thing as well is in case your product is a gifting item, last thing you want is a ungiftable item to arrive, right? Okay. And the last thing that is an update on this same news piece is eligible MCF and Buy with Prime SIP shipments will receive a discount. So these updates roll out between April 1st and 30th. So they start today itself and those SIP discounts will begin applying as soon as those certified items start shipping. Whether or not your asens are actually eligible, make sure you go check that out on seller central starting in April. These settings apply to FBA, MCF, and buy with Prime orders. And if you want to opt out, that is an option for you. You just have to make sure that that goes through in your settings. Also, next week, Bradley Carey and I are going to be in Nashville, Tennessee. We're going to be there for Ecom Mastery AI, which is Kevin King's event. And it is a perfect event for you guys to attend if you are already or you're thinking about selling on Amazon, Tik Tok Shop, or Shopify. Now, this event, I can tell you already from past events I've attended that Kevin King has arranged. They're always amazing. This is where brands go to become empires. It's for beginners to nine figure sellers. and they've got a fantastic lineup of topics as well as 41 speakers, one of who is Bradley. So, make sure that if you can attend and you want to learn about things like AI powered selling, advanced PPC and advertising, brand building and protection, email, UGC, influencer playbooks, AI avatars, AEO and conversational commerce, psychology, sourcing, outsourcing, persuasion, finance and exit strategy. You guys, this is one that you don't want to miss. If the price point has been what's held you back perhaps, then you can go to h10.me/ecommastery AI. Again, that's h10.me/ecommastery AI and use the code capital H10 capital P. So that is H10P, simple code, and you can get a discounted ticket for the gold level. We'd love to see you there, and we look forward to the conversations that will occur in person. And these are the sorts of things that can really move the needle in your business. And if you are going and you would like to be on the Serious Sellers podcast to talk about your brand as well as how Helium10 tools have helped you, then please reach out to me. Helium10.com. That is mhel.dh helium10.com. We look forward to seeing you there. And just quickly before I close out, on April 7th of 2026 this year, 100 p.m. EST or 10:00 a.m. PST, we have a advertising webinar which is all about how you can manage over 300 campaigns in 30 minutes a week using automation rules, day partying, and hidden as targeting. This is one where if perhaps Amazon advertising has been of a bit of a black box for you, I know a Helium 10 tool. You see what I did there? But if it's been a bit confusing, maybe you don't know what's going on, maybe you've got campaigns that you would rather honestly just outsource to somebody else. Guys, remember, nobody cares about your numbers and your business more than you. So why not learn how to do it yourself and do it fast? Do it efficiently. So make sure if you are somebody who wants to scale, then you don't miss this because this is one for the books. will have tons of strategies and it'll be a live demo. So, make sure you go and you register. All you really need is your name and your email address. Again, that's h10.me/PPBC. And with that, today we are done with our weekly buzz. I look forward to seeing you next time to see what's buzzing.