#513 - Goodbye to this MAJOR Amazon advertising payment update (For now..) | Weekly Buzz 4/15/26

A major advertising payment update has been delayed to August 1st, 2026. Amazon's now got a solution for reducing storage fees and how to identify keywords that Amazon's algorithm is tying as relevant to your products. This and more on this week's episode of the weekly buzz. 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. First up, we've got an update on advertiser payments straight from Amazon ads. A few weeks ago on the Weekly Bus, I'd announced that a small number of advertisers had received an email saying that credit card would no longer be taken as a payment. However, this hasn't necessarily been cancelled, but it has been deferred until August 1st, 2026. As you can see from my page, if you're watching this on video, Amazon's always listening to the feedback and trying to improve tools and better understand what they can do for their advertisers. And naturally, they're giving us a little bit more time, especially if you've been hit with this notice, to actually assimilate into these changes. So, what's going to happen is this available payment method is now going to be have to be changed to pay with either seller or vendor account balance or pay by invoice. This is supposed to kind of just help streamline things a little bit. Meaning, let's say that you are generating $10,000 of revenue and you've are paying $3,000 in ads. This is now going to come from your sales instead. So, your payout would be $7,000. Or you can opt to pay later, in which case you'll get 30 days before that payment is due. This isn't the best news, especially if you're somebody who's been capitalizing on credit card points. However, there is a little bit of time here until that preference takes into effect. The existing payment methods such as credit card will still be retained as backup payment method to ensure uninterrupted service in case of insufficient funds. This is for credit or debit card, excuse me. And this only applies to the small group of advertisers that have been contacted directly. Go ahead and check this out if you are somebody who's received this notification in your mail because you've got a little bit of time, but it is coming. Before I go into any more news pieces, let me bring on Bradley who's going to talk to you about a new feature alert. >> All right, guys. I'm happy to introduce the world's first ever Tik Tok Shop Chrome extension. You know, until recently, you couldn't even see Tik Tok Shop uh products on desktop. you can only watch it on or look at it on a mobile browser um or the Tik Tok native app. But now you can actually go to Tik Tok shop on a browser. And because of that, we're able to bring you a lot of the features from the Helium 10 Amazon Chrome extension in a Tik Tok shop. All right, so here's how it's going to work. And this is available if you have Platinum, Diamond, or above. Some features and some features are for diamond and above. So, if you're on any Tik Tok shop listing, like here's one of the products that I run. You can actually see this widget here at the top. It'll say how many items uh sold. All right. Uh how many items total sold? What's the GMBB in the last 30 days? Uh what's the reviews and you know highlight of reviews? And then what I can do is I can actually hit analyze reviews or I can hit the Chrome extension and go to re review insights. Now, this is where it's pretty cool is because not only do you see all the reviews and you know, I can actually sort it by the variations. I can see what breakdown it has, but we have the old thing from Amazon and Amazon made us take this away, but Tik Tok doesn't mind for now where I can see what are the most common two words or three words or four words or five words phrases that appear in the reviews. So, for example, I could see that, hey, a great product is, you know, listed as a number one phrase. Maybe that's not too insightful, but take a look down here. All of a sudden, ink disappears is the fourth most common phrase here. And if I click on this, I can see where ink disappears is appearing and kind of see what kind of context that the buyers are interested in. Another insight here that came from the reviews on this uh kids product here, like you might not understand exactly what it means. Look at this. The se sixth or seventh most common phrase here is how to hold. And I'm like, wait a minute. This product is something for kids to learn how to read and write. What does how to hold mean? So, I click it and then I see people are talking about, oo, it's good at teaching my 5-year-old how to hold a pen correctly. Another person says, "My son loves it. he now knows how to hold the pencil. Maybe I didn't know that that's a key aspect. I'm like, "Hey, they're just learning how to write, you know, with this product." But now all of a sudden, I get this insight like, "Oh, this is something that parents uh like because it teaches their kids how to hold a pen or pencil." Never would have thought about that. Right now, here's where it's kind of cool, too. If I go to Amazon, we still have here here's the exact same product on Amazon, right? We still have the Helium 10 Chrome extension review insights. And if I hit that, we now have information that comes directly from Amazon. But do you see that how to hold the pen or the disappearing ink as one of the top things? No. uh you have a lot of uh good information here in the Amazon Chrome extension and you can actually see the impact it has on the ratings, but there are some extra details that the Tik Tok listing has because we're able to analyze those reviews. So, that's a strategy in itself. If you're looking for the old functionality of Amazon Helium 10 Chrome extension for review insights to get some in-depth data, well, you can't do that on Amazon. You get the Amazon data, which is still good, like I said, but now, hey, go check if that product is on Tik Tok and maybe it has a lot of reviews. Now, you can get these cool insights that you can use on your Tik Tok listing, your Tik Tok videos, or now even your Amazon listing. This review insights part is available for the diamond and above for now. And the rest of this Chrome extension is available for platinum and above. So guys, this is just, you know, version one of this tool. Give it a test drive. Let us know what you like, what you'd like to see changed, how it helps. We'd love to hear from you. >> Then we've got this news piece from Amazon Seller Central, which says, "Identify untapped product opportunities with discover unmet demand." What does this mean? This is a new feature that is inside of the product opportunity explorer. It's supposed to help you identify market opportunities where there's lower conversion rates, meaning people are searching for it and there is search volume there. However, when people are actually going to that search term and seeing all the results, the conversion rate for those listings isn't really that high. Something I do want to caution here though is just because there's search volume and a lower conversion rate doesn't always signify opportunity. So, be careful. I do think as a seller, you should go and check this out. Especially if you are in that launch stage or expanding out your brand for new products, then you can use this as a resource. However, sometimes the reason the conversion rates aren't high is because the term is just simply too broad. I want you to think about the term office or for example dress. Those terms are very very broad and naturally when somebody goes to them you're going to have a lot of different results but the user doesn't really know what they're looking for. They're more so browsing, right? And this is why it might show up because it's got that search volume but not really the conversion rates to back it up. The cool thing about this is and this is taken from Mansour's screenshot actually on LinkedIn. If you go down, you can break up all of those search terms. As you can see, you've got the search volume, you've got 101,000, and the conversion rate here is 99% or 4.20%. And so, a lower conversion rate for something a little bit broad. However, if you keep looking, you might actually end up finding a gold mine. And so, this is something you guys will want to go and check out. Of course, we've always had a similar opportunity to do all this to find untapped demand with Blackbox. If you just go into our Helium 10 Dash, go into the product and keyword research section, you can click it and it'll show you the filters that you can use to find the parameters or use the parameters you have in mind, input them in, and find opportunity. With that, let me pass it over to Carrie Miller, who's going to share with you the strategy of the week, which is all about Amazon recommended rank. Amazon recommended rank shows you exactly which keywords Amazon's algorithm is tying as most relevant for your products. Today I want to share with you an advanced strategy that can only be done using Helium 10. And we at Helium 10 about four or five years ago thought for sure all of our competitor tools would be copying us with this because it's such an incredible tool and an amazing strategy. But no one else has actually done that. Helium 10 is the only tool that offers this and this is called Amazon recommended rank and this feature directly connects with the Amazon API to determine how relevant Amazon thinks a keyword is for a product. So it ranks keywords based on the relevant score that Amazon assigns them and Helium 10 basically translates that score into a rank called the Amazon recommended rank. So for example, if a keyword has the highest relevancy score, say the highest is $9.99, what that means is it's the most relevant keyword according to Amazon's algorithm and Helium 10 then assigns that Amazon recommended rank of number one. So we kind of put it in a ranking form to make it a little easier. If another keyword has a score of maybe 996, then it'll get Amazon recommended rank of two and so on. So this tool is incredibly useful for understanding how Amazon perceives a product. And when you're looking at the top 20 or 30 recommended keywords, sellers can quickly determine if Amazon is correctly identifying their product or if there's confusion with the Amazon algorithm. So this is especially critical for brand new listings. So for example, have you ever launched a new product and struggle to get impressions in PPC? Many times the issue stems from relevancy because Amazon simply doesn't think the product is a match for the keywords that you're targeting. So even in the if the listing is fully optimized, sometimes Amazon's algorithm just glitches and mclassifies a product, making it really difficult to get impressions for the right terms that you're targeting. So Bradley Sutton, for example, he first realized how valuable this tool was when he was selling a pair of novelty socks. And one sock, one sock says, "If you can read this," then the other sock says, "Bring me a coffee." And the most relevant keywords should have been like coffee related gifts or gifts for coffee, gifts for coffee lovers. But since the product was in the clothing category, Amazon didn't associate it with coffee at all or any kind of gifting. So running the Amazon recommended rank revealed that Amazon actually saw this product as just generic socks, which explained why there were no impressions for coffee related keywords in the PPC. So to fix this, Bradley had to take additional steps to make the product more relevant to Amazon. And without the recommended rank, he would have been left completely in the dark and would not have known why this was happening. So let me go ahead and show you what this looks like in Helium 10. So if you look here, we have one of our products here. It's our bookshelf and we've done a reverse as search on this as you can see the as up here. We did the reverse as search in Cerebro. And so what we're going to do next is we're going to take a look at the Amazon recommended rank. So you can see that right here. And I basically just sorted this so that I can see the highest rank. So this is the most relevant. So it says Manny's mysterious oddities coffin shelf, coffin bookshelf, home bookshelf, oddity shelf. All of these are really going to show that this particular product u Amazon knows clearly what it is and what keywords are associated with this. Okay, so we've done a good job optimizing this listing and it's very clear that you know it knows it's gothic, it's a coffin bookshelf, you know, bookshelf, all of that kinds of stuff. But we actually also did a little search here and if you got uh I found this one particular product and it was all the way I won't even show you where it was but it was actually on page four. It was this as right here. And what I did is a reverse as search on this and I sorted by Amazon recommended rank. And as you can see right here this one the reason why it's not ranking for coffin shelf is because it's only r recommend or basically the Amazon recommended rank is for wall shelf. So it's only kind of generic wallshelf stuff. So floating rack shelf, floating storage, all of that um is basically what it's showing relevancy for. So what they would need to do is they actually need to go back and kind of maybe reoptimize and do some strategies to help make sure that Amazon understands that this particular product is relevant for Gothic and oddities type things as well as kind of the floating shelves. So that's kind of where they went wrong. they potentially didn't, you know, write in the right uh keywords into their into their listing to really give Amazon that understanding. So, that is an incredible tool. So, if you have ever in the future have issues getting impressions and you're not sure what's going on, take a look at the Amazon recommended rank to see if Amazon finds you relevant for those keywords that you're targeting. So, hopefully this was helpful and if you haven't checked it out in in Cerebro, go ahead and check out Amazon recommended rank. Thank you, Carrie. The next news piece that I've got for you is global warehousing and distribution has been announced in Shenzen, China. This is starting April 9th, meaning it's already started because the day I'm recording this is April 15th of 2026. You can store your inventory in bulk at a lower cost in their new global warehousing and distribution facility in Shenzen, China, and seamlessly replenish to the US fulfillment network as needed. A few of the primary reasons include reducing storage costs by up to 45% compared to US Amazon warehousing and distribution as an AWD. Of course, if you were to take all your products, you might also need a freight forwarder and logistics to help you get all that product over before you're sending it into the Amazon warehouses. And then you might be dealing with something like overstocking fees or maybe your inventory is running out and you don't have enough. All of that really dissipates when you begin using GWD in Shenzen. At least that's what they're telling us. Because not only do you get to reduce those storage fees, you can actually get the inventory to US fulfillment centers up to 7 days faster when paired with Amazon Global Logistics, you can maintain that consistently healthy inventory level through reliable automated crossber replenishment. You can choose your management style of either AI powered automated replenishment or manual control while Amazon handles the entire crossber logistics process as well as streamline your supply chain of shipping, customs, clearance and delivery to their fulfillment centers all through a single integrated solution as opposed to using any sort of thirdparty services. Of course, if you've already got a really great system in place, then this is just sort of the cherry on top that you can consider. But if you don't and you are doing this let's say for the first time then maybe this is something you will want to look into just to keep the cost low the systems fast and keep up the efficiency of your business. This is really their first step in next generation of global selling vision where once you list you can bring that inventory to the warehouse that you need it to get to and sell globally from day one. If you'd like to get started, then navigate over to seller centrals Amazon warehousing and distribution and select create shipment to create the delivery request for their Shenzen distribution center. I am really curious how this is going to pan out, especially for any of you who end up tapping into it. But please let us know in the comments section if this is something that you will make use of. I'd love to hear. And last but not least, we've got Tik Tok Shop potentially expanding out to Europe. Poland and the Benel countries will follow soon. Tik Tok Shop had a little bit of buzz some time ago about expanding out to some European countries, for example, Netherlands, Belgium, Poland, and that was then put on halt. But now we are seeing some job postings that indicate a launch may be coming soon. So, is live shopping and social commerce finally going to make their breakthrough in Europe? Bite Dance, which had pulled the plug on it before, is it going to actually follow through this time? Live shopping's had such an increase. I was just on a webinar yesterday talking about how it's really become something that grows significantly yearover-year. In fact, with Tik Tok shopping, creators are going live and brands are able to generate six figures of revenue in just a few hours. Seeing that there has been much success in the US with this already, I am looking forward to seeing how this pans out in Europe if a launch does in fact happen. And with that, today we are done with our weekly buzz. I look forward to seeing you next time to see what's buzzing.