#527 - Amazon Seller News: Prime Day 2026 Dates, Extended Deadlines & More | Weekly Buzz 6/4/26

Prime Day 2026 dates have officially been announced. Deadlines are shifting. And Keyword Tracker Now lets you sync rankings across marketplace time zones. This and more on this week'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. First up, when is Prime Day? I know you want to know. The dates are June 23rd to 26th. This is just a few weeks from now, you guys. So, you want to make sure that you are well prepared. You've got all your strategies already up and running. If there's something you want to tweak and optimize, better to do it now than wait till the last minute and then try to play catch-up. As recently announced, those key sourcing dates have been extended. That leads me into the second news bit for today, which are what exactly are those deadlines? This was released on June 1st, just a few days ago. you have a little bit more time before those deadlines were end of May, May 27th, I believe it was, just off the top of my head. And now that deal sourcing window has been extended to June 9th, giving you a little bit more time just to maximize your performance during that event. If there's any sort of Prime exclusive best deals or lightning deals you guys want to put in, you now have until June 9th. That's just 5 days from now when I'm shooting this and we're releasing this episode. So, make sure you're on top of it. Prime exclusive discounts are up to 12 hours before that event end time and coupons are well throughout the end of the event. Deeper discounts of 25% to 30% or more can qualify your products for something called buzzworthy deals placement and additional merchandising across deal landing pages. So consider where you have room to go further. You guys can go in and take a look at your profitability first. I really don't recommend you guys go in and put in deals just for the sake of putting in deals because you think it's going to help you capture some sales. It might, but don't do it at the expense of profitability. If there's also some sort of inventory you've got that hasn't been really moving, this is a great time now to discount it and just get rid of that stock. Even if you feel like you've got some time, just be mindful that the earlier you submit these things, the better your chances are going to be to secure placement. having your inventory arrive at the fulfillment centers by cut off dates to be processed in time for Prime Day and consider increasing daily budgets on your best performing sponsored product campaigns to capture event traffic. We have more really great tips like this to help you be really really prepared for Prime Day as it's approaching really fast in the next few weeks. Just go to h10.me/checklist. Again, that's h10.me/checklist. Some of those deadlines that were originally created into this checklist have now changed. Just be mindful of that. But everything else is still applicable. And I highly recommend you go and you implement anything that you haven't already. That brings us to the new feature alert of this week. Let me go ahead and pass the baton over to Carrie Miller. All right, I'm very excited to bring you this latest new feature update because it's something that a lot of people have been asking for and it's in keyword tracker. So keyword tracker data only matters if sellers can actually interpret it correctly. So for brands managing multiple Amazon marketplaces teams across regions or agencies reviewing performance globally, time zone differences can create confusion when analyzing ranking movement, keyword trends, and historical tracking data. So a keyword that appears to move at one time of day in one region may appear differently somewhere else, making it harder to align reporting and decision-m across the teams. So that is why Helium 10 has introduced a new marketplace-based time zone selector inside of keyword tracker. and it's actually up at the very top here. This is where you're going to select your time zone. And you have all these different time zones you can select. And you can also select your marketplace. Now, this update impacts multiple areas within the keyword tracker. And the first one is just in this regular tab right here. So, it's going to affect the date added. If you scroll over, you can see the date added. That is going to be adjusted based on the time zone. And it's also going to affect the number of organic keywords in the top 10 and 50 and the number of sponsored keywords in the top 10 and in the top 50 as well. And it's also going to affect the ABA top clicked keywords and the BSR here. So those are the things that are going to impact it on this main part. Now if we expand it down a little bit, we can see we have this keywords tab right here. We'll go with this one first. It's going to affect the organic rank and the sponsored rank in this tab. And then if we go to the competitors tab, it's going to affect the relative rank, the ranking average and the ranking asens um according to your time zone in that. And then it will also affect the heat maps tab. Now the heat maps tab is going to be updated based on the time zone. So it's now going to just reflect the selected marketplace time zone. Additionally, in the ads tab, both the organic rank and the sponsored rank charts now reflect the time zone as well. So you can see the organic and the sponsored is going to reflect the time zone. So there are a few data points that are not adjusted within this update including the search volume, keyword sales, ABA total click share, ABA total conversion share and the ads keyword phrase chart. So these metrics remain fixed because they rely on fixed schedule dateonly or profile-based data sources. So this release gives sellers greater flexibility when reviewing keyword tracker performance across international marketplaces and distributed teams. Instead of trying to, you know, mentally account for the time zone differences, users can now analyze ranking movement, daily changes, and keyword trends within a time context that better matches their business operations. So overall, this update makes keyword tracker more intuitive, more globally scalable, and more aligned with the way modern e-commerce businesses operate across multiple marketplaces and time zones. Awesome. Thank you so much, Carrie. Make sure you guys go and you try this out for yourself inside of your Helium 10 dashboard. That brings us to the fourth news bit for this week. That is going to be get inventory in stock faster with AGL preferred routing. If you don't know what AGL means or preferred routing, hang around, my friends. AGL is something I've talked about actually a few weeks ago when I was doing the weekly buzz. It stands for Amazon Global Logistics and it's basically a freight forwarding service that allows Amazon to handle your products all the way from your manufacturer where they're based maybe in China or Vietnam and get it all the way to Amazon's fulfillment centers. It's supposed to help you streamline your flow. And also there are perks to of course using Amazon services. For example, you are Prime eligible sooner. you are going to benefit from automatic rerouting and it's shipped through preferred routes amongst a few other things. You can also save up to 45% on shipping costs. This is just to list a few that are listed actually already inside the seller central news piece I'm looking at right now, but there was a lot more actually if you look at the original news release when they first came out with it. Preferred routing is part of AL services and it's built into every shipment automatically directing your crossber goods to fulfillment centers near destination ports. Al selects smarter nodes so your goods enter the network sooner with no changes to how you create shipments in seller central. If you're interested in something like this, just go into your AL program portal to set up your profile. You can also go into seller central and create that shipment as usual regular business as you would, but select AGL as your shipping method. AL preferred routing is going to automatically direct that shipment to the optimal node and then your goods are going to arrive at a port proximate fulfillment center and enter their network where they can then distributed across the the national fulfillment network for faster delivery to customers. Guys, what's really cool is a lot of people who have been using AL preferred routing have seen on average 13.6% higher sales revenue from getting inventory in stock sooner. I'm not saying this is 100% something you should run with, but it is worth considering, especially if you are interested in just being a little bit more handsoff as opposed to delegating maybe to four different service providers on how your products reach the fulfillment center. Instead, you can just give it over to Amazon and let them run with it. Give them some runway to actually get your products into stock faster and be prime eligible. capitalize on the time basically that it speeds up as well as the shipping cost, the money that you end up saving. You can then take that and pour it into maybe your ad spend or somewhere else where it might be worth a little bit more to you in your business. Okay, and now for our strategy of the week, I'm going to bring on Bradley Sutton. Do you know who is advertising on your product pages? There's a lot of advertising spots on a product page. There's the, you know, sponsored products. There's sponsored display ads that will show up. There's other kind of like product placements like frequently bought together, etc. Uh, all of these are interesting to look at to see maybe and keep track of, hey, who is showing up on your page? Maybe you need to return uh them the favor and start advertising on their page. Well, the way you can do that here, I have essential candy product page. This is somebody else in our in our um scale story series. And I can see stuff here. Here's some sponsored display ads that are showing up. There's some frequently bought together. There's tons of products related to this item. Uh down here, there's just tons of product placements all over. How would you like to be able to see what these products are selling and what their asens are and maybe download these asens and instantly put them into another, you know, PPC product targeting campaign? Well, all you have to do is run X-ray on the product page itself, and all of those products that are showing up here are going to uh be in this list. I can see their sales. I can see their price. And then I can export this to a file in order to make some advertising campaigns. Or maybe I just want to save this file like once a week or once a month and then look back on it. All right, who has been consistently advertising on my page? who fell off. All right, what new players are there in the market? This is a great, easy, instant way that you can only do with Helium 10 in order to track who is advertising on your page. All right. All right. All right. And then we've got Amazon launches Prime in South Africa for under $4 a month, you guys. Oh, isn't that a dream as a Prime customer? Can you guys imagine if customers in the US or the UK or Australia or Japan or literally anywhere else the marketplace exists, if you could get Prime for $4 a month, wouldn't that be the fastest adoption you've ever seen? Which kind of beckons the question of are customers in South Africa going to adopt this really quickly because it is $4 a month? I realize there's a currency difference, but I'm curious to see how it goes. And this might also mean that this will be the next marketplace that is US speaking or might be something you want to consider expanding into. So just keep a pulse on this is what I recommend. Amazon Prime is already available in 26 other countries. Maybe you are selling in one or a few of them. Scheduled for June 23rd to 29th in South Africa as well. South Africa's seen a boom in online retail over the past few years with local players such as Shopright launching on demand delivery services and this was launched only two years ago. That said, the company has now users will be available to a 30-day free trial of Prime. So that is it from me for this week's weekly buzz. I hope to catch you next week to see what's buzzing.