#541 - TikTok Shop Prime? | Amazon New Titles Spotted | Opportunity Explorer New Feature | Buzz 7/30

Will there be a Tik Tok Prime soon? Some of Amazon's new titles are being seen out in the wild. Amazon Product Opportunity Explorer has a new AI feature. 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 AM podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host Bradley [music] 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 [music] see what's buzzing. All right, let's go ahead and hop into the news. The first article is from payments.com and it's entitled Tik Tok test prime style shopping membership service. That's a mouthful. Tik Tok test. All right. Basically, what this article is talking about is it says Tik Tok is reportedly testing a membership program for US shoppers similar to Amazon Prime. It says there are screenshots of this offering seen by some journalists. And supposedly it's going to be called not Tik Tok Prime but still got the P in there. you sneaky rascals. Tik Tok says this might be called Tik Tok Plus and it's going to be built into their Tik Tok shop and it's going to offer perks like it says here, free shipping, discounts, uh coupons similar to Amazon Prime. So, this is going to be interesting because it it talks about there might be like some huge incentives to get people to start. It gives an example here of a hair product. It says usually sells for $57. is marked down by $10 for plus members and they also got 3day shipping and there's going to be, you know, price tiers of uh $6, $10 or $15 a month. Obviously, a lot less in Prime. Now, this is interesting because it the fact that Tik Tok shop wants to do this. First of all, it means that their fulfillment network is getting more robust. You know, like Tik Tok shop, if they didn't have that many distribution centers, how could they offer two or three day shipping? It also means that maybe they're seeing signals that more people are trusting Tik Tok shop. And so, you know, it would behoove them to offer this service. Uh the reason I mention this is because as we know, a lot of people who who like discover products on Tik Tok, what do they end up doing? They end up going to Amazon to to buy it. And so, your Tik Tok is sometimes not very profitable, but you don't care because all the money is coming to Amazon. All this means maybe more people if you start using fulfilled by Tik Tok and they have prime maybe more people just go ahead and buy natively on Tik Tok which again shouldn't affect your profitability. I'm sure whether the profit comes through Tik Tok or Amazon you don't care. You just want the profit, right? But this might be something interesting to look at. Is this Tik Tok Prime going to happen? Is are we going to see an increase? If so, you might need to start considering uh fulfilled by Tik Tok because I assume that would be the only way that you can get into this program. All right, next up, new feature from Helium 10. We have got a uh added functionality for our MCP. Um, and I've made a skill around it. All right, so now we've got the brand analytics full data. You can even look at it at the week instead of just by the month now. And also search performance. You can look at it at the week or month level. And I created a skill that I'm going to give you guys uh a way to to get this free skill for those of you who use the MCP. And basically, it's called the SQP Showdown Skill. It compares your search query performance data to Amazon brand analytics. So this is all using Helium 10, but it does stuff that's 100% Amazon data, right? So it's not like, oh, this is some estimation. I don't know if I can trust this. It's getting you what keywords are guaranteeing that you're it's generating sales from Amazon for you search performance. What keywords get sales for your competitors 100% confirmed by Amazon and comparing it and seeing where your gaps are. So I picked this hemp cream product. I said, "Hey, use this SQP showdown skill to compare my product with this other competitor product who's like out selling me 10 to one um on Amazon for this hemp pain cream." Right? And so it went ahead and and pulled it all. And then take a look uh here. You can see why they're out selling me 10 to one. Look at all of these keywords that that product is getting sales from. The other hemp cream, you can see stuff like pain relief cream that has 12,000 uh search volume. hip pain relief. Might not have thought. I don't even know if I'm It says right here, not index. Yeah, I don't have I probably don't have the word hip in my in my listing. It gave me another list of keywords where okay, I am ranking for it, but the competitors getting sales from it. They're ranked way ahead of mine. So, now in this sense, it's pulling in some Helium 10 data from like Cerebro to see where I'm ranking for and where the competitor is ranking for. So, it gives me this full report on what gaps on where my competitor is getting sales from. Again, not from Helium 10. This is direct from Amazon, the horse's mouth, and comparing to where I need to start taking action. If you guys want to get this uh skill, uh just comment if you're watching this on YouTube, uh type in MCP skill, and we'll go ahead and send it. I'm not sure how we would do it on YouTube. I guess we would put the link there. And for a bonus, if you guys want to get some more skills that even before I drip them out here on YouTube, find our Instagrams. All right. AM/PM podcast and Serious Sellers Podcast. Make sure to follow uh like the video once you see this one come up for our like reels and shorts and put in there MCP as a comment and we'll go ahead and slide into your DMs and send you a link to download even more skills. Next up, interesting update from Amazon and it's entitled link your carrier accounts to Amazon buy shipping. Now, Amazon buy shipping traditionally has been just where if you're doing fulfilled by merchant and somebody buys a product from you, you buy your shipping whether it's from USPS, UPS, FedEx, whatever from Amazon. The cool thing about that is you you get decent rates, right? But the other kind of like benefit is if you ship you with your own carrier back in the day and they lose it, you're on the hook for it, right? Like that's on you. You're fully responsible for that. You have to reimburse everything, right? it's on you, not Amazon. But when you use Amazon by shipping and something happens, it's on them, you know, because you're buying shipping from Amazon as opposed to from your own carrier. Now, the interesting thing is, you know, historically, maybe you didn't like to use Amazon buy shipping. If you're a big seller and you have tons of like benefits from your own carrier, you might get better rates than Amazon. And so, ah, it kind of sucked. you you were thinking like, do I use my shipping and save money or but be on the hook for if if the carrier loses it or do I use Amazon shipping, it costs more, but now I don't have to worry about, you know, late deliveries and stuff like that uh and getting pinged on my seller performance. Guess what, guys? If I'm reading this article correctly, it says here, if you self ship orders, you can now link your carrier accounts to Amazon buy shipping for any of these characters, USPS, UPS, uh, OnTrack, or DHL. So, that means you can use your own rates in Amazon buy shipping. And then here's the kicker, that means that Amazon somehow is on the hook. So, it's like you're using your own carrier, but because Amazon verified them and you're using the Amazon buy shipping, it means that Amazon is kind of on the hook, like if it if it's a late delivery or something like that, um that you're not going to get dinged on your on your performance. Uh you're if there's it's loss, you're not going to get dinged for it. So, this is kind of interesting. If if I'm reading this article correctly, you guys take a look at the the link below. And those of you who do seller fulfill shipping, let me know in the comments. Am I reading this correctly? Is that cuz that seems like it's too good to be true. almost like like what benefit is it for Amazon to to connect it um like that? So, so pretty interesting stuff. It could be like some incentive that Amazon is getting on the back end from UPS and and these other places. I'm not sure, but those of you who do uh FBM, make sure to check that out. All right. Have you guys changed your Amazon titles to have the 75 character title with 125 item highlights? You might start seeing it now out in the wild. We're still not sure 100% how the final thing is going to look, but it's interesting to take a look at some search results. All right? Like, for example, if you're uh searching collagen peptides on desktop, you might see this like I don't know what you call this, like up and down line. Uh there's there's a word for I can't think of the word. You guys probably know better than me. Put in the comments what what what's that word for like an up and down divider line in the in the title. But anyways, um you'll see here like it says black girl vitamins and then that line and then it has the rest. That means that black girl vitamins is the title and then the rest is the uh highlights. And then you see here sports research collagen peptides protein powder 2 lbs unflavored and then there goes that line and then the rest. So like take a look at how those look on the actual page. It's all together. So I'm not sure if this is how it's going to look. It's all the same, you know, on the title. It's all the same like size and font and everything for both of these products. Sports research. But here's the thing on mobile when you search. It's interesting now. You can actually see it divided more. Like for example, you see this vital proteins. You can see how it actually divides it into three. But here's the thing. Remember this was supposed to make the search results in mobile better. And I like kind of raised my initials flag, my BS flag. I'm like, I'm not sure because the mobile experience before was pretty good. But take a look at how it looks in the search results on mobile. You can see it. It puts out the um the brand name first, which is pretty cool. Sports research. And then it has a title, collagen peptides, protein powder, 2 lbs unflavored. So sure, that's great. That's all there. But then look, the item highlights is a little bit less, but it barely has any of those 125 characters. It says 11 grain grass-fed collagen per scoop. And then dot dot dot, it truncates it. Now, for those of you who remember when I first called this out on the Weekly Buzz a few weeks ago, and by the way, when you look on mobile, uh when you click on the actual listing, you could see the full title and the full 125 characters item highlights in a smaller font. But this was supposed to make the search experience better, right? Look back, you know, a couple couple months ago, guys, on the weekly buzz. You can see I had a video of how it looked on mobile. And look at this. You can actually see most of the title like and it was in bigger letters. So, I'm not sure this is much of an improvement because everything was in bold and and there was like three full lines of the title that you can see. Some of these you can have the entire title right here and the and the uh brand. Um, look at Manny's Mysterious Oddities right here. It has almost everything. But now it's almost truncated more. So again, I am not 100% sure that this is completely finalized how everything is going to uh be looking out there in the wild. This is almost a regression as a as opposed to a progression, right? So So take a look, guys. But for those of you who haven't changed your titles yet, number one, it's not the end of the world yet. Like Amazon is not forcing titles. As a matter of fact, they haven't even given you the pending. Remember, they they said, "Hey, we are going to uh give you a suggestion of what it should be, and then you have 14 days to accept it." I'm looking at one of my accounts where you can view pending listing changes and it's empty. Like in the Project X account, it's empty, meaning Amazon hasn't processed it, so they might be rolling it out. Let me know if you never change your titles yet uh after the 27th. Did you have a bunch of pending ones that Amazon's AI is going to do? It would be at the link that you see um in in on YouTube right here uh where where you can review listing changes. I have nothing there. So So again, if you haven't done it yet, don't fret. You've still got time even once Amazon gives you the suggestions. You have like 14 days to accept it. For those of you who haven't done it yet, don't forget listing builder guys, diamond members, go into Helium 10 listing builder at the very top. go into bulk optimize and you will be able to go ahead and import your listings and um it we will with AI optimize your listings in a way where you're not going to lose keyword coverage and you'll be able to sync all of your listings even if you got 100 200 300 plus thousand listings you'll be able to sync them with these new updates. Next up another article from Seller Central is entitled uh understand testing inspection and certification requirements. This is kind of important. Uh it talks about how there's products in certain categories now must be verified through their testing, inspection, and certification process. Like you in the past might have just been able to submit something from your factory, but in certain categories, you can't do that anymore. You have to either send the product to one of Amazon's certification facilities or send the documentation for verification. Guys, this is a real thing. I was uh in one of uh our accounts. It's not even really a toy product. It's like these learning cards and the the product has been delisted from Amazon. You get the dog page for the last like 3 weeks now because of this and I submitted the documentation, the certification cuz this is a legit product. They rejected it. You have to do it through Amazon's now. So, if you guys are in toys or or something that has kind of compliance, make sure you're checking you're checking. Hopefully, you have Helium 10 alerts on that you'll know if your product got suspended or not. Um, but there's a page in this article that's linked there where you can see if you have any compliance issues and there's no way around it now. Um, you have to use one of Amazon services and pay money unfortunately. So, I'll be trying that on on this one account. Let's see how it works. All right. Next up, we have a strategy of the week and it's going to be done by Carrie and it has to do with scheduling when you request a review. >> How to set a time range for when your follow-up emails get sent. Now, follow-up is a tool at Helium 10, and there are many tools like it, and so that's not unique. Our follow-up tool is meant to be able to automate emails. Um, you can also request reviews, which I actually don't re recommend where you write your own emails and request reviews because that's, you know, kind of iffy. Um, I actually like to use the request a review automation that follow-up has where it triggers the Amazon request a review where Amazon will actually go out and send a message to customers saying, "Hey, would you like to leave a review for this product?" and it gives them a link and it's 100% Amazon terms of service compliant. So again, that functionality is not that unique. Okay. However, the one thing that Helium 10 has that nobody else has is a scheduled feature in Helium 10 follow-up. Uh so if you're setting an automation for sending out the request review, like for example, I say here any product that has a discount of less than 30%. Um, me personally, I don't like sending request reviews to heavy discounted sales because I don't want Amazon somehow trying to say that, oh, this is an incentivized review. So, that's why I set that filter. I say, hey, after the order has placed, wait 12 days. But now, what you can do is you can actually say, you know what, most of my customers are on the East Coast or on PST or I don't want Amazon just to choose when they're going to send this message out. And they send it maybe in the middle of the night and the customer never gets it. So, I want to make sure that these messages go out between 9:00 a.m. Pacific and 5:00 p.m. Pacific, or I can select other date ranges or time ranges. So, this is pretty unique. Um, all levels of Helium 10 actually have access to follow-up. So, first of all, if you don't have this activated, you're leaving money on the table because you're not getting the number of reviews that you could be getting. But, a way to even optimize this more is to um set this and maybe you don't know when is the optimized time. So, run a test like for 2 months where you set it from 5:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. and see how many reviews you get and then compare it to how many you get um by doing this another 2 months at a different time. So, you can say maybe the next time you do 5:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. and then whatever works better, try and go with that time. So, there's a lot of different flexibility you can have here. But again, unless you are just one by one clicking it in seller central to request a review at a certain time of day, the only way you can actually set the time is by using Helium 10. >> All right, thank you very much, Carrie. Uh, last news article of the week, something that kind of slid under the radar um in your product opportunity explorer in Amazon. It's something called validate product ideas. All right, so everybody has access to this in seller central. Once you hit that, it goes to a validate a new product idea page, and you enter in bullet points, description, title, and it basically gives you an analysis of, hey, how would this product do? And and I I I what I did was I copied uh one of these uh hemp roll-on products just to like kind of like say, you know, how it would do. This is the number one hemp roll-on product already on Amazon, like the highest seller. So, I was just curious, what would it say about the viability of it? And as with all new things AI with Amazon, sometimes it's not great. That's fine, but there's actually some cool use cases. It gave me a full breakdown here. Uh, and it's saying, "Hey, this is a pain reliever market," which is the first mistake. It should not be comparing it to pain reliever. It should be comparing it to only the hemp uh pain reliever. But it has a lot of information here. It says consider a lower price point. Obviously, that's wrong. We are the number one seller at our price point. So, whatever, you know, thing it was using was wrong. It also didn't even talk too much about the hemp. So, number one, I wouldn't use this to to validate a new product idea. You guys have enough data points through Helium 10 and other places that actually do work. That's good. However, that being said, without selling a product, you can now get access to Amazon data points like customer demographics, seasonal patterns, potentially market segment share. Usually, you can't get this unless you're already selling in a niche and you actually have gotten data. right now you have access to that category data potentially. So this would be something to look at like you you haven't sold in a niche. Put your whole listing in here. See if it opens up any kind of like data points that you don't normally have access to in your seller central. And I think this could be kind of great to to to kind of use and let's just see. You know, again, Amazon hasn't even announced this, I don't think, yet. So I'm sure it's being tested. I'm sure the AI is going to get better. But but take a spin. Go to your seller central. uh go to growth and then go to product opportunity explorer and you'll see it right there at the top. All right guys, thank you very much for tuning in to this week's buzz. Make sure to tune in next week to see what's buzzing. First one from our friend Annie at Stupid Hiccups.