#545 - TikTok Shop USA Booming and New EU Packaging Policy | Weekly Buzz 8/13/26

Tik Tok shop USA sales are booming. There's some new regulations for packaging if you're selling in Europe. The most asked for tool for MCP for Helium 10 is now available. 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, guys. Let's go ahead and hop right into the news. First story is from net influencer.com and it's entitled Tik Tok shops US GMV nearly doubles to 11.8 billion in H1 of 2026. All right. So this is not Tik Tok shop overall. This is just US. All right. So doubling in the first half of this year you know shows that hey business is actually booming on Tik Tok shop US. Now, as a whole, Tik Tok Shop globally is on track to hit $100 billion of GMV for 2026, according to the article. Now, it says that the largest markets for Tik Tok shop are US and Southeast Asia. However, Mexico and Brazil have growth that beat expectations. Now, what about how sales are made on the platform? What kind of changes have there been? According to this article, it says that the uh shop tabs share of attributed GMV rose from 36% to 51% over this period and live narrowed to 8.2%. How many seven figure sellers on Tik Tok shop? More than 5,700 million sellers on the platform. How many seven figure sellers just in the first half of this year alone? more almost 6,000 stores cross a million dollars in GMV, which is 8x year-over-year and 500 of those actually already hit 8 figures, $10 million or more. So, what does all this mean, guys? If you're not selling on Tik Tok shop yet, you should get on there. Is it too late to sell? Of course not. You know, Tik Tok shop is in its infancy compared to Amazon. This is kind of like Amazon 10 years ago. But guys, Tik Tok shop sales keep increasing. And even if you're not trying to necessarily get profit on Tik Tok shop, you're just trying to get exposure, it's working great. People are able to get different individuals aware of their brand and their products who might never have discovered their products before. And where do these people end up buying? Sure, some of them buy on Tik Tok shop. Uh, a lot are also buying on Amazon, which is going to help your Amazon profitability. So again, use the Helium 10 tools to, you know, research your products on Tik Tok shop, migrate your Amazon listings uh over and maybe even connect it to the MCF so you can start fulfilling your first orders through uh Amazon multi-channel fulfillment. Speaking of different marketplaces, let's talk about Amazon Europe. Here's an article from scmp.com entitled Why China's traders, e-commerce merchants feel boxed in by new EU packaging rules. All right, so from Belgium or Brussels, there's new rules that have been aimed at reducing packaging waste. Now, you guys might be wondering, hey, you know, how in the world does this concern me? Wh why why is this even a story? The story says on Wednesday the EU's packaging and packaging waste regulation that doesn't make any sense. Why is it called packaging and packaging like anyways it says the the acronym is PPRW. So yeah packaging twice whatever the PPRW became applicable across the block. Now basically this sets requirements for all packaging that is on the EU market obviously including Amazon. It covers chemical restrictions, recyclability, producer responsibility, and other compliance obligations. Now, this these new rules cover everything from the type of, you know, shrink wrap that you're using to package stuff that you're importing to EU. It covers the type of bubble wrap uh you're using, um, you know, plastic bottles. And this has to do with a wide variety of uh categories as well, including electronics, auto parts, medical devices, and more. All right, so this is something that if you're importing products to EU, you should start googling some of this new PPRW uh and see if any of these rules apply to you and what you're importing and if like maybe the kind of packaging, you know, could potentially be blocked. It says that exporters could face fines, custom blocks, and the withdrawal or ban of packaging or packaged products from the EU market if they are found to be non-compliant. All right, so guys, uh, check this out and see if this affects you. Now, next up is a new feature alert, and this is probably the most anticipated one of our recent MCP launches. As soon as the Helium 10 MCP came out, what everybody was asking me is, "Hey, when will you have MCP for X-ray?" And the answer in a nutshell is never. You know, X-Ray is a Chrome extension. It's not something for the MCP. That being said, basically what you guys were looking for is now here. Is it X-ray MCP? No. It's actually called Blackbox Niche MCP, but it's kind of the same thing. Something completely unique to Helium 10. How does it work? Let me show you. Blackbox Niche is a tool that has been in Helium 10 forever. Basically, you enter in a keyword and you get all of the search results as it looks on Amazon, but with all the details, but it's inside of Helium 10. So now, what you can do is you can enter in, you know, like 10, 15, 20 keywords to Claude and get X-ray level information. Let me go ahead and enter in like five keywords here to Claude and show you how this works. Now, what I just entered here into Claude was five keywords. coffin shelf, coffin bathmat, coffin mirror, gothic decor, and Halloween party supplies. And then I said, "Hey, first take these keywords. Uh, tell me the search volume for each of these. And then also of the top 20 organic results, you know, I can go top 50, top 100." Again, this is kind of like what X-ray gives you, right? For the top 20 organic results for each using Blackbox niche, what the total sales are for those top 20 products. How many listings have more than $5,000 of sales in the last 30 days? And then going to the top 10 products, how many of them have less than 150 reviews? So, this is even like better than what people were wanting for MCP for X-ray because this is not something that you can just filter out easily when you're using the Chrome extension. So, let's see what uh Claude says using the Helium 10 MCP. And take a look. We've got the results right here. It gave me this little chart. uh shows me the search volume. Halloween party supplies is is in the lead at 15,000. Total sales, we can see, hey, uh there's definitely kind of heavy. The coffin bathmat, Halloween party supplies, you can see the total revenue. It's in the millions of dollars for a couple of these for the top 20 products. Uh how many listings greater than $5,000 worth of sales? It's showing me uh Coffin Shelf is actually the least. And then how many of the top 10 that have less than 150 reviews? Halloween party supplies only has one, but coffin mirror has eight. All right, so these were just a sample of the kind of things I can ask it. But again, this is what everybody was asking for. Uh, which is, hey, we want to see basically X-ray level data and be able to search it so that I don't have to go one by one on X-ray. So, this is something that I want you guys to to play with. Just trigger it by saying, "Hey, blackbox niche uh with the MCP." Guys, if you haven't tried out Helium 10's MCP yet, make sure to, you know, give it a try. Give it a spin. I can give you guys a deal for up to six months, 20% off using the code SSP uh 20. All right. And by the way, guys, usually we do like a new feature alert, just one, maybe two. The last couple of weeks, Helium 10's developers have been just going buck wild, it seems, uh, on things. And I've got over 10 new features just released this week alone. So, this is just one of them. If you want the rest of it, make sure to subscribe to AM PM podcast. We'll do the other 10 on a special episode this Friday or Saturday. There will be plenty of other stuff including like index checker now available in keyword tracker available in the MCP. Uh, real time sales data for your Tik Tok shop account, AWD inventory, Walmart inventory data, the list goes on and on. tons tons of new things that are are were the top things that were asked for by you guys. Uh, make sure to check out that special episode this Saturday, AM/PM podcast. Subscribe on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcast or wherever you're listening to this on. Next story, it's something that was released this week from about Amazon.com. All right, this is one of Amazon's websites. Interesting. It's it's talking about Doug Harrington, who who's the CEO of Amazon's uh worldwide stores. I think these were like excerpts from I guess he's got his own podcast or something or is it an Amazon podcast, but it's interesting. He's got some interesting points, but there's a couple of contradictions here. All right, let me just explain it. All right, so so first of all, you know, now first of all, if the head of Amazon's global worldwide stores is saying something, of course, you got to listen to it. All right, and that's why I'm read this article. But he's talking about like how there have been big shifts in retail. And that's 100% correct. He says here, hey, he has a 1910 Sears catalog to talk about, you know, how different back in the day shopping was. And I don't know about you guys, I know I'm aging myself here. I remember those Sears cataloges and and those other J C Penney catalogs and and we'd break it out. There would be like thousands of products in there and we'd get those every month and we just, you know, look through and maybe order some stuff. Obviously, Amazon and the search bar completely changed things. you know, we're not still using those big cataloges today. But here's the thing in this article, he's kind of inferring that we're we're in the midst of another big change now, maybe away from the search bar. He says here, "Hey, I feel like at some point you have so much selection and we need a kind of new technology to make it possible for customers to find the best products." and he says that technology is conversational AI now available to customers as Alexa for shopping. His guest on the podcast then who also from Amazon an executive there said I really believe that we're headed into a world where more and more customers are going to type whatever they want and we've got to do something helpful with it. Interestingly despite saying that the kind of examples they're talking about about how people are using Alexa it's not about product discovery. You know, they talks about, "Hey, where are my AA batteries?" You would ask Alexa, of course, like, "Hey, where's my shipment at?" That's pretty cool. That's a great use case for Alexa. Has nothing to do with discovering products, right? It says more complex questions like the difference between a regular coffee machine and a cold brew machine. You can ask Alexa 100%. I've used Alexa for shopping uh like that. Again, it's not about finding a product like an inherent shift in the way that people search. It talks about taking a picture of his fridge and asking Alexa for shopping to suggest a weekly grocery order. I mean, people weren't using necessarily just the regular Amazon for groceries. So, being able to take a picture and and ask stuff. Sure, I'm sure, you know, people might start using it like that. They even make a bold statement here saying, "Hey, we're going to look back 5 years from now and say, hey, the house is reordering its regular supplies for itself, and we're going to think that's totally normal. Right now, it seems like science fiction." and he says, "I don't know exactly how it's all going to play out, but I'm holding it all lightly for how the future could unfold." Now, this is interesting because on one hand, they're not going out and just saying, "Hey, there has been a big shift and now people are discovering products." If you listen to people on LinkedIn and other places for the last 2 years, you would think that there has been a big shift. Guys, Alexa and Rufus has been around for 2 and 1/2 years. Have we seen a shift in people using keywords to search initially for a product? It's been 2 and a half years. We have not seen any decline in search volume for keywords with the data from Amazon. We did a report on this a few weeks ago that that shows the data. This article was released this week, the same time, almost the same day, another article was released in Seller Central. It's linked to below. It's entitled, "Optimize your listings with built-in seller central tools." It says, "Discover how customers search for your products." Is Alexa mentioned at all here? No. It says, "The search query performance dashboard shows you the exact terms customers type when looking for products like yours. Weave these insights into your titles, bullet points, blah blah blah." So again, guys, there Amazon knows people are still using search terms. Stop listening to nonsense out there that, oh, nobody's finding products through keywords or there's been a big reduction in the number of people use keywords. It's just conversational AI is where it's at. People are absolutely using conversational AI. I use it on a weekly basis or even more. But it's not about discovery. You need to optimize still just as much today as you did last year, 2 years ago, 3 years ago for search terms. Now, on top of that, you need to make sure you're optimized for people who are comparing products, you know, using Alexa and different things like that. But even Amazon itself is not putting out information that's trying to infer that the entire game has changed. Nobody knows. All right. Uh this Amazon executive says, "Hey, maybe in 5 years we're going to be in a completely different world and your own devices at home are ordering for you." I mean, people are just throwing out random ideas. That could be true, but again, we're talking like 5 years from now. So, stop trying to change your habits because of what doomsday people out there say on on LinkedIn and things. Wait until actual changes happen. Amazon gives sellers tons of data. We are going to know when there is a big shift in how people discover their products. Right now, guys, we don't see that yet. Next up, let's go for our strategy of the week. Here's a very unique thing that you can only do with Helium 10. Uh, and I call it the zombie listing hunter. >> How to discover products that other Amazon sellers have given up on. We like to call this method the zombie listing hunter. And now that's not an official term, but what we consider a zombie listing is a listing that is dead on Amazon. So maybe the seller went out of business. Maybe the seller is out of stock. Maybe the seller just gave up on the product and stopped selling it. Now, why would this be interesting to you? Well, you might find product opportunity this way. Like maybe somebody was just crushing it and then for whatever reason they had to stop selling on Amazon and nobody picked up that demand because it was a pretty unique product, right? So this is how you can find that. Here in Helium 10 blackbox under products there is a button that says find out of stock products and Helium 10 is the only tool that can do this. So for example I'm looking here in the home and kitchen category. I'm saying hey when this out of stock product was in stock for that year whatever year it was in stock it had at least you know 500 units of sales. I'm just throwing random numbers here. You guys can do whatever works for you. And then I say hey when was this listing last active? It's inactive right now. So, when was it last active? I put here a range of February 2025 to like March of 2026. And then I say, you know what, I'm looking for a new coffin, you know, kind of product for my spooky brand. I put in title keywords coffin. And there are tons and tons of other filters I could use. But once I hit that, now I get a result and there's 10 items that have come up here. So, there's something here that's interesting, a coffin zen garden. And as you can see, this product is out of stock. Pretty interesting looking product. It's well reviewed. When did it go out of stock? Well, I can look at the BSR history here. Look, it went out of stock like all the way back in August of 2025. Now, how was it selling when it was out of stock? Well, actually a,000 units. So, they gave up on this product, right? Here's another one. Look at this coffin makeup shelf. This product was doing $30,000. All right. And now, if you click on it, they have been out of stock. You see it's completely out of stock. You would never be able to find this product on your own. And it's been out of stock for let's just take a look like looks like over a year this product has been selling. You know, it was selling hundreds and thousands of units even now completely out of stock for whatever reason. And actually because of Bradley finding this product, he actually did a launch of a coffin makeup shelf. and he was able to go into historical cerebro, look at all of the products, old keywords it was getting sales from back in the day, and he launched a new coffin makeup shelf product that's being launched right now and taking advantage of why this seller just giving up on this product. Um, now obviously you have to be careful because who knows the reason why some sellers give up. Maybe there was a patent issue. You should do your due diligence and make sure there's no issues like that. But in this case, Bradley was able to use this tool to find a product that a seller gave up on, take advantage of that and all of the previous research and all his advertising data and be able to launch his own product without having to completely ideulate something brand new, something that was, you know, proven to sell. So, this zombie hunter or this out of stock listing finder, guys, only available on Helium 10. So, use it to find some cool product opportunity. >> Getting back to Amazon again from about Amazon.com. Something that might not affect a lot of you, but it's kind of interesting. Says Amazon expands locker network to more than 750 US college locations. So those lockers are kind of like where you can go and pick up Amazon packages. Like you know sometimes you can't get stuff directly to your door like in college dorms, but they have these lockers uh near dorms, right, where college students can just go and you know go to one of the lockers where you know the Amazon tells you where your product is. You just go there and pick it up. So this is interesting. 750 uh college locker locations on 500 campuses. Okay. And then there's this other program I didn't even know about. It says high school education students 18 to 24 years old can sign up for this new program called Prime for young adults and enjoy Prime savings at 50% the cost. So I I just mentioned this because it's interesting how Amazon is expanding to this. And so, hey, are you an Amazon seller that is, you know, selling products that are good for dorms or for college students, things like that? you might want to look into, you know, doing some AMC advertising for audiences or some perhaps uh brand tailored promotions or, you know, some kind of discount program or something that targets potentially college students uh or gets on their radar a little bit more because now they might be even uh more incentivized to order from you because of this uh new locker network that is around. I might have to do that for one of my coffin shelves, you know, like I can see college students, some Gothic college students perhaps wanting a coffin shelf on their wall. Who knows? Or maybe one of my bat-shaped uh bath mats for their dorm bathroom. We'll see. But guys, just a little kind of like fun uh fact. Amazon is still finding new ways in order to get products to customers, certain aspects of customers uh faster and more efficiently. All right, guys. That's it for the news this week. Don't forget to tune in Saturday for a special 10 brand new strategies from Helium 10 uh here on the AMM podcast. And we'll see you next Thursday on this show so that you can see what's buzzing.