#553 - Live Shopping Doubles! & Amazon Changes Seller Insurance Requirements | Weekly Buzz 9/10/26

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. I'm not wearing my regular Weekly Buzz outfit because I'm actually recording this live in our Helium 10 China uh office. I forgot to bring my Weekly Buzz shirt for those watching on YouTube. But there's a number of news articles. Nothing completely earthshattering today, but let's go ahead and hop into the news. So, this first article is from CNBC and it's entitled, "Live stream shopping is gaining steam in the US thanks to apps like Tik Tok and whatnot." Now guys, if on the weekly buzz I had a dollar for every time we had an article like this over the last two years, I would be a rich person right now because they always keep saying, "Hey, is live stream taking?" And until now, the answer has been no, not yet. But let's take a look at what this article says. The US live stream shopping industry is forecast to reach nearly 20 billion in sales this year, more than double that of 2024. Now, of course, guys, compared to China, it is nothing, right? You know, like they probably do this in less than a month in China, but doubling is a significant, you know, thing that I think we should be uh thinking about. It says like apps like Tik Tok and whatnot are drawing more live sellers and creating spaces for likeminded consumers. Now, here uh CNBC was interviewing this company called Beachwaver. says, "Hey, we did about $8,000 of sales in the first 4 hours of a Tik Tok live stream in late July selling curling iron." Beachwaver uh does about a million dollars in Tik Tok shop sales so far, and it says 25% of it actually comes from live selling. So, yes, for some sellers, it is actually working uh a lot better. Now, I just mentioned China probably does uh that much in a month. Actually, take a look at these numbers. According to the article here, it says Alibaba introduced Tao Live in China 2016. Within 5 years, the market crossed 50 billion and it's projected to top $1 trillion in 2026. So again, America is definitely a lot farther behind, but we can see some growth and I think it's going to exponentially grow in the future. So, if you guys haven't been considering live selling on Tik Tok shop, we have some training materials in Helium 10 uh that will help you uh with some examples from some uh Tik Tok shop sellers who are very successful on live such as Jared Mortonson and others. All right, next article is actually from Seller Central and it's an update to insurance requirements. As you know, a few years ago, Amazon made it requirement that Amazon sellers all had to have commercial liability insurance, but now there's going to be some new rules starting November 2nd. Uh, take a look at some of these rules. It says starting November 2nd, we're going to have a new rule that first of all, of course, you know, you already knew that if you uh have sales at least $10,000 in any month, um, you have to have commercial liability insurance within 30 days. And the minimum coverage is 1 million per occurrence and in the aggregate. But it says now there's going to be two new additional requirements. It says first sellers with products listed in categories with enhanced safety listing requirements now have to have commercial liability insurance policy that covers those products. Again, a minimum coverage of $1 million. So, it sounds like regardless of the sales of the $10,000 sales, you have to have uh insurance. There there it goes right here. It says regardless of this $10,000 sale. This applies to both new and existing listings. What are some of these uh categories? Children's products, cosmetics, ingestible products, lithium battery uh products, etc. There's a full list in the comments or in the the link below where you can see if yours is going to qualify for this. Second, sellers based in China now must get their insurance through the Amazon Insurance Accelerator program. All right, so starting November 2nd, they are going to reject any submitted insurance policies from China that are not obtained through this AIA. So, if you are a Chinese seller and you had submitted some insurance before November 2nd, you can continue to use it, but until it expires, but after it expires, you're going to have to switch to an AIA approved insurance vendor. All right, next up, we've got some new feature alerts from Helium 10. The first one doesn't have anything to do AI. Let's talk about these Walmart ones first. Now, there's Walmart's profits. All right. So, before we didn't have that much information like as far as your profitability goes and your number of orders and things, but now if if you connect your Walmart token to Helium 10, you go into profits, change your dashboard to Walmart, you're going to be able to see your sales, your orders, units sold, your profitability, as long as you have COGS in, etc., etc. So, make sure to update your COGS in Walmart and start checking your profitability day by day. Another thing that we have updated for Walmart and this has to do with the MCP, the Helium 10 MCP. For example, here I'm using Claude and I wrote a prompt here. I said, "Show me the keywords that Walmart product and I put the ID is ranking for in the top 20 organic positions." All right. So, what is this? This is basically running Cerebro for Walmart. That's not new, but it's new in the MCP. So, again, Helium 10 MCP, you can now do your keyword research on Walmart right here in the app. And then it tells me which keywords you're ranking for, number of competitor products, and it gives you some analytics as well. In addition, another MCP update has to do with Helium 10 ads. I can talk about or ask Claude or Chat GBT about my budget usage, like my budget utilization, like am I using too much of my budget? Am I using not enough? Am I running out of budget? So, for example, I used a prompt here, how well did I use my ad budget in the last 30 days? Actually, that probably is too broad because it's like it's Claude went deep and it's telling me, hey, this is how much I spend and this is how much my ad sales and rorowaz. So guys, probably you should prompt a little bit better than than I did here. But it actually answered my question here at the bottom and says, hey, on pacing accountwide utilization reads 42%. But so so again, it means that I'm not maxing out my budget. What you'd be want to be looking at is, hey, am I maxing out my budget early in the day? analyze say, "Hey, show me the campaigns where I have hit my budget limit before the day ends." And now you you might need to go in there and increase your budget, which again you can do in Helium 10, say, "Hey, increase my budget by 20%." On the campaigns where I have exceeded my budget. So, so now guys, the new thing again, Helium 10 ads, you can start getting your detailed budget uh history from your advertising accounts in Amazon. Next story here is from Seller Central and it's entitled, "Your account health rating now rewards great customer service." Obviously, as Amazon sellers, we all want to keep our account health rating high. We know that we uh can do that by, you know, making sure that we're delivering on time and not getting a lot of bad seller feedback. Remember, this can affect your buy box. But now, this article says, "Hey, there's now a reward for strong customer service on fulfilled by merchant orders." So, if you guys are doing fulfilled by merchant orders, um you are going to be able to get more points for your customer service score. It says here, you can now earn up to 12 AHR account health rating points based on your performance across three uh metrics. Number one, if your buyer contact rate is below 050%. That means the number of people who have asked for a refund or a replacement. Number two, your average contact response time is less than 12 hours. Now, this is important. Before, you would only get docked if you go over 24 hours, but now you can actually get points and helps your health rating if you can reply in under 12 hours. Uh, next one is if your buyer dissatisfaction rate is below 4.5%. All right. So, if those of you uh who may not have that great of uh account health rating, here are three different ways that you can get bonus points to increase your account health rating. Next up, our strategy of the week is by Carrie and it's a video about how you can do keyword research without even going into Helium 10. You can do it directly from the Amazon store. Carrie, take it away. >> How to see instantly what some of the top keywords in the search results are on Amazon. As you guys know, of course, you could use the Helium 10 reverse AS tool, Cerebro. You can enter an AS or a group of asens and see what the top keywords are. But maybe you're just browsing on Amazon, right? Maybe you're shopping on Amazon. You see a niche that's interesting and you're like, "Hey, this looks like an interesting product. I don't want to have to go and run it through Cerebro and then look at all the top keywords. Can I just get a quick look and a quick idea on what the top keywords are for the search results on a specific product?" And this is how one of the only ways you can do this is through Helium 10. So here I'm in the search results of this search uh cursive handwriting groove. And so what I can do on this page is I just hit this button here, top keywords. All right. And this opens up X-ray keywords. And now this tells me what are some of the top keywords for these top products on this page just in seconds without having to run a reverse as tool or open up Helium 10 or anything. So, let's say I clicked into one of these products. I'm like, hey, this product is doing pretty well. It's sold about 237 units over the last 30 days. I'm just, you know, I really quickly, without having to go to Cerebro, what are the top keywords that are driving sales for this product? We'll run the same tool to see the top keywords on X-ray keywords on the actual listing. And there you have it. Here are the top keywords that are probably driving sales. If I want to change the settings, I can be like, you know what, I only want to see where it's ranked from 1 to 10. I only want to see keywords that are about a thousand search volume, etc. So, that's another feature that you're able to use. So, everyone, this is a very cool tool for you to just be able to instantly see what are the top money-making keywords on Amazon without having to hop into Helium 10, without having to use an outside tool. So, it will tell you some of the top keywords in seconds with this Chrome extension, X-ray keywords. Okay, thank you Carrie for that. Uh, next up, back to Seller Central, a news article. It's entitled prime big deal days deals deadline extended. That is a crazy title, guys. I'm reading that word for word. Anyways, it says, "Hey, the deal sourcing window has been extended to September 22nd, giving you more time." So, um, this allows you to still apply for, you know, the coupons and and the, you know, deals of the day, etc., etc. the before the deadline was going to be earlier, but now you have until September 22nd to do that for prime big deal days. Next up, some new tools in the Helium 10 MCP. All right, the first one is kind of cool. It's the frequently bought together history. This is kind of exclusive to Helium 10. Uh you want to be able to see, hey, what are all the products that have been showing up in frequently bought together in my pro in in my product or maybe even your competitor product? Why would you use this? Well, for one reason might be, hey, I want to find new targets for um sponsored product as targeting campaigns or sponsored display campaigns, right? Um or maybe, hey, you you want to find products that could be potential line item extensions or potential bundling. There's a lot of different reasons why you would want to see a history of who is the frequently bought together. When you look on an Amazon page, you usually only can see two or three products, but Helium 10 has the history. So, here's what you do in the MCP. I can say, "Show me the frequently bought together history." And then enter in the AS. So, here I entered in our coffin shelf. And look at the results that it gave me. It says, "Here, there are uh 26 observations between October of last year." I mean, this thing goes way back in history and August of this year, and here are eight distinct ones. You know, I can I can ask it for the full list, but here here are bat shelf floating shelves. Um, here's a spiderweb floating shelf. Here's a coffin wall hooks for keys, bat wall decals. So, it shows me when it was frequently bought together, like when um, Helium 10 noted this, and uh, what is the window that it was in and what the price is. So these first of all are great targets for my product targeting ads because this is not Helium 10 suggesting oh maybe people buy this product with this product. This is direct from Amazon because if Amazon puts something and frequently bought together it is telling you a customer bought this coffin shelf together with this bat decals or this spiderweb shelf. Right? So it's not like you're guessing uh is do people buy this together? No. So if you what I would will do I want to target these other asens with my product and show up right there on the page because there's a lot better chance I can get sales showing up on the page since I already know that people buy these products together. So that's something new that is in our MCP get the history right from Claude or Chat GBT. Some other new things I'm not going to show you here on the screen, but that you can ask uh the Helium 10 MCP is maybe you want a history of the cost per click or PPC bid uh of a of a product. All right, you can do that. You can search for that. Hey, are you somebody who looks at the search frequency rank that is from Amazon brand analytics? So maybe that's something you're tracking. You can actually ask MCP now for the complete search frequency rank history of any keyword in the Amazon database. You can also now get the Helium 10 keyword sales history. So, you know how we have search volume uh history, but there's also a keyword sales. In other words, the estimated number of sales that a keyword uh generated in a certain week. You can now see the history of that in the MCP, right? So you could kind of like say, "Hey, overlay the history of search volume to the sales over the last 6 months and show me in a graph like like did the conversion rate go up or down?" These are pretty cool things that you can now do with the Helium 10 MCP. Another thing is in alerts. All right, so maybe you don't have your products activated in alerts. Guys, I highly highly recommend activating all of your products in Helium 10 alerts because you might have somebody steal your buy box. Amazon might change your image. Somebody might change your title. Your dimensions might change. There's many things you want to track in Helium 10 alerts. But maybe you have like 500 SKs and you don't want to one by one activate it. Now do it all at once with the MCP in Helium 10. Say, "Hey, please activate Helium 10 alerts for all of my SKs that are in the US marketplace or something." And now instead of clicking one by one in Helium 10, you can activate it for all of your products. So that's something new that you can now do in the MCP as well. So guys, if you haven't started using the Helium 10 MCP and you've got the diamond plan, make sure to connect right now. We're adding new things you can do every single week as you can see. All right, next article from Seller Central. It's entitled create coupons with fewer steps. Uh it says, "The updated coupon creation experience in Seller Central saves your progress, shows a live preview, and lets you reuse past steps." All right, so here is what's different in the coupon creation. Number one, it says pick up where you left off. All right. So, if you close your browser or get interrupted, your draft will be there. Before, if you accidentally close your browser, you lose all of your work. Number two, it says review before you submit. Uh, so there's going to be a full summary now of your coupon configuration, uh, including every product included in the promotion, so you can catch the errors before they go live. Number three update from Amazon is you can clone previous coupons. All right, so if you create a similar coupon, you don't want to have to create it all over again. you can now reuse your past inputs as a starting point instead of starting from scratch. So, especially if you guys are doing something for prime big deal days coming up. Um, take a look at these things if you're somebody who does a lot of coupons, you can now create the coupons with a little bit more ease. All right, last article of the day is Tik Tok shop opens crossborder sales between EU and UK. So, for those of you who are selling in Europe, this is an interesting update. With the launch of Sell Across Europe, the platform evolved into a panuropean marketplace, enabling sellers to reach consumers in 12 European countries. But now sellers in Belgium, Germany, France, Ireland, Italy, and the Netherlands, Poland, and Spain will soon be able to offer their products to shoppers in the United Kingdom. So, I guess before maybe to sell on Tik Tok shop UK, you had to have a UK based entity. But now, if you're based in these other countries, you will be able to uh to do it. Uh it says a pilot for selected EU sellers will start on September 21st, followed by a broader roll out on October 19th. So, if you guys want more information, you're a European-based company, you want to see, are you now eligible without having a UK entity to sell on Tik Tok shop, take a look at this article and then reach out to Tik Tok Shop if you have more questions. All right, guys, that's it for the news this week. Thank you for tuning in here from China. I'll be back uh next week or Carrie will be back next week, so make sure to tune in to see what's buzzing.