#647 – Remote Fulfillment Credits and Amazon Pricing Hack | Weekly Buzz 3/12/25

#647 – Remote Fulfillment Credits and Amazon Pricing Hack | Weekly Buzz 3/12/25 Bradley Sutton: Amazon is giving sellers a credit for FBA. Another Chinese marketplace is gaining market share. There's a new way to make money with Helium 10. 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 Serious Sellers 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, TikTok shop, and e-commerce world. We give you training tips of the week, and we let you know what new features that Helium 10 has that'll give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Let's see what's buzzing. This is kind of slim pickings, guys, for news articles. I was looking at the news articles that the team prepared. I'm like, what? This is it? There's not much going on. So let's go ahead and hop into it to see. There's a couple of interesting things I want to point out that I think affect sellers out there. So make sure to stay to the end because we've got some cool strategies also at the end. So the first news article of the day is actually from Seller Central and it is entitled New Return Credits for Remote Fulfillment with FBA. And basically what this says is it says, starting March 25th, 2025, we're going to provide you with credits So this is kind of a break from the normal. What's the news that we've been having lately from Amazon? It's, hey, we've got a new fee. No, no, we're going to actually get credits. And this is for return fees for items that are sold and returned. Through the remote fulfillment with FBA, that's for like Mexico and Brazil. All right. So as you guys know, we've talked about this program before. Remote fulfillment is how you can have your inventory in Amazon, FBA, USA. Right. And then just turn on your listings in Mexico and Brazil. And customers there will see it. And then if they order it, it's actually going to be shipped from the U.S. FBA warehouse, right? Well, I guess I didn't realize this. There are some extra fees that sellers are having to pay for if there's actual returns. But now you are going to get credit for it, according to this article from Amazon. It says, this update ensures that you will pay the same fulfillment fees for returns, whether through U.S. FBA or remote fulfillment with FBA will issue credits within 30 days. After a return, this will probably be something that our Helium 10 tool MRS is going to have to check in to make sure Amazon is doing these returns. But there, if you guys were upset about the amount of kind of like fees in some of your returns from these marketplaces, it looks like you're going to get some credit. Next article is actually something that was geared towards Amazon buyers, but I wanted to bring out a certain point. This article was entitled How To Get Free Delivery On Amazon. And so obviously that's talking to people who are potentially Prime or not Prime members. It has some data here that says more than 300 million items are available with free Prime delivery in the US. Let me scroll down here. It says prime is $14.99 a month. I didn't realize you could do it my month, but this is the part that's interesting right here. It says if you're not a prime member, you can get free delivery by spending at least $35 per order in the Amazon store. Now, this is something I just want to use as a reminder. I've told you guys a lot of times before that me, for my listings, I list everything FBA and also FBM. And part of the reason why I list things FBM is because unless it's $35, I think before it used to be $30 a threshold, but what happens is Amazon will put a surcharge for shipping. So let's say my coffin shelf is $30 on Amazon. If there's a customer out there that doesn't have Prime, they see it's $30, they add it to the cart, it actually adds whatever the shipping is, $10, let's just say. So now all of a sudden that $30 coffin shelf becomes $40 and you might lose that sale because now that's priced out of that range. So that's one of the reasons I've always said, hey guys, if you have your own warehouse or your ability to do it, Put your products duly listed so that the customers who see it FBM, they see the $30 because I can kind of like deliver for the same price that Amazon does because I'm not having to pay to ship it to Amazon. But now, if I have an FBM listing for $30 or even $31, a customer adds that to the cart. First of all, that $30, that'll probably be in the buy box. And then when the customer adds it to the cart, the price is $30 or $31. There's no shipping added. So now I turned that customer who might have just forgotten about my product if he had to pay $40, he's going to be my customer and go ahead and hopefully check out at that $30 or $31 price. So just remember, if you're priced below $35, just keep that in mind that especially if you're like $34, $33, $34, Some of you might even want to go up to 35 if you think that you have a lot of customers who don't have Prime and might want to order FBA or even FBM or FBA. Next article is going back to Seller Central. It's an article that says, New Recommended Product Groups for Ships and Product Packaging Program. All right, so this is something that we talked about on the Weekly Buzz last year where you can get like a little bit of a break on your shipping fees. If you tell Amazon, hey, go ahead and ship my product and whatever it is. So that means if I have my coffin shelf in a cardboard box and I feel comfortable with them not having to put that into another box, well, I enroll in this program and then Amazon just sticks like a shipping label on my actual box and they don't put it in their own Amazon box. So take a look at this article in Seller Central if you think that's interesting to you and you'll see some of the new things that talks about like about variations and things like that. But heads up, in a couple of weeks I'm actually going to be interviewing I'm one of the leads of this ships and product packaging department at Amazon and they're going to talk all about this program and then you'll see, hey, is it worth it for you? But in the meantime, take a look at that article that just dropped on your Seller Central dashboard. Next article is going to Media Daily News and it's entitled TikTok to integrate more local services into its U.S. commerce push. Now this at first I was reading this, I didn't quite understand it. But it basically said, hey, they're hiring all these people and their immediate focus, it says, to accelerate offerings on TikTok, it says. But also, they're kind of copying what the Douyin, I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing it right, which is kind of like a TikTok in China, what it would do. Like, for example, they invite third-party developers to integrate mini programs that allow users to order food, call cabs, buy tickets to events, I'm not familiar. I haven't used Douyin when I'm in China, but when I go to other countries, sometimes I'll see other apps like for example, actually WeChat in China. WeChat is almost like social media too and you can do a whole bunch of stuff. Whenever I go to Korea, I use Kakao Talk. And with that Kakao Talk, I can order food. I can order like taxis. I can do a whole bunch of stuff with that app. So maybe like TikTok is moving that instead of just being social media, instead of being TikTok shop, they're trying to integrate things that maybe connect with like local businesses. And again, what's the whole purpose of this? Well, it gets more people in the platform and more people in the platform pay. A fraction of those people are going to be more TikTok shop customers. So that'll be some interesting news to see what TikTok is going to do. And just the simple fact that, that, hey, TikTok is hiring, you know, like if they thought that they were going to get completely shut down, well, they're probably, you know, wouldn't be hiring, I think. Next article is from eladelantado.com. All right. So I think that means like in Spanish, like somebody who is forward-thinking or getting ahead of things. I'm not sure you Spanish speakers can critique me on that. But this says goodbye Amazon and Timu. I doubt that. But it says AliExpress is ahead of the game in bringing incredible deals to technology. So this just talks about how people shipping directly from China from AliExpress actually have better deals when it comes to electronics and not just like no-name brands, We can see here it's talking about Samsung Galaxy, it's talking about Nintendo Switch and some of the prices, and then how you can even look at local warehouses for shipping for AliExpress. What does that mean? That must mean that, hey, if you're an American seller or based here in the U.S. or have a warehouse, You must be able to go ahead and offer products on AliExpress. So if you are doing maybe some electronics products and you want to have another platform that gets a lot of traffic, well, AliExpress looks like it might be moving up the ranks and might be better for electronics products to list as opposed to Timoon Xing. Next article is not really an article, but you guys know with Helium 10, you make money because we find you more keywords that can get you more sales. Now, there's another way to make money and that's by actually referring other customers or Amazon sellers to Helium 10 with our affiliate program. You can actually get 25% commissions for life. You don't have to be a big-time influencer. Obviously, if you have a blog or YouTube channel, it'll be easier for you to attract people. But hey, you're at the Prosper Show and you meet somebody who doesn't know about Helium 10, you can give them your own discount code. And basically let's say that they become the low pricing plan, a platinum plan for $100. Maybe you only had one drink with that person at the Prosper show and you never see them again. Two years from now, if they're still paying Helium 10 for that platinum plan, $100 a month, it means you have gotten $25 a month for two years. So you're making hundreds and hundreds of dollars off this one person you had a drink with, who you introduced Helium 10 with, and you never have to do anything again. So that's how easy it is to make money with the Helium 10 Partner Program. Commissions for Life. If you guys want to get more information on it, go to h10.me forward slash crush it. H10.me forward slash crush it. There are people who are bigger influencers who are making ridiculous amounts like we're paying for their supercars and they're making thousands and thousands, sometimes five figures a month just in Helium 10 commission. So definitely give that a try if you think you can convince some people to sign up for Helium 10. H10.me forward slash crush it. One more new Facebook group. Speaking of not affiliates but like influencers, we started a new Facebook group called Influencer Insider. So you guys remember that we've been launching some tools for Amazon influencers. Actually next week there's going to be some more tools for it. If you're interested in the program, like I said, maybe you're an Amazon seller, you don't care about it, but hey, this is a way for your kids or your significant others to get into Amazon a little bit by making videos of products and getting affiliate commission from Amazon. Well, we have a full course about that inside of Freedom Ticket. But if you're already doing it or you're interested, you just want to talk to other people who are in the Amazon Influencer Program, go directly to this group and apply to be in there as even if you have a free account, you're welcome to be in the Helium 10 Influencer Group. Go to h10.me forward slash influencer FB as in Facebook. h10.me forward slash influencer FB. Alright, so that's it for the news this week. Next up, we are going to get into a couple of new Helium 10 feature alerts. Alright, pretty cool new things about the Chrome extension. How to use it? Watch this. Whenever you're in the Chrome extension now, you will see in the search bar this kind of like little search button with a Helium 10 logo. Alright, if you have the Chrome extension installed, you can do that and hit the button and it's going to take you to this page where you can upload a photo. So like say, hey, you had this idea of this bath mat, bat mat product and you're like, hey, is anything like this on Amazon? Look at this. It shows up all the products that might look similar to this on Amazon and you can see the price, you can see the information that Helium 10 has and you can see similar products that are bath mats. And just by uploading a picture. So that's pretty cool. So that's one product, the Helium 10 image kind of search, utilizing the Amazon image search. You guys probably do that on when you're using your mobile app, but this is from desktop. You can now do that. The other new tools, very similar to this, also with the Chrome extension. Let's say you're in the Amazon search results, right? And like you had never seen coffin shelves before. You see some random product and you're like, Are there other coffin shelves like this? So if you put your mouse over any image on Amazon, you'll see this button that says Find Similar. So hit Find Similar. And it will run that same search. And now I can see all the different kinds of coffin shelves that kind of look like this one that I just saw randomly on Amazon. All right. So a little another like kind of like minor feature. This isn't something that's I would necessarily call a hashtag game changing, but it's it's pretty cool because it allows you to get ideas about products or see what kind of products are out there on Amazon based on just an image or a picture on Amazon itself, as opposed to having to type in more keywords or to search different things. So another pretty cool aspect here that Helium 10 Chrome extension has given you. Don't forget, if you don't have the Helium 10 Chrome extension, you can download it for free. h10.me forward slash extension. Let's now get into the strategy of the week. And it's how you're able to know like, For child items, how much sales are doing instead of just being able to know like the old days that Helium 10 had where you could just see all of the variations, what kind of sales it was generating. So, Shivali, show us how to do that. For years, Helium 10, like all other sales estimation tools, provided sales data only at the parent level. That meant if a product had multiple variations, different color sizes or styles, the reported sales number combined all of them into a single total. For example, if you were selling a coffin shelf and had red, blue, green, and purple variations, Helium 10 showed 100 units sold per month. That number included sales for all variations combined. This was because Amazon Reports Best Seller Rank, or BSR, at the parent level, making it impossible to see how each individual variation was performing. However, now Helium 10 is the only tool that lets you break sales down to the child ASIN level directly with the Chrome extension. This means you can see estimated sales for each specific variation instead of just an overall total. Let me show you how this works. If you are browsing on Amazon and land on a product with multiple variations like queen size bedsheets with multiple colors and sizes, you can now run x-ray and instantly see both the parent level sales and the individual ASIN level sales. Instead of just seeing one large total like 121,000 units sold across all variations, you'll now be able to see that a specific color or size sold 13,000 units. This is a huge advantage because most sellers using other tools are flying in blind. While Amazon does provide some sales data, it's often vague. Only displaying round numbers like 100, 500, 1,000 or 1,000 units and sometimes those numbers aren't very accurate. Helium 10, on the other hand, allows you to really drill down and see exactly which variations are selling the most. That means you're no longer guessing whether a specific color or size is driving a bulk of the sales. You can now make data-driven decisions about inventory, pricing, and advertising by targeting the best performing variations. Alright, thank you very much for that. So guys, don't forget, Helium 10 is the only tool that can do that, where if you're using any other Chrome extension, the sales estimate is only based at the parent level. So you don't know which of those child items are selling the best, but with Helium 10, we've got a very, very highly accurate sales estimates, even at the child level. All right, guys, that's it for the news and features of this week. We'll see you next week to see what's buzzing.