#651 – ANOTHER Amazon Fee Increase? and Big Spring Sale Live | Weekly Buzz 3/25/25

#651 – ANOTHER Amazon Fee Increase? and Big Spring Sale Live | Weekly Buzz 3/25/25 Bradley Sutton: Amazon is raising fees again? Big Spring Sale is now live. 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. Today we're going to go deep into What seems like yet another Amazon fee increase after they had promised no new fees, right? But is it really that bad? Like some sellers are like, what in the world? Coupons are going up from 60 cents to $5. Is that really what's going on? Well, no, that is not true. Yes, there's some new fees here, but it's not necessarily Amazon going against their word. But there are some cases where things could go from maybe something that costs you 300 bucks before to $2,000. So we're going to find out what that is. We're going to do a deep dive into it, kind of understand the ins and outs. So not too many other stories today because I think this is kind of like what's top of mind. So let's go ahead and hop into it. First, let's get into the actual announcement that Amazon made last week that had sellers kind of like up in arms. And this was from Seller Central and it says, Amazon is making it easier to try using deals. So first of all, I think you guys agree with me that a lot of us are like, please, Amazon, stop titling these things. As if you're doing sellers a favor, like sellers, we are really going to help you out. We've got you in mind by raising your fees on this. Please thank us. But anyways, I digress. The title of this article on Seller Central is Amazon is making it easier to try using deals and coupons to create additional demand for your products. And so basically what's going on, it says here, deals and coupons give you access to additional merchandising. We all know that, etc., etc. But now, number one, maybe this is a decent thing, that result of this change. Notice what it says. It says, Deals durations are becoming more flexible. It says, starting in June, you're going to be able to run best deals on any day of the week for a duration of your choosing ranging from one to 14 days. This will allow you to align your deal dates and duration with consumer trends and your objectives. However, deal dates and duration will continue to be fixed for peak events such as Prime Day, Prime Big Deal Days, Black Friday, Cyber Monday. So that's number one. So yes, that part? It's true, that is more flexible. Now, the next one, that might be all for the good news here. Next section, as you guys can see right here, it says, performance and deals fees are becoming performance-based. And then yet again, we got Amazon patting themselves on their back. We're making it easier for you to reach more customers through promotion and deals by linking fees to performance. No, it was flat fee for stuff before. That is easy. Trying to multiply it by 1% or 2% plus a fee is not exactly easy. But anyways, I digress. Yet again, it says, we're lowering upfront deal fees. OK, this is a good thing. This is true. And using variable fees. Now, all of a sudden, it's bad news. That are based on the sale to make it easier for you. Again, Amazon trying to do us a favor here. For you to try out various promotion and strategies. The variable fees are capped for deals to ensure you get the upside. To ensure you get that I swear I think somebody's being paid here Like how often can you gaslight Amazon sellers in one paragraph anyways? I keep, this is like the digression episode. We're going to get into details on some of these fees here. But basically, you know, things are going to be based on the performance, meaning how much sales you make. And we'll get into a little bit more details on that soon. The next subheading here, it says, Updates to Non-Peak Day Promotion and Deals Fees. These are going to be applied, it says, across all of our promotions and deal capabilities effective June 2nd. All right. Best deals and lightning deals instead of $300 and $150 flat rate. Okay, that's what it is now It's going to $70 per day Plus a variable fee of 1% of deal sales. All right got that before you just pay like 150 bucks I think for a lightning deal. There's like $300 flat feet. That's it It's all you ever pay for like a best deal. Let's say it lasts for three days seven days whatever and now that price is going down per se but Yet again, it's per day now, $70. So like as the days go up, obviously the fee goes up. And then plus, instead of that flat fee, you're being charged a percentage, 1% of how many sales you make in that deal. Coupon deals, you know, this might affect more of you. Coupon, as you guys know right now, you just make a coupon. There's no fee if you get no clicks, but it's $0.60 per unit sold. Now that's being changed. Now there's an upfront fee of $5. This is where some sellers were a little bit confused like, what, $5? Instead of 60 cents, no, no, it's not 60 cents to $5. It's like a flat fee, $5, if you're creating a coupon. And then 2.5% of the coupon sales. So in other words, you sell 10 units at $10 each, it's $100, you're paying $2.50. That make sense? Plus that $5. I'll break it down showing you an example of like the coffin shelf in a little bit. It says, for most products sold in our stores, this change will result in lower coupon fees per unit sold. We'll see if that's true for some of my products. Now, there's a little bit of something that was kind of like teased a little bit here. Notice this. It doesn't even have to do necessarily with this deal increase, but it says Prime Day offers more days to shine. It says Prime Day 2025 is going to be a longer and bigger event. So, you know, Prime Day in the past has been a certain number of days. Sounds like it might be like Prime Week. Who knows what's going on? Let's see. We're still maybe a month or two away or a couple months away at least. From this but but look for some announcements that looks like that and you know Maybe a new schedule for Prime Day now for prime exclusive discounts once it's ready It says to reflect the larger scale of the event and impact fees will change from 50 to 100 So thank you whoever wrote this For not saying that you're doing us a favor like in order to give you more bang for your buck. We're doubling the price They were very honest here. They didn't say that this is a favor. They're just like hey, it's going from 50 100 bucks a It is what it is. Great. No problem. And this makes sense. Let's say Prime Day is twice as long as it was last year. Yeah. Well, why shouldn't it be twice as expensive? It says the best deals and lightning deals remain unchanged and that will be fixed fees of $1,000 and $500 respectively. It says more Prime Day details will be shared next week. Unfortunately, that means you guys are going to have to wait a week for us to be able to announce it since We're recording this weekly buzz today and we'll be at Prosper the rest of this week. So look out in your seller central. I'm sure there'll be some announcements about Prime Day this week. Okay. So now before I have this really cool FAQ that I got from Amazon, I'm going to go a little bit more into detail on some of these, you know, some questions you might have about this, but let's just really quick break it down as far as like the coffin shelf in Project X, like what these costs would be. I hope I calculate this right. It's like, 2am in the morning when I'm recording this. I got to leave for the airport in a couple hours here. But how I calculated out is we got the coffin shelf that's $33.97. So in the past, when it was 60 cents for the coupons, right, you can see here, hey, that means that if I sold 10 coffin shelves, it was $6 I paid. If I sold 50, it's 30 bucks. If I sold 500 coffin shelves with a coupon, it is $300. So now let's compare that to the new pricing. So 10 units before cost $6. Remember that Amazon said, hey, this is going to be cheaper for you. But 10 units under the new pricing, which now uses $5 base fee plus 2.5% of the sales. And in this case, the sales of 10 units is about $340. So instead of $6, it is now $13. Now, yes, if my product was half price. Yes, maybe I had a $15 product or $16 or a little bit less. Now all of a sudden, yeah, you know what? It probably is a little bit cheaper this new way, but for me, it's not cheaper. $25 sales of Coffin Shelf under the old coupon fee, I would have paid $15. Under the new one, it's $26, so very, very close. Next one, 50 units. It would have cost me $30 before. Now, it's going to cost me $50. And then finally, or actually a couple more, 100. Instead of it costing me 60, it's now going to cost $90 and 500 units coupon redemptions. Instead of costing $300, it's now going to cost $429. But again, if my product was only $10, yes, it would be cheaper, this new system. But for me, it's going to be more expensive if I were using coupons. I hope I have this right. Let me know in the comments if my calculations are off, but this is not too much of an increase. If you sell 500 units, the difference, I mean, we're talking less than a dollar, not even 25, not even a quarter difference per unit, like almost nothing. So again, this is not that big of a difference. If you're selling 500 units, the difference of paying $300 compared to $400, that's like pennies, like almost nothing. So don't worry too much about it. It could actually save you money if you've got a cheaper priced product. If you're selling expensive products, yeah, it's going to be paying more. Now, let's break down the lightning deals slash best deals. So here's how this one works. Under the current system, let's say it's a one-day lightning deal. How much is that? It's $150 if I'm not mistaken. So $150 is what it would cost. But now let's say you are going and doing a new lightning deal once this change kicks in. What if I sell 10 units? Well, it's actually going to be cheaper. Why? Because remember it's $70. Plus the variable fee which is like 1% of the sales. So 10 units sold of the coffin shelf instead of $150 I'm only paying $73. Look at that. I saved money. If I sell 25 units on this lightning deal, it is now going to cost $78. So again, it's cheaper. If I sell 50 units, it's going to cost $86. And if I sell 100 units, it's going to cost $103. If I sell 500 units, it's going to cost $239. So the only way for a one-day lightning deal for it to be more expensive under the new system is if I sell 500 units. Okay, so not bad. This actually does save me on the lightning deal. Let's go to three days. So let's say I do a three-day best deal. Current, I believe that would be $300, right? But if I sell 10 units, It's under this new system, it's going to be $200. It's cheaper to do it the new way. If I sell 25 units, $200, still cheaper. 50 units, $226. And if I sell 100 units, it is going to be $243 yet again. And the only way it's going to be more expensive is if I sell 500 units where it is now $379 instead of $300. But as the days go on, This is where now it starts to get a little bit more expensive. Let's say you're doing a seven day deal. Current system, right? It's going to be $300. Everything's a flat fee, right? But under the new way, if I sell 10 units, right off the bat, it's already more expensive, $493. If I sell 25 units, it is $498. If I sell 50 units, a little over $500 and it goes up to $500, it's going to be $650 instead of $300. So you can see how this can add up. Now I'm paying double. And then finally, if I'm going to take advantage of the, one of these 14 day deals, that's now coming again, I would pay $300 flat fee under the current system, but selling only 10 units is going to cost me $983. Hopefully nobody is paying $900 to sell 10 units. Obviously you'd want to sell more, but as you can see, if you, if I sell like a hundred units, it's over a thousand dollars I'm paying as opposed to, um, $300 right now. So, so this is interesting. Like you could see that, Hey, I'm under the lower tiers. Yes, it actually might save you money, but you could end, you know, depending on how much money you're making or how much your, your product costs, uh, as far as the customer to the customer, that 1% you can go up. Actually, Amazon, I believe says it's capped to $2,000. And so this is a pretty, pretty significant for some of you, for others, maybe it actually saves money, but it's, it's not like something crazy. Now, let's get into the Amazon Q&A as they had some questions that sellers were already asking. These might be some of the questions that you yourself have. Now, the very first one is very realistic. Amazon knows what's up. They're keeping it real. They said, hey, you announced in December 2024 you're not going to raise fees. How can you justify this? Amazon's response, hey, we're making the promotion and deal fees to make it easier. Again, stop with the gaslighting. It says in their announcement, they said they're not going to increase U.S. referral or FBA fees, and this is not a U.S. referral or FBA fee. They also said they're not going to introduce new fee types. So theoretically, technically, this is not breaking what Amazon promised. Another question is, hey, will it still be possible for deals and promotions to be profitable with these changes? And they say, yeah, it could be. I mean, you guys saw right there that not in all situations are these deals more expensive than they were. You know, like for the coupons, yes, but like, is that really, if you're selling, you know, if something costs, you know, $300 versus $260, is that going to take away your profit when you're selling 300 units? If it does, you've got more serious problems than this increase. Another question, will these changes maintain the same promotion stacking rules? The answer is yes. Another one, what's going to happen if multiple promotions stack up on one promotion ASIN? The answer, they said if you stack multiple promotions like deals and then coupons, you're going to be charged for each promotion according to its respective fee structure. All right. So if I do the coupon, I'm on that new tier. If I do at the same time on the same product, a lightning deal, I'm on that tier as well. It's stacked. Will I incur the fee even if the promotion doesn't generate sales? Yes. The answer is yes. A fixed fee for deals will be charged on the days your deal runs and the performance fees are going to apply to sales from your deal. If you get no sales, there's obviously no performance fee, but those daily fees, you'll be charged for regardless. When will these fees hit me? The answer, you're going to be charged promotion fees just like it is now, 14 days after the promotion ends. Another question, if my promotion is suppressed for the scheduled period, will I be charged? Easy. Answer is no. Question, will best deals and lightning deals still have the same deal frequency policy with the new flexible durations? Answer, yes. Can I extend best deals beyond 14 days? Answer, no. Some of these guys I'm paraphrasing here, but I don't think it needs me to go into too much detail. Will the shift to a fixed fee for coupons impact the way coupon budgets work? No, it's not impacting at all. It's still the same. If there's a lightning deal that runs only half the day, does it charge $35 or $70 for that fixed fee? Answer, lightning deals fees are scheduled for 12 hours or the ones that are scheduled for 12 hours are fixed still $70 per day. All right, so that's pretty much as deep as I can go on this subject. Let me know, what do you guys think of this? Is this kind of like what you planned? Is there something new? Did I get something wrong? Let me know in the comments below. I'm especially curious though, is this going to impact the way you use coupons, the way you do lightning deals, the way you do best deals? Let me know in the comments below. Next article is not really an article per se, but just a reminder, hey, as of today, Amazon Big Spring Sale is live. So the Big Spring Sale is live and just don't forget, guys, go into your, at the very least, if you want, go and do a price discount. If you haven't done one, you can see I did one right here for the Project X account. I did it kind of last second, just tonight. So it's not too late to go ahead and start that. You can do it. It'll start today and it'll go through the The 31st, so if you want to take advantage of perhaps some extra shopping eyeballs that's happening right now, go ahead and set that. There's different price structures that you have to do. It has to be at least 15% off. The current price or the lowest price in 30 days, etc. But it kind of like calculates all of that automatically. That might be something new. Like before, I used to have to calculate what was the minimum I could do. But this time when I did it, it put all of the minimum prices or the maximum, I should say, the maximum price I could put it at to have that minimum discounted amount. Go ahead and add those ASINs. All right now next article here is from Tech Explorer. It says AI startup perplexity. Confirms interest to buy TikTok. So this is just an article kind of like reminding you of the history of what's been going on, but it talks about, hey, there's like supposedly four different groups that are thinking about buying a TikTok. One group includes Frank McCourt, former sports tycoon, and even another group like Microsoft is part of another group that includes Mr. Beast, et cetera, et cetera. But everything seems to be all like all full speed ahead that TikTok is going to be sold by the deadline. I mean, that's just my take from reading this article. But what we don't know is who but that'd be interesting if one of these AI companies like Perplexity is the one who buys it. This article mentioned that, hey, they would rebuild TikTok's algorithm from the ground up. I'm making the For You recommendation feed open source, they said, so that will be interesting. Last up this week, we'll be at the Prosper Show. That's why we're doing the Weekly Buzz a day early. Make sure to come hang out at the Helium 10 booth. I'll be there. Don't forget that you can actually get free tickets to the floor of Prosper. Hit up Helium 10 Customer Service if you don't know how to do that, if you're in the Vegas area. If you guys are at Prosper Show, I'll be speaking at a lot of different events. Wednesday, 1040 a.m., Learning Lounge. I'll be doing a PPC presentation. 150 p.m., I'm going to do another advertising one with Amazon ads and an eight-figure seller. That'll be in room W219. And then 5 p.m., an Ask Me Anything with Destiny I'll be doing in the Amazon ads booth and then the Amazon ads booth on Thursday at 11 a.m. I'll be doing something with a Vincenzo from ecom see so make sure to come hang out if you guys are at the prosper show this week all right next up let's get into now our new feature alerts there's two of them they're both in black box and one of these is is It's been something that's been asked about for years from a certain cohort of Helium 10 users. That's the wholesale and arbitrage sellers. So one thing that sellers have always asked who are doing wholesale is, hey, I want to be able to search in Helium 10 black box by UPC, by EAN code. Also by a g10 and not only that we want to be able to search and upload like a list of like two hundred three hundred or more you pcs like sometimes you might get a wholesale list from a manufacturer and you want to be able to say hey pull up all of these three hundred. products if they are on Amazon and what are the sales well guess what guys you now can do that so go to black box and you'll notice at the very bottom now there is a section that says product identifiers all right so you could just copy Some ASINs into or not some ASINs, but some UPCs into there or you download this file. All right. So if you hit this download button, you got to download the template. And then here's an example. So what I did is I have this template here where I put in some UPCs and some EANs. This is from the template that we had that is from the Project X inventory. So let's go ahead and upload this Excel file of EANs. And let's see what happens. It says Excel file uploaded successfully. There's four right here. I hit confirm. It puts it all right here, the product identifiers. I can hit search. And now let's see what comes up. All of those products that I had entered in, they show up right here in Helium 10 if they're available on Amazon, which of course all my products are. It tells me their ace in sales, you know, who's the seller. And then, you know, that's perhaps a way that some of you wholesale sellers are going to be able to kind of like see, hey, is this going to be profitable or not? Then you can print this off, you know, compare it, you know, put your own prices back into the Excel file, whatever you guys do who are wholesale sellers. I don't know too much about that aspect of things, but this is like probably one of our top ask for things. The next new feature alert is also in black box and again, it is for a different cohort of seller and actually for non-seller. So we've been making a lot of products lately in Helium 10 for Amazon influencers and the way that Amazon influencers make money, by the way, if you guys have Freedom Ticket, take that course. We have a free course inside of Helium 10 Freedom Ticket for how to become an Amazon influencer to be able to make videos and make commission. We got people at Helium 10 who I work at Helium 10 in the day and they're making thousands of dollars a month making videos for Amazon listings. Well, what's one way that Amazon influencers can find profitable videos? Not necessarily profitable. I mean, everything's profit for that, but as far as good ROI, in other words, where if they make a video for it, they have a really good chance to get decent commission because they know it's a high selling product and it's also a product that doesn't have too many videos on it. Well, check this out. What you would do here is in black box at the very top right, you're going to see this drop down where it says seller or influencer. You can now change the influencer mode. It's available on the platinum plan, even on the starter plan. You'll have 20 uses. And then you could say, hey, show me a product in a certain category. That is priced between X and Y and also that has X number of reviews, but hey, maybe it has less than two videos in the lower carousel and less than two videos in the upper carousel and so on and so forth using all of the different kind of like regular columns and filters that BlackBox has, but now it's 100% made for Amazon influencers to be able to find which products maybe they should be trying to make a video for because they might have a good chance at making some commission. So if you're an Amazon influencer or interested in it, make sure to use this brand new BlackBox for influencers tool that we just launched. Alright, next up is our strategy of the week and I just talked about, hey, looking for products in black box where It shows you whether you're a wholesale seller, whether you're an influencer. You use black box, right, to be able to see how much sales these products are making. Well, if we're private label sellers, what do we care about when it comes to sales? We want to know sometimes what's the estimated number of sales that keyword searches are generating because that's an even better metric than search volume. So, Shivali, let us know how Helium 10 can help with that. Unknown Speaker: One of the most powerful and unique features that Helium 10 offers is keyword sales estimate. For years, Amazon sellers relied solely on search volume to determine keyword importance. Tools such as Helium 10 have always provided monthly search volume data, which helps estimate demand, but the assumption has always been that higher search volume means more sales. And, while generally true, it's not always accurate. The real question isn't just, how often is a keyword searched? It's actually, how many sales does that keyword actually generate? Let me show you exactly why this matters. Let's take a look at keyword data for coffin shelves. In most cases, search volume and sales estimate follow the same exact trend. For example, a keyword with 170,000 searches per month might lead to 1,350 sales. And a keyword with 136,000 searches per month results in 1,200 sales. So far, so good. But here is where it gets interesting. Take two completely different keywords, floating shelves bathroom at 15,900 searches per month and gothic decor sitting at 15,900 searches per month. At first glance, these seem equally valuable. Both have the same amount of search volume. If you only had access to search volume, you would also assume that they hold the same potential for conversions. But when we look at keyword sales estimate, the picture changes dramatically, my friends. Floating shelves bathroom generated 233 sales in the last week, whereas gothic decor only resulted in 95 sales. That's more than double the sales for the same exact search volume. So why does this happen? Keyword intent. A shopper searching for floating shelves bathroom knows exactly what they want. They're likely further down that purchase funnel and making them more likely to convert. On the other hand, someone searching gothic decor might just be browsing. They may or may not be looking for a specific item, leading to fewer conversions. This is why keyword sales estimates are worth considering. You only rely on search volume. You could be wasting ad spend on the keywords that don't actually even drive significant sales. So by using this tool, you can prioritize the most profitable keywords, ensuring that your listings and PPC strategy focus on high converting terms, not just high traffic ones. And here's the kicker. Helium 10 is the only tool, the only software solution that provides this level of insight. No other software gives you a direct estimate of how many sales a keyword is generating. So next time you debate which keyword to target, ask yourself, do I want more searches or do I want more sales? With Helium 10's Keyword Sales Estimate, you don't have to guess. You'll know exactly where to focus. Bradley Sutton: Alright, thank you, Shivali. So guys, if you're at, like I said, in Vegas, Prosper Show, please stop by our booth. Please, or you see me walking around, say hi. Let me know you heard this episode and love to hear your story. Maybe you guys can be a guest on the Serious Sellers Podcast. I might do some on-the-spot interviews while there. Next week, Kerry will be back to do the weekly buzz and we'll see you next week to see what's buzzing.