#657 – Amazon Vine Hack Killed? & Massive Tariff Repercussions | Weekly Buzz 4/16/25

#657 – Amazon Vine Hack Killed? & Massive Tariff Repercussions | Weekly Buzz 4/16/25 Bradley Sutton: A popular vine hack was just killed by Amazon. Tariffs are causing lots of changes on most e-commerce marketplaces. A special workshop for Amazon search career performance. These stories and more on this week'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. 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 let you know what new features that Helium 10 has that will give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the E-commerce world. Let's see what's buzzing. A lot of articles today also have to do with tariffs, but it's not the highlight, you know, for the first time in like two, three weeks, because since the last time we did the buzz, there haven't been any, you know, huge tariff implications or changes. I definitely want to get your feedback on what's going on for you guys in a little bit, but I want to lead today with a story actually coming out of Seller Central, and it is entitled, A Clarification of Amazon Vine Review Policy. All right. Now, what happened? Let me explain For years, what people have been doing, people who have like variations, like let's say you've got this Helium 10 water bottle here, this white Let's say we had this water bottle in blue, red, green, and yellow and we want to launch with a lot of reviews. You can only do one vine for one color. For example, if I wanted to do the full 30, I could only do 30 for the whole parent family. If I launched a product altogether, the max I could get would be 30 reviews off the bat. So what some sellers would do, they would launch their ASINs for each of the colors of their water bottle or whatever it might be, the red and the green and the yellow as separate, not part of a parent-family-child relationship. And then they would go and do vine on each of those. So let's say they had five colors. They would do the 30 vine for each one. And then merge the ASIN into a new parent. So then they would have up to like 150 reviews. Does that make sense? So what one of the ways that people call this is a vine stacking. So now there's been buzz around that Amazon's been cracking down. And then this in the seller central dashboard says clarification of Amazon vine review policy. It says we're providing clarification on key vine policies about review aggregation. They don't call it stacking. And Review Limits says, we aggregate reviews at the parent level, not the product variation level. And we recommend that you enroll all related variations together. All right. Now, it talks about their tiers of Vine which hasn't changed. You can do 1 to 2 for free and 3 to 10 units in the middle tier, etc., etc. for different prices. But then check this out. It says, when you merge two or more separate parent ASINs under a new parent ASIN, only the maximum number of reviews for your highest enrollment tier will be retained. For example, if you merge two products that are enrolled in the top tier with 30 reviews each, your new parent ASIN will retain only the 30 highest quality reviews. So I'm not sure how this is actually going to play out. That's saying, hey, if you merge parent ASINs, but I think the way that people would do it is they would merge individual ASINs into a new parent. So is this going to catch that? I'm not sure, but I think it's kind of obvious that this Vine stacking is kind of on Amazon's radar. It's something I never did. I know a lot of sellers who've done it because it wasn't technically against Amazon terms of service, but just like with a lot of things on Amazon that one day was okay to do and then the next day it's not, this could be one of those things. So just beware. If you're doing vine stacking, for sure, for sure, if you're trying to merge parent aces, you're not going to absorb all of the reviews. Potentially, I think this is like, you know, to me, like if you're trying to play it on the safe side, you wouldn't even do the child merging to a new parent because it just seems like if you read between the lines that that's probably not, you know, that's probably going to be frowned upon, right, by Amazon. So, how many people use the Vine stacking out there and are you going to change or are you just going to keep going until Amazon, you know, slaps you on the wrist for it? Let me know in the comments below. Now, the next few stories I'll have to do with what we've been talking about for weeks already or a couple weeks, the tariffs, right? It's interesting how there's news articles about each platform doing something different. Let's first talk about Amazon. This is a report from payments.com. It says, Amazon cancels orders from multiple vendors after tariff announcement. This is kind of like Amazon doing their own manufacturing in China and it says that they've been canceling their orders. It says, Amazon reportedly canceled orders from multiple vendors in China and other Asian countries After the April 2nd announcement, the U.S. plans to levy tariffs on goods from a lot of countries. It says, the cancellations of these orders came without warning, didn't mention tariffs, but their timing suggests that they came in response to the tariffs. Now, this is interesting because what if you're competing with Amazon 1P, shipped and sold by Amazon, like a product that Amazon maybe sources itself or manufactures itself? Well, who knows? Let's say you had a lot of inventory in stock and Amazon was getting kind of low and now they're not going to replenish. There could be something that happens like a month from now where Amazon all of a sudden is out of stock on something if they're stopping ordering. Now, we don't know which products they stopped ordering or if this article is even true, but I have heard that a lot where not just Amazon itself, but Amazon sellers have paused their order and they're like, This tariff could stop or get canceled like in a week or two. I don't want to have an order go through and then pay this 150% tariff or whatever it comes out to be and then all of a sudden the tariff goes back down to like 30% and I just wasted a whole bunch of money because of when the shipment got on the water, right? So this is something that you got to think about like some sellers I know are not raising their price right away because they're like, you know what, I just want to wait out some of these ones who are going to run out of stock because they might not be ordering. It's kind of a risky move because like I said, who knows what Amazon is doing and not doing. Who knows what your competitors are doing and not doing. It's an interesting strategy that some are doing. The next article is also about the tariffs and switching gears to Shein and Temu. This article says Shein and Temu face massive roadblock with new package dues. Now this is talking about the de minimis, right? And, you know, they talked about, we talked about this last week, whoever was doing Weekly Buzz. Was it Shivali? I don't remember. I think it was Shivali who was doing Weekly Buzz. And says, you know, hey, once this de minimis goes away, there's going to be like a 90% tariff or a flat fee of $75. And the duty goes into effect May 2nd. Now let's say the fee is only quote-unquote only 90% and the product's value is like a $5 product you're getting from Timo. You know like now that $5 product becomes What you know, like $9 or something like that, right? And some change. Yes, that almost doubles, you know, the cost, but it's not like 100% like, oh, my goodness, I'm never going to, you know, absolutely not going to buy this thing, you know, that $5 product that's now $9 probably can't get that. On Amazon for $9, maybe, who knows, I've seen coffin shelves for like $9 and I sell mine for like $30 something. So if a $9 coffin shelves price is now $17, it's still theoretically cheaper than like other items. But here's the thing, here's the kicker in this article that I've been wondering about and I still haven't seen complete like explanation of what might happen. I'm sure it's out there. But I'm wondering, what is going to happen with the processing? You know, like this stuff ships from China door to door with like no custom clearance and all that stuff, like shows up in like five, six days. But take a look at what this article says here. It says, ìThe ports are going to be flooded with packages because they have to go through a different system now.î It says, ìThe Commerce Department had introduced a new software system to manage these duty payments, but there would still be delays as the volume of packages that have to be processed is massive.î And so I think this is almost just as big if not bigger of an update with the de minimis thing which gets all this stuff. So it's not just the tariff if it's 90%, obviously that's big, but still doable, purchasable, right? But what if that package that used to take five days to get from Temu or Shein to you from China, now all of a sudden takes like three weeks? Or what if you have to go and sign something at the post office to clear customs or pay some third party? Who knows? I'm not sure that that's going to be the case. But these are the things I'm wondering about once this May 2nd thing comes in, because that is really going to be a killer. What do you want to do? Order something from Amazon that you can get the same day for $20 or buy something from Temu for $11 but wait three, four weeks for it or have to go to the post office and pay something. I'm just going to pay the $20. This is something interesting to be checking on. Still keeping it to the Temu story, here's another story from searchengineland.com. It says, pulls its U.S. Google shopping ads. And so this is interesting because it says, the app store rank crash, like usually Temu is one of the top apps, actually used to be a third or fourth position. And when it pulled its Google shopping ads, the app store ranking plummeted from third to 58. In just three days, so it says it shows how heavily reliant team is on Google advertising for paid acquisition, but like it literally fell off a cliff like you know the activity on team and what you know like. Why would you do that if you're Temu? If you rely on Google Ads so much, they're probably like, shoot, we're about to take a big hit. Let's pull back some of our spend and figure out what's going to happen. This is happening because of the tariff situation and what might be coming down the road for a lot of Chinese Temu suppliers. That'll be interesting to see. Going from the third most downloaded app to the 58th in just a couple of days just by pulling back Google Ads shows you what kind of ripple effect these tariffs are having. Another one, TikTok Shop. This article is from scmp.com, if I'm looking at this correctly. It says, TikTok Shop flags U.S. risk, promotes EU market as Trump triples tariffs on small parcels. So again, talking about that de minimis thing. However, The main part of this article wasn't what I was interested in. It says, hey, TikTok Shop has flagged U.S. tariff risks to its merchants. I got an email from TikTok Shop saying, hey, everybody understand what the de minimis things is? But it says here, TikTok Shop thus has put more effort into recruiting cross-border merchants for EU marketplaces, including Spain, Germany, Italy, and France. Now, here's the thing. This wasn't even the big part of the article, but this is what caught my attention. And supporting qualified US sellers operating in these markets, according to its WeChat account. So basically, to me, that means that it's saying that, hey, if you're a US-based seller and you're operating also in Spain, Germany, Italy, France, you will be able to open a TikTok shop. It even says that right here. It says merchants who shop on other platforms such as Amazon selling in the US will be welcome to open shops on sites in Spain, Germany, Italy, and France according to the statement. Now, why is this significant? Well, as you guys know, for TikTok shop in the US, historically, you have to be US-based. You have to have like an employee that even has a social security number here to get started. My first thought is if TikTok Shop sees less activity from its Chinese sellers because of these tariffs, does that mean that maybe TikTok Shop will lessen its requirements to get started, like maybe allow foreigners to open? Because it looks like they're going to allow Americans to sell in France and Germany, etc. What about now the French and Germans who want to sell on TikTok Shop in the U.S.? But they can't because they don't have a social security number. Is that going to be like opened up? That'll be close. That'll be another kind of like under the radar storyline here. I think that it will be worth monitoring. Next article is from freightwaves.com. And we actually quoted this website in February where they were speculating that Amazon might be making its own LTL service. And sure enough, here we go. This is an article entitled Amazon launches inbound only LTL service. It says Amazon Freight offers new service to vendors that don't need a full trailer. Now, first of all, what do they mean by vendors? In the Amazon, vendors in the general world means anybody who sells. In the Amazon world, vendors mean 1P, people who are vendor central, 1P to Amazon. Is that what this means or does it mean sellers? Parts of the article contradicts itself. Amazon is offering less than truckload service through its Amazon Freight platform according to a memo to customers. It's billed as a cost-effective solution for customers unable to fill a full trailer but only available for inbound delivery to Amazon facilities where the goods will be stored and later shipped through the company's regular package delivery network. This is going to be interesting because now this changes the game a little bit for inbound. Instead of having to go to third-party carriers, who knows, this could be a way to get inventory in faster since it's Amazon's only trucks. It's not like they're random third-party people trying to get appointments and stuff. You would think that it would be seamless, but then there's also stories about AWD and AGL where things aren't exactly seamless. We don't know if this is going to be good or bad, but again, it's interesting because you're getting more options now. I've never done LTL. I always do just SPD using UPS because I keep my shipments smaller, but who knows? Maybe some of these now, it'll be cheaper than using SPD if I use the Amazon LTL. So definitely something to be checking out as time passes. The last article from Amazon today is from their advertising website. It says, Sponsor Display updates all existing campaigns to optimize for conversion opportunities. This is for Sponsor Display. Basically, it says here, they're enhancing the machine learning algorithm to find improved conversion opportunities and help drive incremental sales for reach and page visit campaigns. Basically, if you had a reach or page visit optimized or targeting campaign in Sponsored Display without even doing anything, it says you're going to observe increases in performance metrics according to these campaigns. If you're using Sponsored Display and been doing reach or page visit campaign types, You might see a little bit better results according to this. Last notification of the day, Destaney and I are doing a special workshop on Monday, 11 a.m. Pacific Standard Time about search query performance. This is like the best thing that Amazon has ever released to Amazon customers and I'm still like baffled. I don't know, maybe 50% of sellers I talk to, big and small, are not leveraging this data. It's available in Helium 10. It's available in Seller Central, even if you don't have Helium 10. So regardless if you have Helium 10 or not, we're going to show you how to leverage this data Monday in a workshop. It's just shocking the amount of data. You're going to learn how in seconds you can see any keyword that brought you a sale in the last year and a half. You're going to see at any keyword at any time or over a period of time how you can see how your conversion rate and click-through rate for the keyword compares to all of your competitors. This is data from Amazon. It's not like some estimation or some algorithm. This is data directly from Amazon. We're also going to talk about Helium 10 Audience and why it's important to split test your creatives and how this could increase your conversions by just a few percent, but it could result in thousands of dollars of increased sales. So this is a must attend workshop. If you want to get a free registration, go to h10.me forward slash SQP training h10.me forward slash SQP training. All right, before we get into our strategy of the week, let's go ahead and get into our Helium 10 new feature alerts. And the first one is actually going to be right here in the Chrome extension for X-ray keywords. So the first one is going to be here in the Chrome extension. So as you guys can see, I have a coffin shelf here searched on Amazon. And if I run X-ray keywords, which shows me some of the top keywords that are driving traffic and sales. To these products, I've got 151 here. But let's say this is Amazon USA. Let's say English is not my first language. I speak Spanish. Well, now we have a translate button here. Where I could say, all right, translate to English or translate to English. Yeah, really I'm going to translate English to English. I could say translate to Spanish and then I can see here, all right, organization and storage. It is organizacion y almacenamiento. I had never heard that word before. Here we've got closet shelves, garage storage, metal shelving, all of these keywords now all of a sudden have the Spanish translation right here next to it or it could go opposite like maybe I'm in Amazon Japan and I'm American. I don't speak Japanese. I could go translate to English from the Japanese keyword. So x-ray keywords now has translation for English, Chinese, Spanish, German, and Japanese. Next one also is a new feature alert is also here in the Chrome extension. If you're in any bestseller page, that's the Amazon top sellers, the top BSR in a category or subcategory, you're now at the top of the page going to see a Helium 10 widget that'll give you a summary of all of the products on the page, what's the revenue. I'm here in the beauty and personal care top and the top products on here are doing $150 million in the last 30 days. If I hit The show more data, it is expanded out. I can see what is the organic page one and two revenue broken down by the products, by the brand, by category, by size here. What's the seller country of origin? 27% USA here on the beauty and personal care. The size here, 22% small standard size, 78% large standard size, 65% shipped and sold by Amazon, 35% by FBA. So that's kind of interesting. This is dominated by Amazon 1P right here. I can even have the top keywords on this page too, kind of like runs the x-ray keyword so I know what drives the sale. So this is a new widget that is going to show up to give you a cool summary. Before you've seen this widget probably on search result pages, but now it's available by request on the BSR page as well. All right, now let's get into our strategy of the week. We usually like to highlight things that Helium 10 exclusively have that can help your Amazon business and indexing is very important because if you're not indexed, you're not searchable. You're never going to rank. Ranking and indexing are two different things. Indexing means you're searchable. Ranking means you're actually showing up in the search results. So there's a way that you can check in mass, like hundreds of keywords at a time if you are indexed for them. Carrie is going to show us how to do that. Carrie Miller: Today, I want to share with you an advanced strategy and it's one that's unique to Helium 10 and it actually happens to be one of the very first tools that Helium 10 ever created and it's called Index Checker and it used to be called 5K Checker for any of you OG Helium 10 users from way back in the day. Now, indexing and ranking are two very different things. Ranking refers to how a product shows up in the search results like on the first seven pages, but in reality, there are 30,000 products that are indexed, meaning they're actually searchable for that same keyword. So what's the use case here? So let's say my product has a relevancy issue and I'm comparing my product to one of the competitors. I might be thinking, hey, where are all the keywords that my competitor is ranking in the top 30, but my current listing isn't ranking at all. So I run a search like that and it turns out there are some keywords where the competitor product is ranking on page one, but my product isn't ranking at all. So since I'm the product not ranking for any of those specific keywords, I'd want to know, am I not ranking for this keyword or am I just not even indexed? And why is this important? Well, because if I am indexed for a keyword, but just not ranking for that keyword, that's actually great because I can probably run some sponsored ads and I'll get the keyword into a campaign and start driving traffic to it. But if I'm not indexed for that keyword, I could put it into any campaign and bid $5,000. But if I'm not indexed, Amazon is not going to show my product for that keyword. So it won't even matter. So the next step is to find out if you're indexed. So what I did was I actually took that same list of keywords where I wasn't showing up in the ranking to see if I'm indexed. So I'm going to show you how to do this. Basically what I did was I found those keywords where I wasn't ranking and I want to see if I'm indexed for those keywords and you put it in the ASIN of your product. Okay. And then the next thing you're going to do is hit check keywords and this is going to show you, you know, which keywords you're actually indexed for. So it looks like we're indexing for quite a few of them except for it looks like this one. Keyword right here, so witchy gifts for women. So the question is, am I basically not indexed for any of these individual keywords or just the whole phrase? Because it looks like all of these phrases are indexing well. So what I can do is I can actually just take away these others. And what I can do is I can go ahead, I'm going to just say, you know, remove duplicates and not maintain the phrases. And I'm just going to check the individual keywords to see which ones I'm not ranking for. Okay, so we've got witchy, we're ranking or we're indexing for gifts. We are indexing four and four and it looks like women. So women is the word that we need to probably add into our listing. And that is actually something that you should look at. And I actually found this phrase. This phrase in particular was only like 800 searches in September. And then when we went to December, it went up to like 70,000 searches. So this is actually a really important keyword for certain seasons of the year. So it would be really important for me to figure out a way to get indexed for women. So that we can get that product ranked and get all that traffic to the listing. So if you haven't checked this out, you need to check out Index Checker to make sure that you are indexing for those really important keywords and phrases. And if not, you can figure out a way to write those in to your actual listing and get those all indexed for your products. Bradley Sutton: Alright, thank you very much Carrie for that and thank you to the rest of you for tuning in. Let me know what you thought of this week's buzz. What was your favorite point? Let me know in the comments below. Is there something you want us to like dive deep into or do a strategy on? Let us know in those YouTube comments if you're watching this on YouTube and we'll see you guys next week to see what's buzzing.