#665 – China Tariffs SLASHED! and De Minimis Cut? | Weekly Buzz 5/13/25

#665 – China Tariffs SLASHED! and De Minimis Cut? | Weekly Buzz 5/13/25 Bradley Sutton: The China tariffs have been drastically cut but was the de minimis tariffs cut also? How you can fulfill orders in Amazon Ireland without having to send inventory there? 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 a training tip of the week, and we let you know what new features 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. We're releasing this weekly buzz this week a day or two early. That's because we've got breaking news over the weekend or late Sunday. The news dropped that an agreement was reached on the tariffs. Let's just go ahead and hop into it and get a little summary on that because I think that's been top of mind for any Amazon seller who has been sourcing product especially in China over the last few weeks and so we've got a temporary reprieve I should say on the tariff. So let's hop into this article. I mean every news outlet was talking about it but the one I'm going to talk about was from Time Magazine. It says US and China agree on tariff pause in major trade war rollback. It says the US and China agreed on Monday to significantly reduce tariffs on each other for an initial 90-day period. This is not permanent. Some things still should happen. It's 90 days for now and it's going to affect on Wednesday, May 14th. And countries are going to be reducing the tariffs on each other by 115% for that initial period. So basically the U.S. tariffs on Chinese exports, which is what I think is most of you listeners out there are concerned about, is going down from like 145% down to 30% while Chinese tariffs on American goods will go down to 10%. This article also mentions why is the rate higher for China that's because the 20% tariffs that were Applied in February mark that was about like fentanyl and so those are still in effect So this is I think welcome news to all Amazon sellers who have been like pretty worried about what's you know? How are you going to deal with some of these tariffs? don't forget we still don't know what could happen and so we've actually got a We're going to do a workshop on tariffs next week. Somewhere in the description, there'll be a link to it. Make sure to sign up for that webinar. We've brought in some experts who can talk about it because, again, these tariffs could go back. It could go back after 90 days. We don't know. Other tariffs have come out. I think this, like what happened in the last few weeks has kind of taught Amazon sellers that You can't predict what's going to happen with tariffs, trade wars, things like that. It's important to be prepared. Now is the time to do that like during this 90-day thing so you're not caught off guard again. So make sure to sign up for that workshop. That would be I think next week or the week after. In more tariff news, we've got an article here from Yahoo Finance. This is interesting. It says, US to cut de minimis tariff on China shipments from $2.54 from $1.20. This was actually the tariff that everybody liked. Everybody's like, okay, this is good. We don't want de minimis. De minimis, for you guys who don't know or the first time you're watching this show, it's how Timu and Sheen and Amazon Hall and AliExpress, how they can send shipments directly from China and get around the tariff, basically free of tariffs and so you could send like a $5 phone case and it goes door to door and the recipient nor the sender has to pay any tariffs and so that's why a lot of these websites could ship stuff so kind of cheap. Now last week, Kerry reported that Timu and Sheen completely stopped importing from China. I had posted something somewhat erroneously where I was like, I don't know why they did that. Why did they just completely stop? But this article talks about it, something that I didn't realize. It says here, a White House executive order said that the U.S. would cut the de minimis tariff on China shipments to 54% from 120. But here's the key with a flat fee of $100 to remain now, unless I'm understanding this wrong yet again, that means that no matter how much the product cost. the minimum fee to import direct from China is $100. Is that how you guys are reading this? So now all of a sudden I understand, oh no wonder why Timo and Shane stopped having the option of shipping products directly and only shipping products from local warehouses in the US is because you could have a $30 product and forget the 100% tariff or 120% tariff, I mean, you're going to have to pay $100 minimum fee if I'm reading this correct. So this is not something to be afraid of. The fact that these de minimis is going from $120 down to $54, it doesn't mean that the market is going to get flooded with Chinese cheap products again because that $100 tariff is in place. So like maybe this might be an effect for like a you know, $700 product like a sofa or something like that, which wouldn't qualify because it's not a small a small product anyways, that you know, might actually make a difference than this tariff going from 120 to 54. But for now, if I'm reading this correctly, it looks like we still don't have or we don't have to worry about these cheap Chinese products coming in directly to customers anymore. Speaking of Timu and Sheen though, here's an article from Reuters. And it says US China trade reprieve buys Sheen and Timu time to restock US inventory. So again, this is not about They're going to start shipping directly from China again, but this is about how Timu and Sheen are now storing product locally. The sellers are storing product locally in U.S. warehouses. The product still comes from China but it's going to come just like Amazon products in containers and obviously nothing has been coming in or most things have not been coming in lately because of the tariffs on regular shipments. So now maybe their inventory is a little bit depleted so this article talks about how now with this 90-day pause, maybe some of those TikTok and Timu and Sheen sellers can send their products like through traditional ways to the U.S. warehouses and then you might see inventory on those websites beefed up again. Now switching gears away from this tariff talk, let's talk about something interesting. This is like TikTok pulling a page out of eBay. Now I guess in the U.S. this has been the case for a while. I didn't realize there was a such thing as TikTok shop secondhand products kind of like eBay. Where it's like, you know, you can sell like used appliances or resold luxury goods or baseball cards, things like that. What does that sound like? Sounds like eBay, right? So TikTok shop is kind of like has this eBay thing going on. I did not realize that for the US, but now this article from E-commerce News EU says that Now that TikTok has launched this in the US and the UK, they are now going to be doing it elsewhere in Europe. They're recruiting people for this program. If you're a seller on eBay, I sell on eBay. I sell thousands. I sell almost as much on eBay these days as I do on Amazon some months. Hey, TikTok Shop is a place that you can consider selling your baseball cards, Pokemon cards, used goods, etc. So keep that in mind. Speaking of EU, next article comes from ChannelX.World and we had talked a few weeks ago about how Amazon opened up the Amazon Ireland website. What basically is being announced now is that Amazon Remote Fulfillment is now available from UK to Ireland. For those who don't know, Remote Fulfillment is this program where you can have your inventory stored in one country and then you can have your listings open in another country and then if somebody buys it from that other country, the inventory comes from your FBA in your home country. It's a remote fulfillment setup for Canada, Mexico and Brazil. Basically that means I have my inventory in Amazon USA warehouses but I have my listings open in Mexico, Brazil, etc. and if somebody orders a product, it ships directly from Amazon USA FBA all the way to the customer. So now if you have inventory in Amazon UK, you don't need to necessarily yet send inventory into Amazon Ireland warehouses. You can turn this remote fulfillment on and fulfill the orders in Amazon Ireland from your UK inventory. Next article is an announcement from Seller Central and Amazon sent us a lot of information on it. It's basically upcoming changes to Seller Fulfilled Prime. Seller Fulfilled Prime is like if you've got some crazy good selling speed that you can do on your own, you could have the prime badge even though you're shipping product directly and there's tons of changes. I don't think anything like game changing for it but there's like six pages of information about changes about applying it like what's the probation period, who qualifies, what happens if you fail, how many times you're allowed to reply or retry I should say, what are the thresholds are to qualify, a lot of information. If you've never sold or never had Seller Fulfilled Prime and you're interested in it, make sure to check it out or if you are selling Seller Fulfilled Prime, there could be some changes that might affect your eligibility so make sure to check the link below in order to get some information on that. Next article is also from Seller Central and it's entitled Fee Adjustments For Partner Carrier Shipment Measurements. So for those of you who use like UPS or Amazon, other LTL carriers to ship your replenishment to Amazon, now they say, hey, if the measured weight dimensions or freight class differs from what you provided in the shipment creation, you're going to see this notification in the inbound dashboard. This is starting on June 12th. And it could adjust in a fee adjustment. So like sometimes maybe some people are trying to cheat, you know, like you're going to send via SPD, like UPS, all your replenishment to Amazon and the box measures 24 by 24 by 24. But you're like, all right, I'm going to put 24 by 24 by 18 to try and save some money. Well, you're going to get caught now if you do that. Now, something something really funny I saw here, it says, these measurement differences will result in a fee adjustment, including a credit to your account if you provided measurements that were so high. So first of all, I doubt anybody's been like, Oh, let me increase the measurements on this. But Amazon is saying that if it does, UPS or whoever is going to catch it and refund you money, like give you money back because you paid too much. Yeah, if you believe that I've got a bridge to sell you. Let's take it for what it is. I'm not confident that UPS is going to be like, hey, let me return some money to you guys because you paid us too much, but Amazon is saying that's going to happen. But I think the more important part here is you might get charged extra if you are not being completely honest about your dimensions. An article from Yahoo and Reuters Announced today that Amazon signs up FedEx for residential or so Amazon kind of exclusively exclusively was using USPS UPS for like the last mile shipments, but now Amazon it says here has hired FedEx to handle some of its large package deliveries Weeks after UPS said it was halting. It's less profitable deliveries for Amazon and cutting 20,000 jobs so I don't think this is gonna affect sellers too much, but basically Now, you're going to notice some of your products being delivered by FedEx to the Amazon customers. Yesterday was the Amazon Upfront and so they had a few announcements at Amazon Upfront. Here's an ad week, kind of like summarize it. It says, Amazon drops three new CTV ad formats ahead of its Upfront presentation. They announced that 130 million people see prime video ads each month. So maybe you're not that big of a seller yet, but I think it's becoming more and more accessible or something that smaller sellers, relatively speaking, you know, where it's not, we're not just talking about nine figure brands. Smaller sellers can consider now, perhaps more than ever, sponsored TV, because the sponsored TV seems to be getting more and more mainstream. Now, the new formats that were announced were contextually relevant pause ads, shoppable ads for products on Amazon, and shoppable ads for products off Amazon. That pause is pretty, pretty significant. So like, let's say you're watching, you know, Thursday Night Football, you're watching some kind of Game of Thrones or whatever Prime Video has. I watch some Korean dramas on Prime Video. I hit pause because I got to go check something, right? I got to pause when I watch Korean drama because I use the subtitles and I can't just like look away. If I get distracted, I won't be able to understand because I don't speak Korean. So I might hit pause. But now what's going to happen when I look back at the TV and it's paused, There's going to be ads that sellers are bidding for where there's going to be a product right there front and center on that pause screen before I hit play again. Now, these aren't just random ads. It says that they're using AI to make sure that's kind of like relevant to the show that you're watching. It says, for example, if you're watching the series The Summer I Turn Pretty, a viewer could see an ad for beach vacations when they pause the show. Or it says, here's their second example that they gave. It's kind of funny. If it gets paused in the middle of a steamy makeout scene, maybe there will be an ad for Hershey's Kisses. The second new ad type is you're going to be able to add products to your Amazon cart while an ad is playing on a streaming device. For example, let's say there's an ad for shampoo. There's going to be a button where you can actually click add to Amazon cart in the corner of the screen without even pausing it. And in the last new format, it says it allows viewers to take action during an ad even if it's for a brand not sold on Amazon. So instead of being able to add it to the cart like you can with those other ones, viewers can click a send to phone button. So for example, it says if a travel brand is advertising trips to the beach, the viewer can opt to have more information sent to their phone. So like I said before, maybe a couple of years ago, Most of us sellers are sponsored TV. That's not something I'll ever get into. But hey, I think it's becoming more and more democratized. All right, last up is just three events I'm going to be at over the next couple of weeks, leaving in I'm going to be speaking at World F Istanbul. World F Istanbul is going to be from the 15th through the 17th so make sure that you guys get your tickets h10.me forward slash Istanbul. I'll be speaking on stage there. If you're in Turkey, make sure to join. If you're in Korea, I'll be next week on May 21st in Seoul, Korea at an Amazon ads event. Go to h10.me forward slash ads Korea if you'd like more information and then a couple days later on the 23rd I'll be in Tokyo, Japan for a tech partner day again also by Amazon ads so if you want information on that Go to h10.me forward slash Tokyo. All right, that's it for the news articles this week. Now, before we get into our training tip of the week, let's go over a couple of new feature alerts from Helium 10 that will help sellers out there. The first one up is a enlisting analyzer and listing builder. You are now able to create or analyze listings. In the Amazon Australia marketplace. And also for Listing Builder, you can now create listings in Listing Builder for Amazon Australia. And next up, this is right now only for Elite members, but it will soon come to Diamond members. A pretty cool update for Helium 10 Ads. The artist formerly known as Helium 10 Atomic. And it's called the Budget Manager, right? So this is pretty cool because it kind of like controls your budgets at like your whole account level and allows you to go above and beyond at the monthly level and the daily level, your whatever daily budgets you are putting for your campaign. So for example, what you can do is you can set your daily budgets setting, right? So you can hit the settings button on one of your accounts and optimize how it's distributed. You also have campaign budget limits. You're going to be able to set minimum and maximum budgets for each campaign so you can have some flexible control. Next, we've got auto pacing. So the system is going to allocate budgets based on the campaign performance. You might have a budget for every campaign but because of this pacing, let's say your campaigns aren't spending as much as you wanted or it's going to overspend, the next day it'll do the opposite so that you can keep pace to what you really want your overall spend or budget to be. Another button that is new is going to be the stop overspending so it allows you to adjust your budget at any time to stay within your limits and prevent overspending and so how this basically works is you're going to go, elite members can do this now, diamond members are going to be able to do this soon, you can hit for example settings right here next to your profile and then you've got to activate it like the auto pacing and the stop overspend But you can actually set up right here what you want your daily budget to be like. For example, for June, I can click here and I can edit my whole monthly budget. Let's say I can just put like $400 total for the month across all my campaigns. And then basically now it's going to allocate it completely dividing it by the day of the month. But then I can go in here and then now I can actually change what's happening on a certain day by a percentage or by a budget. So like for example if I'm doing this for July. I've got like a full like I want to spend $10,000 in July. I could have that but then during Prime Week or Prime Day, right? I might go into like the 17th 18th if that's when Prime Day is going to be and I'll be like, you know what I need this budget on these days to be like a hundred percent more and then what's going to happen? It's going to allocate more budget to those days and then take away some budget from the other days the non Prime Days in order to keep pace with my full monthly budget. So guys go in there. And start playing with this stuff. I think it's going to help you be able to have a little bit more flexibility. Those of you who use Helium 10 ads, especially during certain months where you want to allocate more spend, but you don't want to have to go in to all of your campaigns and one by one, like increase the budget for a couple of days or even for the full month. Like some of us do that, right, for November, December. But now you can be like, you know what, November, I just want to take my total budget from $1,000, let me go to $1,500, let me go to $2,000, and then it's going to go in and increase each of your campaigns accordingly. And then whether you're not hitting that, it'll go ahead and increase the rest of the month. I've only been spending like 70%, 80% will be like, you know what, let's go and give 120% of the budget to make up for those days. So a lot of things that, you know, use ads users, Helium 10 ads users have been asking for is going to be implemented in this. Let us know if this is what you guys were looking for, those of you who are asking for this and how we can tweak it even further to help you guys out. Like I said, right now it's elite members only, but soon it's coming to Helium 10 ads dive members as well. I've been speaking at different events like this year and I always ask when I'm on stage, this is one of the most powerful features that Helium 10 has and I bet 99% of you are not using it. Without fail, 95-99% of whoever's in the audience does not raise their hand when I ask who is using this regularly, but this is something that allows us to have a look into Amazon, what they think our product is relevant for. So super important. Shivali, show us how to use it. Shivali Patel: This next strategy is something we predicted years ago that other tools would eventually try to copy because it's just that valuable. It's called Amazon Recommended Rank and it's a direct connection to Amazon's API that tells us how relevant a keyword is to a specific product. Essentially, Amazon assigns a relevant score to each keyword based on how well it aligns with a particular listing and Helium 10 takes that score and converts it into a ranked list of keywords. If a keyword receives a 999 score, it means that Amazon considers it the most relevant keyword for that product, giving it the Amazon recommended rank number one. If another keyword scores 996, it falls into rank two and so forth. This feature is extremely useful because it allows sellers to understand exactly how Amazon perceives their product. At the top 20, 30 keywords that Amazon associates with the listings, sellers can immediately tell if their product is being categorized correctly or if there's a relevancy issue that might be preventing it from gaining visibility. This is really important for brand new listings. If a product launches and struggles to get impressions on PPC campaigns, the issue is usually related to keyword relevancy. If that listing is properly optimized, Amazon may still misunderstand what the product is, which can lead to low visibility in search terms and ad campaigns that don't perform well. We personally experienced this when selling socks that had a novelty message printed on them. One sock said, if you can read this, and then the other one said, bring me coffee. Naturally, we wanted to target coffee-related keywords like gifts for coffee lovers because that's exactly what the product was designed for, right? However, since the product was technically listed in the clothing category, Amazon failed to associate with coffee-related terms. When we ran Amazon Recommended Rank on the listing, we saw that all of the keywords Amazon thought the product was relevant for had nothing to do with coffee. Instead, it treated the product as generic socks, which explained why PPC campaigns weren't getting impressions. Without Helium 10's Recommended Rank feature, we would have never known that this was happening. But once we identified the issue, we were able to make adjustments and improve the listing's relevancy. Let's look at a real-time example using one of Helium 10's coffin shelves from Manny's Mysterious Oddities. When we run it through Serif, and sort the results by Amazon recommended rank, we can immediately see what Amazon believes The product is right at the top of that list. We see terms like coffin shelf wall large coffin bookshelf large coffin bookshelf and gothic bookshelf all highly relevant keywords that clearly indicate Amazon knows exactly what this product is. There's no confusion here and the listing is properly optimized to match what shoppers are searching for. But let's compare this to another coffin shelf product that we found on page 4 of the search results. This is already a red flag because there aren't even that many coffin shelves on Amazon yet. This one is buried deep in the rankings. When we ran it through Cerebro and checked the Amazon recommended rank, we immediately noticed a problem. Unlike the Helium 10 shelf, this product's top ranking keywords have nothing to do with coffins or with gothic decor. Instead, Amazon has categorized it incorrectly, meaning it will never rank well for a coffin shelf related search until the seller fixes the problem. This is a perfect example, you guys, of why Amazon recommended rank is so powerful. The seller of the struggling product likely has no idea why they're not ranking well, but if they were using Helium 10, they would immediately see that Amazon is not associating their listing with the right keywords because of this. They need to go back and re-optimize their listing, adjust their backend search terms, or even check if there's a category misalignment. If they don't take action, they'll remain stuck on page four, missing out on potential sales. This is exactly why Helium 10 users, whether they're on Platinum or Diamond plan, never have to be in the dark about how Amazon perceives their listings. No other tool gives them this level of insight into keyword relevancy, making Amazon Recommended Rank an absolute must-have for any sellers looking to dominate their niche. Bradley Sutton: Alright, thank you Shivali for that tip. Alright guys, that's it for the news this week. I believe Kerry or Shivali next week is going to be here while I'm away for the weekly buzz, so make sure to tune in next week to see what's buzzing.