#669 – Big Amazon/Walmart Change and New Amazon Expansion Course | Weekly Buzz 5/29/25

#669 – Big Amazon/Walmart Change and New Amazon Expansion Course | Weekly Buzz 5/29/25 Bradley Sutton: A big Walmart policy change might have made it much easier for you to start selling on the platform. Amazon cut sellers FBA capacity limits again. Helium 10 launches a new TikTok influencer finder tool. 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, Walmart, TikTok shop, e-commerce world. We let you know what new features that Helium 10 has, and we give you a training tip of the week that'll give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Let's see what's buzzing. We've got just a handful of articles this week, but there are some interesting ones. We're going to start right off with one that I think kind of flew under the radar. A couple of weeks ago, I had a couple of these Helium 10 Elite 101 calls. If you guys ever want to do one-on-one calls with me, just sign up for Helium 10 Elite. You can book me for one-on-one call once a month, h10.me forward slash elite. Anyways, I was on one of these one-on-one calls with a Helium 10 Elite member and he was like, yeah, I heard from my Walmart rep that Walmart is now accepting Amazon MCF for shipment. I was like, nah, I don't believe you. They literally have been for years like suspending Walmart sellers if they catch you fulfilling your Walmart orders from your Amazon MCF inventory, multi-channel fulfillment. So I'm like, are you sure? Maybe that person is mistaken. So I started looking around and somebody else told me that too. I'm like, what? Man, two people said it and I looked into the Walmart policy page on shipping and sure enough, take a look at what they announced here. It says, you may use multi-channel fulfillment as long as you ship a neutral packaging using unbranded delivery vehicles, which means neither can display any logos, trademarks or branding of the other retailer. They don't mention Amazon there, but obviously multi-channel fulfillment, you know who they're talking about. But there it is in black and white, straight from the horse's mouth, right there on Walmart. You now can fulfill your Walmart orders with MCF. This, I think, was something that held a lot of Amazon sellers back. Like, yeah, I don't want to have to make the listings. Okay, well, maybe you can make the listings pretty good because you can use Helium 10 for keyword research for Walmart. But then it's like, well, how am I going to fulfill those? I don't want to start WCF, that's Walmart's FBA, and then have to send in a whole bunch of units and then Who knows how it's going to sell because I'd much rather do MCF like I do on TikTok shop. Some people were saying and fulfill the order from Amazon's inventory so I don't need to invest in any inventory but they have never been able to because Walmart outlawed it. No longer as of a couple weeks ago. So sorry to that helium 10 elite member that I didn't believe when they said that. But yeah, you can now fulfill orders from MCF. But as you saw, there's some caveats, you got to make sure you can't come in the Amazon box, it can't be delivered by Amazon. So you'd have to pick like non Amazon carriers, which is an option in MCF. But Who knows? Is Helium 10 going to come out with something that can help with that for Walmart sellers? Stay tuned. Let us know if you'd like us to have some kind of integration so you can fulfill your orders from Walmart, from your Amazon inventory. Next story is just an announcement of a This is a webinar that's going to come up and this is done by Amazon Advertising, but it's going to include Helium 10 family on there. We're going to have Shivali as the emcee and we're going to have Destiny on there. So if you want to start getting ready for Prime Day in the context of your advertising strategy, make sure to sign up for this workshop. It's going to be next week on June 4th and 5th. Go to h10.me forward slash prime ads. H10.me forward slash prime ads in order to sign up for that workshop. All right, next article. Guess who's back? Back again. Nike's back. Tell a friend. So that's the story. Nike is coming back to Amazon. So if you recall, this was actually one of our first ever weekly buzz stories. We've been doing the weekly buzz now like six years back in 2019. Nike announced like, hey, now we've had enough with Amazon. We are not going to be selling ourselves on Amazon anymore and for the last six years, resellers, wholesalers, arbitrage people who have rights to sell Nike have been completely owning buy boxes because Nike's not selling direct and there's no 1P for Amazon. Millions of dollars of Nike shoes, but that is no longer the case as they are coming back after six years. Now, a couple of interesting things here. They say, hey, third-party sellers that have been selling Nike products they've got until July 19th to sell through their Nike inventory. Yeah, that would have been kind of messed up. They're like, you know, all right, you've got a bunch of inventory stocked up. You can't sell them on Amazon anymore. So you've got until July 19th if you're selling Nike on Amazon, because it looks like Amazon is going to be gating their brand. In other words, nobody else is going to be able to sell Nike other than Nike itself, right? So that's kind of something different. Were any of you guys doing wholesale for Nike? Was that like a big income for you? Sorry about this news, but yeah, you're not going to be able to sell on Nike anymore. All right, for our first new feature alert, this is an actual educational course. Now, a lot of sellers have been concerned lately, obviously, with what's been going on with tariffs For the last year now, people are concerned about profitability and just staying on one platform. Of course, people are considering going to TikTok shop, Walmart, other platforms. Perhaps something that's even easier than some of those transitions is expanding to other Amazon marketplaces. That's the key word for this new feature alert, expansion. If you're just selling in Amazon USA, why not start selling Amazon UK, Amazon Germany? If you're selling in Amazon Spain, why not come and sell in Amazon USA, Amazon Japan? Obviously, the reason why people don't just snap their fingers and do it is because there's a lot of regulations involved and different tax codes and VATs and importation and compliance issues and it's kind of like a headache. So what we decided to do, we partnered with the leader in the world for knowledge about how to expand to other marketplaces, that's Avosk. And we have made a course, step-by-step, helping you understand the basics of what it takes to expand into other marketplaces. Because let me tell you guys, in 2025, if you're only selling in one marketplace, you're kind of like shooting yourself in the foot. You need to expand to other marketplaces. So how do you get this course? Well, first of all, this is free for all Helium 10 members. It's not just Elite, not Diamond, not just Platinum, even all the way down to our Starter Plan. Everybody has access to this course. It's in our Freedom Ticket. Basically, just go to your Helium 10 dashboard, hit Tools, and then under the Learning tab, go to Freedom Ticket. Once you get to Freedom Ticket, on the left-hand menu, you are going to see a bunch of different courses, and then the one you want to choose is Expansion Ticket. And you're going to have a variety of modules here done by myself. I filmed on location at Avosk in UK, and Natalia from Avosk, and a lot of great information in this course. So go ahead and start consuming it. Next up, if you recall last month, I gave everybody kind of a heads up that the May FBA capacity seemed to be cut 33% for some, 50% for others, even 60%. And so that was very strange because it was like during the time of tariffs and stuff and we're like, why is there no room in Amazon FBA? What's going on with that? And guess what, guys? We're now almost in June and it was cut yet again, all right? So you guys need to go into your dashboard and check it out. Well, what you want to do is in your Seller Central, on the top left menu, hit that, hover over Inventory, and then go to FBA Inventory. Once you're on the FBA Inventory page, go to Inventory Performance. And then at the very bottom, you are going to see something called capacity monitor. Hit that and you're going to see what it went down from. It already went down from April to May, but now it's going down even further. So like for example, you see here in project X account, it went from 178 for my capacity limit down to 118. Now for me, I'm still good because my current usage is only 76. So like I'm, I'm golden right now, but I've heard from other sellers that they're not so golden. All right. They're kind of like running out of space and so check that guys because what happens is I think you have a chance to like submit an appeal to like ask for more but if you don't and you're maxed out like let's say you were out of stock of one product and so you like you're not over but you're at the limit. You're not going to be able, once that new product comes in, to replenish and make a new shipment to send to Amazon in the month of June if that capacity is maxed out. So make sure to check that out. All right, next up is another new feature alert. This one is for Helium 10 Elite members. Very soon, though, it'll come to Diamond members as well. But as always, we always give our products first to Elite to test out. And this is something that a lot of sellers were asking for. Those who are selling on TikTok Shop, you know, one of the top ways to get new traffic to your listings in TikTok Shop is by having influencers do collabs like making videos for your product and sending people for affiliate commission to your product page. The way to find influencers is kind of a rudimentary way normally through TikTok Shop like affiliate center. It's kind of hard to do and it's hard to like bulk message and hard to find influencers. And then you can only like send so many messages there per day, right? And so what a lot of sellers are saying, man, we're having to pay like 100, 200 bucks or even more for these services that can help us bulk message and bulk find TikTok influencers. And we said, say less. Let's go ahead and work that out for you. And so very happy to introduce the TikTok influencer finder. All right. So this is not our first influencer finder. We have an Amazon influencer finder as well. You can find this by going into the tools menu and then under marketing, you will see influencer finder. Now, when you land on this influencer finder page, you could be on the Amazon one. So there's a drop-down menu at the top left that will say TikTok or Amazon. And then let's say, for example, I want to find a good influencer that potentially could help me promote my coffin shelf product, right? So I could enter in a keyword like goth. Maybe I'm looking for somebody gothy, right? And then I'm like, you know what? This person, I want them to have produced a decent amount of sales. They've had to at least done $100 of sales for other TikTok shop sellers. I could say, I want them to be able to have done live videos or I want them to have at least sold 10 products or 100 or 1,000. There are so many different filters that we have here. Once you enter those desired filters, the influencers that match that will start showing up here. I could just start looking into these influencers to see if I think they would be a good fit and I can just click on them, take a look at their TikTok profile, like look at this geeky Gothic gamer girl. I don't see anything that makes me think that she would be great for the coffee shop, but there are some spooky stuff here on her page. I might go ahead and want to reach out to her. Let's see, who else do we have here? Here's a person called Goth Psalm. So maybe I'm going to hit up their TikTok and I see a lot of like spooky stuff here and dark makeup. Yeah, you know, that's right up my alley of coffin shelves. Here's another one, a hollow queen, Sam. So basically I could just like select all of these individuals. And then I would go ahead and invite them to a bulk invite to one of my collabs. And I can create that right here inside of Helium 10. I can say, hey, I'm offering a free product. Here's my commission on the product that I am offering. And it's going to automatically send a message to all of them. And if you have You're like auto accept, you're not gonna have to do anything else like the tick tock is gonna have a product or an order set up so you can send them a free product and they're gonna make a video hopefully for your product. So this like I said, guys, this is no extra charge inside of the Helium 10 plans here. Like I said, elite now diamond coming soon. But with this, this might save you a couple hundred bucks if you're having to pay other softwares in order to bulk message and bulk find Take talk influencers guys. I'm telling you, you're going to start seeing a lot of emphasis from Helium 10 about TikTok shop because that is like one of the best platforms. that people are being able to scale their money on. So be sure to if you're an elite member to check out that new tool, let us know what you think and then stay tuned for the announcement of when it's opening up to diamond members. All right, next story is coming straight from Amazon. You guys saw that we announced a couple of months ago that the Amazon marketplace has opened up in Ireland and now what can help you get eyeballs? Amazon advertising. And so you couldn't do Amazon advertising in Ireland until now. Sponsored ads and stores as of May 28th Now have launched in Ireland all right, so if you're trying to you know get some visibility on your products You've got one of the first ever products in Amazon If you're in Ireland, make sure to check it out. You now can create, you know, PPC campaigns and you can actually create your store now in Amazon Ireland. All right. Next up is our training tip of the week. And this is going to be courtesy of Carrie. And this is something that that like saved me hundreds of dollars or not hundreds, like I think thousands of dollars over the course of a year. And it's our size tier alert. I'm notification like this is something that can help you guys know where you could be leaving hundreds or thousands of dollars on the table if you just make a slight change to your packaging. How can this save you hundreds or thousands of dollars? Carrie take it away. Carrie Miller: Today, I want to share with you an advanced strategy that actually brought Bradley $5,000 in extra profit. Let's talk about the alerts tool in Helium 10. There's a powerful feature in there, kind of like a silent alarm that notifies you if one of your products is close to dropping into a smaller Amazon size tier. And here's what that means. Let's say your product is currently considered as a large standard size and its dimensions are nine by nine by nine. Well, did you know that if you could shrink just one of those sides to eight inches, so nine by nine by eight, you could potentially move down to a lower size tier? That small tweak could mean $1, $2, or even more per unit saved on FBA fees and shipping. If any of your products qualify, Helium 10 will notify you. And that's exactly what happened to Bradley around July or August of last year. He got an alert that said, you have products with size tier optimization suggestions. Turns out it was three variations of the same product family. And when he dug into the details, Helium 10 showed him that by reducing the length by one inch, he could shift from large bulky to large standard size. What's the impact? His fulfillment fee dropped from $10.75 to $7 per and that's $3.75 savings per sale. So he redesigned the packaging just slightly and got the product to fit in the new size tier. Bradley sells about 1,500 units per year of this product, which is not a huge massive seller, but only about four to five units a day. But if you do the math, $3.75 times 1,500 units is $5,625. That's $5,625 added directly to his bottom line just by making this one inch packaging adjustment. And that's thanks to a simple alert from Helium 10. So this is how you actually set up the feature. If you wanna go to Helium 10, you're gonna go to the tools, And then you're going to click on alerts and it's going to bring you to this page. Then you're going to click on settings and it's going to bring you to this page. And this is where you're actually going to set up all of your alerts. And the one that I'm talking about specifically is size tier optimization. You want to make sure that that is checked. And if it's checked, you're going to make sure you're basically going to see the alerts in here. So you can see they're all kind of grouped here and you can click on this event history for each product and it'll show you for each product what all the different alerts are that you can take advantage of. Now this feature is available for platinum, diamond, and above. Check your alerts dashboard, look on the left-hand side, and do you see any notifications about size to your optimization? Of course, it won't be possible for everyone, but if you have a molded product with custom fit packaging, changing dimensions might not be feasible, but if there's any flexibility, maybe adjusting the way you package, reconfiguring parts, or even shaving off half an inch, you could unlock major savings. I actually worked for somebody who was selling lighting, and he basically engineered these huge lamps Package down into these small packages to save money on all of those fees. So even a $1 or $2 reduction fee per unit can add up fast. And in Bradley's case, $3.75 per unit meant thousands of dollars back in his pocket. So check those alerts. You could be leaving money on the table without even knowing it. Bradley Sutton: Thank you for that, Carrie. So guys, right now, pause this. If you're on your computer, go to your Helium 10 alerts dashboard, check it out. Let me know in the comments, did you have any size to your alerts? Is it something you can take action on? I did and I did take action on it and like Carrie was talking about, saved me thousands of dollars by being able to change just an inch on one of the sides of one of my boxes. So really, this works, guys. Really cool feature alert that was made by Ivan on our team. Next up, we've got a note here from Seller Central and it says, over $4 billion invested in rural, it's kind of a hard word to say, rural, rural delivery. All right, so basically it says, to help offer faster delivery speeds to customers in small towns, we're investing over $4 billion by 2026 to expand our rural, there's that word again, Delivery network alright so they're they're they're expanding the rural delivery network to over 200 delivery stations allowing us to deliver over a billion more products each month now why this is somewhat significant is I think you know you know you've seen the reports on walmart like how. I forgot what the number was something like eighty six percent or ninety three percent of the population is within. Five miles or ten miles of a walmart or something like that right and so walmart's been able to kind of like catch up pretty fast with the like same day and next day deliveries because of that network and so they can't could have taken over. As far as shipping speed, from some locations in rural America, like maybe the middle of North Dakota or something where there wasn't a delivery station nearby, maybe Prime deliveries were taking two days or even three days or something like that. Well, with this new program, hopefully Amazon is going to tighten the gap. And again, What does this mean for sellers? Hopefully it means increased sales where people who maybe were reluctant to buy from Amazon before because of the shipping speeds and where they live. Maybe, who knows, this is going to help increase your sales and you'll start seeing more sales in different parts of the country. Don't forget to use Helium 10 inventory heat maps to see like the cities and states and regions of where your sales are coming from. All right, last up, you'll see somebody else on the weekly buzz next week and that's because I'll be going to an event for the first time ever In Estonia, the Ambition event is in Estonia. Go to h10.me forward slash Estonia. I'll be speaking on stage here at this event. You'll be able to see some Serious Sellers Podcast guests. A number of them who have been on our podcast before who will be speaking at this event. This is going to be on June the 7th. All right. June the 7th in Tallinn, Estonia. So make sure to show up and show out there at that event if you're in Europe or close by and can hop over there. It'd be great to meet a lot of you in person in Estonia. So again, h10.me forward slash Estonia and that right now. As of now, this is my last Amazon event until maybe Amazon Accelerate in September. I did probably 7 events in May and traveled to 13 countries. After this, there's nothing for a few months for me. So please, it'll be nice to see you guys because I won't be on the road for a few months after that. All right, guys. Thank you very much for tuning in this week. Hope you found some of these stories helpful and beneficial to you. We'll see you next week to see what's buzzing.