#671 – Helium 10’s Big TikTok Launch | TikTok Boosts Book Sales | Prime Day Prep | Weekly Buzz 6/4/25

#671 – Helium 10’s Big TikTok Launch | TikTok Boosts Book Sales | Prime Day Prep | Weekly Buzz 6/4/25 Carrie Miller: On this week's episode of The Weekly Buzz, we have Helium 10 just launched an entire suite of tools for TikTok Shop, which is our biggest launch in a very, very long time. We'll also talk about Prime exclusive discounts and how TikTok Shop wants to be your next bookstore. This and more on this week's episode of The Weekly Buzz. Bradley Sutton: How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. 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 let you know what new features that Helium 10 has, as well as give you a training tip of the week that will give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Today's host is actually going to be Carrie Miller. So, Carrie, take it away and let us know what's buzzing. Carrie Miller: Okay, so this week was kind of a light week in terms of e-commerce news, which is probably because Helium 10 has some of our biggest news in a long time. One of our biggest launches in a very, very long time, which is TikTok tools. Helium 10 has an entire suite of tools to help sellers on TikTok shops. So I'm gonna talk to you about some of those and we'll go ahead and get into some of the e-commerce news first though. So let's go ahead and talk about our first article and that is about Prime exclusive discounts, okay? Prime Exclusive Discount Scheduling is now open for Prime Day 2025. So why should you do a Prime Day Exclusive Discount? Well, you can actually benefit from the increased traffic and visibility on Prime Day, including Prime Day deal badging in search, in cart and on the product detail pages. So this is going to actually help you To stick out quite a bit, it's a red badge usually that they use. So it's really a good idea to do it if you can to get some more exposure. Each Prime Day discount campaign is subject to $100 flat fee. And it can contain up to 500 SKUs. You're not going to be charged though unless you generate at least one sale on a Prime exclusive discount SKU. Prime Day discounts are a great option to promote new and existing products to sell through excess inventory on high traffic days. So not only is it good for new products, but say you had an older product that you have a lot of inventory on. This might be a great time to do that. And I reported on another article actually a few weeks ago. And if you use AWD, you actually can put your stock into AWD and you won't ever run out of stock for Prime Day. So they'll basically consider you in stock if you use Amazon Warehouse Distribution. So if you are using that, it's a really good time to kind of really promote those SKUs that maybe aren't moving as much so you can sell through and recoup that cash for your cash flow. Prime exclusive price discount submissions close 12 hours before Prime Day, but you can still go ahead and get started today. And I would suggest planning ahead now for Prime Day and starting to get to consider which products you want to put on discount. We are actually going to be launching a checklist soon for Prime Day, so keep an eye out for that. We'll have all the things that you should do to prep for Prime Day, so stay tuned for that. But in the meantime, go ahead and set up those Prime Day exclusive discounts. Okay, let's go ahead and get into the next article, which is about TikTok Shop and how TikTok Shop wants to be your next bookstore. So the title of this article here is TikTok Shop wants to be your new favorite bookstore, okay? And if we scroll down a little bit, According to this article, it basically is saying that reading is cool again. I didn't know it wasn't cool because I actually like reading, but it's apparently cool again because print books saw a rise in sales in 2024 totaling over 782 million books sold in the US. And this is actually pretty cool. And this could potentially be because of book talk, which is hashtag book talk on TikTok, which is a thriving space within TikTok devoted to literary discourse led by a group of book influencers who have built massive followings on TikTok. The online community shares everything from videos discussing their favorite recent reads and hot titles that they think are overrated to tours of local bookstores and reactions to videos after reading pivotal chapters in viral books. So, it says, to give you a sense of the scope, in the first three months, Of 2025, the hashtag booktalk hashtag was used in 53 million posts, which is an 80% increase from the same period last year. So the sheer size and influence of this corner of TikTok has already resulted in a transformative shift in the publishing industry. TikTok shop is really hoping to be the place where you not only find the books, but also buy them too. So if you're into books, book talk is probably the place to be. So go ahead and check it out. And if you sell books, that might be something to also look into. Okay, let's go ahead and get into our next article, which is about TikTok launching and introducing a new AI powered seller assistant to streamline in-app Shopping. Okay, so if we scroll down a little bit, basically TikTok is saying that they're stepping up their game by introducing the Seller Assistant, which is an AI-powered tool designed to help sellers within TikTok Shop to optimize their listings, enhance customer engagement, and drive better sales performance. So as TikTok continues to grow as a hub for in-app shopping, this new tool aims to simplify the selling process and empower businesses to thrive on the platform. So if we scroll down a little bit here, shows a little bit more information and that is that TikTok's seller assistant isn't just a chatbot. So that's kind of what I thought. So it's saying it's actually even better and bigger, more significant than that. So basically it's going to be more of a support to help you to do a lot of things within seller central on TikTok. The TikTok Shop Seller Center tool is designed to provide real-time actionable insights, making it easier for sellers to navigate the complexities of e-commerce. So whether or not sellers are looking to boost their product visibility or streamline order management, Seller Assistant is supposed to be there to provide immediate support. I don't know about you, but I'm going to have to definitely try this out because I really always like to talk to a person, especially if there's a big issue. But they're saying this is even better than anything that you could expect. So we'll see. So the tool is built, it says in the article, to be the always on expert offering answers and recommendations tailored to each seller's specific needs. And with this tool at their fingertips, TikTok sellers can access guidance that can help them act faster and smarter. So it's going to give you instant access to real-time support. So if we scroll down, it says instant answers and real-time support and then performance data at your fingertips. So it's going to help you to kind of take a look and analyze and give you breakdowns of your metrics. And then it's also smart context aware recommendations. So it's going to basically help you to Optimize Your Shop. So the ability to receive real-time tailored advice on product listings and marketing strategies allows sellers to stay agile and competitive in a fast-moving market. So we'll see. I'm curious if anyone has used this or tried it out and let me know if you think it's better than a person or something like that. I'm not saying they don't have any people supporting TikTok, but I'm sure they're probably moving more towards this AI-directed help. So I'm really curious to know if anyone has used it. I haven't used it yet. So, let me know in the comments below. Alright, next up we have Shivali with the feature alerts for this week. So, take it away, Shivali. Shivali Patel: Let's kick off our new feature alerts with something I'm personally super excited about, especially if you are brand new to or curious about TikTok Shop. Perhaps you've been looking for an avenue to expand, and this might just be your moment. Well, we just dropped a brand new TikTok Shop training course, and trust me, this one is different. It's filmed at TikTok headquarters itself, and it features real seven-figure sellers diving into all the stuff that beginners are too afraid to ask, like, what exactly is TikTok Shop? How is it different from Amazon? Why is live shopping such a big deal? And how do you even find the right creators to work with? The course walks viewers through fundamentals and actionable steps. So it's not just theory. There's a couple of ways you can access it. So first, if you are on our dashboard, you might see this little thing here, which says this banner says the time to sell on TikTok is now. You can click view the TikTok feature hub now, which will take you into a page that looks like this. If you are watching this on YouTube, you can see it over my head. It says, visit the TikTok Academy. I would just click that and it will take you directly into the learning hub where you can now access the training. As you can see, we have all sorts of different modules here. Why TikTok Shop, getting started on TikTok Shop, from Amazon to TikTok, a real seller's journey, how to integrate, how to discover product opportunity, how to grow and scale on TikTok, logistics, Anything you might think of, you can access here. Now, if you don't see the banner, then you can actually go directly into your learning hub and click the Freedom Ticket course. Which, if you go into that on the left-hand paneling, as you can see, you're accessing the same exact thing. So either way, you will be able to have access to this so long as you are on a Helium 10 plan, starter or higher. You've got access, so go binge it like it's your next Netflix series. Because if you're not on TikTok Shop yet, this is particularly designed to help get you in the game. Now, say that you finished watching the course and you're thinking, cool, I want in, but is it even profitable for me? That is where the TikTok profitability calculator comes into play. Just click the Chrome extension, plug in your numbers on any product listing page. Input in the same way you would do for the FBA calculator, your cost of goods, selling price. The only thing I will mention is as you open up Profitability Calculator by clicking the Chrome extension and going to it, you will need to toggle into the TikTok Shop tab. In doing so, plug and play any numbers if you are, say, offering a 20% commission to your influencers. Because, of course, on Amazon, you have your Amazon fees, whereas on TikTok Shop, you are going to be leveraging the mass network of influencers that the platform offers. And so go in and put in whatever commission rate you have set aside for your product or play around with it. If you don't know yet, that's totally okay, as well as what your fulfillment costs will look like. So if you are doing Fulfilled by TikTok, that's going to be FBT, MCF if you are fulfilling directly from Amazon warehouses, as well as self-ship if you are shipping from a 3PL or your own warehouse or house. So, at the end of the day, as you're going through and you're putting in numbers, the whole premise of this is you can now see your profit margins and decide whether or not it's an avenue that will generate money for you or if it's worth your investment. So, again, before you do absolutely anything to see how much profit you're going to really walk away with, before you list the products, go ahead and run this. I know that on TikTok Shop, some things might look like they're really low ticket items, but once you factor in margins, logistics, your take home might surprise you. No harm, no foul, right? I encourage checking it out. And lastly, if you end up running with it or already know that you want to be a TikTok Shop player and your TikTok Shop account is already approved, You'll need to make sure that it's connected to your Helium 10 account. It's free. It takes like 30 seconds and it helps the interfaces communicate, showing you sales, profits, and trends in one place. Here's how you do it. So when you're inside of Helium 10, you're going to click the dropdown menu on the top right-hand corner, go to connections. That will take you to this page where then you'll add, add another seller account. In doing so, click what account would you like to connect? Of course, that would be TikTok. Click Next, and then you can continue following the instructions as written. Now, once you've done that, you'll find that inside of the Profits tool, it's going to be linked. So all your TikTok shop data is going to start flowing in. You can track performance. We're currently looking at one of our test accounts, but you'll want to dial in your numbers and just stop operating in the dark. Oh, and we are doing something fun. So if you connect your account this week and DM us a screenshot on the Serious Sellers Podcast Instagram, we'll enter you into a giveaway for a free one-on-one consult with me, Bradley, or Carrie. You're pick. So get in, get connected, and let's build something big on TikTok. With that, let me pass it back to Carrie. Carrie Miller: And now we're going to get into my favorite part of this, which is talking about the incredible TikTok tool launches that we have for you. And this is really significant, especially for me as a seller, because you don't have to spend hundreds of dollars on all these other tools. Everything is now in Helium 10. There are some tools that literally do the same things here that cost $300 a month. So that would be $300 extra a month that you would have to do. And not only that, I've been asked so many times by people, you know, I want somebody to help. I want something to help me, you know, convert my listings over to like Walmart or these other platforms. Well, now we've made it super easy when you can convert your listings. I'm from Amazon to TikTok Shop in just like the snap of a finger. Basically, it's so fast and we actually use AI to optimize and convert these over to TikTok Shop. So let's go ahead and I'm going to show you my screen. So the way that you find this is you're going to go to tools and you're going to go to listing converter here. And this is the listing converter for TikTok. And what you want to do is you want to, you know, choose the TikTok Shop. You know, you want it to migrate your products because you can have more than one here. Manny's Mysterious Oddities here. And then you're gonna select which type of fulfillment you want. So you can do fulfilled by merchant or FBA. If you want FBA, I'm gonna show you later how to set up multi-channel fulfillment so that Amazon can fulfill your orders for you. But this is just for the actual converting part right now. And you're gonna answer these questions. Most of them are gonna be no, but it's like the Prop 65. Some of you might say yes. To some of that, but basically you're going to answer these questions because they are required by TikTok and then hit yes, submit and enable, enable to kind of go through, you know, your next step, which is to choose which of these particular listings you want to convert over. And so what you have to do is all you have to do is literally just check the product that you want to convert over. So you just check it. And that's it. And then you hit bulk convert. Now you can do more than one, but this is extremely fast and it says, nice pick. We're syncing your listing. So basically. It's going to let you know that it's syncing the listings and you can see the ones that are actually live. So sometimes it might actually go live like right away. It looks like it's live already. So otherwise it'll say pending when you're waiting for the actual product. Oh actually here it is. It looks like it says pending. So it's pending. So we're basically waiting for a few minutes. It really doesn't take long at all for this to actually happen. So going back though, if you wanted to select, you know, when you're selecting your listings, if you wanted to kind of filter, you could select based on the category or your title or your SKUs to choose the ones that you want. In order to convert the listing over. So the listing converter is actually powered by AI. So it's going to convert your listing to TikTok Shop using AI and it's going to convert it into the correct format for TikTok Shop. So it's going to take your Amazon listings and convert it over for you. Some people are concerned about the formatting and everything like that. We've actually figured that out so that you can do this very quickly and efficiently and with the power of AI. Alright, so let's go ahead and get into the next TikTok shop feature, which is multi-channel fulfillment and how to set that up. Alright, so the next thing that you want to do after you have converted all of your listings over is you're going to actually map your products so that they are fulfilled correctly. And the way that we're going to do that is I'm going to show you with my screen here. Okay, so what you're gonna actually do is you're gonna go up to the right-hand corner where your account settings are, and you're gonna click on Connections, okay? And this is where you're gonna do your product mapping. And this is basically connecting your product that you wanna sell on TikTok Shop to your inventory at Amazon. You can either click here, because this is popping up, Manage Product Mapping, or you can go here, where under your TikTok Shop, where it says Manage Products Mapping, and you're gonna click on that. And this is where you're gonna make sure to match the right inventory to the products that you wanna sell. So for example, we've got this chicken coop stackable. You're gonna wanna basically search through here and you can actually search geese, chicken coop, and then you're gonna be able to find it. The reason why we can't find it here is because we actually don't have inventory on that one. But you can see that we've actually chosen all these different products here to make sure that we have it matched correctly. This next part here is safety stock and what happens if your product goes viral on TikTok shop and you know, you don't want to run out of Amazon inventory. You can actually put safety stock here. You can put a hundred, you can put a thousand, whatever it is. So you make sure you don't run out of stock on Amazon. You can put here. Okay. So another thing you're going to want to do is you want to go up to manage my shop mapping and basically you need to make sure that this is turned on. If this is not turned on, you're not going to have your TikTok Shop connected to your multi-channel fulfillment. So you need to turn this on. This is where it automatically is going to fill orders through your Amazon multi-channel fulfillment when you connect this right here. And then inventory, this is basically going to connect and sync your Amazon inventory to TikTok Shop. So once you turn those on and you hit apply, that is all gonna basically be on and ready to go. So make sure that you have those settings turned on as well so that you can utilize multi-channel fulfillment. All right, this next TikTok feature is absolutely my favorite because it's gonna save so much time and money. Before we had this, you actually would have to pay for a separate tool that was about $300 a month, but now it's all included in the Helium 10 plan. So it's gonna save tons of money and tons of time because you can reach out to influencers using AI. Now, why would you wanna reach out to influencers? Well, because you basically have them create videos to promote your product. That's the main way that you're gonna get products promoted on TikTok Shop, whereas Amazon, you do a lot of SEO. TikTok is basically reaching out to influencers and they do little videos on your product and then you can click it in the app to purchase those. So I'm gonna show you how this works to help you find quickly and easily these influencers that you can reach out to. So first of all, before we even move on, the way you get to this tool is go to the marketing section here and then you're gonna click on Influencer Finder, okay? And then in Influencer Finder, You need to make sure that TikTok is chosen because we're going to look for TikTok influencers. If it doesn't show up, that means you might not have a diamond plan. This is only included in the diamond plan currently. So you want to make sure to have the diamond plan in order to get that. And then the next thing we want to do is we want to actually find some influencers that would be perfect for our product. We sell at Helium 10 some gothic products. So I'm just going to put in here goth. And I'm going to hit search. Now, you can also filter a bunch of different ways. You can filter by category. You can also do a number of followers. I wouldn't go too, too high, although some of you, if you wanted a million followers, those types of influencers, you want to pay a lot of money, you can do that. But I usually have found that there are some micro-influencers that are in the few thousand that have done really well in promoting products. So you can choose those. You can choose the followers age. So that means if your target audience is 55 and up, you can actually target 55 and up or 18 to 24 year olds, whatever the age is. You can also choose the ideal gender. You can push all female or male. And then you can also look at the average amount of videos that they've done. So if they've done at least 100, we can put that there. You can just move this over. Or you can also do by video engagement rate. The amount of viewers they have in their lives, so if you're looking at them doing live selling, you can filter by that. You can filter by GMV, the number of products they've promoted, the items that they've sold, their average commission rate. Now, this is interesting if you have a certain rate that you want to give. You can say, hey, I'm going to do less than 15% average because say you want to give them at least only 10%, I would just put less than 15% to filter that out. And then you can also do average buyer spend. So you can filter all these different ways. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to take a look. So this is their actual bio on TikTok. So it says, you know, goth something. So it looks like engagement rate is kind of low on some of these. So I'm just going to filter by engagement rate. And we're going to see what we've got here. So We've got some more engagement over here so we can take a look and looks like this lady has, you know, some gothic stuff. So I'm going to take a look at her. You can actually look at her TikTok shop profile if you want to by just clicking on her little profile so you can see. Okay, she's. Definitely very goth, so potentially that could be a good person. So I'm going to click invite. You can also, if you wanted to, you can actually also do bulk invites. So you can go, hey, I want all these different people, and then you can bulk invite them. Okay, but I'm going to go back and just invite this person. And what I want to do is I want her to promote our coffin shelf. And I'm going to hit choose. And this is where you choose the commission rate. So say I want to give her like 15% or maybe I'll just do 10%. Okay, so let's do 10% commission rate. We are offering free samples. You can have it auto approve requests or manually review the request. I like to do the manually approve. But we'll just do auto just for this example. And then what you're going to do is, you know, you know, gothic shelf or something like that. You can title it whatever you want. You can do this is valid until you know, let's say June 30th. You can put in your email address. Okay, so you got your email address in there, and then you can ask AI to write a message for you. So if you say, hey, AI, write a message for me, you can say the tone is friendly. You want it short. If you want to do more than one words, like more than 50 words, you can do 100 words, and you want a product info integration in that, you can hit yes, and then hit write. And then it's going to write a message that's kind of engaged them. So it's like, Hi, username, I hope you're doing well. I'm reaching out because I'm a big fan of your content and believe that you'd be a fantastic fit to collaborate with us in promoting our unique product. And then it just talks about the product and the commission rate and all that. And it says, let me know if you're interested. So we can use that suggestion. You can also go ahead and if you wanted to edit it, You can as well and then hit next. And then what you're going to do is you're going to hit send invite. And that is how you can find or basically message those influencers. Now you can see right here, this is our influencer messenger here. And so you can see that we've messaged this person right here with our golf shelf promotion when we did it and it's all completed there as well. Okay, and finally, we have the training tip of the week, and this training tip of the week is by Bradley, so go ahead and take it away, Bradley. Bradley Sutton: What if you're analyzing your sales and you see from one month to another, your sales went down or your sales went up, or you're looking at the competitor's BSR chart and you're like, wow, look what happened in this month. His sales went way up. His sales went way down. What would you want to know? Well, I mean, there's obviously a number of reasons somebody's sales could have gone up or down. It could be that, you know, keyword search volume went up or it's a seasonal product, but a lot of times it's because they got more visibility on a keyword, whether we're talking sponsored rank or organic rank. If there are some high volume search terms where they were not ranking well on and then all of a sudden they got to the top of page one, now all of a sudden you know, hey, that's the reason why their sales went up or the opposite. Their sales went down, but you can find the keywords. Where did their rank go down from one month to the next? That is a very valid and real scenario that you'd probably be wanting to look at for your competitors or even for your products so you know, hey, If my competitor's sales dropped off because their keyword rank dropped off in a keyword from one month to the next, I better make sure my keyword rank doesn't drop off, right? Or the opposite. If my sales went up and I can tie it to certain keyword increases in rank, well, those are the keywords I definitely want to double down on and make sure I never drop off on those keywords or I try and push those up if they had dropped off. Let me show you how you can do that in seconds. So here, let's go ahead and look at that one out of stock coffin shelf. Let's take a look here at their BSR chart. I can see that in June, they had a BSR that was super high. They were not selling much, but then come July, their BSR really went down, meaning their sales went up. So let's go ahead and go back to Cerebro on this product, and let's go ahead and Hit the monthly comparison. Now, let's go ahead and compare June with July. All right, June of 2024 compared to July because that's where their sales had an increase. And let's just say, hey, in June, where were they ranking like outside of the top 20? But then all of a sudden in July, the second month, they were ranking in the top 10. All right, this is for organic. I can do the same for sponsor. Let's just see what keywords come up. And wow, look at that, 18 keywords. Look at this. In June, Emo Decor, they were ranking 165. But all of a sudden in July, their rank went up to 10. Coffin Decor, their rank in June was 21. But then all of a sudden in July, it jumped up to number one. Coffin Seller, all right, it went from 75 to 10. Gothic Shelf went from 33 to 5. Now all of a sudden, what I'm doing is I'm tying in increases in their keyword rank to their increase in sales. I could have done this the opposite way. Like if one month was high, the next month was low, where did they lose keyword rank? Where did they take their foot off the gas in advertising? Guys, this is crazy that you can do this. All right, so this historical Cerebro, guys, is an absolute game changer when it came on because it totally revolutionized the way you can do your keyword research work. Before, you could only live in the now. What is happening right now? All of their tools, all they show you is what's going on now. Even the base Helium 10, that's what it'll show, which is great if the product is doing great right now, but you want to have a holistic look. So yes, look at what's happening now, but take that extra step and tie keyword Increases in rank and decreases in rank to increases in sales and decreases in sales. And I think you can see you can get a lot of actionable information from that. Carrie Miller: Thanks so much, Bradley. That was incredible tip of the week. So if you haven't already started selling on TikTok, or even if you have, go ahead and check out these tools because they are going to be a game changer. They're going to save you so much money. But also if you wanna learn more about how to sell on TikTok, get some more strategies, check out our TikTok course that we have within our Helium 10 tools. It's in our learning hub and you will not regret it. It has so much information. You'll probably learn something even if you're already selling on TikTok shop. So go ahead and check out all those things and we will see you again next week to see what's buzzing. Bye everyone.