Helium 10 Buzz 2/7/25: Temu, Shein, Amazon Haul Closing? | Amazon Vine Change

Helium 10 Buzz 2/7/25: Temu, Shein, Amazon Haul Closing? | Amazon Vine Change Bradley Sutton: Is this the end for Temu, Shein and Amazon Haul? There's a couple of secret pilot programs that paint a picture of a huge move Amazon could be making in the future. Amazon is going to change your listings next week if you don't take action. 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. We give you a rundown of all the goings on in the Amazon, TikTok shop, e-commerce world out there, and we also give you training tips of the week as well as new features that Helium 10 is launching that'll give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Let's see what's buzzing. I think it was last week or the week before where I had said, oh man, there's almost like nothing going on today. And when that happens, usually in a week or so, there's like a plethora of articles. And guys, the plethora has arrived. There's quantity-wise, I've got about seven, eight stories here. There's some zingers here that we're going to talk about. So let's go ahead and hop right into it. Now, the first article is from Reuters.com and it's entitled Shein, Temu, Amazon Haul Set For Price Hikes As U.S. Shuts Trade Loophole. Now, one thing I just wanted to bring out here is there's been a lot of talk the last couple of weeks about new tariffs that are coming and That never has like bothered me too much for me personally, like for my Amazon business. And the reason is because for where I compete in like coffin shells and I have a few other categories, most everybody is also ordering from China. In other words, everybody's affected the same way for these tariffs. Right. Like I'm more concerned about stuff that That either favors or disfavors a certain population. For example, Amazon Haul, only Chinese sellers can use it. That favors them. Kind of sucks for me, right? For me, for like coffin shelves, I'm like, all right, there's going to be a 10% tariff, 15% tariff. Every single person selling coffin shelves is going to have that same exact thing. We're all going to probably raise our prices or do something, but we're kind of like in the same boat, right? So like I haven't really Cared I guess too much about about the other tariffs, but the thing that I think is flying a little bit under the radar I'm now seeing news articles pick it up and that's what I'm going to show today is about the thing we've been talking about I swear we've been talking about like two three years here on the buzz about how you know you know the previous president had kind of hinted at hey we might close that loophole of how sellers from China can just ship via Shein and Temu completely for like ridiculous low prices and get under and not pay tariffs because it's under $800 right that's like a hundred percent of the orders that ship from China for Temu, Shein, etc. fell under this loophole and it was kind of an unfair advantage and you know Amazon even created the Amazon haul program because of it but finally guys after probably 10 times weekly buzz we've speculated it could come one day because of news reports. It is here. It happened a couple days ago where now this loophole is closed like it's gone like it's it's kind of like hard to believe that I'm even saying that guys and this is something interesting and that is more interesting to me than Trump tariffs across the board on my coffin shelves. Because now this takes away an unfair advantage that Chinese sellers had where they could just like ship direct especially using the like the Chinese, you know postal subsidies that they have for like super cheap and we could never You know compete with that. But anyways, this Reuters article here talks a little bit about it. It says Sheen, Temu, and Amazon Haul prices are likely to rise for Amazon shoppers analysts and industry experts that by the way I know I probably did some like clickbaity thing like is this the end of Temu, Shein, and Amazon Haul the answer is no it's not the end but it's the end of business as usual for these platforms because as this article says says Temu and Shein together likely accounted for more than 30% of all packages of Ship to the United States under this de minimis position or provision that that's that's how they were able to get around the. the tariffs. And so that's just kind of like, like guys, I'm just sitting here almost speechless because I wasn't sure if this day would ever come. And so now, you know, the question is, what's going to happen with these orders? Like, what is Timu and Xin going to do? Another article from time.com entitled What New Policies on Imports from China Mean for Xin and Timu had a little bit different things that report on. For example, did you know that actually this week the post office said We are blocking all, like, pretty much Temu and Shein packages from China. Now, the next day, they walk you back and says, oh. Not, you know, psych, never mind. We're not doing that. But it just shows you like this kind of chaos that this thing is causing out there. It says, the ban had the potential to create massive disruptions for online shopping platforms like Shein and Temu, for cheap clothing, etc. How many orders is this affecting? U.S. Customs and Border Protection stated that it processes an average of over 4 million imports per week. The Post Office didn't say why they announced that they were going to block Chinese and Hong Kong shipments of I don't know why it walked back the very next day, but by any means, this is just still like huge information. Now, the thing that I'm curious about is, all right, there's now going to be tariffs on what is imported. So does that mean that if I buy something from Temu that comes from China, I've got to pay a 10, 20% tariff and clear it through customs kind of like when we import stuff? Myself? Or does that fee get passed on to Temu or does it get passed on to the seller? I mean, regardless, it's probably going to get passed on to the seller. But either way, it's going to impact Temu, Shein and Amazon Haul. For example, let's say the buyer, which I don't think is going to happen, but the buyer has to clear customs. Like if I buy something from Temu before I get it from the post office, I got to clear it through customs or sign some form or pay them. That's a hassle, guys. That is a big hassle. And if that ever happened, I would say 75% of those kind of orders are just going to go away regardless of the price. Ain't nobody got time for that to go and one by one mark line items and pay some kind of check to the post office and pass it along to China. What the heck? Nobody's going to want to do that. But if the seller is the one, you know, the Chinese seller is the one who has to pay, well, immediately this is really cutting into their profits. And so something that might have cost $5, now they've got to move it up to $8 or $9 or who knows how much to compensate for this. How long does this delay shipping for the customs clearance? There's actually pretty fast shipping from China, like a week or sometimes even less. Is this going to get delayed? So again, this is just huge, huge news that I think should be music to the ears of anybody selling in the U.S. who was always kind of jealous about the unfair advantage. As U.S. based sellers, we can't even enroll into the Amazon Haul program. So again, unfair advantage now potentially taken away and let's see what this means going forward. Now next is something interesting like a couple pilot programs that really have me intrigued. One of these pilot programs got into my radar because of Jason from the Amazon Expert Slack kind of like mastermind that we had talked about and I started doing some research on some pilot programs that Amazon has. I noticed a pattern in two of the most recent pilot programs it did that is kind of eye-opening. Now, with betas, with pilot programs, with things like looking at patents from Amazon or science documents, you guys know I've always talked about that for years. It's great to look at. We actually have people at Helium 10 who part of their job is to study these, not to say, oh, this is exactly what Amazon is going to do because, again, 90% of what you see in patents and these scientific documents, these pilot programs, they never see the light of day, but it gives insight into kind of like how Amazon is thinking. It gives kind of like a preview of how things could be, right? So it was really interesting to see this first one. This is a finished pilot program. It was from last year, and there's a link to this in the comments below. But this was called the Apollo pilot program. And this says, Apollo is a pilot program aimed at improving FBA selling partners' profit margins on low-priced items. First of all, I just love these. The wording, it's actually for Amazon to save money, but I just like whoever writes these things for Amazon, like, bro, you're not fooling anybody. We can see right through this. But anyways, they framed it as a way to save money. But anyways, it says here, our long-term goal is to systematically improve the profitability and Amazon Pilot has been designed to explore opportunities to help you reduce expensive long-distance transportation so we can share those savings for you. Again, to reduce long-distance transportation that Amazon has to do. This is a pilot that was going through September to November of last year and basically it says they're testing a strategy that fulfills customer orders only from the inventory in the same region. FAQs talk about how the Amazon Fulfillment Network is divided into nine geographical regions and it says you continue in this beta program to send inventory to us, we'll expand it regardless of the inbound placement that they choose. But it says we're going to prioritize fulfilling customers from the inventory within the same region. So that means your enrolled items might only be available to customers in that region. For example, a customer in New York won't be able to purchase your items stored in a California fulfillment center. This approach will decrease the need for costly long distance shipping. Now, what didn't make any sense to me is, what does that mean? They're purposely not going to distribute the inventory? It says right here that they are going to distribute the inventory, so why wouldn't your inventory be in all nine distribution centers? I'm assuming in this case, it wasn't said in this program, that in this case, maybe like if you didn't send enough inventory in or for whatever reason, Amazon kept it in certain locations that maybe one of those nine regional centers did not have any inventory. First of all, the first thing is that I think some people might think that Amazon is already doing this. If you don't have enough inventory, your product is not going to show up in the search results or it's going to be pushed all the way off. I've never seen that, at least not commonplace across the board. No, like I've shown many times where I can see where my inventory is thanks to Helium 10 inventory heat maps. And even if I don't have any inventory anywhere near a region, it's still showing up in the search results almost on the exact same place. But this is and this kind of proves that that is not really happening yet. Otherwise, why would they need a pilot program to kind of like study this if they are already doing that? But this one pilot is showing that, hey, Amazon is thinking about turning off listings from search results or like even buy box pretty much in regions where it's not there. So like for if whatever reason, all my inventory was in California, New York is not going to be able to see the products. And so, you know, a couple of ways that this would work is like maybe I sent only to one location to California, like a thousand units. I was out of stock. Well, it takes a few days for Amazon to populate my product across the country, right? Well, maybe in that situation, in this pilot program, the people in New York, Florida, Texas, they would not have seen my product. They would not have seen a buy box. They would not have seen the search results. So that's kind of interesting to think about. But here's the kicker. This second pilot that is about to start, it's actually going to start February 17th. This one is called the Stock Smart Pilot Program. Now, basically, this says the stock smart pilot program offers you more control over inventory. Again, they're trying to frame it like, oh, hey, we're doing you a favor. All right. It says select sellers have been invited to participate in this and a low inventory fee waiver will be given to all these pilots and from February through April 2025. So this is something that hasn't even started yet and it's going to April 2025. And it says, hey, we are trying to adapt your inventory levels instead of charging you an incremental fee when your inventory is below 28 days of supply. Remember, that's the low inventory fee that got announced last year. If that happens, we're going to focus on delivering to customers who are close to where your product is stored. So it says, if you have a product in this beta and you have at least 28 days of supply, in the network, your inventory will still be available nationally. It looks like regardless of where your product is. So a little bit different than the last beta, but who knows? Maybe this is the second iteration, right? The same thing. But then it says, ASINs with less than 28 days of supply in the network will only be offered to customers in the regions where inventory is available. And in exchange, these ASINs will receive a low inventory fee waiver. All right? Let's, you know, normally, if I had less than 28 days of inventory, every order that I get, regardless of where it is, I get that low inventory fee that Amazon announced last year. This is saying, you know what? If you've got inventory only in California, we're going to turn off the listing in Texas and New York, just like that last beta. It's a little bit more advanced. But even though you have less than 28 days, your inventory, you're not going to get hit with that low inventory fee in California. I hope that makes sense. But again, now this is all of a sudden a trend. Like I said, not 100% of these pilots and different things ever go into actual production, but the fact that there's two in a row pilots that are about the same exact thing almost back to back kind of like makes you think, is this where Amazon is trying to move to? And so it's going to be interesting to see like later on this year, who knows, maybe at Amazon Accelerator or something, we'll hear this announcement. That they're going to have that. Now, in that situation, a couple of tools that Helium 10 has is going to be really valuable, you know, like the inventory heat map. So you can understand, hey, do I have a product in all nine distribution centers? A keyword tracker that's checking, you know, ranks across like, does my listing go off in a certain region of Amazon in the future? Like right now, Amazon's not doing that, but it could. In the future, so very interesting things that are happening that we can see from these beta programs that Amazon is doing. What do you think? Would you like this to happen? I'm not sure I would. Now, there are some situations where I actually turn my whole – here's one situation where I actually do like it. I turn my whole listing off if I have a brand new product launch. I use Inventory Heatmaps and Helium 10 because I want to wait until my product is distributed across the country before I turn it on. And why? Is it because I don't think I'm going to show up in the search results? No, I am going to show up in the search results as it is right now in New York, even though my product is only in California. But what are the customers going to see when they try and add that product to the cart? It'll say something stupid like two-week shipping time, even though it's not going to take two weeks. And so I'm like, no, I don't want it. You know, sellers or buyers to see that it's going to mess up my conversion rate, right? And so like, I'll actually have my listing closed. So in that situation, that's actually pretty good because now I don't have to keep my listing closed and miss out on my orders that I could be getting from day one in California, theoretically. Because those people will see a one-day shipping time and they'll see my product in the search results. Amazon is turning me off on its own in Texas and Kansas and Florida and New York until my product is distributed. So in that sense, I kind of like it, but in the rest of it, it's kind of a scary thought. Imagine all of a sudden, maybe there's just some inventory mess up and your kind of like available inventory disappears from search results in certain entire regions of the country. So it's interesting to see over the next few months what Amazon learns from this beta that's going to go on and what actions they take, if any. Like I said, again, so many betas and science documents never even see the light of day in production. But like I said, it shows you what Amazon is thinking about, right? All right, next article is actually not an article, but I'm already getting notifications from Amazon about something we announced a couple of weeks ago about how Amazon is starting to send out notices if they're going to change your title or change something if it's not in compliance. So make sure to hit the link. That is in our comments below or the description here. You got to check if Amazon is going to change your product like right now. I got a notification and our how cool is that says, hey, here's a listing updates. We're going to do download the report. So I downloaded it and I was just taking a look. It's like really weird. It's like gave me a flat file almost right and it shows me the ASIN and it says hey, We are changing your title from this to this and this is why we're doing it. This was a product I haven't sold in two years. Somebody messed up my title already so I know why Amazon is changing it but I don't care in this situation if they do change it. But I can give feedback and I can say, hey, no, I'm going to fix it myself or I agree with this or hey, product is not part of our catalog and I have to give a reason for this feedback and then I would re-upload it here, upload feedback in this kind of like file manager section of Amazon and then hopefully if this was like a critical change where Amazon's trying to change my title for no reason or like trying to make it something really stupid, I'm definitely going to want to fill this out to stop Amazon from doing that. So guys, don't just not log in to Seller Central and not understand that Amazon is about to change your titles. Hit that link in our description to check if you have any listings that Amazon is going to change. Let me know in the comments below. Is Amazon going to change anything once you hit that link that we shared in our description? A next article also from Seller Central, update to the Vine program. You know how with Amazon Vine, you can get like two for free, two reviews for free. You can get like 10 for 100 bucks or whatever it is and you can get like 30 for 200 bucks or I forgot exactly what it is. But now Amazon has announced that you can actually upgrade to a higher Vine enrollment within the first 30 days. So let's say I was like, you know what, I'm just going to do the free program and I'm going to get two reviews. But then I get two amazing reviews and people are vibing with my product. I'm like, oh shoot, no, I should have got more. Well, before what would have happened? There's nothing you can do. Now I can go ahead and upgrade and be like, all right, I got two. Let me go upgrade and pay that hundred bucks to get those 10 reviews. Now, or if I can go from 10 to 30. Now, you can't go backwards according to this article, but that's a pretty cool update that you can now, you know, kind of change your mind on how many reviews you are trying to get on Amazon Vine. Next article, a couple from Amazon that have to do with Amazon's delivery stats in 2024. The first one is from the EU and it was interesting. It says Amazon delivered over 9 billion items the same or next day around the world last year. The article from EU gave a couple of stats here. First of all, the fastest order was in France. It says there was a laptop charger delivered in 220 minutes. I've gotten products in less than 220 minutes here in America, but I guess the fastest in France was 220 minutes, which is still pretty fast, like three hours, three, four hours, right? Prime members in Germany, it said, enjoyed the fastest delivery speeds ever with more than 590 million items arriving the same or next day at 15%. Now, they also printed an article about this kind of stuff in the U.S. marketplace and it had a couple of stats here. It said, for U.S. Prime members, we expanded the number of same day delivery sites by more than 60% and now we serve more than 140 metro areas. And it said prime members are placing an average of 100 orders per year. That's two orders every single week, which is an increase and they're attributing it to these faster shipping speeds. Maybe you think it doesn't affect us, but I think it does. The faster that Amazon delivers products, the better the delivery experience is, the more trusting people get with Amazon orders and they're going to buy more of our products. An announcement came out, kind of like a secretive announcement. It says, Amazon announces February product event. And as you can see, if those of you watching this on YouTube, it just had this invitation that says, February 26, you're invited. But what people did was they put all of these invitations together. There was like five different ones. And in the background, it kind of spells out Alexa. So basically, what theverge.com is speculating is that, hey, this product announcement is going to be finally the new Alexa, which is going to be powered by Gen AI. So maybe you're like, well, how does this affect Amazon sellers? Well, remember we've said that people have been kind of like neglecting Amazon Alexa for shopping on Amazon for quite a long time now just because the experience kind of sucks. But now all of a sudden, if it's beefed up, the shopping experience, we as Amazon sellers might have to start thinking about how do we optimize our listings more? For Alexa, because maybe more people might be shopping on that platform. So let's stay tuned February 26. Let's see what new things is coming to that platform and if it does affect the way that we might need to make our listings. Another article from Amazon Seller Central last week, it says, hey, create bulk listings with your own template format. And so they introduce a new feature in the spreadsheet option of the list your products page that allows you to create bulk listings with your own custom spreadsheet template. So this says it makes it easier for you to list products with catalog files you already maintain or files downloaded from other Amazon stores. I'm not going to get into the details here, but if you're somebody who uses flat files and things of that nature, you might want to check this article on the dashboard. The last article is not really an article. It's an announcement from Amazon about the IDR. This is the Inventory Defect and Reimbursement Portal. We've had that, I believe, in the U.S. for a little while now. It's where you can see what is going on with your reimbursements and what's going on with lost shipments, damage, and customer returns in one place. And this announcement is just that now it's going to be available for all of you sellers in the EU and also those of you are in Japan. So just the way to go to there, if you're in one of those marketplaces, go to your FBA dashboard in Seller Central and then under the Inventory dropdown, select Inventory Defect and Reimbursement and then you'll be able to see this report there or you can go to the IDR portal from the Reimbursements Report page in Seller Central. Alright, that's it for the news this week. New feature alert. This is going to be for those of you who are interested, you know, make it a little bit more of a side hustle on Amazon or you're just getting, maybe you haven't started selling on Amazon, you want to make some money without having to invest. Maybe you're an Amazon seller, you want to get your kids to start learning how to make money online. We talked last week about the new Amazon Influencer Chrome extension that Helium 10 has. We have now a full course that helps you to learn the A to Z or at least the beginning of how to become an Amazon Influencer. Where you can get access to that is in your dashboard, anybody with a starter and up plan Hit Tools and then under Learning hit Amazon Influencer Bootcamp and from there you are going to be able to see this multi-module course that Michelle here and myself did where she was teaching me how to become an Amazon Influencer. So basically what we have here is a full course on the A to Z of how to get started with the Amazon Influencer Program. And Michelle made this and she was basically teaching me in this video about like how you can get accepted into the Amazon Influencer Program, how you get paid, how you can find products that you can make videos for so that you can get paid with the Amazon Influencer Program. It's a great course. Make sure to check it out completely free for anybody with a paid Helium 10 account. Even if you're on the starter plan, you've got access to the Amazon Influencer Bootcamp. So again, maybe not for all of you, but if you know somebody who wants to go ahead and dabble in making money online without having to invest anything, Amazon Influencer Program might be good for them. Make sure to share this course with them so they can learn more about that. Now for the strategy of the week is going to be about Helium 10's black box, specifically an amazing feature for brand analytics where you can actually see across like weeks, even months of time, which keywords generated verified sales from Amazon, not like a Helium 10 estimate or anything, but how you can see verified sales for any product or group of products On Amazon, let's go ahead and watch this training session. Let's just think about brand analytics keywords, all right, where brand analytics tells us, hey, this is one of the top three click products and one of the top three converted products. Like it'll tell you of those top three click, what was the conversion share? How many sales did it get from a certain keyword? Well, what happens if I look at it right now? I could do that in Helium 10. I could have done that for years in Seller Central brand analytics. Well, if I do that, let's see here. I'm searching for one week, January 5th to January 11th. Where was this product, this Fourth of July Decorations product, one of the top three click products? It's not one of the top three for Fourth of July Decorations, but it was for these three keywords, USA Decorations, USA Decorations for Party, Independence Day Decoration. Now, here's the thing. This is an extreme example. Only three keywords showing up here. That's because as you guys know, it's a pretty seasonal product that really only kicks off 4th of July. But if I want to go look, hey, I want to look at all the weeks in May, all the weeks in June, all the weeks in July because for Memorial Day, maybe this product, this patriotic product is getting some sales. In June, maybe it's going to start to get sales for 4th of July. What would I have to do one by one? I would have to download reports from Brand Analytics week by week for what, 20, you know, 15, 20 weeks in order to get all the keywords where it was the number one click. Well, watch what you can do now in seconds. Instead of going week by week, I'm just going to go ahead and look at starting in July. I'm going to just click all of the different weeks in June, July, even going to May for Memorial Day and then I want to see, hey, is it just three keywords that this product is one of the top three click? Probably not. Let's see what it shows. Look at that 75 keywords. It went from three to 75. It's showing me any week that this product was one of the top three click ones. Look at this one. I didn't even think about this one. President's Day Decorations, Fourth of July Decor, Citizenship Party Decorations. In some weeks, it was one of the top three click from there. I didn't even prepare this, guys. I didn't even know that that was going to come up, but you can see how it differs when you look at a big day range. Is this brand new information that's never been available? No. It's there in Seller Central, but it would have taken 20, 30 minutes of downloading reports that have 1 billion and 2 million keywords and then filtering it out for this one product. Week over week over week to try and find all of these relevant keywords. And it's not Helium 10 saying this is relevant. This is Amazon itself saying, hey, these keywords or this product was one of the top three clicked and had conversions or sales for these keywords. So guys, again, strategy number two, you can only do this with Helium 10. This tool is available for diamond members who have brand registry with Amazon. Alright guys, that's it for the news and features of the week. Hope you guys enjoyed it. Make sure to tune in next week to see what's buzzing.