Weekly Buzz 11/20/25: Black Friday Live | Rufus Gets Upgrade | New TikTok Shop Tools

Weekly Buzz 11/20/25: Black Friday Live | Rufus Gets Upgrade | New TikTok Shop Tools Speaker 1: Amazon's Black Friday deals are live as of today. Rufus gets some upgrades. TikTok Shop has a record-breaking quarter. 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, and e-commerce space. 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. All right, so Hopefully if you're watching this right when we release it, today is Thursday the 20th and guess what? Believe it or not, Amazon Prime week or not prime week, but Black Friday week is already started You know Black Friday is a week more than a week away It seems like these things are starting earlier and earlier, doesn't it? But yes, Black Friday is now live. So if you guys did deals you're gonna start seeing it There's door buster deals already. Remember when door buster guys back in the day? How many people are old enough to remember when door buster for Black Friday meant you go to Best Buy and At like 11pm on Thanksgiving night in preparation for Best Buy to open up the next day to get like a, you know, $50 big screen TV or something. That was what doorbusters meant back in the day. Now, I guess doorbusters mean over a week before actual Black Friday, there's actual deals. But anyways, I digress. Black Friday is live now. You'll see Helium 10, you know, our Project X, our coffin shelves. We've got some Black Friday deals. Now, it's not too late to get these. So how did I get this Black Friday deal badge on the listing? Well, this one, all I did was I went to advertising and seller central and then I hit price discounts and I chose the Black Friday deals. Now, it's not cheap anymore. I think it's like a $250 charge, but let's say you've got 10 products. Don't make 10 different Black Friday deals, that's going to cost you over $2,000 because it's $250 each one. What you do is you put all 10 products in one Black Friday deal and then you set the discounts there. That's what I did. I figured, hey, it's worth a try. $250. I get the badges on all my listings. Let's see how it goes. What are you guys doing out there? How many of you are doing like a deal of the day or are you doing these price discounts? Are you doing coupons? You're just keeping the price as is? Let me know in the comments below. Next up, Switching gears at TikTok Shop, we have now launched our full suite of TikTok Shop tools For all members of Helium 10, before it was just Elite, then it went to Diamond. Now, if you're a Platinum member, you can now see our TikTok Shop tools. And which tools are those? We've got a number of them. First one up, Listing Converter for TikTok. So if you're selling on Amazon and you have a TikTok Shop account but don't have your products live, we use AI to bring all your listings and all of your images to TikTok Shop within minutes. Next tool we have is the Product Mapping tool. Let's say you don't have your own warehouse to ship products to. You don't qualify yet for fulfilled by TikTok. We have a map products feature where you can map your TikTok listings directly to your Amazon listings and fulfill them via MCF. Another tool we have, how do you get traction on TikTok shop? It's through the finding influencers and creators, reaching out to them, offering them free products. And so here in Helium 10, our influencer finder allows you to search the full database of TikTok shop creators and the influencer messenger, which is also in this tool, allows you to go ahead and offer them free samples and it ties them to your product so that they can get commission on it. Next tool we have is the TikTok Product Finder. You want to see what your competitors are doing on TikTok Shop. You want to see what the trending products are, what trending creators are doing. We have this brand new TikTok Product Finder tool. And next up, we've got the TikTok Hot Videos tool, where it's the full database of TikTok videos that tie to products. You can see, hey, which videos are generating the most sales by category? What are these videos made up of? You can get some ideas about Who's making videos? What are they saying? Get some ideas for your own video making endeavor. So again, latest new feature alert from Helium 10 is all of our TikTok Shop tools that are available, have been available for a while, are now available in Platinum. So right now, if you're a Platinum member, you have a TikTok Shop account, you have not been able to use these tools, go into your Helium 10 account, hit your name on the top right, hit Connections, and then add your TikTok Shop token. Alright, now you can start playing with all these tools. So what are you waiting for? Get started now. Next news article is from Amazon itself and this is about Rufus and it's entitled Amazon's Next Gen AI Assistant for Shopping is Now Smarter, More Capable, More Helpful. So little by little, they are adding cool features to Rufus. As you guys know, I don't use Rufus almost at all for my shopping historically because I found it useless for me for my shopping and I shop on Amazon a lot. It didn't help me. The only times I would use it is, let's say I was on my mobile phone, I could get like price history. That was pretty cool for Rufus or I needed to summarize the review. So, you know, like maybe one out of every 20 things I buy, I was using Rufus, but the rest of it, it was, you know, kind of not useful. Now, guess what, guys? Rufus is getting useful. There are some things that just got released that I would absolutely use in Rufus. Take a look at this. It says Rufus can search for products based on activity, event, purpose, and other use cases. You know, even the Amazon search bar has been able to do that, but here's where the kicker is. Automatically add items to cart. So you wouldn't even be on necessarily a product listing. You could just be in the AI assistant Rufus and you can tell it, hey, add this to my cart. Take a look at this. Tell you if you're getting the best price. All right? So again, that's part of the price history thing that it's been able to do, but that's pretty cool. Now it'll tell you, hey, are you getting the best price in the last 30 days, in the last 90 days? It can find top deals every day of the year. So let's say you search a keyword and then say, hey, well, what's the best deal out of all these pages of search results? Here's one that I think I would use. Auto buy items at a set price. You guys ever been shopping on Amazon and you see a product and you're like, This looks good. It's like the only one out there, but man, $29, that's just like a little bit too steep. You know what? I would absolutely buy this product if it's $25 or $20, right? And then what do you do? Maybe every few days you go back and refresh, see if it's on sale or something like that. Guess what? With Rufus now, you can actually set a price where you're like, you know what? If this gets down $25, buy it for me. It doesn't give you a reminder to go back to Amazon, but it'll literally buy it for you and have it shipped to you, so pretty cool. You can also even take a handwritten grocery list and add the items from your cart, so you write something by hand and then take a picture of it, upload it to Rufus, and then it'll buy those products. Now, some more updates is basically you can kind of tell what Amazon is trying to do. People who don't know yet what they're going to buy, they don't have that keyword ready. They'll use Google, they'll use ChatGPT to research things like, all right, what's the weather like in Japan in November? Like me, I'm going to Japan next week. I'm visiting our China office as well. So I might Google search like, what's the temperature like in China at the end of November? And then I'll notice that it says, oh, it's like in the low 30s. And then I'll be like, oh, shoot, I need to, you know, order a winter coat or something like that. Right. But what Amazon wants is like you just do everything, search everything in Amazon. Like, don't forget about Google and ChatGPT. So look at what it says right here. It says in this article, Our AI assistant can solve customer problems and answer a wide range of questions from broad questions such that inform a shopping trip such as what's the weather in Rome in April to highly specific questions about a product detail. So again, you don't know what to buy yet. Instead of having to Google things, Rufus is saying, hey, go ahead and search here. And then once you do that search, now go ahead and stay in Amazon and go buy the product based on what the answers were about where you are going. Another update, it says here, our Rufus AI assistant now has account memory, understanding customers based on their individual shopping activity. So let's say I've been buying a whole bunch of winter clothes or something like that because I'm going to Japan and China. Well, now if I'm interacting with Rufus and I mentioned something that I'm trying to buy for a trip, without even mentioning Japan, it's probably going to be able to say, oh, this is probably for his Japan trip, right? Or potentially if I start buying some bunch of basketball products and I search for paper straws, maybe it might say, hey, would you like these basketball themed straws, something like that. So it's going to start looking at your shopping activity. One thing I want to try on it is I always take things on and off my subscribe and save products as a consumer, but it takes me forever to find where my subscribe and save is. I bet you Rufus either can or will be able to soon. I can maybe say, Rufus, I don't need the cat litter this month. Can you take that off my subscribe and save? Instead of me trying to figure out where the heck I can find that subscription and edit and cancel. So a lot of cool updates coming to Rufus. Make sure to check this article to see all of these updates because it gives a list of even some questions you can try. Does this blender crush ice? Are any items on my wish list on sale? Show deals for me. What about deals on a birthday present for a mom who enjoys gardening and yoga? But remember guys, does this have anything I mentioned today, does this degrade the importance of having the right keywords in your listing? No. There's nothing that Rufus is doing yet that makes keywords irrelevant or something. These are all things now that Rufus is doing that's net new but even under this situation about fine deals on a birthday present for a mom who enjoys gardening and yoga, how would an Amazon listing know like a newer product is for somebody who likes gardening and yoga? Well, you got to have those keywords in your listing, right? Like, hey, this is great for moms who enjoy gardening. This is great for moms who enjoy yoga. Now, for a mature listing, it won't need that, right? A mature listing, it probably knows, oh shoot, 75 moms who were buying gardening equipment and who happen to buy yoga mats, they also bought this one product. So does Amazon need keywords or stuff like that to know to offer that product? No, because Amazon's got like a year of data, right? But remember when you are creating listings in the first place, how do people searching for gardening stuff or for yoga stuff even find your product, right? So you've got to put the right keywords in your listing What Rufus is doing is not replacing yet, for now, traditional search. I'm not searching any different. But what it's doing is allowing buyers like you and I to understand how products work more. It summarizes the reviews. It can tie things together more than just like you trying to read a whole listing. So Rufus is really coming a long ways. But remember, this does not mean that keywords and regular listing optimization stuff is completely irrelevant now. If you start doing that, Rupees is never even going to find your product if you don't even have the right keywords from day one in there. Now it's time for our strategy of the week. This is about eBay because You might not know that eBay has a few ties to Amazon, both positive and negative. Shivali, in this next training, will let you know exactly what ties those are, what the dangers are, and how a tool in Helium 10 can help you. Speaker 2: Wondering why your buy box is disappearing or why are your sales suddenly dropping even though everything seems fine inside of your Amazon account? What if you discovered someone was reselling your product on eBay or dropshipping it from your Amazon listing at a lower price, causing Amazon to price match and lower your buy box price? Or, what if someone was selling returned units or using your UPC without you even knowing? No way. We don't like that stuff, especially as Amazon sellers. So, for example, let's take a look here. We've seen people with our coffin shelf where they've ordered 15 times. We know these people aren't buying 15 coffin shelves for their 15-bedroom spooky mansion. But what probably is happening is they're drop shipping your product to eBay. So let's talk shop about the Helium 10 eBay price checker, which you can't find anywhere else. Literally no other company has this and it can help you solve this conundrum showing you if your product or your competitor's product is being sold on eBay, by who and at what price you can protect your margins and buy box. All you do is go to any of your listings or your competitor's listings on Amazon and in the Chrome extension, click the eBay price checker button. It opens up to show if that product is being sold on eBay and you can see if people are reselling your product and at what price. For example, here we've got six people reselling our product, but they're all like $45, $46, $47, which is okay because they are just drop shipping. But if somebody was selling below our price, we would try to get them removed from eBay because we don't want the buy box to be messed up. And this is a really quick and easy tool. So if you notice that you're losing buy box or seeing suspicious ordering activity, you can just hit that button and instantly see what's happening with your product on eBay. Speaker 1: Thank you for that Shivali. So guys, you want to check out if your products are being sold or drop ship potentially on eBay from Amazon, use this tool. You want to make sure that nobody is selling your products on eBay at a lower price, which could put you in danger of losing your Amazon buy box. Use this tool that's in the Chrome extension. Next article is from Social Media Today and it's entitled, TikTok is making a major holiday shopping push. Now the first thing I want to mention, a few articles were talking about like Q3 was one of the biggest sales, if not the biggest sales quarter for TikTok Shop. I think it was something like $19 billion of sales. It had year to date or in the quarter, something like that. But basically that was one billion off from eBay, what eBay did. So eBay has been around for what, 20, 30 more years? And just in the couple of years that TikTok Shop has been around, it's pretty much caught eBay already. Now, this article talks about as part of an expanded effort, it says, to get more people buying products in the app, TikTok is offering retailers a lot of incentives ranging from covering the cost of delivery to significant cash incentives based on sales growth. So check your email if TikTok Shop has given you any kind of offers or incentives to increase your sales and you could be eligible for some of these deals. It says TikTok is even offering some TikTok Shop merchants up to $20,000 in incentives based on sales growth. So, there's a reason why Helium 10 invested so much in TikTok Shop tools, like I was mentioning a few minutes earlier, is because this is one of the hottest marketplaces in the world, guys. And if you're already selling on Amazon, it is a no-brainer. To start selling on the TikTok Shop platform, sales are booming on there. All right, next up, another new feature alert in Helium 10, and this is our AI assistant. All right, so right now this is only available to elite members. It's going to be to Diamond and Platinum real soon. But we have a full AI interaction. We've had this for a couple of months now for elite members. If you click this button at the very top of your Helium 10 dashboard, it's called AI assistant. This is based on our knowledge base of courses and all of our pro training videos about how to use the tools. So I can say, ask questions such as, how can I find influencers to promote my TikTok shop products? A pretty general question and it is going to go ahead and give me an answer based on what we can do in Helium 10. And so for example, it says right here, the answer the AI gave, it gives a long step-by-step kind of like guide on finding the influencer finder, influencer messenger, et cetera, et cetera. You might be like, hey, how can I use the historical trends in Cerebro? Maybe you don't have time to watch my wonderful training videos that we have in the app and you're just like, I need a quick answer, a step-by-step guide on how to do this. Play with our new AI assistant, guys. This is really going to help you get the most out of Helium 10 and let us know what you like about it. After the answer is done, there's a thumbs up or thumbs down right here. Make sure to hit if it answered right. As we know, AI is not perfect and we need to know if it answers the questions right for you. So a pretty cool new feature there in Helium 10 for elite members and going to Diamond and Platinum soon. Our last article today is from Seller Central. Any Law & Order fans out there? You probably recognize that theme song, right? But now, imagine if your account gets suspended or a product gets suspended, actually, I should probably say, and you said, objection, your honor, hearsay. That's kind of like what we can do now, guys. It's kind of like a Law & Order episode. There is something now called Seller Challenge. It's kind of like objecting for account health assurance. You can use a Seller Challenge to request more detailed information about enforcements on your account. After you've used the standard appeals option more court room vocabulary here, it says seller challenge provides you with the opportunity to request reviews of eligible listing level policy decisions three times every 180 days. I hope you're not getting policy issues on your account, you know, pretty much every other month here. But it says you can submit this challenge, submit additional documentation and helps you get resolve your issues and get your listings reinstated faster than other methods. This is interesting. Just like law and order, somebody is giving you a hard time, you can say objection and this is why you think that it's unjustified, whatever is happening. This is another kind of like safeguard then to make sure that your products or listings are not unfairly suspended or something. Maybe there's a policy violation that was not correct. So make sure to do some research. If you're one of these people who gets these account violations every couple of months, well, you need to be using the seller challenge to kind of like protect your interest for your listings. Alright guys, that's it for the news this week. Don't forget, if you haven't seen it yet, go check out Scale Stories by Helium 10. That is our reality TV show series that we did with a film crew from Mr. Beast, really high quality and different scenarios of entrepreneurs out there. We have a couple of sellers who were plateaued or stuck or having lots of obstacles. What are we doing to try and double their sales? We have somebody starting a brand new business on Amazon. We got somebody starting a brand new business on TikTok Shop. We're showing you every step of the way on how we're helping these entrepreneurs and these brands reach their entrepreneurial goals. So go to YouTube, type in scale stories by Helium 10 and start watching those episodes. And there'll be links to actually go to like more breakout episodes on our website or might be there on YouTube, but really educational. This is basically kind of like Project X season two, but it's just called Scale Story. So make sure to check that out. All of our episodes have now been released. All right, guys, thank you so much for joining us. Don't forget to come back next week to see what's buzzing.