Weekly Buzz 11/7/25: Amazon Rufus Has 250 Million Users? New KDP Translation

Weekly Buzz 11/7/25: Amazon Rufus Has 250 Million Users? New KDP Translation Speaker 1: Amazon Rufus gets $10 billion worth of extra sales. Amazon is suing Perplexity because it seemingly doesn't want agentic AI browsers to browse Amazon.com. 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, Walmart, e-commerce world. We let you know what new features that Helium 10 has and give you a strategy 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. Let's go ahead and hop right into the news. The first article is actually just from Amazon. It's kind of a recap of their Q3 report or their quarterly report, right? A couple of things that are interesting is sales are up. It says increase 13% $180 billion in this quarter compared with $158 billion in Q3 of 2024. So sales are on the rise. Now North America had $106 billion worth of sales international $40 billion and it's AWS was $33 billion. Billion now something interesting this article had like just tons of stats and most of what you know you probably don't even care about but something that just kind of like through in here there was a a quote about rufus where it said hey rufus had two hundred and fifty million customers that just seems like a little bit far-fetched. To me so you know there's been talks like what do they mean by. That number of customers that like they had clicked on it or they actually use it probably something like, hey, just loaded on the page or something. But regardless, even if it's the number is 90% wrong, and it's only 20 million customers, something we got to be thinking about. So we've been talking about it here on the podcast for a long time about optimizing your listings for Rufus. Now, another interesting thing it said was shoppers using Rufus are 60% more likely to complete a purchase. Again, I'm not sure nobody knows what this is referring to per se. My theory is, if you remember, I did a podcast where I dove deep into, hey, who's using Rufus or where they're using it? They're not usually too much in search or in the search results, but rather on the product pages and so it makes sense though. We already proved through the data that there's a significant number of people where they're using Rufus is on the product page. We don't know exactly what, but like me, I use it on the product page to summarize reviews or check out price history or try and see if there's something that the product does or doesn't do based on the content without me having to read it, etc. But that being said, it makes sense that conversion rate is going to increase if somebody is using Rufus for that reason, right? If you're just trying to browse and I don't see the answer to my question right away in the images or bullet points, you might be more likely to just bounce off to another product. But if you're using Rufus and you get your question answered, yeah, you probably are more likely to purchase a product. Now, are you 60% more likely? I'm not sure about that. Part of those numbers don't make sense. If there's 250 million people using Rufus, should its sales have increased by almost 60%? Regardless of what the real numbers are, we know that Rufus is being used, especially on product pages. It's something you need to take into consideration when you're making your listings to make sure that The questions that people are asking on Rufus, you're listing answers. Along those same lines, another article here, this one is from PCMag, it says, Amazon Sues Perplexity As AI Browser War Escalates. So Rufus is kind of like Amazon's AI, but then there's, you know, ChatGPT came out with their own browser, Perplexity has had their own browser called Comet, and Amazon is like saying, no, we do not want You guys using Amazon are allowing perplexity, the browser to like work on people's Amazon accounts. Now, this is interesting, you know, the excuses or reasons Amazon gives, according to this article was, hey, it's degrading the shopping experience. But other people are like, hey, you know, like, maybe they're worried that it's bypassing their advertising, right? Like if a browser agentic browser is just looking on the website, not clicking on ads and things like that, not clicking at all even on anything, that's obviously going to affect the business model. But this is interesting because again, ChatGPT just came out with its own browser, Perplexity's browser. There's probably going to be a lot of AI browsers out there and that actually is something that I potentially We'll use a little bit. I'm not going to use Rufus. Rufus doesn't work for me for trying to shop. ChatGPT doesn't work. I'm not going to use ChatGPT to order my product on Walmart or something like that. But if I can tell a genetic browser, hey, this is the parameters of what I'm looking for. Show me in search results on Amazon with the images and stuff, this, this, and this that hits this criteria. That could be something I use, but it sounds like Amazon might not want that to happen. So it'll be interesting to watch what's going to come out to this lawsuit. What's going to happen? Are the other agentic AI browsers going to be able to browse Amazon? What do you guys think out there? Do you Do you think that that would help things? Genetic AI browsers were able to browse Amazon. Would that help your sales? Would it hurt conversions? What do you think? Let me know in the comments below. All right, switching gears to TikTok now. We have a brand new tool at Helium 10 or a couple of brand new tools that are for product research for TikTok shop. If you're a seller or if you're an influencer, if you're a creator, there's a lot of different ways you can use this. And by the way, the other announcement is A lot of our tools now that were previously only for Elite, then it was Diamond, now it's available on Platinum. This is one of those that is also available on Platinum now. So this is our TikTok product finder. And you can get there if you're a Platinum or above member by just going to the products menu and then under product and keyword research, go to TikTok product finder. And this just pretty much has the entire database. of TikTok Shop USA products. You can have simple mode or advanced mode. So simple mode is for like if you're just brand new, you have no idea what you're looking for. There's some like one-click buttons that help you find like influencer-driven winners, organic top performers, undiscovered opportunities. But if you want to go deep, like for example, let me say I want to see Are there any products that have anything at all to do with coffins or coffin shelves? And here's a bunch of like coffin nails. Here's a coffin letter board. And basically I can go and I can actually take a look at some of these products and I can get some data on this. Like, hey, there's 11 items that have sold of this coffin letter board. It generated $400 of GMV. There's 52 relevant influencers who have promoted This product, you know, that's that's kind of interesting right there and there's a hundred and thirteen videos for this coffin letterboard I can see in the last seven days. There's one new video. Nobody has sold any products and there's one new influencer Here's the list of the influencers who have videos about this now. Why is this important like me having a coffin shelf on? I would say that if there is a successful influencer who is promoting a coffin letter board, that's a perfect influencer for me to be like, maybe they can go ahead and promote my product. So I could sort by, hey, who is the one who sold the most out of these people who have made the videos? And I can even look at their videos. How does the video look like here? This one is like a 13 second video they made of a coffin letter board. You know what? I'm not sure that's the kind of influencer I want to work with and they haven't even sold any GMV. But this is kind of like really, really cool how right from this tool, I can literally like slide into the TikTok DMs of this influencer and say, hey, invite them. Would you like to promote my product? I'll give you a free one. The whole way TikTok shop works is pretty amazing, and this tool is pretty cool. I can sort by, hey, show me products in a certain category that have been listed only within 30 days and has This kind of price range but has this number of items sold but maybe there's a small number of videos you like like for example I can say hey somebody who's sold 10,000 units But there's only like 50 videos. That could be opportunity if I can sell some of that product or maybe the opposite. There's a whole bunch of videos made but not many sold. Maybe people aren't liking what's out there. So there's a lot of ways that you guys can use this data. So again, make sure that you guys are checking out our TikTok product finder. Again, this is available now in the Platinum plan, not just for Diamond members. But if you're Diamond, you're Elite, you'd obviously have access to this. You've had access to it for a while. Hop in there. Let us know what's missing, if there's something that you need to help with your TikTok shop business. Maybe there's another feature from some other provider that you've been using and we don't have it. Let us know. If somebody else has it out there, we can get it too and provide you that service. Next up, an announcement from Amazon. This is actually kind of interesting because it says Amazon introduces Kindle Translate, an AI-powered translation service for authors to reach global readers. Now, something interesting data that they gave here, they said less than 5% of titles or books on KDP on Amazon are available in more than one language. So what's happening now is there are certain languages, if you're making a book in English, now you are going to be able to translate between English and Spanish or German to English, all right? So this is obviously limited right now, but hey, if you have books in English, why not make it available for all the millions of Spanish-speaking people out there? If you've got a book in Deutsch, why not make it available for people in America who speak English or Australia or the UK? Obviously, there's a lot of English-speaking people around the world. Now, your book could have maybe 3, 4, 5x the amount of people looking at it. So if you want to get more information, make sure to click the article below about this. But if you're a KDP author, I think this is pretty good news and I'm sure other languages We've got Shivali next, who is going to give you guys a strategy about getting customer insights that's really going to help you with your initial conversions and making sure you've got good click-through rate, etc. Shivali, take it away. Speaker 2: Ever wondered why your competitor with a similar product is selling twice as much as you, even though your product quality is the same? What is the only difference is that their main image, price, or title is converting better because they tested it before launching. That is exactly the problem that Helium 10 audience solves. Instead of guessing what shoppers want or wasting money on PPC to test variations, you get real unbiased feedback from real Amazon Prime shoppers before your listing even goes live. And that, my friends, is the difference between a 10% conversion rate and an 18% one, which is almost doubling those sales. Now, guys, there are some amazing split testing tools out there like PickFu. If you didn't know, we've been talking about them for years. But something else is you can use PickFu from inside of Helium 10 and it's called Helium 10 Audience. So isn't that so much better than having a bunch of different subscriptions for different things? Now, you can do it all from OneDash instead. Look here. This is the old kind of main image that was being used and we needed a couple of different variations because we wanted the best main image, of course. So, we did a Helium 10 audience poll and we found that the original was the worst one. A new one that was just mocked up got 72% of the votes. And it wasn't just about the votes. What happens is they give you details. The folks who are voting on these things literally tell you why they chose those different things. So somebody here said the box alone isn't enough. The two together is a nice look and fits the image well. Another said they liked it because they can clearly see the applicator. In the first image, it was just a box. You don't even know that the roll-on, how it looks, Every single seller whose private label should be using Helium 10 Audience. This is a must. If you are not split testing your images before you launch, you are literally leaving hundreds, if not thousands or tens of thousands of dollars on the table because you have no idea. A 72% better score on a main image and the results is crazy. And the click-through rate or conversion rate went from 11% to 18%, almost doubling. Sales are so heavily impacted from this sort of thing. And even if you've already launched, you really need to go back and ask, is this the best main image or best supplementary image from my stack? And it's not just about the images. You can test brand names, price points, how things look in your search results, your title. And anything else you can think of. So, sure, it costs money to do, but you are really getting 50 to 100 real Amazon Prime users from your demographics and asking them questions about your brand. That would be near impossible to get by yourself. So, if you're not using Helium 10 audience, get in there and use it now. Speaker 1: Thank you, Shivali, for that. Next up, another release from Amazon Advertising. This one's entitled New Brand Store Page Views Metric for Sponsored Brands. So as you guys know, if you're running sponsored brand ads, you can send people directly to a product page or you can send it to the brand store and you might not have been able to see the metrics as far as, hey, how many people are from these videos or sponsored brand ads how many people are going to your brand store and so now there's a new column here where you can see the number of visitors that were attributed to your advertising. Not everybody's saying, hey, I need to get a sale like immediately, right? Some people are doing sponsored brand ads. For that purpose, branding purposes, right? They just want to get like, you know, their exposure out there and people to kind of interact with their products, let them know. And so you're actually pretty pleased if somebody clicks on the ad and goes to your brand store. Well, now you actually have visibility as far as how many people are doing that. So make sure to check the link in the article below if you want to get more information on who has this ability and where you can see this in Seller Central. Next up we have another new feature alert and again it's for TikTok. And again, this is for people who are sellers. It could be for prospective sellers. It could be for influencers and creators, but it's our TikTok Hot Videos tool. Now, this is, again, available for Platinum members and above. And how it works is it has a full database of TikTok videos. So maybe you want to see, hey, what is trending in my certain category? Or hey, I've got a certain product What are the best videos that are generating the most sales? So for example, I can say, hey, in the last 14 days, in the category of let's just say home supplies, all right, what are some of the videos that were trending? And here's one here that actually generated $500,000 worth of sales in 14 days. Guys, do you see why we're telling people that you need to be selling on TikTok Shop? Let's take a look at this video. It's a one minute and 52 second video. Interesting. Okay. And she's like cleaning her mirror in her bathroom. And I can't see it because this is on desktop, but if I was looking at this on my phone, I'd be able to see what product it links to. This article or this video has 253 comments, but this one video, guys, right here, generated 40,000 units of sales. Now, let's do some math here. This is $484,000. So if we were to take $485,000 and times that by let's just say she had a minimum of 10% This lady here made $50,000 guys on this video and whoever owns the TikTok shop that has this glass cleaning product just generated half a million dollars of sales in 14 days because of this product. So what I can do if I have a product that's very similar to this, I could just go ahead and take a look at this video and say, all right, let me pull the transcript from here. Let me use this similar style because I know this is obviously This is just a cool way to see, hey, I want to see who's making videos about coffin shelves. I want to see what are the top videos that are generating likes and shares and sales in a certain category. There's a lot of different ways that you guys can use this tool. Again, start playing with it. Let us know what you like, what you don't like, and give us some heads up on how you're going to use this. For your business, I know how I'm going to use it for my TikTok shop business. So I would love to see you guys using it as well. All right, next up, this you might have seen some notices on Amazon's like LinkedIn and Seller Central about this is the 25 year anniversary of the marketplace. Of independent sellers selling on Amazon marketplace and so that there's a lot of you know celebrations going on in Amazon. They made this cool article that talks a little bit about the history of like service providers like Helium 10. So this article is from Amazon. It's entitled From Sellers to Solution Providers Fueling Business Expansion and if you scroll down there, you'll see this cheesy looking guy with a Serious Sellers Podcast. Hat on and shirt talks about Helium 10's history, about how it was founded by Manny Coats and Guillermo Puyol. And there's some quotes by yours truly in this. So if you want to kind of like, you know, get a little nostalgic, take a look at this article. It's linked to below as well. Last new feature alert. This is for elite members, but it's going to diamond members. It's going to go to platinum members. It's not one of those things. It's just permanently elite. Elite always gets first crack at a lot of these tools, but this is our new P&L for profits. So where elite members can see this, if you hit profits, and then on the left-hand side, there's something that says P&L, profits and losses. And there are a lot of improvements compared to what we had before. So you're going to still have all of your dashboard right here. But now instead of just a tile view, there's a graph view that you can start graphing different things like, hey, I want to graph my Amazon fees versus my advertising costs. I want to graph my tacos versus my ROI. You have tons of stuff that you can graph and you also have a table view so I can see day by day, hey, what were my sales? All right? It's kind of like a heat map almost here. So, that's the first new feature. Now, the other thing of note is there is filters now where I can go ahead and see. I can pick like, you know what? I want to see my total sales between Amazon USA, Netherlands, and Brazil. I don't want to see Canada and Mexico. Now, you can actually make those selections where you can see like an aggregated amount of sales by multiple marketplaces. I can also filter by brand. I can do it by my different accounts I have. I can start doing it by the product. Another thing like, hey, maybe I'm selling on Amazon USA, but I want to see these sales in Euros because I'm based in Europe or something. Well, you can actually change the currency to show what it is in Euros. I can compare data like based on a previous year or I can use different metrics where I can compare today, yesterday, seven days ago and eight days ago. I can compare a quarter over quarter, year over year. Tons and tons of things that you guys are going to be able to see now on our P&L view. If I click one of these other time periods like for example last month, now all of the products I sold in whatever marketplaces I have chosen up here are going to show up here at the bottom and I'm going to see all of the information whether it's reimbursements, Amazon fees, advertising costs, cost of goods sold, tacos my a cost for advertising my refunds percentage my sessions etc etc if I hit explain it goes into super deep detail so this is like the most advanced. We're the first P&L that we have ever had at Helium 10 under profits and so what we need you elite members to do and Diamond members, you know, once it comes out is hop in there, hit the profit and loss page, let us know if all the numbers make sense, if something like you guys are like not vibing with and you need it shown a different way. We want to hear from you elite members and you Diamond members and Platinum members. Let us know what you are looking for once this comes to you guys, which will be really soon. What are you looking for in a P&L tool? Like maybe you're using another tool, unfortunately, out there and you're like, hey, this is what it's going to take to save my 50 bucks and having to pay somebody else. I just want to be able to use Helium 10. Let us know what you'd like to see in it and we'll make sure it happens because, guys, that's what we're all about here at Helium 10. We are listening to our customers about what they want. That's how we came up with this P&L. A lot of our elite members got together and told us what they were looking for. If we hear from you guys, we'll make it happen if enough people want it. Last up, I will be at Amazon Unboxed next week on Tuesday and Wednesday. If you guys are in Nashville at Amazon Unboxed, make sure to Look around at the Packview booth or just me walking around or hit me up on LinkedIn. Let me know you'd like to meet. Maybe I'll be doing some interviews there at Unboxed. Would love to meet you guys in person. For those who did not register for Unboxed, the tickets have been sold out for a long time. Amazon on their Seller Central has a link to register to watch it live online. So there's no more tickets available, but you can register online to see it. Alright guys, that's it for the Weekly Buzz this week. Thank you guys for tuning in. We'll see you next week to see what's buzzing.