Weekly Buzz 12/4/25: BFCM Amazon, Walmart, and TikTok 2025 Results, Amazon Lowers Seller Fees, and more security on Amazon

Weekly Buzz 12/4/25: BFCM Amazon, Walmart, and TikTok 2025 Results, Amazon Lowers Seller Fees, and more security on Amazon Speaker 1: On today's episode of The Weekly Buzz, we are going to be talking about Black Friday and Cyber Monday results for Amazon, Walmart, and TikTok. Also, is live streaming the next big thing and the biggest cuts to Amazon seller fees that Amazon has ever made? This and more on this week's episode of The Weekly Buzz. Speaker 2: 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'll 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. Speaker 1: All right, so I want to just go ahead and get straight into it because we have a lot to talk about, especially because this last weekend was Black Friday and Cyber Monday, so we have a lot of results to report. The first one I want to talk about is in this article and it's Yahoo Finance. And they basically said that over Black Friday, basically on just Black Friday, there was $10 billion in sales on Black Friday alone, which is absolutely incredible. So it says $10 billion. I'll scroll down so you can see it in this article. And that Amazon actually had $2 billion of those sales. So they are responsible for $2 billion of the sales on Black Friday, which is Incredible. And so I want to share a little bit about my own results on Black Friday, and we actually did do better than last year. We did 16% more this year on Black Friday than we did last year. Our Cyber Monday was a little bit down, but usually Cyber Monday isn't the best for us. It's usually Black Friday. I don't know how anyone else's experience is, but you can definitely let me know in the comments if you did better or worse, what it was. Now, obviously, there's a lot of factors that go into how well an individual brand does on Amazon, and that could be You're advertising your listing page, you know, how you're optimizing your actual listing. Are you doing deals? What are you doing coupons? What are you doing to really attract those customers? So there's a lot that goes into it so that there are those factors. But overall, I think that I'm hearing that people have done well this year on Black Friday. They did better than last year. So that's really encouraging. So I wanna share a little bit about Packview and Helium 10's data based on what we've gathered over the last Black Friday and Cyber Monday in regards to advertising so that you can get a little bit of an idea of how well everyone did overall. So this year's Black Friday, Cyber Monday was actually really strong for Amazon sellers. On Amazon US, the ad costs did rise. So the cost per clicks were up around 10 to 12%, but the good news is that shoppers were converting. So sales grew faster than ad spend. We sponsored product sales up 97% and sponsor brands up 95%. So despite the higher costs, ROAS actually improved. And in Europe, it was a little bit of a different situation. The cost per click spiked even harder. They went up 17 to 27% and that pushed ROAS down. So that's something to watch if you sell in Europe. I know there have been some people who have said that there was a little bit not as great for Europe. So check that out if your cost per clicks were in that range. It's probably Not due to anything that you did. And if you're looking at categories, electronics and beauty drove the most spend, but the best ROAS came from electronics and clothing, and grocery and health saw the highest conversion rates. On the DSP side, US advertisers pushed 56% more spend, but rising costs meant that ROAS actually dipped about 14% year over year with DSP. But overall, for third-party sellers, the demand was really strong, the conversion was high, Amazon US remained the most efficient marketplace, but cost-per-click pressure is continuing to rise, especially in the EU with that, I mean, up to 27%. That's a lot more. So if your ads underperformed, chances are it was due to the competition and the cost inflation rather than the shopper demand. Because as we can see, the shopper demand was especially there in the US. So there was a lot of shopper demand this year. So it's just those cost-per-clicks that are actually rising, makes it a little bit more challenging. Okay, so let's go back into the news articles about TikTok shopping, Black Friday, Cyber Monday. So this is actually some really good news, especially if anyone is selling on TikTok or you're wanting to expand. I'll go ahead and get into this article and I'll show you. But basically, TikTok said that they had their biggest Black Friday, Cyber Monday ever. So that's pretty exciting because I know they did pretty well last year as well as, you know, in their newer marketplace. But basically TikTok shops said that they saw and this is in the article. The day saw nearly 50% more shoppers who bought something on TikTok shop in the US compared to Black Friday, Cyber Monday last year. And that does make sense. People are maybe starting to trust it a little bit more and be a little bit more curious about deals on TikTok. I think that for me at first, I didn't want to buy anything on TikTok shop, but now I buy stuff all the time. So I think that people are starting to buy more on TikTok shop. Also, something that really kind of struck my attention was that live shopping actually delivered a record-breaking performance throughout this year's Black Friday, Cyber Monday campaign. Brands and creators, they found new ways to kind of entertain and drive these live sales. And when compared to last year's Black Friday, Cyber Monday campaign, brands and sellers hosting live streams experienced 84% sales growth during this year. And the shoppers tuned into over 760,000 live stream sessions hosted by sellers and their favorite creators. So that actually generated 1.6 billion views on. TikTok. So I know a lot of people have been talking about live streaming because it's really big in China, but it is starting to trend in that direction this way. So over the next year, you might want to start thinking about live selling. If you want to learn more about live selling, we did actually talk to a seller that we have that uses Helium 10 that started doing live selling last year and did it very well. So we have training on that in our TikTok training. So if you haven't checked that out, go check that out in our Helium 10 dashboard under the learning section. It's a great Great learning for you if you want to learn how to live sell and I think it is kind of the next big thing. So definitely check that out. Okay, so let's go ahead and talk about Walmart. Walmart is always a question that I get because I've talked a lot about selling on Walmart over the years. So this article is basically saying that Walmart had a very strong Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Walmart said that It's a same-day delivery network supported by 4,600 stores and covering 95% of the U.S. population enabled customers to receive Black Friday orders within hours. So for people who are wanting their stuff right away, Walmart was definitely the place to go. Walmart delivered 57% more orders from stores year over year with 44% more orders arriving in under three hours, which is absolutely insane. Walmart said that nearly 10 million shoppers used the Walmart app in stores during the weekend to check availability, compare prices and navigate sales. They said that anyone who uses the Walmart app actually I tend to buy 25% more. So that's something to think about if you're wanting to sell on Walmart, just optimizing your listings and making sure you're ready and looking good on the app. But according to our data, because we did collect data on Walmart as well, Walmart saw steady performance for sponsored products and a major win for sponsored brands where ROAS jumped 40% Showing strong upside for brands expanding off Amazon. So for a while the sponsor brands, people weren't really utilizing them but it seems like they're actually jumping into those and really great news to hear that Walmart did well this year. Anyone who wants to keep expanding to other marketplaces, Walmart and TikTok shops seem like great places to go next. Okay, so let's go ahead and I'm going to pass it on to Bradley Sutton and he's going to be talking about SmartComplete and how it can help you with your keyword research. So take it away, Bradley. Speaker 2: Another small feature that only Helium 10 has but it can help in your keyword research and even potentially your product research is something in Magnet that we have called SmartComplete. This is just a word we made up. You guys know what autocomplete is, right? If you type something into Amazon search bar, coffin shelf, it'll show you all seven other options like coffin shelf for men, coffin shelf for women, right? It's like autocomplete. Helium 10 has something called smart complete. The reason why we call it smart complete is it's not just showing you those seven things. It's showing you 30, 40, sometimes 200. Different variations of the keyword. All that have the word coffin and shelf in it. Like if I type in coffin shelf. And it not only puts the words before it, it puts the words in the middle. So like words like coffin gothic shelf will come up. It puts words after it. Coffin shelf for men like we said. But it also rotates plural versions like coffin shelves will come up. So instantly you should just put a keyword in Magnet. Filter for smart complete and you're going to have the list of all like a long tail versions of that keyword. It's also really great to understand what your potential is when you have a phrase like a phrase match PPC campaign. What are all the possible keywords that would come up if I have a. phrase match pbc campaign this smart complete will show you so again how you do it is in magnet enter any keyword i entered coffin shelf here under match type i select smart complete and then look like did you know that there are 57 different variations that all have the word coffin shelf here's gothic coffin shelf so you see how i put the word uh in the middle look at this one coffin wall shelf it put the word wall in the middle here's here's a plural which is a Misspelling coffin shelves. Right. Here's Curio coffin shelf, mini coffin shelf. All of these look at this coffin plant shelf. I didn't even know that was a such thing. I might need to see I might need to look into that. Hey, maybe I just figured out a new product line for my product. So, guys, this is a really cool tool. Really easy. It's been there for years. I bet you you haven't used that before. But take a look at some of your main keywords and get some ideas and also get some ideas for product or for keyword targeting. With a phrase match and understand what are all the variations of any keyword that you enter. Speaker 1: Alright, thank you so much, Bradley, for that strategy. So if you haven't used SmartComplete, definitely check that out for your Amazon keyword research. Alright, this next piece of news is directly from Amazon. So I wanted to share it with you and it's about European fees. Now this is something I have never seen Amazon do and that is they actually are going to be decreasing fees starting December 15th of this year. So that is actually really great. So they said they are going to reduce referral fees for clothing and accessories from 8% down to 5% for items that are selling about 15 euros. And then they're going to reduce from 15% to 10% for items priced between 15 euros and 20 euros. And they're going to further reduce the FBA fulfillment fees for parcels by an average of, I think it's cents, but I'm not really sure because it looks like it's pounds and euros by 26 cents of pounds and then 32 cents of euros. I'm not really sure what the currency is if they're pence or whatever it is that you guys use. But yeah, so they're actually reducing the fees of, you know, the referral fees and the FBA fees for the UK, Germany, France, Italy, and Spain stores. So that's really, really good news, especially for sellers if you're, you know, our margins keep getting a little bit tighter. So it's really nice to see that those are going to be going down. So if you are selling in those marketplaces, in those categories, in those price ranges, you definitely want to check that out because that is great news. Alright, this last piece of news is something that I have a little bit of a personal connection to because if some of you have been watching the buzz for a long time, you'll know that about two years ago, I actually had somebody hack into my Amazon Seller Central account and they stole our entire payout. This was in January right after. Thankfully, it wasn't our biggest payout, but this really kind of scared us in how easily this actually happened and they were able to hack in. The way that we were doing our two-step verification was via text message. We would basically just get the text message code and then that's how we kind of did the two-step verification. Apparently, people can clone your phone if you click on some sort of link. So using the text verification actually is not very secure. So then we've changed to the Authenticator, which is a Google Authenticator so that we can have much more secure authentication. But now, starting December 2nd, and I'll go ahead and show you, this is an announcement in Seller Central. Starting December 2nd, to improve Seller Central account security, And to maintain Amazon's commitment to trustworthy selling experience, Amazon is actually encouraging the use of passkey verification for all accounts. So this change is to increase the security of your account and to remain in line with industry standards. So a passkey is a password sign-in method that uses your device's identification features like your fingerprint, face scan, or PIN to protect your account with end-to-end encryption. So, the passkey verification offers the following benefits, and it actually does show this in here. It says that it's stronger security than the two-step verification, end-to-end encryption, making your account safe from data breaches, quick access using the device's built-in features, seamless login across multiple devices, and compatible with major browsers and Amazon apps. So this is definitely something that you should set up if you haven't already done that. Definitely do the Authenticator app. I'm actually hoping in the future that they do something like an UbiKey where it's an actual physical key that you have to have in your presence and it'll give you a code in order to get to log in. And a lot of sites actually, like banks, they allow you to use that kind of thing because it's much more secure and not hackable. So that is something that I hope that they get in the future. But for now, I think this is a step in the right direction. They really need to Make sure that these accounts We are secure, so I don't want to scare you or anything, but this actually can happen because it did happen to me, so you want to make sure that you have the most secure everything set up on your Amazon Seller Central account. All right, that's all we have this week for the news. We had a lot to talk about with Black Friday, Cyber Monday. Again, if you haven't put it in the comments, go ahead and comment how you did on Black Friday, Cyber Monday. We'd love to hear from you and how you did, but we'll go ahead and end it here, and we'll see you again next week to see what's buzzing. Bye, everyone.