Helium 10 Buzz 7/12/24: TikTok Shop Special Program | Temu Becoming Amazon-ish? | Etsy Shift

We’re back with another episode of the Weekly Buzz with Helium 10’s Chief Brand Evangelist, Bradley Sutton. Every week, we cover the latest breaking news in the Amazon, Walmart, and E-commerce space, talk about Helium 10’s newest features, and provide a training tip for the week for serious sellers of any level.

TikTok Launches New Program To Attract More UK Merchants
https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/tiktok-launches-program-attract-more-uk-merchants/720798/

Temu Breaks With Direct-From-China Strategy In Threat to Amazon
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/temu-breaks-with-direct-from-china-strategy-in-threat-to-amazon

Amazon Price Matching Update: As we all know Amazon has been price-matching Target and Walmart for a few years now causing many issues for brands.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/brandonfishman_amazon-target-activity-7215821589546721280-2Rv_/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

Flip, The TikTok Shop Competitor, Expands Social Commerce By Acquiring Curated
https://www.forbes.com/sites/pamdanziger/2024/07/09/flip-the-tiktok-shop-competitor-expands-social-commerce-by-acquiring-curated/

Amazon defeats US consumer lawsuit over ‘buy box’ product listings
https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/amazon-defeats-us-consumer-lawsuit-over-buy-box-product-listings-2024-07-08/

Etsy loses its ‘handmade’ and ‘vintage’ labels as it takes on Temu and Amazon
https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/9/24190843/etsy-handmade-vintage-policy-change

Don’t miss an exciting preview of the Amazon Accelerate event and how you can win free tickets from Helium 10. Lastly, Bradley talks about the latest update on Helium 10’s Chrome extension, designed to give you the competitive edge you need in title optimization.

In this episode of the Weekly Buzz by Helium 10, Bradley covers:

• 00:47 – $1M TikTok Shop Program
• 01:43 – Temu Becoming Amazon-ish?
• 03:27 – Target / Amazon Buy Box Blunder
• 05:12 – New TikTok Shop Clone
• 07:12 – Amazon Wins Lawsuit
• 08:24 – Big Etsy Change
• 10:38 – Walmart Connect Updates
• 11:15 – Amazon Accelerate Updates
• 12:00 – Follow Helium 10 On TikTok
• 12:54 – New Feature Alerts & Training

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Temu’s going after Amazon now. Big buy box issues. If you sell on Target and Amazon, is change coming to Etsy? 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 am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that is our Helium 10 Weekly Buzz, where we give you a rundown of all the new stories that are going on the Amazon, Walmart, TikTok shop and e-commerce world. We give you training tips of the week and we let you know what new features from Helium 10 can give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Let’s see what’s buzzing. All right, we got a lot of articles, so let’s go ahead and hop right into it Now. The first article that we’re going to be talking about today is actually from social media today, and it’s entitled TikTok launches new program to attract more UK merchants. All right, so this is basically called the 1 Million Pound Club Initiative and it says it aims to help UK retailers reach 1 million pounds, or about 1.28 million in US dollars, in revenue via the app. Now what is involved in this program? Well, it says they’re going to offer special incentives, support offerings, 0% commission, free sales, free storage, free fulfillment by TikTok seller support priority service. Some of you all might be saying, hey, sign me up. So it’s kind of crazy these benefits that they’re going to do Now. If you’re interested in getting more information on this program, if you’re in the UK, there is actually a link in this article that you should be able to get to down below.

Bradley Sutton:

Let’s go talk about another platform and it’s funny. A couple of weeks ago, when Carrie was doing the weekly buzz, there was a news article she had where it was entitled Is Amazon Becoming Temu-ish? You guys remember that story. It talked about how Amazon’s opening up a kind of channel where it’s kind of like Temu, where they have Chinese sellers, sell directly to US buyers and then they ship directly low-priced items and it gets to customers in like 10 days. This is funny. Now this is entitled Is Teemu Becoming Amazon-ish? So there’s this article from theinformation.com and it’s entitled Teemu Breaks with Direct from China Strategy in a Threat to Amazon. And basically what this article is talking about is how Timo is trying to kind of go away from just the direct from China to US model and they are actively trying to recruit US sellers, or at least sellers who have warehouses in the US, to ship and then potentially, you know, who knows, maybe Temu would have some um fulfillment now for the very first time ever. I started like downloading the Temu app and looking at it and I’m like, oh, my goodness, uh, they’ve got coffin shelves and other stuff on there for super, super cheap prices. I’m not sure how it would work in the U? S. Now I I’m going to be actually trying to reach out to Temu and maybe do like a little mini case study to see how in the world they expect to have US sellers selling on the platform. But who knows, maybe it’s an opportunity, like if they have a whole bunch of incentives where you can make a profit, you know, due to maybe no selling fees and very, you know, no advertising, et cetera. So let’s see, come back in maybe three or four weeks I’ll let you know how my project X team is going.

Bradley Sutton:

Next article is not really an article but just a LinkedIn post. In case you missed it, Jason, who comes here on the podcast sometimes, and he along with the CEO of VitaCup, Brandon, were reporting on something that’s going on where you know how Amazon price matches, you know, with Walmart, Target and other websites. And now target had this circle, target circle prices like target, that target circles, kind of like their club where they get special discounts. But then what’s happening is, on this target circle Now they’re showing the target circle price over here with the regular price, with a line crossed out of it. Now you know you might be wondering, well, how is that an issue? You know that’s pretty cool. But no, it’s not cool because what’s happening is Google, I guess, picked up on that new Target Circle price which only a few people have. It’s not like, oh, everybody’s a Target Circle member, like everybody’s an Amazon Prime member, almost right. So what’s happening now is that’s a special price, a special discount that I believe Target even gives. It’s not really the buyer or the seller who’s giving all of that discount. Target, I think, is subsidizing it a little bit. And now what’s going on is that Amazon’s price matching that and so of course, your Amazon listings are priced higher than that Target circle price. And so what happens when Amazon detects that? No, buy box. So a lot of sellers out there it’s not just VitaCup, I’ve heard this across the board that a lot of people are being affected by this where Amazon is removing the buy box because it thinks that they’re price gouging, right. So if you’re selling on Target and your Amazon sales have gone down, take a look at your Amazon listings. That could be the reason. I don’t know offhand of a solution, but I’m sure Amazon will come up with something before Prime Day.

Bradley Sutton:

Next article is from Forbes.com and it’s entitled Flip, the TikTok shop competitor, expands social commerce by acquiring curated. Now, I have never heard of Flip. I have never heard of curated, but it’s interesting. First of all, why should we care about this? This is like you know. We’re talking about social commerce where there’s social media blended with buying right in one. That’s, that’s the whole kind of like premise. You know, there was TikTok and then now there’s TikTok shop. Now this is big overseas. You think it’s already getting big in the US. Well, the social commerce market in China is going to grow from 350 billion back in 2021 to 900 billion next year. Now US social commerce was 37 billion in one and it’s projected to get to 80 billion. But that’s like China’s like 10x the ceiling. If it really starts to take off in the US, you know, who knows how big it can actually get. So it’s interesting to follow, hey, who are the new players in the game? We saw what happened with TikTok shop in the US and now it says hey, it has over 500,000 merchants in the affiliate program selling products via influencer produced shoppable videos, as we know, right, bloomberg reported that TikTok shop expects to reach 17.5 billion in sales by the end of this year.

Bradley Sutton:

So now there’s another social commerce player. It’s called Flip and they’re similar to TikTok shop, but it’s significant differences, it says, could make it more appealing to customers. In the US it only has 5 million users, so this is not something that TikTok Shop is. Shaking their boots, oh, my goodness, this Flip company is coming after us, but they curate every brand. It features On TikTok Shop not anybody, but it’s a little bit loose. But on TikTok or on Flip, it said pretty, a little bit loose, uh, but on Tik TOK or on flip it said 70% of the sellers that apply uh are actually rejected. Uh, giving customers more confidence. So, anyways, um, just another, maybe marketplace that you can maybe get in a little bit early on. Um, if you think it’s going to get bigger, uh, take a look at flip.

Bradley Sutton:

Next article is from Reuters and it’s entitled Amazon defeats US Consumer Lawsuit Over Buy Box Product Listings. Now, at first when I saw this I was like, oh, did that crazy FTC lawsuit finally get thrown out? No, this was just like something that a couple of random Amazon customers wanted to do some class action lawsuit, saying that, oh, amazon is not rotating the buy box in a fair way. You know, it’s actually showing some prices that were a few cents more expensive than other ones and we’re all affected by it. So obviously the judge kind of like threw this one out because they’re like all right, well, show us the receipts. Like literally like where’s the receipts? And they’re like well, we don’t have any receipts. I guess is how it worked out. But you know, remember that other FTC lawsuit I haven’t heard about that in a few months. You know, what I’ve said always from the beginning is like I don’t understand why the FTC is going after certain things that Amazon is doing when there’s so many other things that Amazon sellers are concerned about, like you know, the new fees and buy box matching and things like that. But here I guess anybody can file a lawsuit against Amazon. But hey, just because you do it, that doesn’t mean you’re going to win. Amazon won and these Amazon Prime customers zero on this one.

Bradley Sutton:

Next article is kind of near and dear to my heart because a couple of weeks ago, literally two weeks ago, I got a whole bunch of my Etsy listings suspended. And I don’t know about you guys who sell on Etsy, but when you sell on Etsy or you get suspended, like on a listing, there’s like no way to contact customer support, no way to argue. It. It’s like final, it’s like this and that and my products, you know, like coffin shelf products on one account and on another account some other similar, uh, not mass produced products that I sell on Etsy. It absolutely falls within what Etsy is says. It’s like the handmade policy. It’s got to be handmade or made by a member of your shop, uh, or designed by you, like. I qualify for all three of those. You know pretty much. So it’s ridiculous that Etsy was removing my listings but now this week the verge is reporting it. Etsy loses its handmade and vintage labels as it takes on Temu and Amazon. So what does that mean? Well, it says hey.

Bradley Sutton:

A policy update announced today creates four new classifications for items for sale on Etsy Made by, designed by handpicked by and sourced by. All right, all products need to fall into just one of those four to be eligible. Vintage items will fall under handpicked by. But again, this is kind of crazy. I had to redo a whole bunch of my listings just because Etsy erroneously removed it. Couldn’t they have waited two weeks? Their policy was about to change anyways. There’s no way that. I mean, who knows, I was already not breaking the policy. So who knows? I mean Etsy probably still could remove my listings. But anyways, this is kind of big news, I think. You know Etsy wants to kind of like, you know, make sure they’re competing a little bit more with Amazon, and you know websites like Teemu, I guess, and so this move you know, let’s see might help them. You know, let’s see might help them. Does this open up the possibility for you to sell on Etsy? Maybe before you didn’t think you qualified. But do you qualify under one of those four things? I, technically, if you design your product, even if you’re not the one making it, you absolutely should qualify if you take that at face value. So a little bit interesting for those of you. Maybe you can start considering Etsy as a marketplace.

Bradley Sutton:

Speaking of different marketplaces, Walmart had a Walmart Connect few announcements that they sent out in email. They said they launched a couple of new things a video module, item and module reordering for brand shop. So brand shop is kind of like I guess you know the your brand store on Amazon, but now you can add a video module to that. You can also rearrange your modules on your brand narrative or brand shop page and do a couple other things. So I don’t even have my brand store set up on Walmart. I better get on that and then I can go ahead and take advantage of some of these other features going to Amazon seller central they have.

Bradley Sutton:

This is the last story of the day Amazon accelerate We’ve been talking about for a few weeks. They announced a couple of the special speakers Amazon Store CEO, Doug Harrington, and also Martha Stewart is going to be joining Amazon Accelerate 2024. So there’s your chance to meet a couple of celebrities of the Amazon and pop culture world. I guess there that you can do if you go to Amazon Accelerate. Now Amazon Accelerate, if you go to h10.me forward slash accelerate, you’ll be able to get a hundred dollars off your um tickets, which I believe is only four 99 right now. But do you guys want to go to Amazon accelerate for free?

Bradley Sutton:

We have a contest going on right now. If you go to our Tik TOK channel right, helium 10 software. Right, helium 10 software follow us and then like one of our posts. All right, don’t just software. Follow us and then like one of our posts. All right, don’t just always just pick the first one I don’t know why my face is all over this TikTok channel right now but pick one of the recent ones and like it and then comment something with the word accelerate. Don’t say, hey, I’m entering the contest for Amazon Accelerate. Say something like Bradley, looks like your hair growth has been accelerated lately with your haircut, I don’t know. Just trying to come up with a unique way of using the word accelerate. And then our social media person, Lailama, she’s going to pick one of you to win a completely free ticket to go to Amazon Accelerate worth $600. So make sure to do that when you see this sometime this weekend, if you can. All right, that’s it for the news this week.

Bradley Sutton:

Now let’s get into a couple new cool Helium 10 feature alerts. All right, we’ve got some new things that are coming to our Chrome extension. Actually, they have come to our Chrome extension and here’s the background of it. As you know, when you take some of my listing optimization classes, or if you’ve learned from other people out there, like Tomer Rabinovich, he’s always said, hey, try and find out what is the niche theme? Right, like what kind of images the competitors are using and like what kind of style they have. But one part of a niche theme is the length of title. All right, it’s not like hey, every single category, every single product, you should have 200 characters in your title. Every single product, you should have 50 characters. No, some could be 50. Some could be 200. Different things work in different niches, and so now what sellers were looking for is hey, how can I just really quick, at a glance, get an idea of what the top 10, 20 products on a keyword page? What is the length of their titles? Well, watch this.

Bradley Sutton:

If you go into the Chrome extension now, you are going to be able to hit Xray, for example, right here. This is a search that I have here for collagen peptides. And if I hit the search button now, as you can see, there is this new widget at the very top. It says average title character count 169. And then, if I put my mouse over the eye here and it says here at the bottom there’s actually six that have 180 to 189 and there’s seven, seven listings, 35%. So 65% of the listings on page one of collagen peptides have between 180 and 200 in the top 20. All right. So now compare that to another one. We go and search accordion on Amazon, all right. And then we run a Xray on this page remember the collagen peptides was 169. What’s the average on accordion? It is only 116. All right, and if we put our mouse over right here we can see that, hey, 25% of the listings on page one actually have less than 100 characters, all right. And another maybe 50 percent or 40 percent have between 110 and 139. So completely different than what you were seeing for collagen peptides, right. So again, just because a list you know, even helium 10 has listing scores. It’s just based on like kind of best practices overall. But this is something that is interesting, where now you can see what’s going on at the individual product level. You can see the title character count of every single product on page one and on average. So pretty cool update for the Helium 10 Chrome extension.

Bradley Sutton:

Now one more update here in the Chrome extension. Hopefully you guys have had a chance to maybe use the new tool that we launched a couple of months ago that uses AI to kind of aggregate and analyze and organize your product research maybe projects, right. Well now, let’s say you’re researching accordions and you ran Xray here and you want to add a few products, like, oh, I want to add this to my product research project right in product launchpad. Well, now what you can do in Xray is go ahead and select any of the ASINs you want and then you are going to hit the button right here save product idea. And once you hit the save product idea, it’s going to open up a widget and now, if you actually have some projects open in product launchpad, you’re going to be able to choose it from here and then just add it right there. Or if you’re just like oh, wow, I’m just browsing Amazon, this is like actually a really interesting idea. These mini accordions for kids never thought of that. I want to start researching that, uh, without having to go and do all this research right now. Let me save this for later. So then you would hit new product idea and now it’s going to go ahead and save in your new project. So super cool updates this week from the Chrome extension and hats off to Simon at Helium 10 for helping push those through.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, now it’s time for the Helium 10 training tip of the week, and this also has to do with the Chrome extension. Maybe a new way that you can see who is targeting your ASIN and start tracking it. All right, it’s not available like in black box or in the Helium 10 tool. It’s available right here in the Chrome extension. Just go to your product pages or go to your competitors product pages If you want to track. Hey, who is showing up on my competitors product page? Where am I showing up on my competitors product page? Or vice versa, who is showing up and who is bidding for the most on the Product Targeting Ads on my page? Who’s putting sponsored brand ads on my page? Who is putting a Sponsor Display Ads on my page? Let me show you how you can do that. You go into Amazon and like, let’s say, this is my product. Actually, this is one of the products I work on in motion hemp cream. You can see that there’s plenty of ads all over the page. Here’s products related to this item. There was a couple of sponsor display or some sponsored brand ads down here towards the bottom. There’s even more products down here that are showing up.

Bradley Sutton:

So what you can do, all you have to do now is hit Xray and then instantly all of the products on this page are going to show up. All right, so you can see here that there’s actually um, let’s see, it looks like 25 products are all appearing on the front of this page, from sponsor brand to sponsor products. Uh, maybe some sponsor display here, and I could just go ahead and just save this as an excel file and just start storing it to see. All right, hey, maybe you can have one of your VA’s do it. You know throughout the day, like, uh, or every once a day, it’s like, all right, let. Hey, maybe you can have one of your VA’s do it. You know throughout the day, like, or every once a day, it’s like, all right, let me just track who is showing up the most on my page. So again, that’s just two clicks it takes to do that.

Bradley Sutton:

Make sure to start looking at your competitors pages. Look at your pages. I like looking at competitors pages too, because it might give me ideas on different products that I can target in my Sponsored Product ASIN Targeting Campaign. So, uh, pretty cool feature. I think you guys maybe are sleeping on. You might not have known that it existed. Make sure to go to hop on any product page, run Xray and tell me who is advertising on your page. All right, guys. Thank you so much for joining us this week. We’ll see you next week to see what’s buzzing.

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