Helium 10 Buzz 10/24/24: Big Amazon Shipping Delays | Amazon Temu-Ish Service Rumors

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.

Amazon sets ultra-low pricing plans for Temu rival store, The Information reports
https://www.reuters.com/technology/amazon-sets-ultra-low-pricing-plans-temu-rival-store-information-reports-2024-10-22/

Amazon to shut down speedy brick-and-mortar delivery service
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/10/22/amazon-to-shut-down-speedy-brick-and-mortar-today-delivery-service.html

Amazon Announces New Fuel Savings Offer for Prime Members
https://press.aboutamazon.com/2024/10/amazon-announces-new-fuel-savings-offer-for-prime-members

Amazon’s enhanced homepage features make shopping easier and more personalized
https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/retail/amazon-homepage-redesign-features

One man’s mission to save his sick dog sparked a thriving pet probiotic business on Amazon
https://sellingpartners.aboutamazon.com/one-mans-mission-to-save-his-sick-dog-sparked-a-thriving-pet-probiotic-business-on-amazon

Lastly, we also introduce the latest features from Helium 10, including enhancements for our Chrome Extension for Amazon Influencers and a revamped Keyword Tracker tool. Tune in to discover all the exciting developments and strategies designed to help you succeed in the Amazon marketplace.

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

• 00:49 – Big Amazon Logistics Problems
• 06:20 – Amazon Temu Clone Details
• 08:08 – Deferred Transactions
• 09:00 – Amazon Today Closing
• 10:23 – Image Manager
• 11:03 – Amazon Gas Savings
• 12:08 – FBA Shipment Notifications
• 12:44 – Amazon Homepage Update
• 14:05 – Amazon Seller Story
• 15:33 – X-Ray For Amazon Influencers
• 18:50 – Keyword Tracker Heat Maps + PPC Data
• 24:45 – Sydney Australia Event
• 25:17 – Milan Italy Event

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Amazon warehouses on the West Coast are full. More details about the potential Amazon Team Wish service have leaked. Find out how, if you have Amazon Prime, you can get up to $70 of free gas. These stories and more on this week’s Weekly Buzz. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.

Bradley Sutton:

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 goings on in the Amazon TikTok shop and e-commerce world. We give you training tips of the week and also let you know what new features Helium 10 has. That will give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Let’s see what’s buzzing. We’ve got tons of news articles today, lots going on, so let’s go ahead and hop right into it. All right, the first news article of the day actually starts off from Amazon Seller Central. I’ve got some additional information that Amazon sent over that you sellers need to know. It’s kind of like important, especially those of you trying to get inventory in here in q4. Uh, it’s entitled updates to support us. FBA peak inventory shipments says we understand this is from amazon that many of you are experiencing longer receive times that are affecting your shipments. High demand has led to longer receive times at some of our west coast inbound locations and for palletized freight. It says they’re trying to actively take steps to resolve the situation, including rerouting shipments to other regions. So, effective immediately, they’re making the following adjustments to inbound requirements. Number one they’ve extended the automatic closure window to 90 days for shipments created after August 7th through October 31st. Okay, you know, usually it’s a little bit shorter where they automatically close a shipment that hasn’t been received and they’re extending the abandoned shipment window from 30 to 45 days for shipments in that same time period. All right, so now that’s kind of like the official notice that went out to sellers, you know, on your Seller Central dashboard.

Bradley Sutton:

But I got my hands on some other information here that Amazon wanted sellers to know about and it was kind of like a frequently asked questions about what’s going on. So maybe some of these questions you’ve actually have actually had and maybe this answers it all right. So the first question is why is this happening? Well, it says hey, there’s an increased demand to send inventory to the West Coast facilities and it’s resulting in longer p times or lead times. Right, so, so we already got that. But then they said, hey, is amazon rerouting non-partnered carriers to inbound locations? The answer is no. So if you’re not using an amazon partner, they’re not telling, like your own freight company, hey, you need to go to Texas or something you know to deliver. No, if you’re shipping your inventory with a third-party carrier and you have longer receive times, you could actually still reach out to your carrier, amazon says, and get a new appointment through Carrier Central.

Bradley Sutton:

What changes are you making to the inbound placement service fee? Inbound placement service fee? Amazon says hey, effective immediately, where we’ve temporarily reduced the rate range for the inbound placement fees for minimal shipments into the East region by 5 cents. Better than nothing, guys, right, 5 cents per unit, okay. So you know, like, if before you had to ship to the East coast and you had to, you know, have certain placement fees that were, you know, 30, 40 cents each, you get a 5 cent discount. Now, because of these issues, what are the temporary fee changes to help move out of the West? Same thing 5 cents in reduction in fees for the minimal shipment split option to the East region. Next question says if inbounding to the east region still is the most expensive, even with this five cents difference, what should I do? Amazon says we recommend that you use the Amazon optimized shipment splits or select central or east regions under the partial shipment splits or the minimal shipment splits options.

Bradley Sutton:

Another general question that some are asking hey, my shipment is still showing delivered status, but the inventory has not been received. What should we do? It says most delivered shipments are received within a week of delivery to ensure placement of your inventory. Now, if you’re using a non-partnered carrier, communicate with the carrier to get progress reports. If you’re using Amazon Freight, they can help locate your shipment by submitting If you submit a carrier, missed pickup request to Amazon and that’ll help you get more information.

Bradley Sutton:

Another question are fulfillment centers equally affected by the long receipt times? In other words, we know the receipt, the inbound is having trouble, but are my customers going to start having issues on the West coast because of what’s going on? The answer no. These longer receipt times are mainly affecting the West region because it’s a popular location for inventory shipments, but fulfillment centers are not experiencing that issue. Why do I still not see the partial shipment split options to the West? Answer. The partial shipment splits inbound option will be provided if your shipment qualifies, but due to the busy holiday season and high demand, partial shipment splits to the West may not be available on send to Amazon. So you might be like wait a minute, how come? You know, normally when I create my shipment I usually see this the shipment split to the West available and now it’s not like showing up at all. Well, this is the reason why, because of this, this issue that that we’re talking about now. Hopefully that’s not the case for you, but this is the answer If that is happening to you.

Bradley Sutton:

Now here’s a funny one. Are there alternative shipping methods, ship mode, when possible, of course. Where’d that be? I mean, how do you use air all the time If it didn’t cost five times as much as ocean shipping? So for most of us that might not be an option, but hey, at least Amazon’s giving you an alternative. In case you didn’t realize that you can ship your product via air. All right, so that’s most of the information there about what’s going on with Amazon West Coast. Let me know in the comments. Have you been affected by this? I actually haven’t. Thankfully, knock on wood, I haven’t had to ship anything in the last week and a half or two weeks I got most of my stuff in early. I’m about to send a shipment in tomorrow for my warehouse, so let’s see how it goes. What about you? Let me know in the comments below if you guys have been affected by this.

Bradley Sutton:

Next article is from Reuters.com says Amazon sets ultra low pricing plans for Temu rival store. The information reports Now this is something we reported a couple of months ago how Amazon might be launching like a Temu-ish kind of service for sellers from China, where it’s going to ship directly from China to customers might take 10 or 12 days. Well, some more information has come out. Supposedly there’s going to be caps on what they can charge, uh, in the categories. So if it’s jewelry, if it’s going to be part of the service, it’s $8. If it’s a guitar a guitar it’s 13. If it’s a sofa, the most expensive sofa you can ship is $20. I mean a Lego sofa, like what in the world sofa costs under $20. Now I saw other reports that said, hey, the total price is $20. I saw some reports that said, hey, it had to be less than a pound or less than 14 inches long. If it’s less than 14 inches long. How are you going to have a sofa even in there? So there’s so much information and misinformation out there right now, like I’m not sure what to trust yet. I’m just throwing out information as I get it. This is an actual article in Reuters.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, what do you guys think about this? I know the last time when we first announced this, people were upset. They’re like man, this is not good. So, like, my biggest question still is are US-based sellers European-based sellers? If we have a factory in China, will we be able to use this service to at least have an equal playing field, or only Chinese manufacturers are going to have access to this shipment? So let’s see how things go. I think a story I saw where it said maybe somebody said hey, only you can’t even have branded products here and it’s going to be separate from Amazon’s websites like a sub site. Who knows Can’t have branded products, you only can say generic. There’s all kinds of stories, but as they keep coming out, we’ll let you know and hopefully there’ll be some clarity on what exactly is going to happen with this program soon.

Bradley Sutton:

Next up is article from the Seller Central and it’s called view your reserve payments in the new deferred transaction report. All right, so if you get a sale, you don’t get the money from that sale right away. Like, let’s say, your disbursement is every two weeks and it’s on the second Monday of the month or whatever. Well, if you’ve got an order on the second Sunday of the month that those orders, you’re probably not going to get that money the next day. All right, because there’s usually kind of like a reserve Right In addition to your account level reserve, take a look at this article because now they’re saying that, hey, you’re going to have more visibility into which exactly which orders exactly are being deferred until the next pay period. You’re going to be able to see this in your payments reports repository. If this is something you’re curious about I’m not going to go too much into detail Go into your Seller Central News. You’ll have the link right there of how you can find this new deferred transaction report.

Bradley Sutton:

Next article is from CNBC. It’s kind of interesting because we’ve been doing the buzz so long, that stuff that we broke as stories about what was going on amazon before. It’s like now being defunct, like we announced the release and now, a couple years later now it’s going away. So CNBC says amazon to shut down speedy brick and mortar delivery service. This was called amazon today and if you remember that weekly buzz years ago. Basically what it means is like if there’s a amazon seller who actually has a brick and mortar store, kind of like.

Bradley Sutton:

I think what the example gave was like GNC and if it’s sold products, it would allow fulfillment of the products directly from the local GNC, like a neighborhood. So if somebody orders from GNC on Amazon and they have inventory at that local GNC, then Amazon would hire these local drivers to go pick it up at that GNC and then deliver it to the customer down the street. Whatever, you might not even know that existed. Good for you, because now it doesn’t exist anymore anyways. In reality. So Amazon’s laying off all the employees that were part of that system. It would have been interesting to see if that played out more Like. I could have seen how you know. Maybe it could eventually roll out to you know sellers who have warehouses in certain you know localities. You know, maybe they could have just delivered to local customers on their own, but that service is gone.

Bradley Sutton:

Next up, an article from seller central fix image issues fast with a new image manager feature. All right, so this is a new feature that you can go in your seller central. You go to catalog and then manage your images and then you’re going to come up to this page and basically, if there’s image issues, you’re going to see in the bottom left like a, like a red flag, and then, instead of having to go one by one into your listings and edit the listing and then try and fix your images from this one page the image manager any issues that Amazon has with your images you can just fix them directly on this interface here. So if you want more information on that, check your seller central news dashboard.

Bradley Sutton:

Next article is a press release from Amazon. It’s kind of interesting because this is not really for sellers. But if you’re an Amazon member, guess what? You can now save up to 10 cents a gallon at Amoco or AMPM locations, all right, so I’m assuming AMPM is like Arco, right, like that’s what Arco, that’s what AMPM is here in California. But anyways, you can save 10 cents a gallon, which averages like $70 a year on gas. Again, maybe this doesn’t affect you. It does if you live in America and I just got you $70 right now. But I always like reporting on any benefits that, like Walmart Plus or Amazon Prime give, because it’s just going to make our customers more sticky to Amazon Prime, right? Because if they’re getting this $70 of free gas, if you want to see how to activate this, real easy, if you’re an Amazon Prime member, go to amazon.com/fuelsavings. It’s a one-time setup and then next time you go to an ARCO or AMPM you’ll save 10 cents a gallon.

Bradley Sutton:

Next article, again from Seller Central. This is called New FBA Shipment Notifications for Better Visibility. So if you are using a partner carrier pickups and you’re experiencing FBA shipment delivery disruptions, you’re now going to get an email from Amazon. So this is something that you are going to need to opt in or opt out of, depending on if you want a whole bunch of emails about what’s going on with your partner carrier deliveries. So make sure to go into settings and to notification preferences and then go to FBA inbound shipment status notifications and make sure toggle on or off if you want to get these notifications or not.

Bradley Sutton:

Speaking of Amazon and the website on the front side of the website, not seller central, amazon has been testing new homepage new homepage on amazon.com. Also on the app. This is an article from about amazon.com and it says improvements include personalized recommendations, improve browsing and streamline reordering in time for the holiday shopping season. Now, I did not see any of these updates on my personal Amazon that I use for my Prime account, but they showed some pictures here where there’s kind of like a new interface with big images, kind of like tailor-made, I guess, supposedly for the people who are buying, and more intuitive design. It says here it’s called a window display, like there’s these big tiles or windows of products that it’s showing. Um, the other addition is that there’s a improved buy again hub. All right, so you’re going to see this buy again section, or amazon buyers are going to see that and then products they bought before real easy to almost kind of like one click and get it in the shopping cart. So it’ll be interesting to monitor this because, like, is this going? You know, like those of us with replenishable products, could this potentially help increase our repeat orders? You know could be so. So let let’s see uh, how this, this new Amazon website and app, uh might help or hurt some of our sales.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, last article of the day. It’s from Amazon’s website. They’re selling partners website. It’s funny because Helium 10 members a lot of times are featured on Amazon’s ad page and I was like, wait a minute, I know this guy. So if you go to the link is in the comments below. But if you go to this Amazon website, it’s entitled. One Man’s Mission to Save His Sick Dog Sparked a Thriving Pet Probiotic Business on Amazon, and some of you might recognize this. This is Santiago Galvez. He’s a Helium 10 member. He comes to our elite workshops, he’s been at a lot of our events and he’s actually been on the Helium 10 Serious Sellers podcast en Español. All right, so take a look at the link here. It’s a really cool story about how he came up with his brand. It has to do with his pets and everything. And then if you speak Spanish and you want to hear more of his story, check out episode 147 of the Serious Sellers Podcast en Español. That’s not this one. You can search it on whatever you have Si habla en Español. And his podcast title was Así Lance Mi Marca en Amazon. So it sounds like it’s the same kind of like story he talked about in this one, as he told to Amazon.

Bradley Sutton:

So pretty cool to see Helium 10 members being featured on Amazon’s main website. All right, that’s it for the news this week. Let’s go ahead and hop into some new feature alerts. All right, we’re not going to do a training tip of the week this week, because the new feature alerts kind of doubles as a training tip. It’s going to be pretty cool. Now you’re going to see a lot more content from Helium 10 about the Amazon Influencer Program. All right, amazon Influencer Program is a really cool way for Amazon sellers to get some money initially to build up to be able to do private label. It’s a great way for maybe your family members to kind of like get involved in Amazon, or even you yourself, if you want to make some extra money.

Bradley Sutton:

So one of the first things that we are going to have in the for Amazon influencers, if you have updated the new version of the Helium 10 Chrome extension, go to any search result page or any product page and then run X-Ray like normal. Ok, so once you hit X-Ray, it’ll pull up on the page, just like you know any other time. And now what’s going to happen, though, once you pull up x-ray, is that there is a toggle on the very top right. You’re going to see, and I’ll say standard. That’s the default for Amazon sellers. But let’s say you wanted to dabble in the influence. If you’re a Amazon affiliate Amazon influencer, you hit the button on the top right and then select influencer version. Now what happens is X-Ray now is going to show some data that is interesting to Amazon influencers, who? Those are the ones who create videos that go on listings and then those videos end up showing up in the carousel in the bottom row and then if a buyer watches the video, right, and then they buy the product, guess what that Amazon influencer has? The video is going to go ahead and get commission on that.

Bradley Sutton:

So now the kind of things that you can see in Helium 10 Chrome extension x-ray is you’ll be able to see stuff like what’s the opportunity score for an influencer? How many videos are in the upper carousel, like look how many products on the coffin shelf page have no videos? I mean that could be interesting to Amazon sellers at all. I just want to see who’s got videos in their carousel right. How many videos are in the lower carousel, the one that’s kind of like at the bottom of the page? That’s also where influencer videos, customer review videos, can go. How many of these videos are influencer videos on the page. The one that’s opportunity for Amazon influencers is when there’s like one or zero influencer videos. That means you’re kind of have a better chance perhaps at getting your video featured in that upper or lower carousel, meaning that if you’re the only video there, every time somebody watches the video and then they buy the product, you’re getting commission on that product. This shows how many brand videos All right.

Bradley Sutton:

So again, this is for Amazon sellers or influencers. You want to know the brand itself. How many videos did they put on their own page? You can see here. There’s some here that have six and even eight, oh my goodness. And some have two and some have zero. What is the commission rate for an influencer for the product? The commission rate for Amazon influencers varies across different categories. You can now see that right here. And then, even if it’s your product, maybe you’re curious how much is Amazon giving to influencers who are promoting my product? Well, here you can see that. You can also see the affiliate commission. Affiliate commission is different than influencer commission rates. And then the affiliate commission actual dollar amount. So some cool information here now is showing up in the Chrome extension. This is just the first of a lot of things we might have for Amazon influencers out there, but some of it is still relevant to Amazon sellers as well.

Bradley Sutton:

Another update that Helium 10 Elite members have had for a while but now it’s being released, even all the way down to the platinum plan is some new features inside of keyword tracker. All right, so in keyword tracker you probably noticed that a few weeks ago the new interface already, but now you are going to have additional features. All right, so here’s a new interface. You can see the keywords here, and I’ve done videos before I talk about how now you can add competitors and kind of see where your competitors are ranking, like all on a certain grid, so that you can see for each keyword you know who’s got the best rank with those keyword harvesting, where we’re going to like follow up based on what you’re saying and tell you what keywords that your competitors are ranked for in the top 10 that maybe you’re not ranking for, or keywords that you weren’t even tracking that you’re ranking for because you didn’t even know that you’re ranking for. Right.

Bradley Sutton:

But some of the newest things this week, uh, one of them is a heat map. You know we’ve always had uh in market tracker 360 heat maps for our keyword tracker there for like two years and users were like man, we want this to be in the regular keyword tracker. And it took us a couple of years, guys, but now we have it. So we brought the Market Tracker 360 feature of heat maps into the regular keyword tracker and you’re going to be able to also not only see the day of week like maybe you want to see, hey, every Sunday does my rank change? But also there’s going to be little gift boxes that you see on some dates on this keyword tracker graph. This is indicating like a holiday. Like maybe you want to kind of like eyeball in and say, hey, did something happen to my rank on if there was a holiday? So here on October 14th, I can see that was Columbus Day. I can take a look at my ranks. I can change this to go from left to right to right to left. I can also change like hey, maybe I don’t want to see the exact rank, but I’m just curious what page am I showing up? Page one, page two, page three, page four.

Bradley Sutton:

Don’t forget that helium 10 is one of the only keyword trackers that actually checks all pages. A lot of popular keyword trackers out there, you’ll notice it only goes up to like 100 or 150. That means it’s only giving you two page of search results. We’re giving you all pages of search results, all 306 locations or or positions. Seven, the full seven pages that appears in search results. You can see in helium 10 keyword tracker. But this is the heat maps. It’s kind of like a different way to visualize what’s going on. And then, don’t forget, if you see this red dot in any of this, that means that you had boost on during that time. Again, that’s another thing that only helium 10 has. Well, we’re checking in one day, if I have boost on, 24 different browsing scenarios 24 times a day. It’s checking different browsing scenarios in Edge or Chrome or Safari. And then what if the zip code is over here? What if the address like even in the same zip code it’s an address across the street over here, an address over in Florida or whatever, like it’s doing a lot of random things, so that you can really have an idea about what is going on with your rank and then you’ll be able to see what happened throughout the day if you have that boost on. So that’s the heat maps.

Bradley Sutton:

And then now, if you have. For those of you who have Atomic remember Atomic is now in the diamond plan You’re going to have access to this ad section. That means we’re ready to have you all your PPC and your advertising information and now you’re going to be able to see some super cool things about what’s going on with your keyword rank as it relates to your advertising. So, for example, I can see hey, how many campaigns did I have active where I got at least one impression or a click of coffin shelf? I’ve got four exact match campaigns where it came up. I’ve got zero auto campaigns where it came up.

Bradley Sutton:

I can change the date range. I can see all right, how many PPC sales did I have during this time? How many units did I sell? What was my spend during this time on this keyword? What was my ACoS? What was my ROAS? How many PPC clicks did I have? What was my impressions overall? Like here, I got 8,000 impressions in PPC for the word coffin shelf. But then, guys, the reason why this is in Keyword Tr tracker is it’s now tying in all of this information.

Bradley Sutton:

So if I hit this graph next to coffin shelf, now all of a sudden I can start graphing different metrics where I can say let me graph my organic rank and graph it versus my cost per click, right? So now here I’m looking at this graph and I’m like, okay, here’s my cost per click. As it decreased, my impressions increased somehow, and then, as my cost per click increased, my impressions, for whatever reason, went down on that same day. However, that’s just one way to look at it. The other way to look at it is no, things don’t happen exactly on the same day. However, that’s just one way to look at it. The other way to look at it is no, things don’t happen exactly on the same day. But look, every time that my cost per click increased, the very next day, my impressions increased. My organic rank. Maybe I want to you know what? I want to see how it changed my sponsored rank. Take a look at this. My cost per click was 55 cents. I increase it to 55 cents. What happened to my sponsored rank the next day? Uh, it started going up from 17 all the way to five. Take a look over here. My, you know, I decreased my, my bid, potentially, or just whatever Amazon was giving me as cost per click, and my rank increase. Uh, my, my rank decrease. So this is really interesting to kind of see what effects does what you’re doing in PPC have on what is going on in your organic and sponsored keyword rank. So make sure again, if whatever plan of Helium 10 you are on, make sure to dive into keyword tracker and play around with some of these new functions. Well, I’m going to have some more detailed training in the future podcast where I’m going to go deep into tracking keywords and all the new features that Keyword Tracker has.

Bradley Sutton:

One more thing, guys, A couple events in the next couple of weeks. Next week I’ll be in Australia. So if you’re anywhere near Sydney, come to the Amazon advertising event. I’ll be speaking there. There’ll be a Helium 10 booth. We can come hang out, maybe the night before. I know a lot of you are already coming out, h10.me/sydney for information on that. And then also the following in a couple of weeks we’re going to be in Italy First time. We’re doing a Helium 10 event in Italy and I would love to see you guys go. I’m going to go ahead and throw out a discount code too for you. Anybody is open to this. It’s normally an elite workshop but we’re opening up to everybody h10.me/milan. It’s on November 11th, if you want to save 50%. So it’s going to be less than $40 to even attend for a full day of great training and networking, h10.me/milan. Use the code Helium50, no spaces, and save 50% off your registration. I would love to see you either in Sydney or in Milan, Italy. All right, guys. That’s it for the news this week. Uh, don’t forget to tune in next week. I will have Shivali back here to let you know what’s buzzing.

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• Freedom Ticket: Taught by Amazon thought leader Kevin King, get A-Z Amazon strategies and techniques for establishing and solidifying your business.
• Helium 10: 30+ software tools to boost your entire sales pipeline from product research to customer communication and Amazon refund automation. Make running a successful Amazon or Walmart business easier with better data and insights. See what our customers have to say.
• Helium 10 Chrome Extension: Verify your Amazon product idea and validate how lucrative it can be with over a dozen data metrics and profitability estimation.
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