#643 – Walmart Catching Amazon & TikTok Growth Goals | Weekly Buzz 2/26/25

We’re back with another episode of the Weekly Buzz with Helium 10’s VP of Education and Strategy, 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.

Walmart CEO delivers alarming news for Amazon
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/walmart-ceo-delivers-alarming-news-for-amazon/ar-AA1zHNTw?ocid=finance-verthp-feeds

Amazon Alexa event live – Alexa Plus officially announced, with more news still to come
https://www.techradar.com/news/live/amazon-alexa-event-2025-live

TikTok Shop eyes 100% growth in 2025
https://jingdaily.com/posts/tiktok-shop-eyes-100-growth-in-2025-amid-us-uncertainty

Is Amazon on course to upend LTL industry?
https://www.freightwaves.com/news/is-amazon-on-course-to-upend-ltl-industry

Online marketplace Temu allowing Canadian businesses to sell through platform
https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/online-marketplace-temu-allowing-canadian-151954793.html

Launching sponsored ads for authors: India, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands
https://advertising.amazon.com/en-us/resources/whats-new/sponsored-products-and-sponsored-brands-ads-expansion/

We also take a closer look at the advanced features in Black Box and Helium 10 Ads, emphasizing new strategies for keyword harvesting that allow you to fine-tune your targeting criteria and adjust cost per click to boost your campaigns. Learn how utilizing these features can maximize your impressions and improve efficiency. Moreover, discover how Helium 10’s Alerts tool can help you identify opportunities to save on fulfillment costs by making small adjustments to product dimensions. These tweaks could potentially save or earn you significant extra profit over the year.

This episode also explores the controversial Amazon Rufus AI and its impact on Amazon listing optimization. While Rufus shows potential, it has limitations, particularly in generating accurate search suggestions for niche products and identifying deals. We highlight the importance of ensuring that product descriptions are comprehensive to improve customer experience and sales. Listen in as we analyze Rufus’ keyword suggestions, examining their current relevance and potential future significance as more users adopt these recommendations. Thanks for tuning in and we’ll see you next week!

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

• 00:42 – SSP Schedule Change
• 02:47 – Walmart Same Day Delivery
• 04:36 – New Amazon Alexa?
• 06:07 – TikTok Growth
• 06:57 – Amazon LTL?
• 09:43 – Temu For Canadians
• 10:30 – PPC For Authors
• 11:06 – Helium 10 New Feature Alerts
• 15:22 – Strategy of the Week: Size Tier Alerts
• 18:55 – Hot Take Of The Week: Rufus is Meaningless?

Transcript:

Bradley Sutton:
A change for the Serious Sellers podcast. Walmart has caught up fast to Amazon and something Is Amazon Rufus meaningless. These stories and topics and more on this week’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 world. We give you a strategy of the week and we let you know what new features that Helium 10 has. That’ll give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Let’s see what’s buzzing. First article of the day is actually not an article and it’s just an announcement about the Serious Sellers podcast. 

Originally, for about three years we had the podcast go two days a week. We just had two podcast episodes. This was in the days before the weekly buzz and it was like a one episode on like Tuesday, wednesday and another one on Saturday. Then we added like a third mini episode, the weekly buzz. You guys have been watching for a few years now and that was kind of like always on Thursday or Friday. It wasn’t like a numbered episode, it was almost like a separate show. We just had the date on it. But the only numbered episodes was like the Tuesday and Saturday ones. 

Right Now, we just had our company offsite in Irvine for Helium 10. And there’s a lot of new and exciting things we’re going to be working on and a lot of it’s going to involve myself and my team, my entire team, not just Shivali and Kerry, but the rest of my team, and so I was like man, I got to free up some time for the team to take on these new and exciting projects that we’re going to be working on. That, trust me, you guys are going to love. So we’re going to be working on that, trust me, you guys are going to love. So we’re pulling back on some of the episodes, the extra episodes that we’ve been doing. Again, we’ve always done at least two episodes a week. So, starting today, you’re probably like why is the Weekly Buzz coming on a Wednesday? This is kind of like the new day for the Weekly Buzz. It’s actually going to have a number now. It’s going to be a regular Serious Sellers podcast episode and we’re still going to have our Saturday episode, all right, so it’s just no more extra episode, like we’ve been doing a couple years now, where there’s like one on Tuesday and then there’s a weekly buzz and it’s one on Saturday. So, going forward, guys, you’ll be getting the original two episodes that we used to do back in the day. This time it’ll be one weekly buzz episode where we give you the rundown of the news, and we’ll have some new features too, like today, I’m going to talk about my hot take of the week. So that’ll be a recurring feature every now and then when there’s not that much news, like today. But in our regular episode, our Saturday episode will be as always. So, guys, just a little bit of change. But it’s going to be good, because the reason we’re doing this is to work on some pretty cool stuff, like I said. 

All right, so let’s go ahead and hop into the next story now, and this is from MSN. All right, so MSN had an article entitled, kind of like a clickbaity thing I do that sometimes myself but it said Walmart CEO delivers alarming news for Amazon. Now, this was about some of the reports about what’s going on in the first quarter so far and last quarter of last year, what’s going on in January. But there’s this one thing that I wanted to call out and that was during Walmart’s Q4 2025 earnings call. It says management announced that 93% of US households now have access to same-day shipping, something Amazon has been outspoken about building out in recent years. This is interesting because I bet you a lot of you guys out there are in the same boat as me, where we thought that, as far as the number of houses and households that can be delivered to same day, that Amazon is leaps and bounds ahead of anybody else. So it was kind of shocking to me that Walmart is already at 93% of households. This article also goes on to talk about how deliveries made in three hours or less were up 180%. Three hours or less we’re up 180%, all right. So you know, like we know, that Walmart doesn’t necessarily have a fulfillment center per se footprint as much as Amazon does, but what does Walmart have? Walmart has thousands of stores a lot more than Amazon has fulfillment centers and so a lot of these stores are able to do, you know, storing and local shipping and things like that. So, same day delivery 93% you know that that’s just going to mean more Walmart plus members and more potential customers. For those of you who are selling on the platform. 

Next article is from techradar.com, and I’m recording this in the wee hours. What time is this? Like four in the morning here in California. By the time you guys are watching this episode, it’ll probably be, like you know, 10 am, 11 am Pacific time, and this has already passed, but today at 10 am Eastern time. So, again, this probably passed by the time we’re listening to this. But that thing that we talked about a few weeks ago about announcements for Amazon Alexa, it would have passed. 

All right, this is the first Amazon devices event since 2023. And again, the main things could be Alexa, could be Echo, could be other devices, but I think the takeaway here is what I would predict, if I can’t predict, but based on these articles, it seems like other people are predicting that there’s gonna be a drastic change to Amazon Alexa. I mean, it could go for, like a pay subscription, but the big key is how much will Gen AI transform the Alexa experience? And now, if that does happen, will it finally be like a more significant place that people are going to go for shopping? So that’s the thing that I think we sellers should be looking at. You guys who are listening to this know already more than I do right now when I’m recording this because, like I said, this event is going to be three hours away from now. Hopefully it’s not anticlimactic, but next week maybe we’ll talk about what was announced and what kind of ramifications it could have eventually for Amazon sellers. 

The next article is from JingDaily.com and it says TikTok shop eyes 100% growth in 2025. All right, so this is across the board for TikTok shop, because it’s actually saying that the US market, what they’re targeting, is 200% growth. So, again, this is just a quick little tidbit from this article I wanted to bring out because, you know some people are like, oh man, is TikTok still going to be around? But it looks like, you know, tiktok is operating as if, hey, everything is going to get taken care of, even setting these kind of crazy goals of 100% overall across all TikTok shops. As we’ve been announcing in recent weeks, it’s opening in new countries such as Brazil, Japan, France, Italy, etc. But it’s expecting 200% growth for the US TikTok shop market. 

The next article is from FreightWavescom. This I found actually interesting. Again, you might look at this title and not know how it affects sellers, but let me explain myself a little bit here. The title of this article from FreightWavescom is Amazon on course to upend the LTL industry, it says. Rumors signal e-commerce giant plans to become for higher LTL carrier. Now what is that basing it on? It says Amazon’s strategic maneuvering toward LTL capabilities, is evidenced by recent job postings for LTL product managers and network design positions. These roles, apparently destined for Amazon Freight, the company’s truckload and intermodal division, signal a clear intent to build out internal LTL capacity. 

So again, none of you guys are shippers right Per se or have your own trucking companies where, oh, my goodness, this is going to cause me problems. But think about this A lot of you send product to Amazon via, maybe, UPS. Like me, I don’t use LTL, it’s easier for me just to do UPS, and a lot of the LTLs out there are kind of expensive in my opinion, unless I’m doing gigantic shipments. But Amazon has a ridiculously robust delivery system, right. They’re even expanding their own shipping where you can hire Amazon to ship almost like FedEx and UPS right. But imagine if Amazon gets in the LTL game. That could affect and perhaps lower cost for us for when we’re shipping our replenishment orders. It’d probably be a lot cheaper than the SPD. And remember, UPS has rumored that it’s going to try and pull back on how many Amazon packages it’s delivering, not just the packages that deliver from Amazon to the customers, but obviously those of us who use SPD when we’re doing replenishment shipments. That is going to be something that would be interesting if Amazon offers now their own instead of a partner carrier, but literally their own carrier right To pick up the replenishment from your factories or your factories or your warehouses here in the US and delivers it to Amazon fulfillment centers. Or is this going to be part of AWD, you know, like who knows? But the fact that they’re making these hires could indicate that on the horizon, we might have some new options for how we transport our products, even not even having to do with Amazon. Maybe Amazon will even be picking up our products and taking it to a TikTok if we, if they’re just going to be an LTL for hire, who knows? But this will be something definitely that we should be watching out for in the coming weeks and months of what might be announced here. 

An article coming out of Canada, yahoo Canada, is entitled Online Marketplace Timu, allowing Canadian Businesses to Sell Through the Platform. So this is just a small announcement that talks about how now, if you are a Canadian business or individual and you want to start selling on Timu, you’re going to be allowed to, as opposed to it being strictly for the Canadian market Chinese based sellers who are selling on Timu in Canada. So that you know, we already saw that kind of shift in the US, where Timu is definitely looking for more local sellers. Now that is the case in Canada. So for those of you, Canadian companies, Canadian individuals, might be something to look out for. It’s not fully ready yet, I don’t think, for application, but it’s going to be coming where you can apply to sell on Temu in Canada. 

An announcement coming out of Amazon advertising just for any of you who might be authors, kindle authors or book authors you now have the ability to do sponsored ads If you are selling your books in India, japan, mexico and Netherlands. Previously that was not available in those marketplaces. So, again, if you’re writing books in those marketplaces again India, japan, mexico, netherlands you now have access to the advertising console to get some more eyeballs on your books. All right, that’s it for the news articles this week. Let’s go ahead and hop into our Helium 10 new feature alerts. The first one is in Blackbox All right. So Blackbox, you know, is a tool that you guys all know and love. We’ve got, by popular demand, a couple new filters here that you can use when you are searching for product in Blackbox. 

If you guys haven’t noticed it yet, if you guys haven’t noticed it yet basically, these new filters are exact seller country, region and exclude seller country or region. So a lot of you were saying, hey, I love how, in the Chrome extension, you can see where the seller who has the buy box is from. Is it a US based seller? Is it a seller based out of Angola? Is it based out of China? Is it based out of India? So now you can say, hey, I have all of these kind of criteria of what kind of product I’m looking for that is being sold on Amazon Like, maybe it’s in the home and kitchen category and maybe it’s selling a certain amount of money and I can say, hey, I want to exclude any sellers or any products where the buy box seller is from China. Or maybe I only want to see sellers from China, or I only want to see, hey, what are the sellers who are selling more than a thousand products a month who are from Australia? I mean, the possibilities are endless that you can do. And then now, once you hit that Black Box filter, in the results there will be a column that says seller country or region. So in this particular search I was like hey, show me a product in the home and kitchen category that the review count is less than 50. The parent level sales are more than a thousand per month. But the seller country, region is not in China, and so we can see here there’s plenty of US sellers in this category. I see in Indonesia, I see Taiwan. Here there’s Amazon. I even see a seller from Vietnam who’s got a product under that category. So this is just a really cool new filter that you guys are going to be able to use to get some additional data points that our Chrome extension has had before. 

Next new feature alerts are mainly from Helium 10 Ads. Yes, that’s right, I said Helium 10 Ads. That’s the artist formerly known as Helium 10 Adtomic, our advertising tool. But in Helium 10 Ads, if you are making your own custom rules for keyword harvesting in other words, in the past you might have said hey, if I get more than two orders at less than 40% ACoS, take it from my auto campaign and put it in my manual campaign right. Well, we just have a few extra filters that you can now do in Helium 10 Ads, and one of these is the ability to have multiple criterias. So before you can only have one criteria, now you can have multiple criterias of like hey, this is the exact kind of keywords I want to harvest. 

And also, what you can do is you can now set the current instead of just setting it at whatever cost per click it had. You can now say, hey, set it to whatever the cost per click was that it got in the auto campaign plus an additional percentage. Now, why would you want to do that Like, for example, let’s just say you had a um three conversions in an auto campaign for a new search term that you weren’t manually targeting, and it was. You know you had gotten it at a 10% ACoS, right, but you know that you’re that you can go a little bit higher on your ACoS as long as it’s below, let’s just say, 50. So basically, what you can do is you can say, hey, whatever cost per click it had, and it was, let’s say it was at 10% ACoS. Now you’re going to add a certain percentage, so maybe the cost per click was a dollar and that’s under 40%. You could say if that ever happens, I want you to put it to a manual campaign where it’s if it’s $1, we’re going to increase it by 20%, we’re going to put it to $1.20 and just see what happens. So you know, this might be a little bit in the weeds for you, but regardless if you’re using Helium 10 ads or not, this is something that you should be thinking about. You know, like when you’re doing your keyword harvesting, do you just want to bring it in at that cost per click? Probably not, especially if you know, by definition, it’s at a very low ACoS. You might want to go ahead and raise it to see if that can get you some, even some more impression. So that’s another feature that has been added to Helium 10 Ads. 

All right, now let’s get into our strategy of the week. It’s a quick one, but it is a strategy that is going to get me hundreds, thousands actually, of dollars extra this year in profit, and the reason is Helium 10 was able to find money that I was leaving on the table if I just made a slight change. So here’s that strategy that all of you guys I think can potentially use. This is in the Alerts tool. We have this kind of like alarm where we’re going to send you a notification on your alerts dashboard If we notice that you have a product that is very close to going down a size here. All right, so like, for example, let’s say you’re a large standard-size product and it’s nine by nine by nine. Well, do you know that if you go nine by nine by eight, you could you actually go down to a different size here and it could mean one, two dollars or even more of a difference in your fulfillment costs and your shipping costs If you just shave off like a half inch or an inch on one side. If you have any product like that, or Helium 10 is going to let you know it, let me know about this in about July or August of last year. 

Let me show you the exact notification I got. I got this notification that says hey, you have some products with size tier optimization suggestions. It was actually three different products that were all in the same variation family. Now, when I went to see the details, it was saying hey, if you just reduce your length by one inch, you could go from large bulky to large standard size. Now, what does that mean? Your fulfillment cost goes from $10.75 to $7 per unit. 

Guys, my computer-like mind says that that $3 and 75 cents per unit. Guess what I did it? I redesigned my packaging and a little bit of the product and I was able to fit on that new size tier and now I am getting charged $3 and 75 cents less than I was getting charged before. Uh, what does that equate to as far as uh fees go? Well, this product I sell about 1500 units a year. Not very much, that’s only like what? Four or five units a day. Watch this $3 and 75 cents times 1500. And it came out perfectly because it was in January of this year when I got my next shipment in. That is $5,500. And it came out perfectly because it was in January of this year when I got my next shipment in. That is $5,600,. Guys, $5,600 is going to my bottom line because I got this notification from Helium 10 saying that I could just shave off a half inch to an inch on one side of my product and I’m going to save all those Amazon fees. So, guys, this is a platinum diamond. Any level. 

Check your alerts dashboard on the left-hand side Does it say that you have products with size to your optimization suggestions. You can’t always, you know you can’t always change it, Like like I did. Uh, it was easy for me to change my product. Some of you have like a mold and you literally have a perfect package that fits around that mold and you can’t really change your, your packaging size, um, other than changing your actual mold. But some of you might be able to change the way you package it. Some of you might be able to, you know, do a different configuration and shit and shave that half inch or inch off of one side and it could mean a dollar, $2, $3, or, like me, $3.75 cents per unit difference by, uh, reducing my packaging size. And that is money to your bottom line. All right. 

So my hot take of the week is entitled Rufus is meaningless. Now, yes, that is pretty much a clickbait kind of title right there, uhdr. No, I do not think it’s completely meaningless. There’s a certain context. I think it might be meaningless and it’s important, I think, because this is something that really ticks me off lately, not that I’m ticked off at a certain group of people, but I’m kind of ticked off that there’s Amazon sellers who I think are suffering because they’ve lost their focus on the strategies that actually are more impactful because of a narrative that’s going around, and so let me talk about it now. 

Before I get started, let me just caveat this by saying I actually, as an Amazon seller, I am using Rufus and I’ve made changes to my listings. I’ll talk about that in a couple minutes here. As an Amazon customer no, I don’t use Rufus and I’ve made changes to my listings. I’ll talk about that in a couple minutes here. As an Amazon customer no, I don’t use Rufus much at all because I found it near useless. When I’m personally shopping, I buy like three, four things from Amazon almost every day of the week for my family. 

That being said, first of all, how is Rufus good Like? How can sellers utilize it? What is the way that I’ve utilized it? Let me just show you an example here. So this is one of the coffin shelves. On the actual page for our coffin bookshelf, one of the auto-complete Rufus questions I’m not sure if that’s what you would call it ask how sturdy and durable is it? 

So this is what it was showing before and when I clicked it, the answer it gave. It says while the product description doesn’t mention durability, customers generally have mixed reviews on sturdiness. Blah, blah, blah had some negative things to say, but that’s the key right there. So I like looking for questions that I think might actually potentially be asked by customers. This was one of them. Okay, I look at them on my listing Sometimes, I’ll look at them on competitors just to get an idea what might make sense, what people might be asking for. I was like you know what? There might be some people asking how sturdy and durable it is, and so this was kind of concerning that it says my product description doesn’t mention durability. So I’m like all right, well, if, if this is what customers are asking, I want Rufus to be able to answer it without saying it does. I have no answer. I only have the reviews where everybody says or not everybody were mixed. Some people say it’s, it’s not very stable, right. 

So then what did I do? What I did was I went into my listing just to do a test now and I changed a nonsense bullet point that. I don’t even know where this bullet point came from Might not have been me who made this listing and I just put I wanted to do a test. So I changed one of the bullet points and I put in there due to the strong MDF wood construction, the coffin shelf is sturdy and durable and will not buckle under moderate weight loaded on it. So, thankfully, the listing updated within like just an hour and it had my new bullet point right there, like that. That’s actually one of the fastest times my listing updated, and so, right after like within minutes of it updating, I was curious is Rufus going to update? 

All right, you know, like indexing on Amazon regularly takes a lot more time, and so then what I did was I took a look and I look at the question, the same exact question I typed in how sturdy and durable is it? Remember the very first time that I did it, it says the product description doesn’t mention durability. But now, the second time that I did it, just minutes after the listing updated, look at the answer it gave. It says, according to the product description, it is sturdy and durable due to its strong MDF wood construction. However, customers are mixed with some reviews noting it’s sturdy enough, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right, so that the original like negative stuff was still there, but now that got pushed down, and instead of saying, oh, we don’t know because of the description, doesn’t say, it said yeah, the product description says that it is sturdy and durable. So that’s pretty cool. Right, like hey, if there’s a really good question that you’re like, oh, shoot, yeah, probably people are asking this, shoot, yeah, probably people are asking this, you can actually get it in your listing, right, and it will index in the Rufus indexation, I guess, almost immediately. So that’s pretty cool. 

Another cool thing is, once I did that, there were some other questions there that I thought were unrelated, but when I hit the question that was coming up in Rufus, for example, another one was is it suitable for outdoor use? Now, I don’t think many people are trying to put coffin shelves outdoor, but that’s besides the point. Look at what the answer said after I had updated the listing. It says while the product description doesn’t mention anything about outdoor use, it is constructed from strong MDF wood, which suggests it may be able to withstand some outdoor elements. However, customers mostly use this indoor. To be sure, it’s best to consult the manufacturer’s guidelines. So so this is interesting. Now this could go good or bad, right. 

The good part is look how fast it indexed right into Rufus, and it wasn’t just my original question that I was trying to index for, at least in Rufus’s algorithm, but even something else that was unrelated, like is it suitable for outdoor use? I didn’t write suitable, but because I wrote that it had MDF wood and because I wrote that it was sturdy, amazon is taking or Rufus is taking it a step farther and saying, yeah, it could be suitable. Now, obviously that could work against, like, imagine if my product melts in the rain or in the sun or something, and Rufus is just making up stuff that, yeah, yeah, sure, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s suitable for outdoor use and it really isn’t. Obviously that’s a problem. But again, the the point I’m just trying to make is just showing you how fast one change to the listing actually affects what Rufus answers. 

Now, the reason, though, why I get upset, like I kind of said, was I like that people are talking about Rufus and it’s a fun new topic and doing experiments. I even had fun, you know, writing this, like doing some experiments, and I’ve had fun working with Rufus, but what’s happened is, I feel like not, I feel like this is a fact. Like I’m talking to sellers out there. I do one-on-one calls a lot for the Helium 10 Elite program. And then some of them are all like enamored with Rufus and they’re like, oh, look what I’m doing for Rufus and this and that. 

And then we go into something like very basic, like like search career performance, and they’re like, what’s that? They’ve never even looked at their search career performance. They’re not using Helium 10, historical Cerebro. They’re not running, they’re not harvesting keywords that their competitors are ranking highly for a lot of the bread and butter, which are much more basic strategies and that can have bigger impact. Now, all of a sudden, they’re not even doing and they’re focused on Rufus. And the problem is that right now, Rufus is not making a big impact on sales for like 99 of products out there because not many people are using it, kind of you know, as far as Amazon buyers uh, go, relatively speaking. 

Now again, that being said, again, I’m not trying to say, oh, forget about Rufus altogether. I just showed you an example of how I literally use Rufus in order to change something in my listing Because, remember, selling on Amazon is about doing the 1%, the stuff that might move the needle, 1%, half a percent, when we find a new keyword in search career performance that we think we can convert for maybe it only gets us one sale a month, we still do it just because that’s like one 10th of 1% of our sales. Do we just say, you know, I’m not, I’m going to forget about that keyword? No, we add it, it’s. It’s incremental growth, right, we add a keyword here, we add a keyword there. We monitor our competitors, we change an image here. These things are not changing our sales by 10, 20, 30%. So no, optimizing our listings for Amazon is absolutely about doing the stuff that moves the needle half a percent here, a quarter of a percent there. 

But the thing is that is what Rufus does. Rufus does, I’m sure, move the needle Like is somebody going to now maybe buy my coffin shelf because it says it’s sturdy and durable? Now, maybe one person next month might do it who hits Rufus? But that’s worth it, that was worth my five minutes. It took me to put that in the listing. 

But here’s where there’s a problem. Rufus is like talked about so much by everybody and it’s made to be this like super important thing. That’s like crazy that everybody had to do that. People are now pushing to the side the kind of 90% that they should be doing and now they’re like focused too much on Rufus and when they don’t have time to be working on the easier stuff, that actually does affect sales more. And so that’s where I say, oh, in that sense, like kind of like Rufus is kind of meaningless. It’s meaningless in the context If you are like taking away the important things that you should be doing in order to try and optimize for Rufus. So far, because, again, Rufus is not something that like even 50% of people are using. 

I ran a pick food poll the other day just to Amazon Prime members. I’m like all right, how many of you guys are actually using Rufus and the poll had here? 38 out of 50 say no, we don’t use it at all. It’s not useful. For people out of 50 says yeah, I, I’ve used it before to actually search for for products, and eight people out of 50 says I’ve actually used it on our product page to get more questions about the process. Most people aren’t using it right. Very few people are using it to get ideas in search, and double that number of people are actually using it to get more information on the product, which I think is the main use for it as well. 

But again, this could change over time and you should always be at the cutting edge of stuff. But just remember, do not be optimizing for Rufus at the expense of stuff that’s gonna get you more sales. That is not theoretical or hypothetical, right. Like me, I don’t have any proof. There’s no data from Amazon that says if I changed my listing to stay my, it’s sturdy and reliable that I am going to increase in sales or there’s a good chance I’m going to get more sales. Like, there’s nothing that I have that would prove that. Now, if you’re looking at search query performance and you see a keyword that has brought you sales before and you notice that now you lost impressions, you tie it into Keyword Tracker. That’s like actual sales that you have left on the table that you need to optimize for. You need to increase your bid and you have proof of concept. Like you are going to get more sales theoretically, because it’s already happened. Do you see the difference there of why you got to focus on the stuff that matters? Now, if you’ve got all of that taken care of, if you’re doing all the basics absolutely you do you should be optimizing, like I am for Rufus, if you have time. But again, that’s that’s my main point is, guys, if you’re not doing the basics of the stuff that you know is going to bring you sales, you should not be thinking about Rufus yet, because it’s not that big of a thing compared to some of this other stuff. 

Let’s go back into Rufus now. Let me just show you some other things I was testing out, just to show you why it’s not, or some proof, kind of like, that it’s not fully being used like across the board. So, for example, I did a search for coffin shelf. Now, again, I did not try and manipulate these results or anything. You guys will know that my main product in the account is coffin shelf. So I was just like you know what I’m not going to try and like pick and choose things that are going to fit my narrative or something like that. I was just like I’m going to show exactly what I find. You guys know the number one keyword is coffin shelf. So here we are. This is just today. 

I did this search for coffin shelf and what are the questions that Rufus says All right, one of them was fine deals for me. One of them says are coffin shelves available for displaying memorabilia or keepsakes. Let me tell you guys, I can guarantee you that nobody, who’s one of those gothic weirdos who is buying coffin shelves or searching for them Not one of those people have ever typed in our coffin shelves suitable for displaying memorabilia or keepsakes that that is not the way that my gothic witches who buy coffin shelves are typing. So right off the bat we can tell hey, Rufus not necessarily putting questions in here that people have been asking about a certain product. It’s like trying to extrapolate ideas of what people could ask for, and sometimes it might get it right, like I really do think people have asked if it’s sturdy, but sometimes, like this one, it might not be, uh, it might not be right. Another thing that sometimes it’s not picking up yet on but I would like to see it because I do think that this could help buyers is you saw that the very first question on there was find deals for me. That was what Rufus said. So when I hit that and I hit find deals for me, it was showing some random stuff that has nothing to do with coffin shelves. They weren’t even in the search results for coffin shelves shelves. But my product is on a deal right now my product is showing up, page one, position one, and I’ve got a 20% off coupon there. There’s others who had a 20% off coupon but for whatever reason Rufus didn’t pick up that there was deals on actual coffin shelves. So again, once Rufus starts fixing some of these, I do think you’re going to start seeing more people use it on the search results. 

Another thing that people have talked about is how the Rufus is indexing what is like words that is in the images, and let me tell you that is a hundred percent accurate. Here’s a test that I did, for example. You can see this image and, yes, I can guarantee that that’s a hundred percent happening. Here’s one of the questions that Rufus had put as an auto-com on one of our coffin shelves. Listening, it says can its shelves be adjusted or removed? And it put in the answer a picture that shows allows for different arrangements removable shelves. It says removable shelves, so obviously could read that removable shelves part of the image right. Shelves, a part of the image right, based on that same image. I know you guys who are just listening to this in the podcast can’t see this, but it says the image has text that says allows for different arrangements. And so I asked the question this is not an autocomplete question. I literally just typed this into Amazon Rufus, does it allow for different arrangements? What did it answer? It showed me the exact picture where that text came up and says, yes, it allows for different arrangements. And then it says the coffin bookshelf comes with removable shelves. That’s other text that’s on this image, allowing you to display larger items when the shelves are removed, according to the product description. So this is good information that people have been giving. Yes, Rufus is looking at the images. 

Now I am not taking action on this per se, and the reason is, if you did not put these things like that has removable shelves and there’s allows for different arrangements, which is not even that important, but if you didn’t put that in your copy of, like your description or bullet points or something that you’re not doing the right thing right. There should not be a situation where, oh, my goodness, I have to do something so important that it should be an image, but somehow it wasn’t important to put in the rest of my listing. Does that make sense? You know, when we talk about like indexable fields, like that’s for like, like kind of like things that maybe were not important. It wasn’t one of my top 50 keywords or one of my top use cases, so I got to stuff it in, like the search terms and the backend, and maybe I can get indexed for it. That’s how we talk about indexing fields. But if it’s so important that it would be in your maybe one of your two or three infographics in your listing, well, it’s probably in the rest of your listing. So this doesn’t mean that much to me yet. All right. So because I am, I there’s. I cannot think of a situation where something is so important that it should be in my image and yet it’s not in another part of my listing. So I should already be indexed for these like, like I am for the these keywords here about being having removable shelves. 

The reason why Rufus was able to answer was not necessarily because the image. It’s because I have it in multiple places in the rest of my listing, because the fact that it has a removable shelf is a very important aspect of this coffin shelf. All right, so again, yes, it is 100% true that Rufus is looking at images. No, I don’t think that’s very actionable at this point Now. How could it be actionable in the future? Does having it in your listing and your image add to the relevancy for just regular search? That’s something I haven’t really tested yet, you know, because obviously we have the Helium 10 Amazon recommended rank, which is a direct tie-in to the Amazon relevancy score, and it’d be interesting case study to see hey, does this affect that Now in that case, yeah, you know, I’m going to probably maybe see about doing some extra things on my images, potentially to help my ranking and relevancy, right, but right now, like I would not use this as a hey, let me put some like fringe important keywords in an infographic where I only have two or three of those. 

I got to put my most important aspects that actually talk to the customer. Remember, a lot of the concepts that we’re talking about when it comes to Rufus is the same concepts that everybody has been teaching for years is don’t just think about keywords, don’t think about keyword stuffing, don’t think only about the Amazon algorithm. You’re selling to a customer. Do things in your images and your bullet points that talk to the customer, and you still should be thinking that way. Don’t be like, oh, this is again one of those pet peeves where it’s like, oh, shoot, I’m going to make my images completely optimized for Rufus, like, why, like, there’s no point right now. You got to think about the customer more than the algorithm, especially when it comes to your images. 

Another example of how it definitely looks at images is I asked a question how many hardware options for hanging are there? And there was an image I have here that says two hardware options. Now, it didn’t pick up on that. Unfortunately, it did show the right image, so it kind of like knew that this image was talking about hardware options, but it says unfortunately, the product information does not specify the number of hardware options available for hanging the coffin bookshelf. This was an example where I only had it once. Do you remember how I talked about how, hey, if you have an image, you probably you’re trying to get indexed for something in Rufus, it should already be in your listing. I did not put in my product description hey, there are two hardware options for hanging. It didn’t say that anywhere other than this image and because of that, rufus didn’t completely pick up on it. So so this just shows that you know, while it can have an idea about what the images are about and even read the text, if you don’t have it anywhere else in your listing it. It might not fully even understand that you know what, uh what your infographic saying. 

Now, another thing that Rufus I think need to improve on before more uh, Amazon Prime members are using. It is some of the ways in the search results when it answers questions Like, for example, uh, one of the do you remember that one question that I made fun of, where it says are coffin shelves suitable for displaying memorabilia or keepsakes? When I click on that, it gave, oh my goodness, a plethora of answers. It wrote paragraphs like almost an essay here about weird things. Coffin shelf for urns there’s no such thing as a coffin shelf for urn. Nobody has that. That actually could be something interesting. Now you can use Rufus for product research. Rufus picked up off of Amazon, right, but it’s not helping the buyer because there’s literally no such thing as a coffin shelf for earned on Amazon. There’s no such thing as a memorial photo shelf. So I don’t even know where these answers are coming from. But here’s the interesting thing. 

What happened was when I asked this question in the search for coffin shelf, at the very end of this long essay that it had, it gave like three or four options that I could click on. It was not products. It had a picture of products, but then each of these were actual search terms, keywords. So the very first one, from the very first question that shows up on coffin shelf. It took me to a search for decorative coffin shelf blackwood. This was an actual search. It wasn’t a Rufus search. It’s not inside of Rufus. I clicked on it in Rufus but it actually took me to a search term, as if I had typed it out on Amazon and, sure enough, my product showed up at the top for this decorative coffin shelf blackwood. Now, I had never heard of that keyword before. 

What I did was I was like, maybe because that’s the very first thing that Rufus is showing, this would be a way to prove is Rufus inspiring more searches? Like, are people actually clicking on this? The very first thing that shows up in Rufus? So the first thing that I did is I took that keyword decorative coffin shelf blackwood. I put it into Amazon brand analytics for last week and checked Was it one of the top 4 million keywords that were searched? And it wasn’t. As you can see, it says no data found for that. Now I’ll say, okay, well, maybe it. It wasn’t searched for that much. You know, like the top 4 million keywords in brand analytics, you know might correlate to about you know like a hundred 150 search volume. So I was like, all right, I’m obviously showing up at the top, so it should also be in search query performance. So how sensitive is search query performance? Search query performance will show your keywords that you even just had one impression for, like. For example, here is my last week search query performance and you could see that it’s showing keywords such as Gothic room wall decor that I only had one impression for, meaning that I only showed up for the whole week one time on page one in the search. So basically, if something was ever searched, it is going to show up in my search career performance. 

I downloaded the list of all those keywords from last week and those keywords that were showing up from Rufus the decorative coffin shelf, would something or other another one or a coffin earn holder those did not even come up once. What does that mean? That means the number one thing that Rufus is suggesting that people search for and they can just click and they’ll search. Not one person in the whole week clicked on it. So again, this is sometimes these keywords that it’s suggesting or these answers, is not really relevant to most of the buyers In my niche. Not one person clicked on it. So again, this is not something that. Oh my goodness, this is a hashtag game changer. I’ve got to make sure I’m indexed for all these keywords that Rufus is suggesting until it can get a little bit more relevant. You’re not going to see that many increases in searches. 

Now you might be thinking, oh well, Bradley, well, that’s a coffin shelf niche. You know, hardly anybody’s even searching for a coffin shelf. So what I did? You guys know the other keyword that I always search for whenever I’m trying to give examples outside of coffin shelf, and if I’m trying to go to a very saturated niche, what is it guys? Yep, you got it right Collagen powder, collagen peptides. All right, collagen powder is searched 60,000 times a month. This is not some super niche keyword, right? So 60,000 searches. 

What is the top thing that Rufus is suggesting? In the search, it says what types of collagen peptides are most effective for skin. It says here okay, what type of collagen peptides are most effective for skin. And in the answers, the number one thing that you click on that again takes you to a search is bovine collagen peptides for skin. Never heard of that. Bovine collagen peptides for skin. 

Helium 10 says that has zero search for. I’m sure it might have like 30 or 40 or 50, but I know it doesn’t even have 100 searches because right here in brand analytics this was not even one of the top 4 million keywords that were searched last week and this came from a Rufus like search results that had 60,000 searches, all right. So if it that one in such a highly searched thing doesn’t even have probably 100 searches, again, this is just not something that the way that customers are searching, yet People are not utilizing this aspect of Rufus. And again, I say yet, and that’s the beauty about this, as soon as more people are using this Rufus like suggested search, I very much think that this is should become an important part of part of your keyword research and optimization and it’s not going to be something you have to guess because of these other Amazon data points, like brand analytics, search performance, you’re going to be able to see once more people start clicking on it because guess what these keywords that Rufus is suggesting, you’re going to start seeing in search performance. You’re going to start seeing in Amazon brand analytics, et cetera. So until then, unless it’s something that obviously looks like a no brainer, I I’m saying that, hey, you know, don’t just go blindly putting all these keywords just because you saw it in Rufus. Um, another cool thing that I think Rufus is you know, it’s kind of like hit or miss, but, but when it’s good it’s good is looking at the reviews, right. 

Here’s a review in one of my coffin shelves where it says I bought these to display my nightmare before Christmas knickknacks. So what I did was I asked Rufus, can I use this for nightmare before Christmas knickknacks? My listing, my description, doesn’t have that at all. I don’t have that in my description. I don’t have my bullet points, I don’t have it in my images. It’s only showing up in the review. What did Rufus answer? Based on customer reviews, this product is suitable for displaying nightmare before Christmas figurines and knickknacks. So again, I didn’t have this in my listing and it still had it. So that’s pretty cool. 

But then let’s say this was something super important, right, like nightmare before Christmas knickknacks. I don’t think that’s very important, but let’s say it was something like oh, my goodness, I did all this research. This is a super important keyword and it’s only in my reviews. How would you action this? Well, you’d want to put Nightmare Before Christmas knickknacks in your listing. So it’s not just in the reviews that it shows up, but it’s kind of hit or miss. All right, take a. 

Take a look at this other example of a review. Here’s a review where somebody said I bought this to put my anime figurines in it, but it wasn’t big enough. They don’t fit. So I asked Rufus on the same page can you put anime figurines on it? It says, according to customer reviews, this product is suitable for placing anime figurines, when it literally isn’t like it’s the opposite. It’s the customer who reviewed about that said no, I can’t put anime figurines in there, and Rufus says it is. So, as customers see this, this is probably one of the reasons why not enough people yet have adopted Rufus is they see it completely saying the opposite of what actually is the case, and so I think what is going to get more people to use Rufus from a customer viewpoint down the road is hopefully, the accuracy will get better and less hallucinations and things like that. 

So again, is Rufus completely meaningless? No, of course not. That was just a clickbait title for this little section right here, but it’s meaningless in the sense that you’re screwing yourself as an Amazon seller If you stop doing all the regular strategies that are guaranteed to kind of give you a sale here and a sale there for strategies that you’re not sure of, right Like there’s no proof that me putting a knickknack, christmas or whatever I just said in my listing is going to get me sales. So I would say hey for some of these things that aren’t no-brainers like this sturdy one was for me a no-brainer but for some of this other stuff, don’t be taking away time from what you know is guaranteed to work to try these new things. But if you are doing all the basic strategies and you have extra time, go ahead and experiment, like I was doing here. 

It’s very doubtful that any of this can actually hurt your listing by doing this. So it’s very doubtful that experimenting with Rufus is going to like actually cause you harm, you know per se. So, like the only time it can cause you harm is if it’s if you’re working on Rufus-related things at the expense of guaranteed actions that can help you, like optimizing your PPC and looking at search crew performance and Helium 10, cerebro to to get new keywords. You’re listening, etc. So, guys, let me know what kind of experiments you’ve done with Rufus and on the buyer side, like, are you using Rufus at all to help your Amazon Prime purchases? And what do you think the future is? I don’t think any of us really know for sure, but love to hear speculations on it. But until then, I hope you guys found this informative and interesting and we’ll see you in the next episode. 

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