Helium 10 Buzz 1/23/25: Amazon FBA Shipment Change | TikTok Drops Dropshipping

We’re back with another episode of the Weekly Buzz with Helium 10’s Senior Brand Evangelist, Shivali Patel. 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 FBA Shipment Change
https://sellercentral.amazon.com/help/hub/reference/GC3Q44PBK8BXQW3Z

TikTok Shop Drops Dropshipping

The TikTok outage caused TikTok Shop sales to spike, not sink
https://digiday.com/marketing/the-tiktok-outage-caused-tiktok-shop-sales-to-spike-not-sink/

Apple, Google remove TikTok from stores as app halts service in U.S.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/18/apple-google-remove-tiktok-from-stores-as-app-halts-service-in-us.html

Apple won’t return TikTok to the App Store until it’s sold to a U.S. buyer
https://appleinsider.com/articles/25/01/21/apple-wont-return-tiktok-to-the-app-store-until-its-sold-to-a-us-buyer

Walmart will now let suppliers test products in its customers’ homes
https://www.modernretail.co/operations/walmart-will-now-let-suppliers-test-products-in-its-customers-homes/

Inventory Defect and Reimbursement portal now available
https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-news/articles/QVRWUERLSUtYMERFUiNHRkVaMk1ZR05KWFNDSEw2

New Features for Amazon Advertisers
https://advertising.amazon.com/API/docs/en-us/release-notes/index

New Amazon product title requirements effective January 21, 2025
https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-news/articles/QVRWUERLSUtYMERFUiNHNEJGOUZIUUs4SFBXWkRV

In the next segment, we turn our attention to exciting new Helium 10 product features and updates in the Amazon marketplace. We introduce powerful features inside Helium 10 Adtomic like the Share of Voice tool. This tool is designed to enhance brand visibility and streamline advertising campaigns. Furthermore, Shivali guides us through a compelling strategy for expanding product offerings by leveraging niche book topics by using Helium 10’s Black Box tool for KDP allowing sellers to tap into new markets and diversify income streams. By identifying high-potential keywords with low competition, sellers can capitalize on existing skills and broaden their market presence. Don’t miss this episode for a comprehensive look at these critical updates and strategies to enhance your e-commerce success.

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

• 00:47 – Amazon FBA Shipment Change
• 02:34 – TikTok Shop Drops Dropshipping
• 04:23 – TikTok Sales Spike
• 05:36 – TikTok App Unavailable
• 07:06 – Walmart’s Scintilla
• 08:59 – IDR Portal LIVE
• 10:33 – New Features for Advertisers
• 12:06 – Title Policy Reminder
• 12:51 – Helium 10 New Feature Alerts
• 19:09 – Training Tip: Black Box For KDP

Transcript

Shivali Patel:

An Amazon FBA shipment change, TikTok Shop not allowing dropshipping anymore and Walmart launching an in-home testing program. This and more on this week’s episode of the Weekly Buzz.

Bradley Sutton:

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 in the Amazon, Walmart and e-commerce world. We highlight the latest new feature alerts from Helium 10, and we review a training tip of the week that’ll give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Today, our host is going to be Shivali Patel, and so Shivali. E-commerce world Today, our host is going to be Shivali Patel, and so Shivali take it away and let us know what’s buzzing.

Shivali Patel:

First up for my Amazon sellers. We have an important update coming your way directly from Amazon. Effective February 20th 2025, amazon is making some significant changes to its FBA inbound placement service, and this can impact the way that you send your inventory to fulfillment centers. If you’ve been using the partial shipment splits option up until now, where you could send inventory to two to three locations for a reduced fee, that’s now going away. You should have received this email and, moving forward, you will only have two options. The first is Amazon optimized shipment splits, which means that there will be no inbound placement fees, but you’ll need to send your inventory to multiple fulfillment centers, at least five shipments or more. Or you can opt for minimal shipment splits, which lets you send inventory to just one location, but this comes with a fee. This is interesting because, for the past year, many sellers have been used to having three options Amazon optimized splits, minimal shipment splits and partial splits but with this change, sellers are now going to have to choose between shipping to either one location or five plus. This means it might be time to reevaluate your logistics strategy to ensure that you’re keeping costs down while maintaining efficiency. Also a development on the same topic as of January 15, 2025, amazon has lowered inbound placement service fees for large bulky size products by an average of 58 cents per unit for minimal shipment splits. Plus, if you have new parent ASINs that qualify for the FBA new selection program, amazon will waive inbound placement service fees for up to 100 units, but only for shipments that were created between December 1st 2024 and March 31st 2025. So, as a seller, how do you feel about these changes? Will this impact your fulfillment strategy? Drop a comment and let us know down below.

Shivali Patel:

Next up TikTok Shop. So much has happened on this front. While available for use after a short ban that thankfully lasted less than some flights to, there’s a few things that you should be aware of. There have been some changes made to their customer order shipping policy. TikTok Shop now prohibits sellers from purchasing products from another online retailer and shipping them directly to customers. This means if you’ve been dropshipping products but buying them from another platform, like Amazon or Walmart, and then having them shipped to your TikTok customers. That is no longer allowed. However, do not panic. This update does not affect sellers using Amazon’s multi-channel fulfillment to fulfill their TikTok Shop orders. We reached out to TikTok directly and they confirmed that sellers who store their inventory in Amazon’s fulfillment centers and use MCF to ship TikTok orders are still compliant with this new policy. The goal behind this change is really to protect customer data and enhance trust, ensuring that those orders are really going to arrive in unbranded packaging rather than a competing platform. TikTok wants sellers to maintain direct control over their inventory to prevent unauthorized sharing of customer information. Some ways to stay compliant and adapt to this new policy include avoiding fulfilling orders through third-party e-commerce sites. TikTok is really prioritizing data security, so all fulfillment really has to come from inventory that you own and control. Also, take ownership of your inventory. Proper inventory management is so key to ensuring a smooth fulfillment process and meeting TikTok’s guidelines. Consider TikTok’s fulfillment program as well. If you’re concerned about any sort of compliance issue. Doing this can help you stay within the guidelines while ensuring timely delivery and proper packaging. Let me know in the comments if this really impacts your TikTok Shop strategy.

Shivali Patel:

But you know what’s pretty cool at least I think is pretty cool. Actually, during their momentary shutdown, sales on TikTok Shop did not miss a beat. Despite the shutdown over January 18th and 19th, sales on TikTok Shop actually held steady. They didn’t actually hold steady, they spiked. According to Digiday and data from charmio, TikTok Shop saw a boost in sales over the day that it was banned, reaching over $32 million in sales, marking a $5 million week over week increase. This surge highlights the deep connection between TikTok creators and their audiences, with many shoppers really rushing to make purchases in anticipation of the ban. In fact, weeks leading up to the shutdown saw record-breaking sales figures, with the week of January 12th hitting over $200 million in sales, making it one of the most highest performing weeks ever outside of the holiday season. Of course, I still really would encourage you to use everything that has happened as both a warning and an opportunity. While TikTok Shop remains a powerhouse for social selling, it’s important to have a backup plan in case of further disruptions.

Shivali Patel:

All right, what’s next? That advice remains sound in the present moment, considering CNBC is reporting that Apple and Google still do not have TikTok listed back in their app stores. Following the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, TikTok is not available for download in the US, even if the app itself is usable for those of you that already have it downloaded. This change could have significant implications for customer acquisition and brand visibility for sellers who have been using TikTok as a key part of their marketing strategy. Over 7 million businesses rely on TikTok to drive sales and while the halt itself did not affect sales, it actually led to a spike. Things like not having it available for download might somehow plateau for a little bit the growth that you experience as a brand. So this, I really think, leads into me encouraging you to diversify your buckets of how you’re marketing your brands. Use alternative platforms. Make sure you’re not putting everything into the TikTok Shop basket, just in case. Have alternatives like Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts and Facebook ready to maintain your audience engagement. It’s always in best practice to diversify your marketing efforts and keep an eye on other social platforms as well as developments that might occur as TikTok gets fully back up and running and installable again. Installable is that a word? I think it’s a word. So we’ve talked briefly about Amazon and TikTok Shop.

Shivali Patel:

Let’s chat about Walmart. Walmart is in the process of making a major move to help brands better understand their customers by launching an in-home product testing program. This new initiative allows verified Walmart shoppers to receive products at home, test them and then provide valuable feedback to suppliers, offering a unique advantage to brands looking to fine-tune their offerings before they hit the shelves. This program is exclusive to suppliers who are subscribed to Walmart Luminate, which will soon be rebranded to Shintilla I hope I’m pronouncing that correctly. Walmart’s research team will assist brands in designing surveys and gathering insights directly from real Walmart shoppers via their invitation-only customer spark community. What does this mean for brands and sellers alike? Great question. Unlike traditional market research firms, Walmart is really tapping into its massive customer base and transactional data, allowing suppliers to test products with highly targeted audiences those who have previously purchased similar items. This real-time feedback can help suppliers refine their products in terms of packaging, pricing, flavors and overall effectiveness before any sort of full launch occurs. Early adopters, like the battery brand Duracell, was among the first brands to give Walmart users a trial run using Walmart’s program to then validate their new paper-based packaging with battery buyers, leading to positive consumer reception and eco-friendly innovations. This initiative could really revolutionize product development by reducing market risk, helping suppliers really understand their customers better and ultimately ensuring that the right products make it to Walmart’s shelves. So if you’re a seller who’s considering Walmart’s ecosystem, then this program might even offer you a strategic advantage to test new products effectively before you scale. What do you think Could this kind of direct consumer insight help shape your product launches?

Shivali Patel:

Okay, back to Amazon. Amazon’s launched a few things, so let’s dive into those. To wrap up, this week’s news Amazon has launched, and is now live with their new inventory defect and reimbursement portal to help you better manage your fulfillment by Amazon FBA inventory. This centralized tool is designed to give sellers greater transparency and control over inventory defects and reimbursement claims, making it easier to track and resolve issues efficiently. With the new IDR portal, as a seller, you can now gain full visibility into defects related to warehouse loss, warehouse damage and customer returns all in one place. You can view detailed information for each of these defects, including creation date, action, taken reasons and current status, as well as identify potential reimbursement opportunities with comprehensive reporting and policy checks. Then you can also analyze defect frequency and the resolution rationale, leading, hopefully, into reduced reoccurring issues. This update is really a major win for sellers, I’d say, as it provides a clear and organized way to track and dispute inventory issues, a process that was previously scattered across multiple reports and often lacked transparency. However, it’s important to note that the portal does not cover defects related to inbound shipments, removals or warehouse disposals, so sellers should really continue to manage those separately. To access this portal, go to your FBA dashboard on Seller Central and underneath inventory, defect and reimbursement. Use that dropdown to select this right here.

Shivali Patel:

Next up, we have a couple of additional rollouts powerful new tools to help advertisers better understand their ad performance, with the introduction of deduplicated reach and frequency across multiple orders and at the advertising level. First, with the launch of frequency group level reach, advertisers can now set a single frequency cap across multiple orders within a campaign. This helps ensure ad exposure is controlled more effectively across different placements, leading to a more consistent customer experience. The new cross-order reach and frequency reporting provides a unified, deduplicated view of ad exposure across all campaign orders, eliminating double counting and offering clear insights into campaign effectiveness. For advertisers who use Amazon DSP, a new advertiser reach and frequency metric is now available, providing a unified view of audience reach across multiple publishers, channels and devices. This feature helps advertisers understand total unique reach without overlapping audience counts, ensuring a more accurate measurement of their Ad spend’s impact across various touch points. These updates allow advertisers to control ad frequency more effectively across multiple orders. Accurately measure their unique audience reach by eliminating duplicate impressions. Optimize ad spend with better insights into customer exposure and engagement. Advertisers can now access these valuable metrics through the reach and frequency reporting, offering a V3 reporting for deeper insights to fine tune your advertising strategies.

Shivali Patel:

And, by the way, guys, don’t forget that there’s new product title requirements in play, effective as of January 21st 2025. Bradley talked about this just a couple of weeks ago on the Weekly Buzz. So, for any of your SKUs that you already have up, make sure that all of your listings match this for product title. Inside of Listing Builder at Helium 10, if you’re using that tool to build out your listings, we do have a section that ensures you meet all the best practices for Amazon, and this will apply to that. So just be sure that you are abiding. So tell me, are you excited about these new features? What’s your stance on this week’s news? How will it impact you? That does conclude our news pieces for this week. It’s time for new feature alerts. Let’s turn things over to Bradley. Bradley, what do you have in store for us?

Bradley Sutton:

Let’s get into this week’s new feature alerts. We’ve got a couple of them. The first one for now is in Adtomic and it’s only for elite members, but it’s soon going to be available for Diamond members, who also have Adtomic, and then later on it’ll be pretty much open to all Diamond members, and it’s a brand new tool called Share a Voice. So how this tool works is you can go find it if you have an elite account and go into your Adtomic dashboard and then look for under reporting where it says SOV. All right, hit SOV and from here you’re going to hit create a new report and basically what that is going to do is it allows you to kind of like create like a market, if you were All right. So you would just enter the name for your report, like I would say, hey, coffin shelf, and you can add the keywords. I suggest having maybe about 10, 15 of your top keywords that are most relevant to you, that you’re definitely advertising for that Organic sales are definitely coming on these keywords and then, once you hit create report, it might take about 24 hours or so to populate. Here’s just a sample, one that I did with just two keywords coffin shelf and bat bath mat, all right. So basically what I’m able to see here is I have brand share a voice and keyword share a voice.

Bradley Sutton:

When we talk about share a voice in this context, it’s basically your share of voice of page one out of a certain keyword. So, for example, I have brand share of voice. I already selected my brand. So if I, if I just select Manny’s Mysterious Oddities as my brand, I’m going to be able to see over time what is my share of voice or share of shelf on these keywords. Overall. My brand, for example, Manny’s Mysterious Oddities, I have 5.4% overall. That’s all the organic placements, all the sponsored placements. What is the average price on page one? What’s the top ASIN? And then it breaks down the share of voice to different types. Here’s my organic one 3.2% out of all the products I have for these two keywords. My paid share of voice, I’m actually doing pretty good. It says here 25%, right? Sponsored product share of voice, sponsored brand share of voice. And then it breaks down the sponsored brand into sponsored brand product, those headline ads. And then we have sponsored brand video share of voice, which I have 25% of page one on those keywords.

Bradley Sutton:

I can also be looking at other brands in particular, like maybe some of my top competitors. If I click over here to keyword share a voice, now on the individual keyword level, I can see by brand what is the share of voice. And so, for example, once again I can go ahead and say you know what? I just want to see Coffin Shelf and I want to see my brand versus you know another brand over here Right Now. All of a sudden, over time, I’m going to be able to see what my share of voice has been and I could see actually, hey, my paid share of voice could be 32 percent. I must be doing something right. But my organic 4.2, not too bad. I only have two products on the coffin shelf page and there’s 50 or so organic placements. But again, this is something that is a brand new tool that a lot of customers have been wanting, and so we are going to be kind of like breaking this out a little bit more based on your feedback. So, if you’re an elite member, you’ve had access to this for a few weeks. Get in there If you haven’t already. Diamond members with Adtomic, make sure to check it out. As soon as it’s released to you, you’ll probably have an email.

Bradley Sutton:

Another feature update is in our follow-up tool, just a minor one, but something that a lot of you users have been asking for and that was in the tool follow-up, to be able to select different accounts. All right, so for different like tokens, different marketplaces. So for some of you like especially agencies who have maybe tons of accounts you’re managing the same Helium 10 account. You were only able to make kind of like changes at the overall level and weren’t able to break it down by account. So now you are able to do that account. So now you are able to do that. So just go into follow-up and you’ll be able to go ahead and break things down by your different accounts so that you can make sure that you are setting up your features at the account level or marketplace level, because obviously you know different accounts. If you have a dog treat account, your follow-up is going to be different than if you have a coffin shelf account, because how you want to send emails out will be different. So now you can go ahead and set things at the account level.

Bradley Sutton:

Last update is going back to Adtomic, for those who are using our AI advertising or interested in using our AI advertising, which is kind of a hands-off way of managing your Amazon advertisement. You now have some new options when you go into your account, when you’re setting up your new campaigns. All right, so before you could just pretty much say, hey, here’s my ACOS and here’s my product and that’s it Right. But now you have a couple options where you can have strict control, which is what I suggest, or shared budget, where soon you’ll be able to like, just put a whole bunch of different products in your AI advertising account and have it go to multiple products. You’re also able to do advanced allocation. That’s something that is new, and you have a little bit more options as far as adding seed keywords, adding different ASINs that you might want to target, and excluding different keywords and different ASINs, and also some advanced targeting. So this is something that you know. Throughout the year, our AI advertising tool is going to continue to be refined based on the feedback of those of you who have gotten into it. You’re under no obligation to have to use the AI advertising. I personally don’t. I’ve been doing Amazon advertising for years, and so I actually just choose to make all my own rules in Adtomic. But a lot of you might want a hands-off approach and have AI do most, if not all, the heavy lifting. That would be something that maybe I think you would be interested in these new updates to AI advertising. So that’s it for this week’s new feature alerts. Let’s turn it back to Shivali.

Shivali Patel:

Thank you very much, Bradley. And of course, last but not least, our training tip of the week. Did you know that you can actually use Helium 10’s black box tool to discover profitable book ideas too, if you already sell on Amazon? Naturally, it only makes sense to leverage your skillset to diversify your income, or you could even opt to create an eBook to serve as a leads magnet. Let me show you how. So when you go into Amazon, typically speaking, and you’re trying to find a profitable book idea, you might end up opting to go into the bookstore or even into Kindle right here and then go through categories and subcategories. Now, I’ve done this. It’s really, really time consuming, but then again you can go through each book or even look at it holistically and try to figure out what’s going on inside of this niche. Alternatively, you can go into black box to find a product idea Instead of doing all the manual work. Go to the keywords tab, type in a search volume. Say, I want to find books that are being searched for at least 2,000 times per month. I can type that in right there. As a minimum, you can put in monthly revenue if you’d like. Price point. That is typically retail price point. I just like to leave it blank. What you do absolutely want to do to find book ideas, though, is click the books category. This is going to help you narrow down things to the paperback and hardcover versions, and then you can input in any other parameters that you have in mind.

Shivali Patel:

For example, maybe I’m interested in finding those book ideas, the niches where, of my top 10 organic placements, a certain amount of them have less than 150 reviews. So what this right here is telling me is three, a minimum of three, of the top 10 organic placements have less than 150 reviews. For review count, you can do the same thing for competitor revenue or ratings. Down here, that’s going to differ from the very top, where these two right here review count and review ratings is really looking at the average of the top products for that search term. I’m going to go ahead and add in for keyword search, how and click search, because I’m looking for how-to books that I might be able to create From there. As you can see, we have 17 phrases found where three of the top 10 placements have less than 150 reviews, alongside a minimum of 2,000 for search volume, and they have how in the actual keyword phrase or title how to change your mind, how to do the work, how to know a person, how to make money in stocks, how to hug a porcupine I didn’t even realize this was a niche.

Shivali Patel:

Then you have some more. You can keep going down. If you are selling a physical product currently, this is a really cool way for you guys to go in and find a book, category or topic idea that you can then publish. There’s so many different artificial intelligence tools out there that can help you write or create a digital product quickly that you can then use as a leads magnet to get more external traffic for your physical product brands. Alternatively, you can use this to diversify your income and leverage the skill sets you already have as somebody who sells on Amazon. I hope you take advantage of this. With that, that is it for this week’s news. I’ll see you next week to see what’s buzzing.

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