Helium 10 Buzz 12/12/24: Chinese Sellers Struggling? | TikTok Shop, Amazon New Countries

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.

No Black Friday windfall for Chinese sellers on Temu and Amazon as competition rises
https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/article/3289727/no-black-friday-windfall-chinese-sellers-temu-and-amazon-competition-rises

TikTok Shop Goes Live for Spain, Ireland in Europe Rollout
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/tiktok-shop-goes-live-spain-094457160.html

Countdown to Amazon.ie as businesses are invited to register and new Country Manager is announced
https://www.aboutamazon.eu/news/retail/countdown-to-amazon-ie-as-businesses-are-invited-to-register-and-new-country-manager-is-announced
Create percent-off price discounts with minimum discounted price floor on Amazon

How Gen Z Fashion Brands Shein and Temu Exploit a Legal U.S. Tariff Loophole
https://www.forbes.com/sites/gregpetro/2024/12/09/how-gen-z-fashion-brands-shein-and-temu-exploit-a-legal-us-tariff-loophole/

Amazon and Intuit expand their strategic partnership
https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/aws/amazon-seller-central-quickbooks-aws-partnership

Amazon launched new seller-fulfilled customer service quality insights on the Feedback Manager page in Seller Central.

Generative AI tools in the A+ Content Manager are now available to all Brand Registered sellers in the US.

Lastly, we discuss some game-changing Helium 10 new features for Black Box ABA top search terms and provide valuable insights into calculating profit margins on TikTok Shop with the all-new Helium 10 TikTok Shop profitability calculator. Whether you’re looking to optimize your sales strategies or stay informed on the latest e-commerce trends, this episode offers a wealth of information to help you succeed.

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

• 00:46 – Chinese Sellers Struggling
• 03:06 – TikTok Shop EU Opens
• 04:01 – Amazon Ireland Opening
• 04:40 – Price Discount Update
• 06:00 – Why Temu/Shein Are So Cheap
• 06:39 – Amazon x Intuit
• 07:11 – Customer Service Quality Insights
• 08:54 – Gen AI A+ Content
• 09:29 – Check Out Helium 10’s Latest Blogs
• 10:12 – Helium 10 New Feature Alerts
• 13:08 – Training Tip: TikTok Shop Profitability Calculator

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Chinese sellers on Amazon and Temu struggling. TikTok shop opens in two new marketplaces. Amazon’s about to open in a new country. These stories and more on today’s Weekly Buzz. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that is our Helium 10 Weekly Buzz, where we give you a rundown of all the goings on in the Amazon, TikTok shop and e-commerce world. We give you training tips for the week and we 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.

Bradley Sutton:

We’ve got tons of articles to go over today, so I’m just going to go ahead and hop right into it, and one that might be kind of like music to some ears is this notion that maybe, hey, some sellers from China are struggling. Now, this is not what we want to see. We don’t want to see any Amazon seller struggling, but the ones that are from, like you know, Temu and Shein. Sometimes people are worried that, oh my, they’re going to eat my lunch for sales and they’re going to, you know, take my business away from on Amazon, and sometimes you know like we feel that maybe some of our factories in China are selling our products directly, and so you know we should never rejoice in anyone’s misfortune. But I’m just reporting the news here and this article says no Black Friday windfall for Chinese sellers on Teemu and Amazon. As competition rises, the article says cut to the bone, pricing is eating into the profit margins of Chinese merchants selling online. So for those of you who think, oh, my goodness, you know, just, you know, Chinese sellers just have this, these unfair advantages over the rest of us from Europe and the US and other locales, well, no, it’s not all rainbows and unicorns for Chinese sellers right now this article is talking about. Hey, Chinese sellers on overseas shopping sites, from Temu to Amazon, are struggling to turn a profit during this year’s Black Friday sales. A clothing factory owner in Guangzhou said Black Friday sales at his Temu store plunged 30% from last year. Another one said that their shop offered discounts but sales volume was only up 20% higher than usual. He says that there wasn’t much profit at all. However, on the flip side, says, TikTok shop invited Nicki Minaj to host a live stream shopping event on November 24th and had TikTok shop records of 3.6 million viewers and 20,000 orders. Hey, maybe live selling is finally coming on strong. But anyways, I have a sneaking suspicion that some of you US sellers are not exactly shedding tears over this news about maybe some sellers from China might be struggling a little bit. But hey, guys, you know we don’t want to wish misfortune on anybody, but what we can wish for is maybe a little bit more level playing field and, who knows, maybe this trend is going to result in perhaps not so much undercutting of price that we’ve seen in the past coming out of other countries. So it’ll be worth watching to see, you know, what goes on in the future.

Bradley Sutton:

Next article is from Yahoo and it says TikTok shop goes live for Spain and Ireland in Europe. Rollout All right. So you know. Until now, I believe you know, TikTok shop has been available, you know, obviously just in the UK and US. But now, hey, it is going to start on, or it has started on, Ireland and also Spain. Now, interesting tidbit here in this article says TikTok tripled its US shopping sales to more than 100 on Black Friday, a sign the looming ban has done little to dampen interest among the more than 170 million Americans who use the app every month. By the way, guys, we’re going to have a workshop today with Michelle, who’s going to talk about TikTok shop. If you missed that webinar, reach out to customer service you might. There might be a replay, or just wait, we’re going to have clips from it on a future podcast right here on whatever you’re watching this on.

Bradley Sutton:

Next article is again talking about new marketplaces, this time Amazon. Do you know that Amazon is opening in a new marketplace? Do you know what it is? It is Ireland. All right, so Amazon.ie countdown officially started. According to Amazon, they announced a new regional manager and businesses in Ireland can now register their accounts. There’s a link in the article here below where they can register their accounts to sell on Amazon.ie in 2025. So if you’re living in Ireland, make sure to go ahead and register to be one of the very first sellers in Amazon’s brand new marketplace.

Bradley Sutton:

Next article is from Seller Essentials Dashboard. It’s about discounts. It’s entitled Create Percent Off Price Discounts with Minimum Discounted Price Floor. All right. So this means that it says here when you create a price discount, you can enter a percent off. When you create a price discount, you can enter a percent off discount, like you normally would like. Hey, you can do a 20% off discount a hundred dollar item. That means the discounted price will be 80. But now, to make sure that you don’t accidentally do some crazy you know low price that you didn’t want to do, you can put a minimum discounted price. For example, if you do that 20% discount and you set the minimum discounted price of $75, right Now, if, for whatever happens, like, let’s say, your regular price goes to $90, okay, your regular price. Now that 20% discount would apply to the $90 price, resulting in a price of $72. What’s going to happen here? You put a discount floor of 75%. Well, what’s going to happen is your discount will automatically deactivate, right, because the discounted price of $72 is less than what you had put as the minimum of 75. So this is kind of a cool thing. You know, this might avert some disasters of you know, like maybe some employee lowers your price because they didn’t know that you had a discount somewhere else, and then you know, like all of a sudden you’re giving people a 50% off. Well, well, this is going to avoid that.

Bradley Sutton:

Next, articles from Forbes, and this is something that’s not new information, but for those who are curious. You know we talked about Temu and Shein and things. But for those who are curious, how can these websites offer products and things for like $3? Like what is going on? Well, this article from Forbes explains this and tell how Gen Z fashion brands, sheen and Temu exploit a legal US tariff loophole. So it talks about the tariff loophole where you know it’s products under $800, et cetera, et cetera, and so just maybe you know. For those of you just wondering, like how in the world can these companies operate at these prices? Well, this will you know, kind of explain that.

Bradley Sutton:

Next article we have is from Amazon itself and it’s entitled Amazon and Intuit expand their strategic partnership. It says next year Amazon sellers can benefit from more seamless access to Intuit products with Amazon seller central Intuit. It’s kind of like QuickBooks and a whole bunch of other things. So I’m just curious how many of you sellers out there are using like QuickBooks to do accounting. Who knows, maybe this means that there can be something in Helium 10. Now would you like Helium 10 to connect to QuickBooks utilizing this new Amazon partnership? Let us know in the comments below.

Bradley Sutton:

Next article, going back to Seller Central dashboard new. Let us know in the comments below Next article. Going back to seller essential dashboard new customer service quality insights available. There’s three new things on this dashboard called preventable contact rate, average contact response time and buyer dissatisfaction rate. All right, now I’m not even sure how these things work, you know. But here this is how it looks for those watching this on YouTube. One of my accounts has it. And preventable contact rate? It says it tracks customer service contacts from buyers seeking a refund or replacement due to a product quality or shipping problem, excluding buyers who simply changed their minds. And it’s calculated by taking the number of preventable contacts, dividing it by the number of items shipped. But a lot of these contacts don’t go to we, the buyers, they go directly to Amazon. So again, I need to look into this more to kind of understand how this is being calculated. But hey, my performance is 0%, so that must mean I’m doing a pretty good. But you can also see buyer dissatisfaction rate and average response times. And while I was looking at this, I had noticed that all my seller feedback I actually had a couple of negative seller feedbacks I easily got removed. It means I wasn’t watching my Helium 10 Alerts, remember. In Helium 10 alerts you can set an alert for if you get negative feedback, it’ll let you know. So right away you can go in and you know, delete that feedback or get Amazon to delete it, if you know, because 90% of them are not valid, and to keep your customer, your feedback rating, at 100%, like now. Project X is at 100%, but it was at 50% Because I didn’t notice there was a couple negative feedbacks that needed removing. So just a reminder to on this dashboard you can also control your negative feedback and if you don’t want to be checking it every day, just set that as an alert and Helium 10. And we’ll let you know whenever you do have a negative feedback.

Bradley Sutton:

Next article is from Back in Amazon Accelerate and Unbox. We talked about a whole bunch of new Gen AI features that were coming for Amazon advertising. Well, some of them are now available, especially in the A+ Content Manager. All right, so go to A+ Content Manager in Seller Central, find the modules that say AI ready and then go ahead and start playing with it. Let me know what you think. You know, sometimes the Gen AI tools that Amazon has is pretty cool. Sometimes might need some work. I haven’t tried these. I want you guys to and let me know in the comments below how it’s working out for you, all right. One more thing I want you guys to bookmark Go to helium10.com forward slash blog. We’ve been launching a lot of FHIR blogs lately. Here’s one that Kerry just did recapping all of the 2025 fee changes, not just on Amazon fulfillment, but on MCF, AWD, etc. Make sure to check out that article. I did a couple of articles last week about the accuracy of Helium 10 sales estimates. Like you ever wonder how accurate it is compared to Amazon, compared to other tools like Jungle Scout, data Dive, etc. Helium 10 blows the other tools out of the water, including even Amazon’s estimates. So you might be wondering how is that possible? Make sure to check out that article Again. Go to helium10.com/blog.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, let’s get into the Helium 10 New Feature Alerts. The first one I want to show is in pretty much it’s in Helium 10, in Black Box, in Product Launchpad any tool that has like sales estimates right For products. You now have a new column, so like, for example, here’s some Black Box results and you’ll notice there’s a parent level revenue and an ASIN revenue. Okay, parent level sales and ASIN sales. So you’ll notice this first product I don’t know. This looks like a game. The number is the same. Well, what does that mean? It’s probably there’s not. It’s not a variation, right? But then some of these you might see something different, like, for example here is a coastal pet safari dog soft slicker brush. You’ll see the parent sales is 114. ASIN sales is 25. So in the results this is an ASIN that’s coming up in the results of Black Box. This particular ASIN must be a child item because it’s got 25 estimated sales, but the overall estimated sales for all variations in the family are 114. Again, this is exclusive with Helium 10. You use any other tool, you are not going to see estimates at the child level. All right, this is what sellers have been asking for years to be able to know what you know estimates the child items have. Well, now we have got that available. Another tool that’s now available only for Helium 10 Elite members, but eventually it’ll come to Helium 10 diamond. You elite members who are watching this, make sure to go check it out here in Brand Analytics, Black Box ABA Top Search Terms, you can now select multiple ranges.

Bradley Sutton:

So this is kind of like a game changing feature. You know, you know how I don’t use that term lightly, it’s. It changes the game, because whether you’re using Helium 10 to look at brand analytics or whether you’re using seller central, what do you have to do? One by one download every single week. You’re looking at data and then put them all together and try and figure out. Now watch, this I put in my coffin shelf and I want to see for every week like in the last, like six or seven or eight or nine weeks, or I can go up to like 20 weeks what were all of the keywords that I was one of the top three clicked. All right, so instantly I am going to be able to hit apply filters. I’m going to be able to see hey, I was one of the top three clicked for nine different keywords and I can see some of these. How many weeks I was like look at this coffin shelf. Almost every single week I’m one of the top three click. But look at this one lawyer’s coffin. I don’t even know how that’s a keyword lawyer’s coffin I was only a one week I was one of the top three clicks. So this is like super, super cool. This is basically kind of like seeing what keywords are driving sales. So again, this is for elite members. Now, don’t worry, it’s coming to Diamond soon, so I’m giving you guys a sneak peek, but I’m probably more excited about this little feature than any feature in the last two, three months that Helium 10 has dropped, because this is saving hours and hours of time of having to go through brand analytics data super slowly.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, now let’s go with the training tip of the week, and today I talked a little bit about TikTok shop. We’re doing a big workshop on TikTok shop, a podcast coming out about it. You’re going to see a lot of things about TikTok shop coming up, a lot of you’re going to see a lot of things about TikTok shop coming up. Now, if you are interested, like or just wondering, what kind of profit margins can I have on TikTok shop from your Amazon products? Well, go, just go to your listing or go to your competitors listing right and on Amazon, and then all you have to do is hit the Profitability Calculator, just like you would the same Profitability Calculator, or you can check Amazon Profitability and you’ll notice a third tab. It’s called TikTok Shop. This is bringing in all of the data from your Amazon listing, so, like you know, your box size and weight and all those things and it you know, you, you put in just like normal, your, you know your shipping prices and things like that. And then your affiliate commission rate how much do you plan on dedicating to you know giving to affiliates to promote your products? And this is going to give you your profit margins, whether you use fulfilled by TikTok, whether you’re using MCF from Amazon you know a lot of you might choose MCF to ship your TikTok Shop products or whether you’re a self shipping your own products. So if you just want to kind of like a quick glance at, hey, how profitable would my product be on TikTok Shop, depending on how much I’m dedicating to influencer marketing and depending on what kind of fulfillment I’m using, make sure to use the Helium 10 TikTok Shop Calculator that’s on any Amazon page. All right, guys. That’s it for the news and features of this week. We’ll see you next week to see what’s buzzing.

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