Helium 10 Buzz 4/4/24: FBA Low Inventory Fee Delayed | TikTok Shop Fee Increase | Shoppable A+ Content

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, interview someone you need to hear from and provide a training tip for the week.

TikTok Shop Is Raising Referral Fees After offering discounts that seemed too good to be true, the video app is reeling back its deals. Here’s what businesses should expect.
https://www.inc.com/sydney-sladovnik/tiktok-shop-is-raising-referral-fees.html

The article above puts a spotlight on TikTok Shop’s uptick in seller fees, and we’re lifting the veil on Amazon A+ content’s new direct purchasing prowess. We share tactical advice to manage your inventory like a pro and harness these updates to amplify your sales. Plus, we’re taking a behind-the-scenes look at the Helium 10 Project X account to give you a clear picture of dodging potential fees and making the most of Amazon’s fee credits.

But wait, there’s more! We’re not just talking shop about Amazon; we’re wading into the latest seller must-knows, including the sleek, cost-saving product showcase cards and the mandatory third-party supplement testing that could make or break your listings. Then, we’re switching aisles to Walmart Connect’s advertising innovations, spotlighting the fusion of in-store and online with TV wall ads. And for those hungry for a taste of real-world selling strategies, I’m personally inviting you to saddle up and join me at the Seller Velocity Conference in the Big Apple. Don’t miss out as we also tease the latest features from Helium 10 that are poised to take your selling game to the next level.

week, we cover the latest breaking news in the Amazon, Walmart, and E-commerce space, interview someone you need to hear from and provide a training tip for the week.

TikTok Shop Is Raising Referral FeesAfter offering discounts that seemed too good to be true, the video app is reeling back its deals. Here’s what businesses should expect.
https://www.inc.com/sydney-sladovnik/tiktok-shop-is-raising-referral-fees.html

The article above puts a spotlight on TikTok Shop’s uptick in seller fees, and we’re lifting the veil on Amazon A+ content’s new direct purchasing prowess. We share tactical advice to manage your inventory like a pro and harness these updates to amplify your sales. Plus, we’re taking a behind-the-scenes look at the Helium 10 Project X account to give you a clear picture of dodging potential fees and making the most of Amazon’s fee credits.

But wait, there’s more! We’re not just talking shop about Amazon; we’re wading into the latest seller must-knows, including the sleek, cost-saving product showcase cards and the mandatory third-party supplement testing that could make or break your listings. Then, we’re switching aisles to Walmart Connect’s advertising innovations, spotlighting the fusion of in-store and online with TV wall ads. And for those hungry for a taste of real-world selling strategies, I’m personally inviting you to saddle up and join me at the Seller Velocity Conference in the Big Apple. Don’t miss out as we also tease the latest features from Helium 10 that are poised to take your selling game to the next level.

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

• 01:05 – FBA Low Inventory Fee Postponed!
• 06:25 – Increased TikTok Shop Fees
• 07:12 – Shoppable A+ Content
• 09:45 – Dietary Supplements
• 10:51 – Walmart Advertising Updates
• 13:13 – Join Bradley at the Seller Velocity Conference
• 14:05 – New Feature Alerts

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Amazon saving sellers by delaying the low inventory fee. TikTok shop is raising their seller fees. Your customers can now purchase directly from your Amazon A-plus content. These new stories and more on today’s episode of the 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 and news stories out there in the Amazon, Walmart, e-commerce world. We give you training tips as well as let you know what new features Helium 10 has. That gives you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Let’s see what’s buzzing. We got some pretty cool news articles. Like there’s not that many, but I would say per capita. We got some good bang for the buck this week on our news articles, including one that I think you guys will especially like. Let’s go ahead and hop right into that very first news article. It was an announcement on LinkedIn. It was also in your seller central a few days ago and it was entitled credit for low FBA, low inventory fees, incurred during April 2024. All right.

Bradley Sutton:

So for those who have just been sleeping somewhere and been in hibernation, don’t know, amazon’s been releasing new fees. They didn’t just come out of the blue. This was announced way back in December of last year. Now this low inventory fee long story short, it’s something where you’re going to start getting charged on orders for items that Amazon considers you having a not sufficient inventory level. Now Amazon said hey, we’ve been getting a lot of information about, you know, sellers being unhappy with this. They’re not understanding exactly what it goes into. You know, we here at Helium 10 have been in contact with Amazon trying to get to the bottom of some of these. You know use cases like some sellers are wondering what if it’s a seasonal product? You know what if, you know I go completely out of stock for a couple of weeks? I mean, there’s just a million different questions that sellers have.

Bradley Sutton:

So what Amazon is saying is they’re still going to charge. You’re going to see charges between April 1st and April 30th, but at the end of the month they’re going to credit everything back. So if you do incur this low inventory fee, basically you’re not going to have to pay anything. All right. So this gives you one month to kind of see all right, what’s going on? Can I get some of these products out of the low inventory fee? All right? So, as it says right here, it says, hey, starting April 1st, which was obviously a few days ago, this transition period will begin and you’re going to be charged the fee on eligible products with historical days of supply below 28 days. But then at the end of the month or in May actually, you’re going to get credit for all of those units. Now, starting May 1st, the fee is going to be charged without the credit back. All right. So it says, hey, you can avoid that fee by ensuring that either the long-term historical days of supply, which means at least 90 days, or the short-term historical days of supply, which is the last 30 days, are above four weeks of inventory. All right.

Bradley Sutton:

So I highly suggest going to Seller Central, looking at this news article and then hitting this button here where it says low inventory level fee. It’s going to bring you to some frequently asked questions so far about it, and then you’re going to be able to at least see the charts. You know, like, hey, if you’ve got a small standard item and you actually have been having less than 14 historical days of inventory, you’re going to get a whopping 89 cent charge per unit, all right. If it’s between 14 and 21, it’s going to be 63 cents a unit, or under 28 and over 21, it’s going to be 32 cents. The largest charge is if you’ve got a large standard item and you have less than 14 days. You’re going to get a whopping dollar and 11 cent charge per unit, all right. So check this page out. There’s a lot of frequently asked questions.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, as Amazon said, you can actually go in and see if you’re getting this charge. So, for example, here in the Helium 10 Project X account, you go to inventory and your FBA inventory and then look at this column where it says low inventory level fee. It’s going to tell you if you are going to get a fee or not, and you can see most of my products here say, hey, no fees will be applied in the current week, and it’ll tell you what your historical days of supply is, all right. Now it’s interesting because it’s basing it on the parent ASIN, all right. So I got to do some digging to see what does that mean? You know, like, is it a combination of everything or what it is? I haven’t looked into this too much because, as you can see from my account, it’s not really affecting me at all.

Bradley Sutton:

That being said, there is one item. It’s kind of interesting. I’m discontinuing it. I’m purposely letting it run out because it was just a test. You know, in project X, amazon account, I do lots of testing, you know, to see what’s going on with ranking, and so here is a coffin shelf that I had launched a few weeks ago. I’m lending it right out of stock. There’s only like seven units left, and so obviously, amazon is like oh no, this is a low inventory, so if Amazon did not, wasn’t crediting me. It’s saying that, hey, fees will be applied to current week and it says applies to units shipped in current week.

Bradley Sutton:

How would I know how much I’m being charged? I scroll over here to the right and on the section where it says hey, where is your Amazon fee? 1195 includes $8 and 20 cents FBA fee. Hit that button and this calculator is going to come up and it’s going to tell you what my low inventory level fee is. And, as you guys can see right here, my low inventory level fee is 87 cents. It’s actually a little bit off screen. You can’t really see it here. So for me, I would have had to pay 87 cents a unit, even though I was trying to discontinue that product, which kind of sucks. But thankfully Amazon made that call where they’re like hey, we’re not charging you this month. So as of now, it looks like I’m not paying a single cent of this low inventory fee throughout the whole account. All right, you guys, I want you to check yours. Let me know what you see in your account, how many of your products are going to get that fee and how much do you estimate it’s going to be for the end of this month? If Amazon was charging, let me know in the in the comments below. It’s going to be for the end of this month. If Amazon was charging, let me know in the comments below.

Bradley Sutton:

The next article is from Inc.com and it’s about TikTok shop. We’re talking about Amazon doing away with some fees for this month. Well, TikTok shop is actually raising their fees, but it’s not that bad because of what TikTok shop was out. So, starting a few days ago, referral fees for products sold in TikTok shop are increasing from 2% to 6%. Now you might think, oh, my goodness, that’s like 300% increase, right, but just remember that’s 6% overall. Still, what is Amazon? What’s Walmart? It’s about what? 15%, right? So it’s still like a fraction of what other marketplaces are. So that’s interesting. Are you selling on TikTok shop yet? Did you take advantage of when it was 0% and then 2%? You’re probably still making money even at the 6% and 8%, all right.

Bradley Sutton:

The next news article is actually again from Amazon Seller Central and it’s entitled shoppable basic A+ Content modules now available for brands. All right, so this was from about a week ago. Amazon announced this and it says shoppable content modules are now available for brands that use basic A+ Content, so your customers can add an item to cart directly from the standard comparison chart module. So this is especially great. If you’ve got multiple products in your brand. You want to cross promote on a pages. It’s almost kind of like an addition to your virtual bundles, right? Virtual bundle takes up a lot of space on the page and doesn’t cost anything for people to go ahead and buy from it, and I’m assuming you know this wouldn’t either. So if you want to you know, see how it looks go into your A-plus content. All right, create a new A-plus content, hit add module and then take a look at where it says standard comparison chart. You can kind of see how it would look. This is available, you know, not for premium A+ Content, like maybe before you had to have premium. This is available even as just regular A+ Content, all right. So it’s not too difficult to get a premium anyways. But still, if you just have maybe one or two or three products, you haven’t qualified for A+ premium yet. You still have access to this. People can see a number of reviews, uh, etc.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, Michael from one of the slack groups uh, I’m in Michael V. He actually talked about another link that’s coming to some sellers and you can actually you can’t really, I don’t think you can really do anything yet with this link, but it’s available for many sellers and you’ll see something new that’s coming. Uh, product showcase cards. Uh, Michael brought out this URL that you might see on my, my screen here, where you could actually have, uh, instead of just a comparison, you can just kind of like have this really cool graphical interface where you’re showcasing different products or even have a single image and then put products in this kind of like mini carousel here and then, where it’s almost like a virtual bundle where you can just add like all three of them, all three products your shopping cart. So again, new and exciting things coming to A+ Content. And the beauty about it is not pay-per-click, all right. So these are free modules that you can do and don’t expect your sales to skyrocket. But hey, if you can get an extra sale every day per product or an extra sale every other day across your product line just because of this 1% conversion increase, who wouldn’t want that? So cool things that Amazon is announcing.

Bradley Sutton:

On the flip side, if you’re selling dietary supplements, you might be a little bit more restricted than before. So a couple of days ago, amazon announced on their dashboard that there’s going to be changes to dietary supplements. All right, I used to sell, I used to work for company. I sold dietary supplements before I worked at Helium Town, and now I’m assuming that that company is having to deal with this. But it says, hey, we’ve updated the policy on dietary supplements to meet safety standards in our store, Effective in April. Dietary supplement products need to be verified through a third party testing, inspection and certification organization. Third-party testing, inspection and certification organization All right. So you need to go If you sell a dietary supplement. Guys, go to manage your compliance dashboard and make sure that you’ve got all your ducks in a row as far as your third-party testing goes. And if you don’t have it there, it’s very possible that Amazon might suppress your listing. All right, so there’s going to be a webinar that Amazon might suppress your listing. All right, so there’s going to be a webinar that Amazon’s going to have in April where they’re going to talk about it. If you want to see more information on this, just go to your seller central news dashboard and click on that link.

Bradley Sutton:

Next article is from Walmart and it says how Walmart Connect is putting Walmart’s purpose in motion. So Walmart Connect is one of the things that they do is that’s like their advertising. All right, so Walmart’s advertising kind of like portal there, right, and some interesting things are right that they have launched or are launching. First of all, an interesting stat in their advertisers marketplace sellers. You know, third-party sellers like you and me are the fastest-growing advertisers the sponsored search advertising that we have done. It grew by 63% in one year, doubling on their self-service platform. Now, interesting things that they are doing. There’s going to be non-endemic brands now advertising on Walmart, so maybe you’ve got a product that’s not. I highly doubt. They’re going to allow you to advertise Amazon products on Walmart but outside of Amazon maybe you’re not on Walmart but you’ll be able to advertise on Walmart there’s going to be increased international support. Now here’s.

Bradley Sutton:

I always like looking at things that is very unique to Walmart that Amazon can’t really compete on. You know things that have to do with Walmart store network. Amazon can’t compete with that. You know, like picking up your Walmart order at a Walmart store that’s down the street from Amazon can’t really compete with that, right. Another thing you know how there’s lots of like TVs in Walmart’s. You know, like a whole TV section. Well, now, this is this is called an in-store experience or self-serve capability, where you can have in-store campaign management to the Walmart ad center, starting with TV wall ads. So I know you guys listening to this in the podcast maybe can’t see my screen here, but you know, imagine your ad of your product showing across all of the flat screen TVs in the Walmart. You know like TV section, right, kind of like a unique idea, your ad potentially coming up in thousands of Walmart stores at the same time, you know, and then maybe it would drive them to go to Walmart and order your product, or, uh, I’m not sure how that would work, or if you have to have your product in store. But again, something unique that Amazon can’t really compete on, a type of advertising.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, that’s it for the news today. Like I said, not that many articles, but pretty, pretty impactful ones. Uh, I would have to say so speaking of impactful, if you guys want to have an impact on your business and you live on the East coast or actually you can be living anywhere Join me at the seller velocity conference in New York the first week of May. All right, so I’m going to be speaking there. A lot of great speakers, I’m going to be talking about a lot of my launches, that I’ve been doing and what worked and what didn’t work. You guys saw I was getting hit with a low inventory fee on another product because I was launching it. All right, I learned a lot of stuff. There’s a reason why I’m letting that product run out. Something is changing in launching in my experience, and I’m going to show you what that is at this conference. So, if you guys want to hang out with me and a bunch of other cool speakers in New York for a couple of days. Go to h10.me/velocity for more information.

Bradley Sutton:

Let’s go ahead and now switch over to our Helium 10 New Feature Alerts, and we’ve got a couple of really cool updates, you know, for everybody, all right. So this very first one is called product launchpad completely new tool from scratch here at Helium 10. Guys, like it’s amazing how every week we have New Feature Alerts. You know, I don’t know anybody in this game who is innovating with new tools and new features at even one-tenth of the velocity of Helium 10. So this is thanks to you guys. You guys are letting us know what you want. So this first tool is called Product Launchpad, all right. So this has been available to Elite members for a while and diamond, but now it’s available to platinum, diamond and elite and it’s still in beta. The way you can get to it is hit your tools bar and then go to product launchpad.

Bradley Sutton:

Now this is kind of like, for if you want to just kind of organize your thoughts as far as your product research projects, a lot of times when we’re looking for products, we might come up with 10, 15 different ideas. Maybe one comes from Blackbox that we found, maybe one comes from Etsy, maybe one comes from just we were shopping in the market or we just had some idea, and then we all have our own little ways of how we kind of like validate that product idea, you know, checking out the demand and things like that. Well, now this is an AI powered tool that can help us organize our thoughts and then kind of like summarize it for us. So how you use it is by going into product launchpad. I’m going to show you one that I that I actually made here for a coffin makeup shelf. But you first enter keywords like hey, what are the main keywords in this listing or in this niche that are driving sales for existing products? All right, so once you enter those keywords, you’ll have down here a lot of cool information like Amazon search volume in the history, the Walmart search volume, the estimated keyword sales, you know, the brand analytics, click share, a lot of data that you would get in multiple Helium 10 tools. It’s now going to be in one place.

Bradley Sutton:

As I am researching this niche, I’m putting notes in this notepad where I’m saying, hey, there’s a lot of irrelevant products on page one and I’ve got this opportunity to differentiate and a lot of bad reviews about this or that. You just start putting your notes in there instead of trying to remember all these things. This or that. You just start putting your notes in there instead of trying to remember all these things. The next thing you do is you click on competitors and then you throw in all right, who would I be competing with if I get into this niche? Right? And so you know, here I did a coffin makeup shelf, which, who knows, maybe I will, you know, launch a coffin makeup shelf down the road.

Bradley Sutton:

But now, right here I can. I have all the competitors and there’s a lot of historical information here. You know the average price, the sales, the historical sales, average number of ratings and reviews that these sellers have. You know where the sellers countries again, stuff that normally you might have to pull from the Chrome extension, maybe from black box, maybe some listing analyzer it’s now kind of like in one place here. And then, after you enter in the competitors, now you go to what we call the idea scorecard, where it asks you to put in some other information, like maybe you were able to find some suppliers, how many suppliers did you find what?

Bradley Sutton:

But Helium 10 is using AI in order to give you like an assessment of what is going on in this niche. Like it starts looking at stuff like the search volume trends, the sales trends, and say you know what? This is trending down, this is trending up. You know, now, this is not meant to be like some go or no go thing here on. Hey, I see that AI told me to launch this, or AI said not to launch it, so I’m not going to do it. I lost $15,000. It’s just meant to summarize and in the future you’re going to be able to go in there and adjust how we score this. It’s kind of just based on some common principles that a focused group of sellers had wanted. You’ve got to, obviously, at the end of the day, make your own decision, but the number one use of this tool is now you can finally organize how you do your product research and how you validate it all the way up until your decision-making, and then also, for the first time ever in Helium 10, using AI to kind of like look deeper than maybe the naked eye could, by looking at trends across multiple products, multiple keywords, to give you some recommendations based on those trends and then based on your own notes that you might have entered. So pretty cool feature. Let us know what you like and don’t like. Like I said, this is in beta, so the future of this tool, how it’s going to go, is going to be based on your feedback. So make sure to let customer service know what you like and don’t like about that tool. The next feature alert is in Listing Builder. Now this one is available for Diamond members.

Bradley Sutton:

We’ve talked in recent weeks about how we had a scoring system here in Listing Builder. This is one of the top things that people have been asking us for a while, and we went ahead and made a scoring system. But some customers were like, hey, we want to see what goes into the score. I want to see on a more granular level what is affecting the score and how my competitors are doing. So what we have added here is the competitor comparison. So what’s new here is we’ve got two buttons at the top of your keyword bank and listing builder. The first one is open keyword performance.

Bradley Sutton:

Now what you’re going to see here is that same list of keywords that are like the individual keywords from your keyword phrases that you entered. Now you can see you like. You can click on one of these, like coffin. And now I can see, all right, all here on the right side, all of the keywords in my listing that had coffin in it that I had targeted as important keyword. I can now see, all right, how is, are these coffin keywords optimized in my listing? Oh, in my title I’ve got an exact phrase. In my description I’ve got an exact phrase. All right, so you can see what exactly goes into your score for your listing, right? The second button here is open competitor comparison.

Bradley Sutton:

Now for those keyword phrases that I have in my keyword bank. I can see everywhere where I uh, myself or a competitor has that keyword and in what phrase it has it like. For example, you can see everybody has coffin shelf in exact phrase in their title, all right. But then some of these keywords here you could see that there might be opportunity, like curio shelf All right, curio shelf.

Bradley Sutton:

Down here is here’s a keyword in my list, like you can see it’s blank. Like I don’t even have that keyword in my listing but a couple other competitors out there have it and they’re ranking for it. So that might be something I’m like. Hey, I might need to optimize my listing a little bit more for this word curio shelf All right. So again, a lot of uh visibility into what’s going in in your score, what’s going into your competitors a score and then where there might be gaps that you could potentially take advantage of. So thank you guys for giving us this um suggestions and we hope you like this. We hope this is what you were looking for. Keep, keep those suggestions coming in. What else do you guys want to see in listing builder? We will get it done as long as there’s enough people asking for it. Well, guys, that’s it for our helium 10 weekly buzz this week. Hope you guys enjoyed this episode. Carrie will be back next week and she’s going to let you know what’s buzzing.

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