Helium 10 Buzz 8/29/24: Amazon Alexa Goes AI | Big Walmart WFS Updates

We’re back with another episode of the Weekly Buzz with Helium 10’s Chief Brand Evangelist, Bradley Sutton. Every week, we cover the latest breaking news in the Amazon, Walmart, and E-commerce space, talk about Helium 10’s newest features, and provide a training tip for the week for serious sellers of any level.

Amazon’s revamped Alexa with generative AI to roll out in October
https://www.zdnet.com/home-and-office/smart-home/amazons-revamped-alexa-with-generative-ai-to-roll-out-in-october/

Walmart Marketplace Accelerates Growth; Launches Category Expansion, Multichannel Solutions and Omnichannel Innovations for Sellers
https://corporate.walmart.com/news/2024/08/27/walmart-marketplace-accelerates-growth-launches-category-expansion-multichannel-solutions-and-omnichannel-innovations-for-sellers

How customers are making more informed shopping decisions with Rufus, Amazon’s generative AI-powered shopping assistant
https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/retail/how-to-use-amazon-rufus

How Amazon is using AI to detect fake product reviews and ensure authentic customer feedback
https://www.aboutamazon.eu/news/customer-trust/how-amazon-is-using-ai-to-detect-fake-product-reviews-and-ensure-authentic-customer-feedback

China fast-fashion retailer Temu soared like a rocket for two years—in just a few hours, its parent company lost more than $50 billion in market value
https://fortune.com/2024/08/26/temu-pdd-stock-plunges-government-scrutiny-amazon-rivals/

Amazon India to cut down its selling fees by 12% ahead of festive season
https://www.livemint.com/companies/amazon-india-to-cut-down-its-selling-fees-by-12-ahead-of-festive-season-janmashtami-2024-11724471866431.html

Join Bradley and other Helium 10 Members for an informal meetup in Mumbai early in the morning on Friday the 6th! We will be in the Crystal Lounge networking and would love to see you there! For more details go to: h10.me/mumbai

Catch Bradley at the Istanbul Global E-Export Summit 2024 h10.me/istanbul and at the Amazon Global Selling Community Event PH Seller Bootcamp in Manila h10.me/manila

Lastly, are you leveraging Helium 10 to its fullest potential? We break down the newest features of Helium 10’s Chrome extension, including the X-ray tool’s suggested PPC bid column and clickable brand insights. Learn how to split-test product images and ideas with real Amazon buyer feedback using Helium 10’s Audience tool powered by PickFu, and listen to a special use case from Kseniia that showcases its power in product development. Tune in for all these valuable insights and more to keep your e-commerce strategy ahead of the curve!

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

• 01:17 – Alexa With AI
• 03:13 – Walmart Big Announcements
• 09:09 – Amazon Rufus
• 12:19 – Amazon Fake Reviews
• 12:55 – Shipping Time Settings
• 13:32 – Temu Trouble
• 14:21 – India Fee Reductions
• 14:54 – Meet Bradley on the Following Events
• 16:03 – Helium 10 New Feature Alerts
• 18:06 – Training Tip: How To Use Helium 10 Audience

Transcript

Bradley:

Walmart makes a lot of announcements at their conference this week. Alexa’s long-awaited revamp is almost here. Amazon lowers fees in one marketplace. These stories 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. I’m your host, Bradley Sutton. This is the show that is our Helium 10 weekly buzz. We give you a rundown of all the new stories in the Amazon, Walmart, TikTok shop and e-commerce world. We give you training tips of the week and we let you know what new features Helium 10 has that can give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Let’s see what’s buzzing.

Bradley:

Not much going on in the e-commerce world. I expect it’s going to be this way for a couple of weeks, because usually Amazon, for example, wants to sit on a lot of their big announcements and save them for Accelerate. Now what happens inevitably every year is that things accidentally leak out right and then it becomes a new story. So who knows, maybe one of these stories will leak out and we can report on it, but I expect slim pickings over the next couple of weeks on the Amazon side, but there is definitely some news this week on Walmart, but let’s go ahead and just hop in to this week’s news.

Bradley:

The first article we’re going to talk about is from ZDNet.com, and it’s an article entitled Amazon’s revamped Alexa, with generative ai to roll out in october. Okay, so this is something. I think we reported on this probably a good year ago almost, or at least six months ago of how lacking the amazon Alexa is, but they were going to revamp it with ai. You know I’m not going to go too into depth, but it’s going to be a paid service, that kind of sucks. I’ve got Alexas literally all over my entire house, but now supposedly it’s going to be called Remarkable Alexa and it’s going to remarkably cost $10 a month which kind of sucks. But it’s going to be able to allow you to create text, create bedtime stories for your kids, come up with poems and just a whole bunch of crazy. You know things that you would expect from AI.

Bradley:

Now you might be wondering why in the world am I talking about this? For the weekly buzz? How does this affect Amazon sellers? But historically, Alexa has not been that great of a source to get sales for Amazon sellers just because it’s so like kind of clunky. To be honest, you know it’s not. The reason why I have Alexa is not necessarily for it’s semi AI, you know things is just to control devices in my house and things I’ve tried to shop on. It’s not great. But if now all of a sudden, Alexa is going to be AI powered, you’ve got to imagine that the shopping capabilities are going to be exponentially better than they were before. And now, all of a sudden, sellers are probably going to have to start paying attention to, like, how does their products come up in verbal searches on Alexa? Maybe Amazon will give us data points that allow us to see what people are searching for in voice. But anyways, that’s why I’m interested in this story and to see how it develops, because I want to see, hey, how is this going to help Amazon sellers due to being able to connect products to customers perhaps in a better way?

Bradley:

I mentioned this at the outset, but Walmart had their conference this week in San Francisco and pretty big conference. It was bigger than before. I believe they had one last year. I didn’t go to either one yet. Carrie from here went and there was a lot of announcements, so let’s try and get through some of these announcements. One thing they mentioned was Walmart Marketplace has achieved more than 30% sales growth rate each of the past four quarters right. It surpassed global e-commerce not just Walmart USA, but global Walmart sales surpassed $100 billion, right. So that’s pretty big.

Bradley:

Some new announcements they are now going to have premium beauty. You know like we’ve got that on Amazon, but now there’s gonna be a premium beauty category and then two more categories pre-owned and collectible. So that’s interesting. You know the premium beauty, I think you know we kind of know what’s going on Amazon, for that’s going to be something similar. But pre-owned is going to be this new section called resold at Walmart for pre-owned items from performance managed sellers. This to me sounds a lot like eBay, so maybe Walmart’s kind of trying to eat into eBay’s market share for pre-owned stuff. I do a lot of business on eBay myself, like selling old Pokemon cards and other things like that, so it’d be interesting what kind of products show up in that category.

Bradley:

Now, another one that’s near and dear to my heart is collectibles. I sell, like I just said, a lot of collectibles. I sell a lot of baseball cards, basketball cards. I buy stuff on there. But now they’re going to have a collector shop on Walmart where you can even do pre-orders for certain things and some sellers can take advantage of a 0% commission fee for collectibles good grief, through October 31st which includes action figures, dolls, trading cards, sports memorabilia, comic books, records and musical instruments. So there’s a couple of new features for Walmart that are coming out.

Bradley:

Another thing that you know, maybe we were kind of used to, or we heard about Amazon rolling out. You remember how Amazon rolled out this program where if there was local stores that had products right, like like not an Amazon necessarily affiliated store or an you know, an Amazon like fresh or something like that, but just like I believe one of them was like a vitamin store right, they could have their listing on Amazon and then if they see that the customer is near there, they can buy it and then pick it up at that store locally. Well, now Walmart is going to have something called Walmart Local Finds right, and basically it introduces a new way for customers to discover seller’s merchandise in their vicinities. It’s going to enable speedy deliveries and connect shoppers with local businesses through Walmart’s digital channels and it’s going to allow people to have that last mile delivery and pretty fast delivery times for things that are coming from their local stores. Now you guys know about Amazon MCF, multi-channel fulfillment, right. It allows you, as an Amazon seller, to maybe have your Shopify inventory right and then, if you get an order, you can be like, hey, I’m going to have fulfill it for my FBA inventory and that’s done through something called MCF. Okay, you can have integrations. Well, now Walmart is going to have multi-channel logistics right.

Bradley:

So you know, I didn’t think that they were this far along to be able to you know, with their delivery network, to be able to offer this. But nope, bradley, you’re wrong. They said we are ready, all right, so it’s going to allow sellers to use their WFS that that’s the Walmart version of FBA to fulfill orders from any commerce site via Walmart supply chain. Um, there’s going to be unbranded packaging. That’s important to a lot of people Fast, reliable shipping and competitive rates averaging 15% lower than the competition. This is going to be launched on September 10th.

Bradley:

They also re-announced the cross-border fulfillment. We already talked about that last week in the news. Another new thing that I didn’t even know wasn’t a thing yet, but I guess you weren’t able to send full truckloads to WFS. Now you can sell full truckloads to WFS. There’s a new global seller center they announced, and it’s going to be a new app that provides onboarding for eligible sellers in any market so they can do cross border andorder and sell US, Mexico, Chile and Canada All right.

Bradley:

So those who attend the let’s Grow 2024 Summit are going to be the first to be able to access this. So that’ll be interesting. Is that going to be kind of like remote fulfillment with Amazon, where I can have my inventory in Walmart yeah, the USA and then ship to those other countries? I’m not sure I wasn’t at the conference. I’ll. I’m sure Carrie will have news coming for us soon. Walmart is waiving peak season storage fees for those who get their inventory into WFS fulfillment centers through September 30th. So another announcement that they made. And now also Walmart is going to have a new deals dashboard that makes it easy for sellers to enroll items in Walmart’s popular deals events. So does a lot of this stuff sound familiar guys? Yes, it does. Now, this does not mean that you know, Amazon copies Walmart, Walmart copies Amazon.

Bradley:

I mean, these things are just standard for e-commerce. The analogy I always use is like Burger King, right, like I’m not sure who was first Burger King or McDonald’s, I assume McDonald’s. Now McDonald’s had a drive-through menu. Now Burger King eventually came on 10, 20 years later. They had a drive-through menu. Does that mean they copy? No, it’s like that’s what you call it. It’s called a drive-through menu. Like if you’re going to have your car drive through, you need a menu. You know extra value meals. All right, it’s not one person copying off of each other, it’s just these are the, the stand. It’s like what should be expected by consumers. And so we see that now in the Amazon and Walmart space, it’s not necessarily Amazon and Walmart are copying each other, it’s just like, hey, they’re both coming out with these features that sellers want and a lot of them have these similar names. But I think that’s great for us, because for those of us who are Amazon sellers, we’re used to a lot of these, these kinds of mechanisms here that Walmart’s now coming out with.

Bradley:

Going back to AI, let’s talk a little bit about Rufus AI. This is a story coming out of Amazon and says how customers are making more informed shopping decisions with Rufus, amazon’s generative AI shopping assistant. Now Rufus is available across the board for everybody, even on my desktop. Now I want you guys to let me know in the comments are you using it when you shop? I try to and I just I don’t know. Maybe it’s I’m skeptical because I see how regular AI just makes so many mistakes, and then I saw how Amazon’s review AI summary was kind of meh and so it kind of like I don’t know, maybe it makes me inherently not trust it, but I have not had good experience with it yet. But that’s to be expected. This is a brand new technology but it’s something to get excited about because it kind of shows you the future of you know, kind of like how the shopping experience is going to be. Whether we think it’s going to be game changing or not, it’s here, all right.

Bradley:

So Rufus is here, and then Amazon came out with some information from it. You, rufus, is here and then Amazon came out with some information from it. You know, like they’re saying hey, people are asking Rufus questions like is this coffee maker easy to clean and maintain? I don’t know about that. Guys Like who the heck is is after they they get on a coffee maker page, is literally typing that whole question out to Rufus. That’s just kind of a strange me, but that Amazon says that’s what people are doing. So there you go, there. There’s, I guess, some very patient people out there. Now you know some of the things that sound more reasonable. That’s interesting is, I think that this could help Amazon, you know, be even more of a search engine, right.

Bradley:

A lot of times some of us still search things on Google first, like we might say, hey, you know what’s the weather like in this place in this time of year, and then we see that it’s cold. Now we go to Amazon and look for jackets. But look at this, this story, that, or this part of the story that Amazon said, hey, um, one customer recently said they asked Rufus about a pool umbrella recommendation for Florida, but then Rufus shared facts about Florida’s weather, humidity, and suggested umbrella features. All right, so umbrella features, all right, so, so maybe it could be something where, instead of I’m going to google and then going to amazon, I’ll be like you know, hey, rufus, um, what kind of outerwear should I be using for florida in september, or something like that.

Bradley:

And it’ll tell you oh, you should probably be naked and not wear any outerwear because it’s miserably hot and humid. Hopefully rufus doesn’t say that, but anyways, you get my point right. That that is something I do think is, you know, could be beneficial and how Rufus, you know, can help. But again, this does not change anything that we Amazon sellers are doing. Sometimes sellers get so like, oh my God, rufus is changing and Cosmo and this, and that Nothing has changed. Guys, so far, all right, yet could things change? Sure, we have the data from Amazon. We’ve got search credit performance, we’ve got brand analytics. We know what people are searching for and the number of times. That is still not going to change. What powers Rufus and these other AI things is the information, the accurate information, that we have in our listing, plus the reviews, which we don’t even have control over, but continue to optimize your listing for the best keywords so that Amazon knows what your product is and it can come up in any AI situation or just traditional searches.

Bradley:

Next article is here from Amazon EU. It was just an interesting article. I’m not going to go too in depth into it. It’s called learn how Amazon leverages advanced AI to publish authentic reviews and weed out the fakes. If you ever wondered how like maybe you thought that Amazon is not doing this because you see a lot of fake reviews Amazon actually has come a long ways as far as weeding out fake reviews. Make sure to check this article out so that you can kind of see what they’re doing is really really fascinating. So check the notes in the comments below about what Amazon is doing to kind of like weed out hundreds of millions of fake reviews. It’s kind of shocking.

Bradley:

Next article is from Amazon Seller Central. There’s going to be changes to handling and transit time for orders shipped to the US All right. So starting on the October 25th, if you’re shipping from China, for example, you can no longer select 28 days for shipping. You have to have it be under 20 days. So that’s something new, and there’s also different shipping templates that are available now. There’s also some handling time settings that you guys need to be aware about also. So if you were wondering if those affect you, if you’re doing seller fulfilled, check your seller central dashboard and you’ll be able to get information on there.

Bradley:

Another quick article from fortune.com uh, Temu, uh, you know, says here soared like a rocket, but now its parent company, in a few hours, lost 50 billion dollars in market value. So, like the, the head of Temu, he was the richest man in China for like three weeks and then now he’s not anymore because Temu took a big hit. So another interesting article to you know. Check the link below to get more information on it. But it could be something interesting about, you know, Temu’s future. I don’t think it’s in danger yet, but yeah, it’s. It’s the. The glory days are over for Temu right now, um, but they’re still very actively trying to recruit us sellers. I’m trying to get on board, but I just keep my. My application keeps getting denied, so I’m still trying to get on there. But what about you guys? Anybody out there, uh, shopping or selling on Temu? Yet Let me know.

Bradley:

Uh, last article of the day is from live mint.com. It says Amazon India is to cut down its selling fees by 12% ahead of the festive season. All right, so they announced this last weekend 12% of selling fees in a lot of categories If you’re selling an Amazon India, and this is going to be applicable from September the 9th, all right. So what a nice, uh you know, kind of like difference when, when now they are actually rolling some fees back. I wish they would do that even more here in the States.

Bradley:

Speaking of India, that’s a perfect segue. I am going to be going to India for the first time ever and I’m going to do a little meetup. All right, there’s going to be a little meetup I’m going to do in Mumbai on September the 6th Friday, I believe. Yeah, September the 6th Friday, morning early 7am. If you guys want information on that, go to h10.me/mumbai. So it’d be great to to see some of you, uh from, uh, who are there near Mumbai, uh, to come and hang out with us for a couple hours. Um, right before that, I’m actually going to be coming directly from Istanbul. So if you guys want to hang out with me in person, I’m going to be speaking at a big conference out there. Go to h10.me/istanbul. Maybe we’ll have some Turkish coffee together or some donor right. And then, right after that, on September the 11th, I will be speaking at an event in Manila, Philippines, and if you guys want more information on that. That’s an actual event put on by Amazon. Go to h10.me/manila.

Bradley:

All right, let’s get into the Helium 10 new features of the week. This is mainly going to be in our Chrome extension tool. So, for example, right here if those of you watching on YouTube, I just searched coffin shelf I can run x-ray keywords on this page and this is going to get me a lot of the main keywords that these products on this page are getting sales from. Now we have a new column right here in x-ray keywords, the suggested PPC bid, which will help you have an idea if a keyword is super expensive or pretty cheap if you were to bid on it in PPC Another thing that has come to the Chrome extension. So, let’s say you’re in those same search results here in Amazon and you hit our just regular tool, x-ray. The results are going to come up. You are going to see some new columns and some new features that some of these columns have.

Bradley:

So look over here and you’ll see an age column and then you could see how old are these products. All right, so you know. Like, for example, you could see, here I’ve got the coffin or a bat shaped bath mat and it’s only seven months old. It’s the youngest, the new kid on the block here on this page. But then here’s the original man. He’s mysterious, odd. He’s coffin shelf 58 months old. Well, that’s amazing. Uh, it’s like almost five years old, believe it or not. Project X is five years old, but anyways, we have got that now as a column so it gives you an idea about, like are these products new kids on the block or are they old faithful?

Bradley:

Another couple of things that sellers were wanting was hey, if we click on the brand name, we want to be able to go to their brand storefront. All right, so now you can go ahead and do that. If you see in the brand column here in x-ray, you hit the brand, you’re going to go directly to that brand’s storefront. And lastly, the last column it’s now the seller column. You know, like, for example, here’s us. How cool is that? This now also is a link. So if you want to go to directly to the storefront not the brand, but the storefront of the seller see what else products they have, you can now do that directly from x-ray.

Bradley:

So just a few small updates this week to the Chrome extension. All right, now let’s do our training tip of the week, and this is probably, you know, one of the most slept on tools in my opinion, but it’s something that everybody should be using across different stages of their Amazon journey. All right, you know, like if you want to split test your main image, that’s kind of like the no brainer one to do, but also you can do it in your product development as well. Just take a quick look at this 40 second clip here from somebody who was recently on the podcast, who actually said this is her favorite tool in Helium 10. Your favorite Helium 10 tool Kseniia.

Kseniia:

The audience. That’s the one that I use all the time.

Bradley:

How are you using that, like for your images, or just for product ideas, or what are you using that?

Kseniia:

Honestly for everything, for both for the product ideas, the images, because I just think it’s so easy. You know, when you’re thinking about like the product we find, then I usually do like the drawing and uh, 3d, you know the 3d image of the product that doesn’t exist yet. Then usually all my products are like really designed differently. That’s what’s on the market right now and I just upload the image there and I see what people say and ask them would you buy this product? And if you wouldn’t buy this product, why, why not? Or what would you change in this product? And sometimes I see the things that I didn’t even. You know, I didn’t even think about that All right.

Bradley:

So that’s definitely a unique use case that Ksenia has right there. Um, what kind of things do I use Helium 10 audience for? Here’s an example of how I got some super important insight right. So I ran. I mean, here’s just a simple one where I was just like saying, hey, which main image is going to be better? And I thought I was doing a simple one right here with three different main images for the coffin shelf and, yes, one of these won. But so not only did I get the information on hey, which main image should I use for this listing? But take a look at the analysis of what people were writing. So these are real Amazon buyers writing their thoughts about why they picked each one of these. And then take a look. It says a person A said this showed me all of the accessories and multiple angles of the box. Okay, option A’s image seems to present the shelf really well. Option A shows the coffin open and closed. The coffin is also displayed at different angles for better understanding.

Bradley:

So what did I find out here, guys? This product is a, not one product. It’s a coffin shelf and it’s a coffin gift box. I thought it was completely obvious about what is the value at it. Like I’ll say, hey, this is going to be amazing for me because I’m going to be the only one that has a coffin gift box and a coffin shelf two products in one. But now, all of a sudden, without even knowing it, just by running this helium to an audience powered by pick food test, I was able to see that no, it’s not that obvious that this is two different products. Most people thought it was just showing the cover of the product or showing it at different angles. So now I got to go back and kind of like reimagine how I am presenting this. So that’s just like one of the many ways that you can, you know, use this in order to get insights.

Bradley:

So how it works is you just go into Helium 10 audience Anybody has access to this as a Helium 10 account you hit create new poll and then you have these templates that you can choose from. You can use a poll builder, you can build from scratch. You can say, hey, I’m comparing A plus content. Hey, I’m comparing bullet points, I’m comparing titles, I’m comparing videos, websites. I mean there’s a whole plethora of things you can compare and then you can choose your audience and then from there, helium 10 audience is going to go out and pull 50 people or more If you chose that of a certain demographic, and then now you can get customized feedback exactly about your product from your target demographic. So, guys, if you are not using helium 10 audience for every launch before your launch, you’re leaving money on the table. There are some people who use this for even the product research, just like Ksenia did Like.

Bradley:

Okay, I’m not 100% sure what design I want. Let me throw three designs and get some feedback from customers. So, guys, this is something that a lot of you are sleeping on. Make sure to get in there to Helium 10 audience and run this as much as possible to get those insights. That’s going to help push you ahead of the competition. All right, guys. That’s it for the news this week. Thank you so much for tuning in. We’ll be back next week, uh, but we probably carry uh. The next time I’m going to be back here, I’m going to have a lot less hair. I let myself my hair go those of you watching this on YouTube for about three, four months but I think I’m going to get a haircut couple weeks after my trips. I said I was taking to India and turkey and Philippines and I’ll be back here to help you see what’s buzzing.

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Want to absolutely start crushing it on Amazon? Here are few carefully curated resources to get you started: 

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