E-commerce Updates: Amazon Reimbursement Changes and TikTok Shop Expansion

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 Inventory Reimbursement Policy Update | Helium 10
https://www.helium10.com/blog/amazon-fba-inventory-reimbursement-policy-update/

TikTok Reportedly Bringing In-App Shopping to Spain and Ireland
https://www.pymnts.com/news/ecommerce/2024/tiktok-reportedly-bringing-in-app-shopping-to-spain-and-ireland/

Additionally, we highlight significant updates on Amazon Seller Central. Discover the enhanced Voice of the Customer dashboard, which now includes new performance metrics and multilingual customer feedback. US-based brand-registered sellers can now create free 3D product models using the Amazon Seller iOS app, offering a 360-degree view to elevate the shopping experience. New brand analytics features are also on the horizon, focusing on customer segmentation to better target new audiences and reduce cart abandonment.

Lastly, we explore Helium 10's AI-powered features in the Listing Builder tool, designed to optimize and generate copy and seasonal AI images for Amazon Posts and product listings. Tune in for a comprehensive rundown of these updates and more!

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

• 00:51 - Amazon Reimbursement Changes
• 02:47 - TikTok Shop Expansion
• 04:00 - Voice of the Customer Updates
• 05:09 - Free 3D Models
• 06:42 - New Customer Segmentation
• 07:34 - Pro Training Tip: New AI Features Of Listing Builder

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Carrie Miller:

Amazon has a new reimbursement policy, TikTok is expanding to even more countries and free 3D models for sellers who have an iOS seller app. This and so much more on today'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'm 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 news 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 will give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Now, today, our host is going to be Carrie Miller. So, Carrie, take it away and let us know what's buzzing.

Carrie Miller:

So the first story is about Amazon changing their reimbursement policy. So, starting November 1st of 2024, amazon is going to proactively reimburse sellers for FBA items that are lost in Amazon fulfillment centers. They're going to issue the reimbursement as soon as an item is reported as a loss by the fulfillment center, which you can actually track in the reimbursements report on seller central, and Amazon is hoping that this is going to be a more seamless experience that's going to save sellers time and money by minimizing the need to manually research and file claims for lost items. However, if you as a seller do not receive an automatic reimbursement and you believe that your inventory has been lost or damaged, then you're going to actually also have to file a manual claim when they don't proactively do it, if there's a glitch in the system. Additionally, any removal claims are still going to be need to be filed manually. Also, starting October 23rd, amazon is actually updating their eligibility window policy, so all manual claims must now be submitted with the following deadlines. So, first, a fulfillment center operations claim for an item that is lost or damaged in the fulfillment center must be submitted no later than 60 days after the item was reported lost or damaged. Second, an FBA customer returns claim can be submitted between 60 to 120 days after the customer refund or replacement date. Claims must not be submitted before 60 days to ensure that the customer has time to return the item to Amazon for processing. Third, a removal claim for items lost in transit can be submitted 15 to 75 days from the shipment creation date. Claims must not be submitted before 15 days to ensure the shipment can be delivered back to you. And then, last, all other removal claims must be filed within 60 days of the shipment being delivered back to you. If you want more information, we actually wrote a blog so you can get that link to that blog in our description. So go ahead and check out the blog and it should answer all of your questions in regards to the new policy.

Carrie Miller:

All right, so next up, we have some TikTok shop news. TikTok shop is allegedly, or reportedly, going to be bringing in-app shopping to Ireland and Spain. According to this article, they're basically saying that they're expanding first to Ireland and Spain and have some plans to expand to more countries in Europe. Now, obviously, TikTok is already in these countries, but this is going to be the in-app shopping piece so that people can actually utilize TikTok shop here. And this is after a few months ago. It talks about here and here that TikTok had planned to bring this shopping feature to Spain, Germany, Italy, France and Ireland earlier this year, but they actually halted that because they wanted to focus on the US market. Now there's a lot of uncertainty with the US market, so they probably are going ahead with the expansion to Europe because of that. So we'll see what happens. I think this is an interesting development. It could be some really great opportunity for sellers to everywhere. So we'll see how this goes and you know, just keep your eye on these European countries. If you are a seller and you can potentially expand out there or, you know, maybe some influencers in these countries can start making money selling on TikTok shop.

Carrie Miller:

All right, next up, we have some information about how the voice of the customer dashboard has been updated as well as there are some new translation features. So Amazon says here to show you how your products perform against industry bank benchmarks, amazon has updated some features on the voice of the customer dashboard. The negative customer experience review rate and the NCX return rate show how your product review and return rates compared to the product category benchmarks. This information enables you to track your product performance over time so you can make informed decisions to improve quality. On the listings detail page, you can you to make corrective action and improve your product offerings. Amazon, finally also has enhanced the customer feedback section by now offering it in multiple languages. Previously it was only available in English and now it's available in multiple languages.

Carrie Miller:

All right, we actually have another update to share that was actually in your Seller Central dashboard and that was where it was announced, and it's for brand registered sellers in the US, and that is that you can now create free that's right, free 3D product models using the Amazon Seller iOS app. These models are gonna provide a 360 degree view of your product, which is going to further enhance your customer's shopping experience. So 3D scanning in the Amazon seller app is actually going to be a guided experience and the eligibility actually depends on the type of product is, because not all products are actually going to be good for a 360 model. So you know things like that more like hard products, and so they're going to look at the product category, the physical properties and other factors. So if your, if your products don't appear in the app for scanning, then that's probably wise because they're not actually eligible. In order to get access to this feature on your phone, you're going to need an iOS or an Apple device, and it has to have iOS 17 or newer, and your device language needs to be set to English. So you're going to also find instructions in the app on how to prepare your product for scanning, and a 3D artist will actually review each scanned model for quality and if your status if you basically it says in progress that means they've successfully received a scan, and then, once they've received the scan, it's going to take about three weeks to complete the model and then make it ready for your customers on your listing and it's going to actually just pop up there automatically, so you don't actually need to kind of check anywhere and upload it yourself. It'll automatically populate. So you just want to keep checking your listing to see if it's been populated.

Carrie Miller:

Okay, this last piece of news is actually with brand analytics. Amazon has actually introduced new brand analytics features that are going to help you to refine your segmentation of customers and help you to engage the following audiences. So the first audience is new audiences. That allows you to highlight declining top tier and declining promising customers segments for insights on groups of likely customers who are forecasted to spend less in the next year, and then next cart abandoners to spend less in the next year, and then next cart abandoners. So this audience is going to help you to engage and convert customers who have added your products to their cart and they have not yet completed their purchase. All right, so that is all the news, and you can see there's a lot going on. You know lots of really important information. So if you want to check anything further out, you can find some of those things in your seller central dashboard with some more information. Or if you want to check out our blog on those reimbursements, you can check that out as well. All right, so let's go ahead and get into our training tip of the week now.

Carrie Miller:

This is going to be in our listing builder, ai. We have a lot of really great ai features throughout helium 10 tools, but I wanted to focus on the ones that are in our listing builder because I think they might be a little bit overlooked or maybe you don't even know that they exist. This is one of our listings, this is our coffin shelf and what you need to do is you're going to just scroll all the way down. So we've already written this one and used AI there. But if you scroll all the way down to the bottom, you're going to see where it says Amazon posts, and sometimes you might have writer's block and not really know what to caption your Amazon posts with and you want to make sure that they're optimized. So what we will do is take the keywords that are in the listing here and just the information from the listing, and it's going to help write some different posts for you. So I just hit write it for me and then you're going to see some fully optimized posts come up here. So, for example, we've got here transform your space with this coffin shelf set, perfect for your goth decor. It includes a skull figurine and led pumpkin candle. Okay, so since ours does not include that, I'm going to just kind of I can just edit this if I wanted to use it. So you can basically kind of use it as a jumping off point and you can just start, you know, editing and doing whatever you need to do. You can also hit rewrite it for me and you can get some more suggestions that are rewritten for you right there and you can utilize those or kind of take some from this one and then add it to this one anything that you want to do, but that is a great way that you can get some optimized content for your Amazon posts.

Carrie Miller:

Next, we have how to generate AI images. Now, this is really cool because you can change these amazing backgrounds. Sometimes, especially going into different holiday seasons, you might want to put your product in a different background with a different holiday season. So all you need to do is just upload your product with a white background here and you'll just click browse and upload that and then you're going to choose a theme. So you could choose you know holiday and maybe you know Halloween or something like that, and it will give you kind of a suggested description. But you can actually edit this and do whatever you want to do.

Carrie Miller:

I already did one for you here. I uploaded this coffin shelf here and I chose holiday and Halloween spookiness, and I actually just kind of changed the item, the image description, and I was able to get some of these. Now, obviously, some of them are not perfect, but you can go ahead and edit the description and then hit generate images. Again. It'll generate some images that are different, so this is a really good place to get some of those really cool backgrounds, especially for those stationary products, and help to make your product look a lot more festive for the holidays or anything else. You can choose any of these themes. You can do home themes, abstract, whatever you want, and then you can choose a theme setting once you get over here. So really great cool things in Helium 10. We're always trying to innovate and give you the latest and greatest tools to help you with your Amazon business. All right, so thank you all for tuning in to this week's Weekly Buzz. We'll see you all next week to see what's buzzing.