E-commerce Insights: Amazon, TikTok, and eBay Developments

Amazon changes the game for retail advertising. TikTok Shop is opening in a surprisingly new country. eBay makes a move to join a popular social media network. These buzzing stories and more on this episode!

► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast

► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension

► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup  (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life)

► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft

► Watch The Podcasts On YouTube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos

We’re back with another episode of the Weekly Buzz with Helium 10’s VP of Education and Strategy, 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 aims to expand advertising business by letting retailers use its ad tools on their stores
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/09/amazon-to-expand-ad-unit-by-letting-retailers-use-ad-tools-on-stores.html

Title Rule Clarifications
https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-forums/discussions/t/3c9f0b3c-4594-4efc-a05f-0f8d371fa466

How TikTok Shop is changing the way brands reach customers
https://www.retaildive.com/news/how-tiktok-shop-is-changing-the-way-brands-reach-customers/736726/

EBay shares soar after Meta allows listings on Facebook Marketplace in U.S., Europe
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/08/ebay-shares-soar-as-meta-allows-listings-on-facebook-marketplace.html

Conversion Path Reporting (beta)
https://advertising.amazon.com/en-us/resources/whats-new/ad-touchpoints-drive-sales-with-conversion-path-reporting/

TikTok expands e-commerce operation into Mexico amid potential US ban
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/tiktok-expands-e-commerce-operation-093000468.html

Switching gears, we explore the new features in Helium 10’s Magnet and Cerebro keyword translations, designed to aid sellers operating in multilingual marketplaces. The training tip of the week highlights Helium 10's exclusive Amazon Recommended Rank feature in Cerebro, which evaluates how relevant Amazon considers specific keywords for your product, scoring them. This tool helps sellers identify potential ranking, indexing, or advertising issues, especially for new products, by analyzing the top 20 keywords and ensuring Amazon correctly understands your product's relevance. Listen in for these crucial updates and insights that will help you stay ahead in the competitive world of e-commerce.

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

• 00:54 - Amazon Retail Ad Service
• 02:27 - Title Rule Clarifications
• 06:46 - TikTok Shop Stats
• 08:50 - eBay x Facebook
• 10:02 - Amazon Conversion Path Reporting
• 11:07 - TikTok Shop Mexico
• 12:24 - Helium 10 New Feature Alerts
• 14:19 - Training Tip: Amazon Recommended Rank

Bradley Sutton:

Amazon changes the game for retail advertising. TikTok shop is opening in a surprising new country. eBay makes a move to join with a popular social media network. 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 Weekly Buzz. We give you a rundown of all the goings on in the Amazon, TikTok shop and e-commerce world. We give you training tips of the week and let you know what new features that 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 All For serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Let's see what's buzzing All. Right, this is the first buzz of the new year, or second buzz of the new year, I should say. Let's go ahead and hop into it.

Bradley Sutton:

The first thing we're going to talk about is an announcement they made at CES this week. The one who's reporting on it is actually CNBC, and the article is entitled Amazon aims to expand advertising business by letting retailers use its ad tools on their store. So some of the TLDR here is that Amazon is letting other retailers now use its own homegrown advertising tools to run sponsored ads on their own website. The service is designed to make it easier for other retailers to run targeted ad campaigns on their online stores. All right, so, as we know, ads has been big, you know, for Amazon over the years. We know that as Amazon sellers. But this is this is different. All right, so basically, like, let's say, I've got my own retail website, I can now use Amazon's advertising console to use the ad tech or the technology the advertising technology that Amazon has to run ads on my product pages on my website, on search, and this is going to help Amazon. You know like build it's like and how it can anticipate buyer behavior and things, but it's going to help. You know retailers as well, because you know, obviously, amazon's advertising system is very robust and you don't even have I believe you don't even have to be selling on amazon to take advantage of this service. So, uh, this is going to be interesting to watch as it rolls out and how this this changes the game for retailers. Perhaps you know, like, how many are going to adopt the amazon advertising um, as opposed to whatever they were using before. How many might start advertising more because of what's going on be definitely worth taking a look at.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, last week we talked about the new title requirements and there was an Ask Me Anything in the Amazon forums a few days ago that kind of clarified some things and even some things that I was confused about. I'm not sure if I said it wrong last week, but like I probably read it right, but for sure I understood it wrong last week. But like I probably read it right, but for sure I understood it wrong. All right. The way I understood the title was that you can't duplicate words in the title. Did some of you guys get that too out of what their announcement was? But actually the fine print says you can't have more than two. All right, it's not, it's not. You can't have two or more, it's more than two. Little bit of dyslexia there, um. So basically that means if I have the word in the title you know, coffin shelf uh, for home decor, something, something coffin, blah, blah, blah, blah. That's okay. Last week, when I read this, I thought that wasn't okay, um, because I just must've switched the words when I was looking at it.

Bradley Sutton:

But that's the first big thing that came from this AMA, but let's go ahead and open up some more of the questions and answers. There's some things that you guys might have had that I think are notable. Here is one question that I know a lot of us had. It said are the plural and singular versions of a word considered the same and count towards the maximum? And this seller said for example, if I had cake pan, loaf pan and muffin pans, is the word pans counted as the same as pan? And then that would make it three times, meaning that it's above two, meaning that that's against Amazon terms of service. And Jim from Amazon replied plural of the same word would be considered redundant. In the example you provided, pan and pans imply the same and thus it would be considered duplicate. All right, so there's the. I know people are asking about that. How are plurals considered? That's the answer, right there.

Bradley Sutton:

Another question was from what impact will it have if we don't update? Changing the title like this could significantly affect our search traffic. And Jim says if the title is not updated, amazon will modify the product title to comply with a new policy, while retaining all relevant information. All right. So there you have it? It like you're not going to get your listing suppressed per se, but amazon's going to go in and change your title. Sounds like Another question by PTC Tim Do words that are part of the brand name count towards the count of reusing a word?

Bradley Sutton:

For example, if the brand name is Muffin King, could they have a title such as Muffin King Beginner's Kit includes chocolate chip and banana nut muffin mixes and a 12 muffin pan. All right, so muffin is there three times in singular version. So you might think, oh, that can't be allowed. But Jim from Amazon says no, this will not be considered a policy violation, because the word or phrase is considered duplicate only when there are three or more instances in the same context. But muffin, the first instance is a brand name and the other two describe the product. So if you have a word that's part of your brand like maybe my brand was Manny's Coffin Shelves that first coffin doesn't count as the use of the word coffin in the title. That makes sense.

Bradley Sutton:

Another person asked a question and says you know, there were some punctuation marks that were listed, like dollar sign, question mark, underscore, et cetera, and it says are these the only special characters allowed? What about dash colon, open parentheses, close parentheses, et cetera, and Jameson actually answered. He said hyphen, colon and regular brackets are allowed as they often have functional value. Uh, there actually were some other uh characters not allowed that Amazon didn't announce. And these are the tilde, you know, like the little ñ that goes over the N in Spanish when you say baño right. The greater than and less than symbols, those are not allowed. The semicolon is not allowed and the I don't know how you describe it, but it looks like a top of a house, the roof of a house. That symbol is not allowed. There were more different kind of like specifications and questions that people had that you might want to look at. So make sure to check the link in the comments to see some of the more the other clarifications on this new title policy.

Bradley Sutton:

Next article we have here comes from Retail Dive and it's entitled how TikTok Shop is Changing the Way Brands Reach Customers. All right, so there's I brought this up because there's a lot of just interesting kind of like factoids here, and one of them it says 70% of TikTok users say they discover new brands and products on the platform 70%, that's crazy and 83% report TikTok playing a role in users' purchase decisions. I guarantee you we're not seeing that kind of stuff on Temu, right? The company also reports that three in four users are likely to buy something while using TikTok. Think about that, guys. How many users of TikTok are there? And three in four are likely to buy something. You might think, well, that's not something that you know. All marketplaces everybody should be buying something. But remember, TikTok is not a marketplace, TikTok is a social media. If you think three out of four people on Instagram are buying something, three out of four people on YouTube are buying something, it's like I don't know what the number is. It's probably like less than one in 10, one in 20. So this is like kind of an astronomical number.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, why is TikTok so powerful? One reason is here. It says nearly three in five Gen Z consumers say they trust recommendations by local or micro influencers. Per a survey, over a quarter of US consumers who responded to the survey reported buying a gift directly based on an influencer's recommendations. That's kind of crazy and that's what drives, you know, TikTok shop sales is influencers and micro influencers. So, guys, if you're not selling on TikTok shop, you know, get out and do it. We have some, uh, some training on how to get started. We're going to have some more training. We're going to have, like, different tools that, uh, you guys might ask for that that would help you sell on TikTok shop. But, um, I was trying to. I'm starting to ramp up. I launched a couple more products on TikTok shop last night. I'm going to keep launching some products and let you guys know what I find, but I really think that TikTok shop is going to be one of the major marketplaces moving forward.

Bradley Sutton:

Speaking of different marketplaces, let's switch gear and talk about a marketplace that I barely ever talk about but I actually personally sell on. That's eBay. All right, so this is articles from CNBC. It says eBay shares soar after. Meta allows listings on Facebook marketplace in US and Europe. All right. So in Germany, France and the US. What's going to happen is eBay listings are now going to be able to show up in Facebook marketplace. All right. So like that's going to give eBay listings a lot of visibility. So let's say I'm browsing on Facebook and I go to the Marketplace or maybe, who knows, maybe there'll be some way to put ads like in my Facebook feed. I'm going to be able to click on that product and then purchase it by signing in on eBay, I believe right there on the Facebook app still. So imagine being on Facebook, going to the Helium 10 members Facebook group, because you're getting all the good information there, and then you see an ad or something for an eBay product and while still on Facebook, you go ahead and purchase. I mean, if that's the way it's going to work, that's going to be, I think that might be a little bit successful for eBay. I'm definitely going to look into it for my eBay listings that I have. How many of you guys sell on eBay out there? Let me know in the comments below.

Bradley Sutton:

Going back to the Amazon marketplace, last week, in case you missed it, there was a new conversion path reporting, a beta program that Amazon has. It kind of like reminds me of how AMC is set up, but now you're going to be able to see the ad touch points on a customer's 30-day path to conversion, starting with the purchases. All right, so this is available in sponsored ads and DSP. Make sure to check the link in the article below for more links on where you can find it, but like you'll be able to see oh, they saw the streaming TV, then they went to a sponsored display ad and then they went to a sponsored video ad. They saw a sponsored product ad. Now, this is good information, but there's definitely some things missing. Like you can't see the ACOS, like all right, great, I see that this kind of ad is what drove my sale, but my ACOS on that exact ad was like 400%. It's not exactly viable, right. So I mean, it's not perfect, but this is great, you know, step in the right direction as far as visibility goes with your advertising.

Bradley Sutton:

Going back to TikTok, now guess what? TikTok is opening up a new marketplace and it's right here in North America. It is opening to Mexico. Per Yahoo Finance says TikTok expands e-commerce operation into Mexico and it says that they've already started inviting merchants to open stores on the platform ahead of the expected startup transactions in February. Now, who can sign up for Amazon or TikTok shop Mexico? Merchants with a locally registered entity are eligible to sign up. Now, that's interesting, because what's the requirement for USA? As we know, you could have a local entity being a US corporation, but if you're a foreigner with no US employees and nobody with a social security number, you can't sign up. But if this is to be taken at face value, you maybe can be a foreigner, but as long as you have a Mexican entity or business, it looks like you might be able to sign up on the platform and the first 90 days of activity for TikTok shop Mexico zero commission, zero commission fee in Mexico, or have a Mexican entity. Make sure to go ahead and consider starting up on the platform.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, let's go into our new feature alerts now. This one is going to be for, I believe, all plans, Platinum and Diamond. It's been for elite for a while because it was actually elite members who first asked for this, but this is going to be in Magnet and Cerebro, um, at the start. It might be in other tools, but what sellers were looking for was a way to translate keywords. All right, like this could be, for, let's say, you're in the US marketplace and you see a whole bunch of Spanish keywords and you're just curious what it means. Well, what people were doing is that they would copy the keywords from Helium 10 and then put it to Google Translate or something like that.

Bradley Sutton:

Or let's say you're doing keyword research in a marketplace that is not your native language, like maybe you're trying to make a listing for Amazon Japan. Of course, you can use Helium 10 Listing Builder to make a listing in Japanese, but you want to make sure you're feeding it the right keywords and you don't know what the keywords mean in Japanese. Well, this is what you can do. If you go into Listing Builder or into Cerebro, there will be a translate button right here, all right. So if you got the results in Magnet or Cerebro, just hit that and then you can go from, like English to Spanish, to German, to Chinese, et cetera, and you're going to have an option Like I'm going to pretend that maybe I'm somebody from China and I'm not. I don't speak English that well. Well, I'm going to go ahead and translate these English results into Chinese by default. It's actually going to show up right underneath the actual English keyword or whatever keyword or language you're looking at, but I can also change it where I can have it in a separate column, all right. So here now, all of a sudden, side by side, I've got the English keyword and the Chinese translation side by side. So this definitely helps English speaking people who are doing research in other languages or are curious what kind of meaning some of the keywords that are coming up in your own marketplace that are in different language, or if you speak a different language and you need just some quick translations, this is going to help. All right.

Bradley Sutton:

Now let's talk about the training tip of the week, and this is actually. I'm still going to stay right here in Cerebro, actually, and I want to show you guys something again. Only Helium 10 has this, and what it is the Amazon recommended rank. So actually here in Cerebro, I've got my coffin shelf here Now. This is especially helpful if you ever start getting ranking issues like you start losing your rank, or if you maybe like lose indexing somehow, or maybe there's some keywords that you know you're relevant for in your index for, but you just can't get PPC impressions. This is especially helpful when you are first launching a product. As a matter of fact, you know, like this is what I've been teaching for the last two years, where if you launch a product, I say that you almost should always do a test listing first that you're not really going to sell, but just to check this metric and this is Amazon relevancy.

Bradley Sutton:

Everybody always uses the term relevant and we can kind of insinuate hey, what is relevant for a product due to the keywords that are ranking for it. But until Helium 10 had this, you never knew what is really relevant to Amazon. What does Amazon think the product is? This Helium 10 is the only tool that's tying directly to Amazon to give you how relevant Amazon thinks a keyword is for your product and it's called Amazon recommended rank. It's listed from like a score of one to 900. The number one means it's the most relevant according to Amazon, et cetera.

Bradley Sutton:

Now is the number one and number two and number three keywords always the top keywords for your product? No, but looking at the top 20, I always sort it in helium 10. And I look at the top 20 ones and it will tell me is Amazon confused about my product, especially if it's a brand new product, right? So let me just show you, for example, this is my coffin shelf here and if I go to this column of Amazon recommended rank and I hit it, it's going to sort it by the top ones and like look at this number one keyword that Amazon says I'm relevant for coffin shelf wall Manny's mysterious oddities coffin shelf coffin shelf small. So just by looking at these top you know 10 keywords, top 20 or so. Um, I can tell that. Hey, amazon pretty much knows what my product is. Now, something concerning is the actual keyword. Coffin shelf is the only the 28th keyword, so you know what that tells me. I might have some issues with advertising on my product. I might have to look at what's going on, but at the very least Amazon isn't very confused about my product.

Bradley Sutton:

Now let me give you a contrast here. I went to the search results of coffin shelf and obviously my product is on page one. But here I scrolled all the way down to page four and then I saw just some random coffin shelf. Where did it? Here's a coffin shelf very similar to mine Pachyon floating shelves, coffin shape, shelf, wall mouth. This is a terrible title, but you see, their BSR is like 7 million. They are not selling any units at all of this, and they are right, even though this is one of the few coffin shelves. I mean, page two and three and four don't even have that many coffin shelves, because there's not even seven pages worth of coffin shelves.

Bradley Sutton:

So you might be wondering why in the world is this product ranking so low? Well, outside of listing optimization, one of the reasons is the relevancy. Take a look when I run this product in Cerebro and I sort it by Amazon recommended rank. Let's go to that column right here. Look, do you remember what my mind was? Let's just look back here. Remember the top ones coffin wall shelf. Coffin shelf small spooky hanging coffin shelf Halloween decor indoor home. Look at the top keywords of what Amazon thinks is relevant for this poor. Selling coffin shelf. Floating shelf wall. Floating shelf. Selling coffin shelf. Floating shelf wall. Floating shelf. Wall shelves, room wall. Do you notice something? These are just generic keywords. So, for whatever reason, they must not have their listing optimized. Or maybe there's a category issue. But Amazon is not even picking up the word coffin in the top keywords that it is saying it's relevant for. So this product is probably never going to rank very well for coffin shelf. Nor are they going to be able to advertise if they wanted to.

Bradley Sutton:

You can see right here with Helium 10, they're not advertising. But this just kind of like illustrates what can happen if you, if Amazon, gets confused about your product, you're going to have some issues. So make sure to check that out. All levels of Helium 10 can access that platinum diamond and above. Go into Cerebro. Run it on your own product, especially your brand new products. Or if you ever have trouble ranking or indexing and check sorted by the Amazon recommended rank, take a look at those top 20 keywords and see hey, does Amazon kind of like have a good idea about what your product is, or is it confused? And then you can take action from there. All right, guys, that's it for this week's Weekly Buzz. Hope you enjoyed these articles and also these new features and training tips. We'll see you next week to see what's buzzing.