Navigating Amazon Compliance and New Market Trends

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 is responsible for dangerous products sold on its site, federal agency rules
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/consumer/amazon-responsible-dangerous-products-sold-site-federal-agency-rules-rcna164309

Etsy Is Getting Loyalty Program for Its Most Dedicated Shoppers
https://gizmodo.com/etsy-is-getting-loyalty-program-for-its-most-dedicated-shoppers-2000481536

AWS Outage Hits Amazon Services, Ring, Whole Foods, Alexa
https://www.crn.com/news/cloud/2024/aws-outage-hits-amazon-services-ring-whole-foods-alex

Amazon looks to reduce costs to compete more aggressively on price as consumer habits shift
https://www.geekwire.com/2024/amazon-looks-to-reduce-costs-to-compete-more-aggressively-on-price/

Dozens of angry Chinese suppliers swarmed Temu's office, saying they're tired of giving Westerners refunds without returns
https://www.businessinsider.com/temus-office-besieged-chinese-suppliers-protesting-refund-policy-2024-7

New landing page in Sponsored Brands Grow brand impression share goal
https://advertising.amazon.com/en-us/resources/whats-new/grow-brand-impression-share-with-new-landing-page/

Scale your message with priority delivery using Prime Video programmatic guaranteed deals
https://advertising.amazon.com/en-us/resources/whats-new/scale-your-message-using-prime-video-programmatic-guaranteed-deals/

Harvest high performing targets with Target Promotion, now available for Sponsored Products advertisers in UCM ads console
https://advertising.amazon.com/en-us/resources/whats-new/target-promotion-for-sponsored-products/

This episode is jam-packed with news and insights to help you stay ahead in the competitive world of selling on Amazon, Walmart, and ecommerce!

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

• 00:50 - Amazon Recall Change
• 02:40 - New Bullet Point Rules
• 06:23 - Etsy Prime?
• 07:01 - Amazon Outage
• 07:43 - New Amazon Fees
• 09:50 - Amazon Cost Cutting
• 11:30 - Product Images Update
• 13:22 - On Time Delivery Policy
• 15:42 - Temu Sellers Gone Wild
• 17:38 - Labor Day Sale
• 18:16 - FBA Capacity Fees
• 19:51 - New Sponsored Brand Page
• 21:24 - Prime Video Ads
• 22:03 - Keyword Harvesting
• 24:04 - Sellerfest Online Event

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Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Amazon is changing its bullet point requirements. There is yet another new fee that Amazon sellers are going to have to pay. Temu sellers in China storm the Temu offices in protest. This and more on today's Weekly Buzz. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Series 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. Let's see what's buzzing. Today might be a first. There's so much news today. I think there might be a total of 14 or possibly more news articles that affect e-commerce sellers out there. So a very abnormal week. Let's go ahead and hop right into it.

Bradley Sutton:

The first news story that we're going to talk about today is from NBC News and it is entitled Amazon is responsible for dangerous products sold in its site. Federal agency rules, all right. So the Consumer Product Safety Commission is classifying Amazon, it says, as a distributor of the product and therefore bears legal responsibility for a recall. You know, in the past Amazon kind of like had this stance where they're like hey, we're not the sellers. It's third party sellers. You know like we'll do what we can to keep customers safe, but we're not the ones who are responsible for it. But now this ruling says that Amazon has to notify customers about and remove products deemed dangerous that it sells through its website. Federal regulators ruled on Tuesday, all right. So basically it's saying that, hey, amazon bears legal responsibility for product recalls, even if they are sold by us. You know, third party sellers. I guess there was a few years ago, three years ago, there was about 400,000 products sold that had faulty carbon monoxide alarms and and flammable children's pajamas, that's. I shouldn't laugh at that. But that's like who? Who is selling flammable children's pajamas? Like what kind of quality control are you guys doing? And flammable hairdryer, and they're subject to this order. But you know Amazon says it's already removed and notified customers about it. But anyways, you know like this might seem like, hey, we're not selling flammable pajamas, what does this have to do with me? But you know if this requires a lot more procedures or things that Amazon is going to have to do, well, you know there's costs that come with that and we might see some of the cost of that. Now, on the flip side. You know, let's say, there are sellers from other countries, like factories that are are selling, you know, not high quality things that are dangerous. Now it looks like maybe Amazon might take a more proactive approach and so you know, hey, this could help Amazon sellers long term.

Bradley Sutton:

Next article is going to Seller Central. Spend a little bit of time on this one because this is interesting. I think a lot of sellers are going to find this important and it's entitled Review Updated Bullet Point Requirements to Optimize your Listing. All right, so effective in a couple of weeks, on August 15, 2024,. It says Amazon is updating its bullet point requirements. All right, so we announced this a long time ago, actually, where it was for hardline. Now it says here that the main points is restriction of special characters, emojis and some phrases such as refund related guarantees. Now, supposedly, you know like Amazon a while back said no more emojis, but we haven't seen that policed too much. So now that it's kind of like coming out with it a little bit in a more official capacity, perhaps like could this mean that you know, listings might start getting suppressed, or things like that. Well, let's read on here. Other thing is it says is that one change is you're going to have guidance to help you create high quality bullet points that are clear and concise.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, now here's the thing. They're going to use AI to help optimize listing quality. They're going to remove non-compliant content and use AI to generate compliant, high quality bullet points. Supposedly they're going to share these with you for review before published. But again, this is kind of like something like before. We talked about how Amazon has image requirements, we're going to talk about that later and then, if you're not meeting the requirements, amazon could go in there and change your images. They can go in there and change your title, and then you're kind of stuck with that. So, buyer beware now, hey us. Or seller beware. I guess I should say, if you're a seller, who's kind of like towing the line and then using emojis or using things that you shouldn't. Potentially this kind of like policy might state that, hey, you're giving Amazon the right to go in there and put some AI thing or put what it thinks is valid, and in the past, when Amazon does that, you know, be it with images or be it with titles, once that happens, it's like you can't change it back, right. So it's kind of a serious thing Now that article that was in your seller central dashboard.

Bradley Sutton:

It says hey, don't put a sense, don't put N a or not applicable or not eligible or TBD or copy pending. Don't do any of that. It says don't use phrases such as eco-friendly, environmentally friendly, ecologically friendly antibacterial made from bamboo I didn't realize. Made from bamboozle. I have a bamboo brand. I didn't realize. Made from bamboo. I have a bamboo brand. I didn't realize that that's not allowed. Made from soy or contained soy. You can't say hey, if not satisfied, send it back. Full refund, unconditional guarantee with no limit, not allowed to say those things. Obviously no company information there, no repetition.

Bradley Sutton:

It says and then you have to include at least three bullet points as far as character limits, as hey, uh, use more than 10 characters but less than 255, uh characters. So something to think about. Like, uh, you might want to do an audit on your listings. Make sure that you're compliant instead of like just taking the chance that you know Amazon might just slap you on the wrist and you can just remove your emojis or something later on. So curious, what do you the wrist and you can just remove your emojis or something later on. So I'm curious, are you guys going to just take this seriously, or maybe think that's kind of like their image requirements where Amazon doesn't enforce it too much, or hey, they've been saying bullet points, no emojis for years and I've been able to get away with it. What are you going to do? Are you going to keep going or are you going to actually change it this time? Let me know in the comments below.

Bradley Sutton:

Next article is from Gizmodo and it's entitled Etsy is getting a loyalty program for its most dedicated shopper. So this is going to be an invite only closed beta. It's going to cost $5 a month and kind of like. Makes me think of Walmart plus. You know Amazon prime target three, 60, where it's a membership buyer called Etsy insider. So it's not called Etsy Prime, but it's called Etsy Insider and it's going to offer exclusive benefits to buyers. So something very similar perhaps to what you guys know about Amazon Prime is now coming to Etsy. So is that going to increase sales, increase loyalty on the Etsy platform? Will be interesting to find out.

Bradley Sutton:

Next article is from CRN.com and it's entitled AWS outage has Amazon services, ring, whole foods and Alexa. Um, you know a lot of stuff in this article. Maybe doesn't, you think doesn't apply. But this is maybe what happened. Like how many of you guys out there, I saw a lot of message boards and groups where, talking about a few days ago, the seller central dashboard was glitching like crazy, you couldn't even get into your Amazon advertising, et cetera. So it probably is related to this. So I saw some people saying, hey, is it just me or you're not able to get your data? Well, it's no, it wasn't just you. There was this big outage that even affected whole foods, uh, supermarkets from Amazon. So don't worry, it looks like everything's back to normal. Uh, but you weren't the only one affected, if that was affecting you.

Bradley Sutton:

Next article, back to Seller Central Dashboard, and it's entitled Digital Service Fees Effective October 1st. So guess what, guys? We have got yet another set of fees, but it's not anything huge and it's because of some kind of regulation. So it says the Canadian government recently implemented a DST Digital Services Tax similar to those of the UK, France, Italy and Spain, and so on October 1st, we're going to start introducing a digital services fee to account for DST. Now, who does this apply to? All right, well, this DST rate is 2% in the UK, 3% in Canada, France, Italy and Spain. But it depends on the location of the buyer, the location of your business, et cetera.

Bradley Sutton:

So if you are a USA seller and you only sell in US, all right, so you're a US-based company and you're selling Amazon USA, you're not going to have to worry about any of this. All right, it's not going to apply. But if you sell in Amazon USA but your business is established in a country in which DST has been introduced UK, France, Spain, Canada now the sales in your Amazon USA store is going to apply to this DST fee. All right, so it is a 3% fee in the US store. Now you might be thinking 3%, good grief. Now that's crazy. If I'm already paying 15%, what? It's 18%? No, it's 3% of your Amazon seller fees. So if your seller fee is $2.25, like it is on a $15 item, you're paying only 7 cents more because it's 3% of that 225, as opposed to 3% of the 15. All right. And another example they gave here is if your product is in the UK, uh, that's going to be a 2% fee based on the Amazon fee, all right. So, so make sure to check your dashboard If you're not sure. Hey, is this going to apply to you? Um, you know, if you're outside of Canada and these other places, check the fee schedule in your dashboard for more information. But hey, it's not going to be a surprise if something is coming months from now and Amazon is giving everybody a heads up on it.

Bradley Sutton:

The next article here is from CRN.com and it's entitled Amazon looks to reduce costs to compete more aggressively on price as consumer habits shift. All right, so a lot of this was on their Q2 report. You know they actually had some. The shares of Amazon went down. But whenever you have these reports there's always some interesting tidbits that Amazon kind of like not leaks but mentions, and it kind of can give you insights into what their plan is in the future. And then one thing that Andy Jassy was saying is they're trying to make cost improvements, all right. And the thing that I thought affected sellers is. It says here Jassy said that the company will expand its use of automation and robots, continue to build out its same day delivery network Okay, great so far further regionalize its inbound network and strive for better inventory placement. He says it's going to enable faster speeds, more orders per box, and then here we go Fewer inventory transfers once items hit fulfillment centers. So that's the part that I liked. The other stuff, whether Amazon's using robots or not I don't know how that's going to affect me, but how many times have you had some inventory and all of a sudden it goes into transfer status or reserve status and then a lot of times that's because Amazon's having to move it around to different warehouses. Well, I think this is definitely going to help because the less you know, the more it kind of like you know distributes your inventory in a correct way and doesn't have to redistribute. Well, that's going to. That's going to help. You know your, your buyability, in my opinion, and how much you know units you have available to sellers or to buyers, and then you then it's going to help the shipping times as well. So let's see how this works out, if sellers are going to have an advantage because of these changes.

Bradley Sutton:

Our next article is going back to the Seller Central dashboard and it's entitled Update to how Product Detail Page Images Are Selected. So back in January on the Weekly Buzz, we had talked about how product details pages for hard lines product types are going to start displaying, potentially, images from multiple sellers. All right, now, in the coming months, this article says it's going to now include both soft lines and consumable products types. All right, and supposedly this is going to help increase sales. Um, but you know the they made a couple of tweaks to it since January. All right, they're going to prioritize brand owner images, thank goodness. All right. So if you're a brand registered owner, it's not like you're just going to automatically get your images removed. Um, and they're only going to use Amazon or brand registered sellers content If the required images are missing in the product detail page or to upgrade low quality content.

Bradley Sutton:

So this is what I talked about a little bit earlier, about what's going on, where sometimes, if Amazon says, hey, if you're not hitting our requirements on images, on title, on bullet points, we're going to step in and make necessary changes that we see fit. Now, again, this is the thing that I brought up like seven months ago, back in January. That I thought was super noteworthy, and they're reiterating it here. It says, as a reminder, each product detail page must have at least three required images one with the product on white background main image. One with a product in an environment that's what we call lifestyle images and one with product information such as dimensions or nutritional facts. This is an infographic. January was the first time I ever saw this where Amazon is basically saying you need a white background image, you need an infographic. January was the first time I ever saw this where Amazon is basically saying you need a white background image, you need an infographic and a lifestyle image. So they're reiterating that requirement. Now, you know, like three years ago you never, you only saw the white background image and the rest of the images could be whatever you wanted it. So, so make sure your images, guys, are in compliance.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, the next article back to the seller central dashboard. I mean, it seems like they they just seems like they just spit all these things out back to back to back 're going to have to maintain a 90% OTDR on time delivery rate. All right, I don't know what it was before. I mean, 90% seems pretty reasonable, like I thought it was a hundred percent that you pretty much had to do, but it's recommending that you actually do 95% according to this article. And obviously this does not apply at all to FBA, you know, because sellers aren't responsible for on-time delivery promises. Okay, now another thing is transit time settings. Now, before this September 25th date, on August 25th, the transit time requirements are going to be updated to match delivery capabilities of shipping services. So if you're shipping within the continental US you know that means that's not including Puerto Rico and Hawaii and Alaska you have to have a maximum transit time of only five days for standard and eight days for free economy shipping. Now this is interesting to me because I know some sellers who are doing FBM. You know, including myself.

Bradley Sutton:

You know maybe your initial reaction is like oh, this is going to be a pain in the neck. But remember what was announced in the Weekly Buzz a few weeks ago by Carrie about how Amazon might have like a Teemu-ish kind of like setup where Chinese sellers can ship directly within like eight to 10 days. Well, if that happens, who knows, maybe this is kind of like a protection for those of you shipping for full but fulfilled by merchant domestically, where you're going to have a guaranteed advantage over those Chinese direct shipping where you know the buyer is going to see five days delivery time, all right. So this five day delivery time, it's because Amazon's going to be displaying this as the as the shipping time for the product. And then if the Temu ish ones have like eight to 10 days, well, you, the Temu-ish ones have like eight to 10 days. Well, you know, this might help you know the buyability of your products. There's a lot more information here in this detailed article on your Seller Central dashboard, so make sure to check it out when you can. If you are an FBM seller, if you do 100% FBA, you can just go ahead and forget about that article, as it doesn't apply to you.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, speaking of Temu, this next article is kind of funny. Like sometimes, I think, amazon sellers, you know, like, especially when I read message boards, they get on the same page. They want to complain about the same thing of Amazon. Have you guys ever fantasized about or like thought about, let's all get together and let's like storm Amazon's headquarters not storm it, but, like you know, let's go there and let Bezos or let Jassy know how we feel and see if we can get up a meeting. Well, that might seem comical and like not realistic, but that is like literally what happened in Temu last week. All right, so this is an article for Business Insider and it says dozens of angry Chinese suppliers swarmed Temu's office saying they're tired of giving Westerners refunds without returns. Now, 80 people got in the building. There's like 300 people this article says was protesting and then 80 of them actually were able to storm the building here and they're disgruntled. So I know we're kind of jealous of what's going on with Temu sellers. Man, how could we ever match the prices? But not all is rosy over there. So these Temu suppliers are upset that Temu is trying to recruit US-based sellers and they're also upset about the refund policy.

Bradley Sutton:

So if they ship something from China to the customer and the customer says you know what, I don't like this product, it looks like I didn't realize this. I've never bought one thing from Temu myself, but Temu just returns the money and they don't even have to return the product to the, the product to the customer. So, like the sellers are up in arms about this. One merchant said told this Chinese newspaper that he lost almost all of his profits when he was fined $400,000 for customer refunds and complaints. First of all, holy crap, if he profited $400,000, how much did he actually sell in the last you know a few months? But anyways, this is what's going on in Temu. Don't get any ideas, guys. I don't think if 300 of you tried to storm Amazon Seattle offices that 80 are going to get through. Pretty sure Amazon has got some pretty tight security over here.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. Next article, again going back to Seller Central. It's not necessarily a prime day, but there is going to be a special Labor Day sale that Amazon is going to have. All right, it's actually entitled Labor Day sale and this is going to begin August 26th and runs through September 3rd. All right, so right. There's going to be deals that you can offer and these are time bound promotional offers and go to advertising, go to deals hit, create new deals and then select the week of the 26th and then that's going to go ahead and see if you're eligible to be able to have a special Labor Day sale deal. All right, the next article is for the last time, I believe again going back to Seller Central Dashboard, and this is an article about peak readiness and timelines for FBA capacity limits.

Bradley Sutton:

Now a couple important things. Number one a date that you have to keep in mind. It says if you want to guarantee you're going to have the prime badge for black Friday we're looking way ahead you have to have your inventory in the fulfillment centers by October 19th. So set a reminder for yourself. However you ship your inventory to Amazon, you've got to have it in the fulfillment centers by October 19th. Now that's kind of crazy if you think about it. When is Black Friday? Isn't that like November? You got to get your stuff. Don't think that you're going to send it in the beginning of November. You got to get your stuff in there pretty early. And one more thing here about fees and actual elimination of a fee. You know for once. Isn't that nice. It says additionally, to help you simplify operations and manage inventory more efficiency during peak, we have eliminated this overage fee for storage effective July 1st 2024. So if your on-hand inventory exceeds your capacity limit, you are not going to get this overage fee. All right. So that's, how often is it that there's a reduction or elimination of fees? Usually the announcements we we give her are about new fees that Amazon is charging. So that's a nice little welcome surprise from Amazon this week. If you want more information on that, make sure to check that news article in your dashboard.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, now we've got a few Amazon ads announcements, all right. So for those of you who are doing PPC, we have got some advanced ones, some beginners ones. Let's go ahead and hop into that. The first one from Amazon advertising. They announced new landing page in sponsored brand grow brand impression share goal Right. So what is this? That launch says the sponsored brand grow brand impression share campaign now allows advertisers to utilize a new landing page option in the product collection ad format. So you can select three products to advertise and then that's going to lead shoppers from a top of search ad to a new brand landing page containing these products.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. So one of the differences is now this is a new type of landing page that Amazon creates that buyers can land on. So sellers who even don't have a formally prerequisite Amazon store brand store which hopefully you guys have, but that used to be a requirement to be able to advertise some of your top of search ads Well, now you don't need that prerequisite stores to say you can just start this campaign super quick and ensure the brand product discovery experience. So where this is is under your goals when you set up a new sponsored brand campaign, one of the goals is grow brand impression share and now you can choose, once you, if you select that one, the product collection ad format, and then there's a brand new section right here that says new landing page and says pick products to advertise and we'll create a landing page for you here. For those of you watching on YouTube, I'm showing an example of the shoe brand. Who's got one of these set up right now and where this is now available. It's across the board North America, south America, Europe, middle East and Asia Pacific East and Asia Pacific. Next news article from Amazon advertising.

Bradley Sutton:

It says scale your message with priority delivery using Prime Video programmatic guaranteed deals. I'm not going to go too much into details because probably not that many of you are using Prime Video ads, but basically they launch programmatic guaranteed deals for Prime Video so you can have run of service deals, contextual deals that can go on, like you know top best of TV shows, page best of movies, best of Prime Video originals, et cetera, and then audience based deals. Check the link in the comments below or the description below If you want, if you're somebody who uses Prime Video ads and you can get a little bit more information on this. Last article of the day is an announcement from Amazon Advertising says on this last article of the day is an announcement from amazon advertising says harvest high performing targets with target promotion now available for sponsored products advertisers. So this is kind of like funny. It's like like very similar to what like atomic and another you know PPC software does where you can supposedly harvest keywords from like auto campaigns and move it to a manual. Now I tried to test this in my account and it wasn't working. So like just got a bunch of error messages. But for those of you who aren't using software, you know this is a potential option for you. Um, I'm not sure I can suggest using it yet because I got to see first how the suggestions work. You know, like if Amazon's algorithms was perfect in advertising, they wouldn't we wouldn't even have to negative match keywords because once we get like 30, 40 clicks they would start negative matching itself. But no, if we don't do anything, amazon's still going to keep charging us. So you know that in mind, like I'm not sure if we can, you know, quote unquote just trust this Amazon suggestion thing to move keywords in the right way. But who knows, maybe it's going to be pretty cool thing to move keywords in the right way. But who knows, maybe it's going to be pretty cool.

Bradley Sutton:

But for me it doesn't affect me much because I've been doing keyword harvesting for four years using Helium 10 Atomic. I set my rules and I say, hey, if one of my auto or broad campaign gets two orders at this ACoS or less, I want you to go ahead and move it to this campaign and I could exactly set up the flow. So there's nothing that is coming out here that is going to really affect the way I do things, but maybe for those of you who are just trying to eyeball your Amazon advertising and not even using the search term reports and not making pivot tables and not using software or whatever, maybe this might be a feature that can help you a little bit. So check out your advertising console, go to one of your auto campaigns, go to the ad group, go to the search terms page and take a look there. Does it show you something that? Uh? Does it give you suggestions on what you can move? Uh, it did it on mine because it was broken, but maybe it's working on yours. Let me know what you think and I'll leave a message in the comments below. All right, that's finally it for the news this week.

Bradley Sutton:

One last thing I wanted to give you a heads up. I'm going to be giving some cool strategies at the Seller Fest online next week. So if you want to get free tickets. I think it's free. I'm not sure if it's free or not but for more information, go to h10.me/sellerfest. Even if you have to pay, it'll be worth it. There's going to be tons of great speakers uh, other than myself as well, so I'm sure you're going to get a lot of value. h10.me/sellerfest for more information. All right, guys who that literally made a record? We've been doing Weekly Buzz for four years and this was the most articles, the most news stories in one week that we have ever had. So thank you, guys. For those of you who stuck to the end, let's see what's going to happen next week. Make sure to tune in next Thursday or Friday to see what's buzzing.