FTC Regulations on Fake Online Reviews and Market Insights

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.

YouTube takes on TikTok Shop with expanded Shopify partnership
https://techcrunch.com/2024/08/20/youtube-takes-on-tiktok-shop-with-expanded-shopify-partnership/

Walmart adds a Burger King benefit to its membership program
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/08/22/walmart-plus-burger-king-benefit.html

Shein sues Temu over copyright infringement, alleges rival loses money on every sale
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/08/20/shein-sues-temu-over-copyright-infringement-trade-secret-theft.html

FTC finally makes a sneaky online shopping tactic illegal
https://www.thestreet.com/retail/ftc-online-shopping-tactic

Temu’s Semi-Hosted Japan Site Will Officially Launch on August 27
https://pandaily.com/temus-semi-hosted-japan-site-will-officially-launch-on-august-27/

50% of Amazon Prime, Walmart+ Subscribers Step Up During Sales Events
https://www.pymnts.com/news/retail/2024/50-of-amazon-prime-walmart-subscribers-step-up-during-sales-events/

How Amazon supports Black-owned businesses during Black Business Month—and all year long
https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/small-business/how-amazon-supports-black-owned-businesses-during-black-business-month-and-all-year-long

Make sure to watch this week’s training tip in our Helium 10 Alerts tool, this is something that could potentially save you thousands, if not tens of thousands, of dollars. That's how valuable this tip is. Lastly, don't miss our insights into Helium 10 Adtomic's new features for creating custom bid rules in PPC management, designed to optimize your campaigns effectively.

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

• 00:50 - Big Amazon Coupon Change
• 03:05 - Youtube x Shopify
• 04:47 - FBA Inventory Deadlines
• 05:36 - Walmart x Burger King
• 07:07 - International Return Update
• 08:08 - Temu vs. Shein
• 09:48 - FTC vs Fake Reviews
• 12:48 - Temu Japan
• 13:11 - Prime / Walmart+ Stats
• 14:33 - Black Business Accelerator
• 15:10 - Subscribe to Helium 10’s YouTube Channel
• 15:40 - Training Tip: An Alert That Can Save you $1000’s
• 19:07 - Helium 10 New Feature Alerts

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Bradley Sutton:

Amazon has made a big update to coupons and promotions that could save you from some expensive mistakes. YouTube's trying to pull off some TikTok shop type moves. Walmart's giving away free Burger King Whoppers these stories and more on this edition of the Weekly Buzz. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of 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 news stories and goings on in the Amazon, Walmart, TikTok shop and e-commerce world. We let you know what new Helium 10 features have and also give you a training tip of the week that will give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Let's see what's buzzing. I've got a number of articles this week, so let's go ahead and hop right into it. First one coming up here is actually I was adding a coupon to this new product launch I'm doing of a coffin letter board and look what we found here on the coupon page. Anybody else notice this? In your browsers when you're trying to do coupons, there's this section that says stack promotions and it says do you want to allow this coupon to stack with percentage off or buy one get one. Promotions yes, allow stacking or no? Allow stacking. Now, this is pretty important because, as you know, in the past, like promotions stack with coupons and vice versa, meaning like let's say you had like a 20% off coupon on your page but then you had a 20% off promotion, that customer who's savvy could pick up both of those and apply it to your order, get 40% off right. But now, finally, you have the option to have it not stack If you're creating the coupon. Next, in the new help document about this, under stack promotions, amazon says here, based on your input provided on if you are going to stack or not, either one or both of the coupons or percentage off or buy one get one, free promotions will apply at checkout. So, for example, gave an example here it says let's say that you create a coupon 10% off and a percentage off coupon 20% off on the same ASIN, same duration. Now, if you say yes, I'm going to allow stacking during this promotion creation. Now both of these promotions are going to stack and the customer is going to get now 30% off at the checkout, right, the 10% plus the 30%. But if you select. No, I do not want them to stack. These promotions won't stack, and so the customer maybe they might see it and try and clip the coupon and do the promotion, but it says they're only going to get the higher benefit of the two promotions. So, like in that case there was a 20% off coupon and a 10% off promotion, they would get the 20% off coupon. So that's something that's pretty cool. I highly recommend doing that, for you know, usually people don't want to stack, and then when people have had stuff stacked, it's by accident and they end up losing a lot of money that they didn't realize. So if you're one of those who do not want your promotion stack, make sure to always click that no stacking.

Bradley Sutton:

Next article is from TechCrunch and it's entitled YouTube takes on TikTok shop with expanded Shopify partnership. All right, we talked a little bit about this, oh, I want to say, about four or five months ago, but now it looks like YouTube is ramping up efforts. It says, as TikTok shop is gaining traction, YouTube is expanding its partnership with Shopify to onboard more brands for its YouTube shopping affiliate program. All right, so now creators and influencers are going to get access to 1000s of new brands. It wasn't, like you know, before. We're just like 10 brands or something like very small number of brands you could actually promote for in a shopping experience on YouTube. Now it says 1000s of new brands are going to allow those products to be tagged in shopping videos. So you know, generating a lot of affiliate commission for these YouTube creators. Now if you're wondering, hey, what is the potential of this, well, YouTube actually had a pretty interesting stat. They said that people watched more than 30 billion hours of shopping related videos on YouTube last year and that the platform saw a 25% increase in watch time for videos that help people shop. And so you know, traditionally, the only option is okay, here I'm an influencer, I'm going to make a video about something and I'm directing people to Amazon, or I'm directing people to TikTok, or I'm directing people to Walmart or whatever, right. But now the YouTube influencers are going to be able to create content and then, right in there, link directly to Shopify products and people are going to be able to buy directly from YouTube or in the YouTube platform. And then these influencers are going to be incentivized because they now can get affiliate commission on YouTube.

Bradley Sutton:

Next article is from your Seller Central dashboard. Just a reminder of some important dates coming up. All right, prime big deal days is coming up in October. So now they announced that, hey, the last day that you can get inventory in to make sure that you have the Prime Ready badge is going to be September 13th. And then they reiterated again we already announced this a couple weeks ago Black Friday and Cyber Monday you've got to have your product in by October 19th. One other update they gave was hey, if you are using, you are going to get 25% off the base rate for e-storage fees and 15% off the base rate for AWD processing and transportation fees. All right, so this is going to be a limited time offer. If you're using a, amazon is giving putting some money back in your pocket for a change. What, what? What a novel concept. That is all right. Usually we're used to the uh, the other, the other side of things, right.

Bradley Sutton:

Next article is from CNBC. This one gave me a chuckle here. You know we've talked before about how amazon will come out with something. Wal. Walmart will come out with something. Vice versa, Walmart is now a pioneer in doing something new. Now we've always talked about the benefits that Amazon Prime starts adding, the benefits that Walmart Plus starts adding et cetera. Because the more Walmart Plus, the more Amazon Prime members, the better it is for us sellers, right, the more likely it is that we're gonna get sales increase. Well, now Walmart is doing a first. They're the first ones in this. They're adding Burger King as a benefit to the Walmart plus program. All right. So now, if you've got Walmart plus, you're going to be able to save 25% off of any Burger King order made through the Burger King app. All right. In addition, members will also be eligible for a free Whopper every three months, starting in September with a purchase. All right.

Bradley Sutton:

So first of all, you know it's painful to do this article. I've been on a crazy diet this week before I go traveling, lost already like eight pounds, and I'm looking at these hamburgers and fries. I'm like, oh my goodness, my stomach is growling. But anyways, I digress. What I really want to see now is all right, amazon, the ball's in your court. Let's see you make a similar deal with, like a fat burger in and out, Jollibee, something like that, and I'm going to be there. I need something for my Burger King. I'm not too much of a fan of, so. So, amazon, please hook us up with some good fast food and I am there to take advantage of it.

Bradley Sutton:

Next article is going back to the amazon dashboard. It's an update just on international returns, all right. So seller fulfilled international returns is going to be updated starting September 16th. So if you're an international seller who's selling in the US but you're overseas and you don't have a default US return address in Seller Central, now you are going to be required to issue a return less refund or provide a prepaid international return shipping label. So this is kind of interesting. This might seem like one of those articles. Maybe you just completely skip over, but read this in detail. But read this in detail. You know, those of you who are overseas, check do you have a U S return? Because, trust me, guys, that's going to get expensive. All of a sudden, you know your customers start getting you know returned without even you being consulted, and you don't realize it. Or you have to go pay for some international shipping which is crazy expensive, all right. So take a look at this article in your dashboard, see if that affects you, those of you overseas sellers out there.

Bradley Sutton:

Let's go back now to CNBC for another article, and this one's entitled Sheen sues Temu over copyright infringement, alleges rival losses money on every sale. So you know people are talking about oh man, Temu is trying to be like Amazon, you know, because they're trying to recruit US sellers and fulfilled in the US. You know, amazon trying to be like Temu. You know, trying to get Chinese sellers to ship directly with subsidized shipping. And then you know they're scared of each other for taking market share. You know, stories like that here and there have been coming up. But now it's Temu versus Sheen. All right, so this is something that was actually filed in the US. All right, this isn't some internal battle going on in the streets of Beijing or something right in China. This is happening in the US, in Washington DC.

Bradley Sutton:

A civil complaint where Sheen accused Temu of stealing its designs and also that an employee stole confidential trade secrets. They also say, hey, Temu is losing money on every single sale it makes and it uses trademark infringement to make up for the losses. This, this fight, you know, talks about a lot of different things, but it's kind of interesting because it kind of paints a picture of how sheen and Temu are making money and it makes you wonder, like, is that model sustainable? Like, if they are losing money in every order. How in the world can they keep that going, right? So, if you're interested in in these other marketplaces, I'm trying to get my Temu account set up just to test it out. I'm having a heck of a time getting approved on there, so so I'm still working on. I still want to be able to give you guys an update about Temu. So we'll see how it goes and let's see what if this lawsuit, ever you know, results in anything.

Bradley Sutton:

Next up article from the Street. It's entitled FTC finally makes a sneaky online shopping tactic illegal. Now, this article kind of confused me a little bit. I need to do some more research on this, because I'm not 100% sure that this article is going to happen the way it thinks it's going to happen. Okay, but this is a step in the right direction, all right. The article starts out hey, if you've ever read an online review for a product and thought, hey, this is too good to be true, you're probably right. It says that 30 or 40% of online reviews have been fake. But then here we go. But that will soon change, as the era of fake online reviews is about to come to an abrupt end. No, guys, I'm sorry. I don't care what FTC or Amazon or anybody, there is no way that you're going to clean up bad reviews, you know, like super fast, all right, it's just I'm sorry it's not going to happen. But again, I'm not trying to badmouth this. This is a move in the right direction, all right.

Bradley Sutton:

Now this new rule that's going to go in effect in October from the FTC, it's going to ban fake online reviews in several different ways. All right, the first rule says it's going to prohibit reviews from people who don't exist. Like wait, how can people who don't exist make review? No, obviously, what it's referring to is people making fake, you know. Can people who don't exist make review? No, obviously. What it's referring to is people making fake you know, profiles and leaving reviews, doing brushing and things like that, and also reviews generated by artificial intelligence. It's kind of saying that it's inferring that it's not going to be allowed. And now the interesting thing here maybe the most interesting for me is it says reviews from individuals who never experienced the product, business or service will be banned as well.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, why do you think I found that interesting? Because to me I'm now wondering does that mean that they're going to require Amazon, you know, Walmart, other platforms, to not accept any reviews other than verified reviews. You know, right now I can just go on any product and leave a review, right. But that almost makes me think, right that that Amazon might, or FTC might, ban that. The non-verified review is interesting. Now the rule also blocked businesses from providing compensation for positive or negative reviews. Okay, so I mean up until a few years ago that was even allowed on Amazon. It's still not illegal per se. Like I if I have McDonald’s, I can go pay somebody right now to leave a good review on my google profile. I guess you know, but that that's not going to be allowed anymore. So it's not just amazon's getting bad. It looks like that's going to be banned across the board. It says insider reviews, like by those who work for the company, is going to be prohibited. And here's a funny one, a funny statement. It says businesses will also no longer be allowed to use legal, groundless legal threats, physical threats, intimidation, to prevent a negative review. It says no longer be allowed. Does this mean that until now you've been allowed to use physical threats to get people to change? I don't know what this article is trying to say, or the FTC, I mean it is supposedly it was just quoted here but interesting stuff coming to the world of reviews.

Bradley Sutton:

Next article up here is from pandaily.com. Quick note Teemu is opening up a new marketplace in Japan on August 27th. Go look up information on that. Take a look at this article. It might be a good opportunity to get in a brand new marketplace. You know, right before it gets too big, who knows? If you're selling in Amazon Japan, you could probably get your stuff on the new Temu marketplace pretty fast if you hurry.

Bradley Sutton:

Next article is from payments.com. It was another one of these surveys. Some of these surveys are pretty interesting. It says 50% of Amazon Prime and Walmart Plus subscribers step up during sales events. Now, based on this study, they had some interesting data points here, all right. For example, it says shopper spending climbed 11% to 14 billion on this Amazon prime day. Now, 40% of all consumers participated in prime day. 20% participated in Walmart plus week, which is like their version of prime day. Now, this is pretty interesting because that Walmart number is still lagging way behind Amazon, but that surged 71% from 2022. It was only at 12% in 2022. So interesting Walmart Plus might be catching up. Walmart Plus subscriptions have increased 30%, especially among millennials and individuals earning less than $100,000 annually. But it says here Walmart Plus still lags way behind Amazon Prime, and both events saw a 50% participation rate from their subscribers. So interesting little stats that maybe you want to check this article out. Walmart plus is is still way, way, way behind amazon, according to this article, but they are catching up, maybe at a little bit faster rate than you might have expected.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, the last article of the day is just from amazon. Remind sellers that this month is black business month, all right. And then it talks here in this article about the Black Business Accelerator, a program that we've talked about right here on the podcast. It talks about a lot of the features they have for black owned businesses. It has some quotes here from Rod. You might remember right here he used to be. He was on the Serious Sellers podcast before. So if you have a black owned business, make sure that you get certified so you can get that badge, and then you're actually going to qualify for some special programs inside of the black business accelerator that Amazon has. Make sure to check out the article link to below for that.

Bradley Sutton:

So I want you guys to do is to go to YouTube search Helium 10, and make sure to hit this subscribe, the subscribe button right here at the top, and then make sure that you put notification on all, all notifications, so you know when we come out, weekly buzz and other articles. If you guys are watching a video right now, you're watching this on YouTube itself. Right under the actual video there's that subscribe button. Make sure to hit it, make sure you're subscribed, make sure it says all so that you get notified when we have new videos.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, let's get into our training tip of the week, and this is something that could potentially save you thousands, if not tens of thousands, of dollars. That's how valuable this tip is, all right. So a lot of sellers have said oh man, you know, I wish that I could be able to know if I'm on the border, what am my packaging on the border of one of these size tier changes like bulky to standard size, you know, or small oversize to just regular oversize? If I'm on the border, that could actually mean a lot of dollars to your bottom line. How are you going to find that? Whether you have a Platinum Diamond, whatever plan you have, watch this, what I want everybody to do right after this video or you can do it right now If you're at home. Go to Helium 10 Alerts. So go to your Alerts page you can find it in the tool menu and it is under operations hit Alerts and then check out on the top left-hand side under the overview section.

Bradley Sutton:

Normally, under overview, most sellers only have three lines of notifications talking about the buy box, monitoring slots et cetera. But if you have a package that is near the border of one of these size tiers, you are going to have a fourth line of Alerts here and it's going to say products with size tier automate optimization suggestions. And, as you can see, it says I've got three. So I click this button and it's going to take me to those suggestions. So take, you can see it says I've got three. So I click this button and it's going to take me to those suggestions. So take a look here. It took me to the place that has my dimensions and there's a big red little icon and then it's giving me a message. It says we've identified an opportunity to optimize your FBA fulfillment costs. By reducing the link by one inch, you could potentially move from size tier large bulky to large standard size, decreasing the FBA fulfillment costs from $10.75 to $7 per unit.

Bradley Sutton:

Guys, do the math really quick. All right, let's that. That's a whopping $3 whopping. You see, I was thinking about the Whopper that I talked about in the weekly buzz earlier. Yeah, $3.75 is nothing to scoff at. Let's do some math here. All right, so let's say I sell of this product 15 units a day, and now on my next shipment or maybe I can just change the packaging now on my next package and I can go take that one inch off, and now I save $3.75. Let's say, what did I say? Let's just say I sell 15 units a day, all right, so $3.75 times 15 units a day, that means every day. This could mean $56.25 to my bottom line. Times that by 365.

Bradley Sutton:

Guys, this one alert from Helium 10 has the potential to get me $20,000. I think that's a pretty valuable thing that Helium 10 is offering. So I hope everybody rushes to their computer. Check your Alerts page, check If you've got that size to your optimization active. Go to it and then take it. Take a look Now. You know some of you who are selling products that are a set size like because you have a mold or something it's not like. You can just snap your fingers and change your packaging. But, like me, if this is like one of my coffin shelves, I can easily redesign my next shipment where I can just shave off a half inch off the product itself and maybe shave it another half inch off of the packaging inside so I can cut down to that size All right. So that's a really cool update. Guys, make sure to go check that out. I said update. This has actually been around for about three or four months, but I think a lot of you guys didn't realize we had that. Now we are going to get into our Helium 10 new feature Alerts. Last week we had a huge one with a completely redesigned keyword tracker. This week I've got a lot of Adtomic updates for you.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. The very first one is the ability for ad Adtomic now to run sponsored ad TV ads. The first one here is now ad Adtomic is pulling in your sponsored TV campaigns. You're gonna be able to make rules in Adtomic for your sponsored TV ads. You're going to be able to see the metrics and run analytics. All of you can see me like I don't have any sponsored TV ads. It’s going to be able to see the metrics and run analytics. All of you can see me like I don't have any sponsored TV ads. It says zero right here, but now it is importing. How many of you guys out there are using sponsored TV? I'm just very curious. I'm not sure you know, like how much this is being used out there in the Amazon world. Let me know, are you, are you running sponsored TV ads? Have it? Has it worked out? Well, regardless, if you're using Adtomic, you can now make AI rules and bid rules and a whole bunch of cool keyword harvesting and things from those campaigns directly from Adtomic.

Bradley Sutton:

Another thing we have in Adtomic is a new way to make bid rules. Okay, so in Adtomic you can create your own custom rules. You can say, hey for my bid. If, if my ACOS is over this amount and my ROAS is less than this amount, then I want you to take the bid and increase it by 10%. Like it can get super, super granular and very complicated, and rightfully so. I mean PPC is complicated. A lot of our customers out there use a lot of different methods when they're running their PPC, so you need this level of granularity to be able to make rules. But other people you might be like overwhelmed, like oh man, I don't got time to make all these rules. I really like some templates and so you know, now we actually have some templates. So if you go to add Tomic and hit add new rule, you know you choose all the products that you want to apply to this rule. Now, on the right hand side, you choose all the products that you want to apply to this rule. Now on the right hand side you are going to see this button that says apply template. So hit that and you'll be able to choose from some bid templates that we have, and we're going to keep adding more.

Bradley Sutton:

Like I believe destiny from better media is working on some. But, for example, you've got one that says high a cost bid window and current bid safety net set up to lower a cost. That sounds like a mouthful right there, but basically what it means is like hey, you're decreasing bids on a high a cost target within a window based on certain kinds of criteria. Another one is decrease when cost per click is lower than the bid. So some people are like hey, I've got a bid that's $4, but if I'm getting cost per click for only three, I don't need to be at $4. You know somebody could bid me up and I could lose money. I want to go decrease it. You can just create a rule and all the little algorithms instead of having to, you know, come up with the actual rule step by step, it's going to just automatically create that for you. You've got an automatic bid rule, that's that takes away your wasted spend who doesn't want that? And then another automatic or another template that increases your exposure and resets your bid if you feel that there's a certain you know threshold that you're not reaching.

Bradley Sutton:

So a couple cool updates right there in Adtomic. Now, the coolest one of them all is now you can do paw. You can set a rule to pause your targets. Okay now, why is? Why is this important? I have rules in Adtomic where, for my search terms, I'm like, hey, if I get 20 orders and, by the way, guys, you know whether you use Adtomic or not this is something that I hope you guys are doing with your own software or with your own spreadsheets but basically I have rules where I'm like, hey, if I get 30 clicks or something like that 25 clicks, 30 clicks, 20 clicks with no sales I want to pause this or I want a negative match, right, this search term.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, I've always suggested do not negative match search terms in your performance manual campaigns, your, your exact manual campaigns, because now it's going to look like you have a target active but you really pause it in the background and then you might be like, oh no, I can't add any more keywords or targets to this campaign, cause I have so many, but in actuality you had pause all of them. You just don't realize it. So because of that, now we have the ability to make a rule. Let me show you guys how to do that here in Adtomic. I can go in here and I can select a new rule type and I'm going to put bid. All right, I hit next. Now it's going to take me to the new bid rule page and then watch this from here.

Bradley Sutton:

Under the criteria, I can say, hey, if my ACoS is greater than I don't know, 50%, right, I can actually now choose to pause targeting. All right, so it's going to pause the target. So if you've got an exact manual product targeting, ASIN targeting campaign, a keyword, exact campaign, and you've never and you always had to pause the targets manually, one by one, because you couldn't do a negative match or you didn't want to do a negative match. Now you can set that as a rule in your Adtomic. Another super cool thing that saves you tons of time and, as we know, time is money. So if you guys haven't gotten into Adtomic, make sure to go to h10.me/adtomic and sign up now, because this is what I use to manage all my campaigns and it's just getting better and better as we go along. All right, guys. That's it for this week. Thank you so much for and tuning in. We'll see you next week to see what's buzzing.