Amazon Fee Updates and TikTok's Game-Changing Test

Amazon announced FBA fee changes for 2025. Did they raise fees for our sellers again? TikTok is testing something that could be game-changing for sending traffic to Amazon. These and more buzzing news on this week’s episode!

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.

Update to US referral and Fulfillment by Amazon fees for 2025
https://sellingpartners.aboutamazon.com/update-to-us-referral-and-fulfillment-by-amazon-fees-for-2025

TikTok is quietly testing product links in posts as it looks to boost its reputation for shopping
https://www.modernretail.co/technology/tiktok-is-quietly-testing-product-links-in-posts-as-it-looks-to-boost-its-reputation-for-shopping/

Amazon announces the launch of Rufus, a new generative AI-powered conversational shopping assistant, in beta across Europe
https://www.aboutamazon.eu/news/retail/amazon-announces-the-launch-of-rufus-a-new-generative-ai-powered-conversational-shopping-assistant-in-beta-across-europe

Sponsored Brands forecasting for impressions and clicks is now available in the advertising console
https://advertising.amazon.com/en-us/resources/whats-new/sponsored-brands-forecasting-for-impressions/

eCommerce Growth Outpaces General Retail Sales, Hits 15.6%
https://www.pymnts.com/news/ecommerce/2024/ecommerce-growth-outpaces-general-retail-sales-hits-15percent/

Amazon DSP launches contextual keyword targeting GA in US, UK, CA, AU.
https://advertising.amazon.com/en-us/resources/whats-new/amazon-dsp-launches-contextual-keyword-targeting/

Helium 10 vs. Jungle Scout Accuracy: Amazon Sales Data - h10.me/h10sales

Don't miss the opportunity to learn about these powerful resources that can give you an edge in the competitive e-commerce and Amazon-selling market.

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

• 00:50 - 2025 Amazon Fees Update
• 04:56 - TikTok Link Testing
• 07:51 - Rufus in EU
• 09:11 - Sponsored Brand Forecasting
• 10:02 - E-Commerce Gains
• 10:48 - DSP Targeting Update
• 12:25 - Helium 10 vs Jungle Scout Sales Data Accuracy
• 16:57 - Helium 10 New Feature Alerts

Bradley Sutton:

Amazon gives its annual announcement of fee changes for the following year. Did they raise fees for our sellers again? TikTok is testing something that could be game-changing for sending traffic to Amazon New updates to Amazon-sponsored brand and DSP advertising. These stories and more on today's Weekly Buzz. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.

Bradley Sutton:

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 goings on in the Amazon, TikTok shop and e-commerce world. We also give you training tips of the week and let you know what new features Helium 10 has. That'll give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Let's see what's buzzing.

Bradley Sutton:

We got a few news articles today and the biggest one, I would say, is something that I think a lot of us sellers look at each year around this time of year, around November, with anticipation, but I would say frightful anticipation. What is that? That is the announcement of what's going on with Amazon fees. Now, we've been doing this weekly buzz for like four years and you can look back and we always have this episode right where Amazon announces it. And you know, two or three years ago you'd have seen things like OK here, there's a 15 cent increase here, and a 20 cents increase here, and blah, blah, blah, blah. Last year was like the worst we've ever had Fee increases. But then the big things was brand new fees. Like three big whoppers were announced around this time last year, which was the inbound placement fees which have affected all of us this year, the low inventory fees right, and the high refund rate fee right. Those are all announced in this annual announcement. So a lot of sellers were like, oh no, what is Amazon going to announce this year? Let's go ahead and show this article from Amazon and it says update to US referral and fulfillment Amazon fees in 2025. And, spoiler alert, here it is we will not increase US referral and FBA fees. I can't remember the last time they said that. And here's the more important one we will not introduce any new fee types and, as a matter of fact, we are decreasing some fees and offering new benefits.

Bradley Sutton:

So talk about music to sellers ears. Right, because if we would have gotten squeezed any more on the fees front, you know it'd have been pretty hard for us to keep you, because if we would have gotten squeezed anymore on the fees front, you know it'd have been pretty hard for us to keep, uh, you know, selling for some of us. So, they had a note to sellers here. They're like hey, we're trying to simplify things. You know, we heard sellers and we want to make sure that, um, you know, we're providing the best service and not, you know, complicating things with a bunch of new fees. And so that's what they said hey, our focus is on continuing to partner together to delight customers and providing our seller selling partners a great value that helps their businesses thrive.

Bradley Sutton:

Now they actually mentioned that some fees. Not only is it not being raised, it was actually being lower. For example, if you are doing a large, bulky sized product, you're actually going to see lower inbound placement service fees on average 58 cents per unit for minimal shipment splits. In addition, they're going to waive inbound placement service fees for new parent ASINs that qualify for the FBA new selection program. I'm not going to go into too much depth what that is. You're going to have to search that in seller central.

Bradley Sutton:

We could talk about 10 minutes about that FBA new selection program. But if you are eligible for that for a new product and you create a shipment between December 1st and March 31st, uh, it's, the first hundred inbound units will be exempt from inbound placement. Now again, remember what you have to do to be completely exempt from inbound placement fees is send at least five identical shipments to five different places, um, or three plus different places that Amazon specifies. Then you won't have to worry about email placement fees. But let's say you've got a full container. Actually, a full container probably wouldn't qualify as maximum 100 units, but let's say you had a container of a thousand units, right? Well, those first hundred units, obviously your containers are going to one place. Those first hundred units are not going to have a fee. If you qualify for this Right now, it does have a fee. So maybe wait to create your shipment until December 1st if this qualifies for you.

Bradley Sutton:

In addition, this article mentions that they're introducing more incentives for adding certain new selection in our store. We're going to enhance the new seller incentives and FBA new selection programs with greater fee discounts. All right, so take a look at the link. This is going into effect on January 15th, so a number of weeks still to go for this, but the seller benefits page and seller central will have a little bit more information. Some might ask well, does this mean that absolutely under no circumstances will there be any new FBA fees in in 2025? Amazon says no, hey, we do things in a dynamic way and who knows what might happen that might cause us to change stuff, but as of right now, no new fees. So I think everybody is very happy about that. Uh, switching marketplaces.

Bradley Sutton:

The next article is from modern retail.co and it's entitled. TikTok is quietly testing product links in post as it looks to boost its reputation for shopping. Now, to me, this is, I don't know if I would say, flying under the radar, but I think it's more important than it might seem because, as you know, obviously traffic from other websites is big, but when you have influencers talking about a product on a different platform right, like if it's on Instagram um, how can they put links? I'm influencers talking about a product on a different platform, right, like if it's on Instagram, how can they put links? I'm not talking about, you know, reels and stories where you can put like links there, but if you just have a regular post, you cannot put a clickable link usually in the post right, what, what, what do you see influencers say when they're trying to send people to a product, like on Amazon, another website? What do they say? Link in bio?

Bradley Sutton:

I'm sure you guys have seen that. Right, hey, link in bio. Because in the bio of like TikTok and Instagram, you can actually have links and then a link tree comes up and you got to pick which product it is, et cetera, et cetera. It's kind of you know, the conversion rate's not going to be great with that, and the reason why these platforms, social media platforms, do that is because they don't want necessarily people going off. Right, like, if I'm, if I'm Instagram, I want people to stay on Instagram. The whole algorithm is designed to keep people on Instagram. So then I don't want people clicking a link and now maybe their Instagram journey ends because now they go down a rabbit hole on Amazon, right? So TikTok has always been like that.

Bradley Sutton:

This doesn't mean that they're going to go forward with this. This is according to this article. This is a beta test that they've been doing and it says TikTok hasn't posted about this anywhere, but it was spotted by expert marketing consultants who wrote about it and basically it allows creators to add shopping links from other affiliate partners, including Amazon, Walmart, target, Rakuten, impact, et cetera, et cetera, even Temu, and they're going to be able to add these links to the actual post. It says with this new integration, product links show up at the top of a post comment section, reducing the number of steps a shopper has to take to navigate to a creator's recommended products. Now this, potentially, is huge Game-changing, I should say I don't use that term lightly.

Bradley Sutton:

Something to be game-changing has to change the game. Right now, the game is influencers absolutely promote products, but how many of them drop off customers because they don't want to click on their bio? Try and find the link, and let me just figure it out now. Forget it, you know, or maybe they'll search for it, right? But imagine if, right at the top of the post, they could actually click with one click and go right to the Amazon listing. That's just going to open up a lot of affiliate marketing potential for TikTok influencers and we Amazon sellers. It's going to help us out too. And then, you know, who knows, maybe Instagram might follow and that would be pretty big as well.

Bradley Sutton:

But right now, all just speculation, because this is just a beta test that TikTok is doing, going back to the Amazon platform, an announcement by them and says and Amazon announces the launch of Rufus in beta across Europe. So Rufus has been now for us here in the US, for consumers in the US, for a while. They launched in UK in September. Now it's going to be available in Germany, France, Italy and Spain. So you know, for those who, for whatever reason, have not been using the Amazon app or maybe you are in one of those countries you've never seen it. You know, rufus is this AI assistant that allows consumers to like ask questions about the reviews or, you know, talk about different topics, what are different types of running shoes. It's almost like searching Google, doing your product research for what kind of product you're looking for, without having to go to Google. You're doing it all on Amazon. So now this is going to come up in Italy, Spain and those other marketplaces I talked about. I have not seen any huge changes in the way people shop here in the States yet. I've tried it before and, as with many things with AI, it doesn't work that great yet, but I think the possibilities are kind of endless for this. As the algorithm and the AI learns, it could theoretically have an impactful effect on sellers, how consumers find their products, how they can read the reviews, etc. So keep an eye on anything Rufus related, regardless of which marketplace it's in Going to Amazon advertising.

Bradley Sutton:

Now an announcement from Amazon says sponsored brand forecasting for impressions and clicks is now available in the advertising console. So this new feature it says it provides forecasts of impressions and clicks based on your campaign settings. Basically, this means it's forecasts of impressions and clicks based on your campaign settings. Basically, this means it's an estimate of the number of times your ad is going to be displayed and it's going to forecast the number of clicks, or the estimate the number of times your ad will be clicked. Makes sense, right, and so this was not available before for sponsored brand ads. It also mentions hey, this is not a guarantee of actual performance. If the forecast is 100 clicks, it doesn't mean that, hey, you're going to get 100 clicks. It's just a forecast based on historical campaigns with similar budgets according to Amazon. So take a look at that, if you have access to that, when you're setting up your sponsored brand campaign.

Bradley Sutton:

Next article is just a general one from Payments.com campaign. Next article is just a general one from payments.com says e-commerce growth outpaces general retail sales and hits 15.6% All right. So, again, a shift towards paying online through computers, mobile devices, remains firmly entrenched. E-commerce sales hit $288 billion $388 billion a 2.2% increase, and is up 7.5% since last year. Other news in this report says hey, Walmart’s got some momentum. It says Walmart reported that e-commerce sales in the United States surged by 22% in the most recent quarter, but Walmart said that their e-commerce marketplace sales were 42% higher. All right, so that's pretty impressive increases from Walmart.

Bradley Sutton:

Going back to Amazon advertising DSP, amazon DSP launches contextual keyword targeting for US, uk, Canada and Australia. All right, so this is pretty interesting. So now, before, if you were doing DSP, you can target category or product retail based approaches. But now you can put something in. The example that they give here is, you can put something like 4th of July, right, and now, when you hit 4th of July, it's going to give you contextual keywords based on that Right. So, so that's going to be interesting. So that's going to be interesting.

Bradley Sutton:

We've talked about contextual search, meaning that, hey, you might show up for keywords that aren't necessarily that you're indexed for, right, like 4th of July. What would come up? Maybe like 4th of July outfit women. Maybe you don't have the word outfit for whatever reason, in your listing, right? But you know, if you're, contextual, search means that somebody could search for the July outfit women and your product would show up, right, because it's. It's kind of like say, hey, they're probably looking for this and even though this product is not indexed as keyword, let's go ahead and show it. Now, this means that with DSP, you can just target, like, like a season or a general theme or something, and it's going to show you to a lot of keywords that you cannot manually target with like keyword targeting ads, because normally if you target a keyword that is not in your listing or that you're not indexed for, amazon's not going to give you impressions for it. So, those of you who use DSP, this could be pretty cool. Let me know if you've gotten into that, all right.

Bradley Sutton:

Next up, let's go with our training tip of the week, and it's actually kind of like an exercise I want you guys to do and kind of like a study that is going to give you guys some confidence. And this is about sales estimation, right. So I want you guys to take your product and look in to what your actual sales were. You know, either using Helium 10 profits or maybe your business reports for the last 30 days, through yesterday, all right, not through today and then compare it to the Helium 10 numbers, even down to the child level. Because remember, as Kerry announced last week, you can now see estimates in x-ray for products. Before, if you had a red, blue and green product you were looking at on Amazon, part of variation, Helium 10, like other tools, would just show you the same exact number for each of those and what it meant was hey, this is what overall you're selling. Remember now, Helium 10, just like Kerry said last week in the buzz, it's showing at the child level. So it'll say, hey, red sold 50 units, the blue sold 23, and the green 17, whatever, right, so check your sales versus that.

Bradley Sutton:

And then if you're wondering, hey, who's got the most accurate sales data? Is it Helium 10? Is it tools like Jungle Scout or Data dive, which uses Jungle Scout information? Or maybe I don't need Helium 10 10, I don't need Jungle Scout, I'll just use the amazon bought in the past month metric, right? Well, I did a deep dive, guys, uh, into this in this blog, and you can see this blog at h10.me/h10sales. You can watch a video, uh, or. Or look at this, this document, and we did a deep study with over 29,000 listings that we had actual sales on, and basically you know, long story short, you guys should read this whole blog or watch a video so you can understand the science behind this. Helium 10 had an 89.59% accuracy rate, basically 90% accurate. Jungle Scout had 60%. You couldn't even compare the Amazon one because, remember, amazon is so limited with what it shows, just 50 plus 100 plus 500 plus 1000 plus, so there's just so many numbers in between that the accuracy is just kind of off the charts, bad, as it were, because it's not showing you exact estimate. So, anyways, in this case study, we just pretty much compared Helium 10 and Jungle Scout, since we couldn't really compare the Amazon bot in the past metric. It was just so far off. So make sure to check this out.

Bradley Sutton:

And then, at the end of this, I actually did a live case study, all right. So I did a live case study during this video where I took products that I actually have access to the Seller Central account on, and so watch the video, because what I did was instead of just like saying, guys, all right, believe me that our data science team did this. You know, like I've always said that you know, if we came out with a report like that, you guys would probably just take it with a grain of salt. Like, of course, Helium 10, data scientists are going to show information that shows Helium 10 is the most accurate. But no, guys, I did a live case study right when you can even see the timestamp on my computer so that you know, you could see I wasn't trying to like edit stuff out or fake, uh, do fake things. But I did it over like 30, 40 products across three different accounts, um, and showed uh, when jungle scout was more accurate, when Amazon was more accurate, when Helium 10 was more accurate, and I had very similar results. As a matter of fact, let me just show them to you.

Bradley Sutton:

The Amazon bot metric only had five estimates out of these 37 that I tested. Helium 10 had 34 out of 37 estimates, including the child items. Jungle Scout had only 21 out of 37. The Amazon bot metric was the most accurate of the three estimates Only one time out of the 37 ASINs. Jungle Scout was the most accurate four out of the 37 ASINs and Helium 10 was the most accurate for 28 out of 37. All right, the biggest that Amazon was off was 72% off. The biggest Jungle Scout was off was 650% off. The biggest Helium 10 was off was only 50%, and that was when it was like we said three. It was actually two or something like that But anyways, watch this video, h10.me/sales and then do the exercise. Guys, take your own sales and then compare it, um, and then see how close the sales are. So we did this just to make sure that, hey, uh, some, some sellers are like wondering how much can I trust Helium 10 sales numbers that I see in Xray, Black Box, et cetera. You can trust it a lot. All right, everybody. That's it for this week's Weekly Buzz. Thank you for tuning in. Make sure to tune in next week to see what's buzzing.

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