#492 – 2026 Amazon Big Spring Sale Dates & Sponsored Brand Ad Update | Weekly Buzz 1/30/26
Audio version above. Video version b
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, TikTok Shop, 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 quietly revealed the 2026 Big Spring Sale is back on March 25-31, shown inside Seller Central’s Deals/Lightning Deals section, where some products are already being flagged as eligible. Sellers should start planning promos now—locking in Lightning Deals early or lining up Prime Exclusive Discounts ahead of the event.
Exclusive: Some TikTok Shop sellers are pulling back as the platform moves to end independent shipping in the U.S.
https://www.modernretail.co/operations/exclusive-some-tiktok-shop-sellers-are-pulling-back-as-the-platform-moves-to-end-independent-shipping-in-the-u-s/
This week’s strategy shows how to uncover competitors’ proven sales-driving keywords using Amazon-confirmed data in Helium 10’s Brand Analytics (ABA Top Search Terms), not just estimates from Cerebro. Add competitor ASINs, choose high-spike weeks, and filter for more than 1% conversion share to reveal keywords Amazon verifies are converting.
New Feature Alerts: Helium 10’s TikTok Ads now adds automation rules for GMV Max so you can auto-add high-performing affiliate videos and remove underperformers (like a “negative match” for low ROAS). There’s also a new Creative Insights page to track ad, affiliate, and authorized posts in one place and quickly move winning videos into campaigns.
Helium 10’s Keyword Tracker got a small facelift, and the Boost button is finally back to red instead of blue. Boost is the feature that checks rankings up to 24 times a day across rotating browsing scenarios to track organic and sponsored position.
New section-level shopper engagement insights on Brand Stores (Beta)
https://advertising.amazon.com/en-us/resources/whats-new/brand-store-insights-at-section-level-beta/
Join our free live AI workshop on Monday, 8 am PT, to learn how to prep your product/brand images and prompts so AI generates the exact look you want. We’ll demo it live using real Project X images and show the before-and-after results.
Register free at http://h10.me/aimfeb
Bradley will be in Dubai next week at the Worldef Conference, filming case studies and potential podcast interviews with sellers in attendance. If you’re there, come say hi and message me on Instagram @SeriousSellersPodcast to get on camera.
Event info at http://h10.me/dubai
In episode 492 of the AM/PM Podcast and Weekly Buzz, Bradley discusses:
- 00:00 – Introduction
- 00:43 – 2026 Amazon Big Spring Sale
- 02:04 – Amazon Sponsored Brand Update
- 03:22 – Competitor Keyword Sales
- 05:17 – TikTok Shop Exodus?
- 08:01 – TikTok Ads
- 09:44 – KW Tracker Boost
- 10:55 – Amazon Brand Store Insights
- 11:45 – Upcoming Events
Transcript
Bradley Sutton:
2026 Amazon big spring sale dates announced. You don’t have to have custom titles or creatives and Sponsored Brand ads anymore. Are sellers leaving TikTok shop over the new shipping change? These stories and more on today’s weekly buzz. How cool is that? Pretty cool. I think. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of AM PM podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host Bradley Sutton. 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 let you know what new features Helium 10 has, and we also give a training tip of the week. So let’s get started and see what’s buzzing.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, let’s go ahead and hop into the news. And first article is about, it’s actually not an article, but more of like a subtle date announcement that Amazon did. We all know about prime day, right? You know, usually in the summertime, there’s like a couple of years later, you know, prime big deal days, you know, towards the fall. And then the last couple of years there’s been the prime big spring sale, I should say. And last year it was March 25th to 31st.
Bradley Sutton:
This year, the dates March 25th to 31st. Shout out to Josh. He was the first one who I saw post about it. But if you look into your seller central, what you’ll see if you go to like your lightning deals and your deal section under advertising, some of your products might be eligible here. I’m in one account graceful by design and, and they got to offer for a lightning deal. And if you scroll to the bottom, it says right here, big spring sale, Wednesday, March 25th to March 31st.
Bradley Sutton:
So did any of you guys do anything special during that day? Like did you run a lightning deal? Did you have a prime discount, prime exclusive discount? Let me know in the comments, how did it work for you? How were your sales during that week? Are you just going to ignore this? Or are you going to try and do some kind of a promotion this year? If you want to, you know, you better start locking in that, uh, lightning deal or, you know, you can kind of like wait up until the last second to do one of those prime exclusive discounts, keeping it to Amazon.
Bradley Sutton:
There was an email that Amazon sellers got this week. Here’s a copy of mine. It says, dear advertiser, this is an update on Sponsored Brands product collections starting January 28th. All right. Just a few days ago, Sponsored Brand collections will replace product collections in the ad console. Your existing product collections campaigns will keep running. You can still optimize them, but you won’t be able to add new ad groups.
Bradley Sutton:
So there’s a few bullet points here. Not too much has changed. Like for example, you’re going to be able to feature three to 10 products, but a minimum of three required, just like it always has been. But here we go. You can now scale and optimize your campaigns and let the Amazon AI curate and show the most relevant products dynamically or pick them yourself. In addition, you can now eliminate creative dependency.
Bradley Sutton:
What does that mean? No custom image or title needed. Obviously, you know, like AI has kind of made that easier, but if you’re an AI person and you’re like, I’m not a graphics person, that’s why I can’t do these Sponsored Brand Ads and stuff. You know, I don’t, I don’t know what to come up with for the custom creative. I don’t know what to do with the title. Guess what? You’re not going to have to do that anymore. All right. So this for the most part has rolled out already. So check your email. If you want to get details a little bit more on that.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, let’s get into our strategy of the week. And this is an interesting one. You guys know that in search query performance, you can see what keywords are driving sales for your products. However, it’s not telling you what your competitors drove sales for, but did you know that there’s a way to get actual Amazon data to see this? It’s pretty much only available in Helium 10. Shivali, show us how.
Shivali Patel:
It’s no secret that search query performance is great for your own products, but it doesn’t exactly tell you if your competitors are getting sales on certain keywords. Historically, you’d probably have to run Cerebro. And that is great for estimates.
Shivali Patel
But if you want confirmation directly from Amazon data, you’ll want to use brand analytics inside of Helium 10. Here’s how. Go into the black box tool and click on ABA top search terms. That is going to be a tap up at the top. Then input all of your top competitors. And from there you’ll want to select multiple weeks where sales are likely to spike.
Shivali Patel:
This for the coffin shelf can be a time like Halloween or Christmas for us. So I’m going to use November to December-ish somewhere in between that frame. Now set a filter to only show products with more than 1% conversion share.
Shivali Patel:
If a competitor has more than 1% conversion share, you guys, what is it really telling us? Amazon is literally confirming that they generated sales from that keyword. And that is where things get really fun and powerful.
Shivali Patel:
You will uncover the obvious keyword shore, but you’ll also find those random hidden gems that you might’ve missed. And instead of downloading massive reports from seller central and spending hours, merging pivot tables, things that we all love doing, Helium 10 can now do it for you within seconds. This is one of the most reliable ways to discover money-making opportunities using guaranteed Amazon data. And I recommend you go check it out.
Bradley Sutton:
All right. Thank you very much. Shivali next articles from modern retail. And I’m not sure about this. Uh, that’s why I wanted to bring it up. It says exclusive. Some TikTok shop sellers are pulling back as the platform moves to end independent shipping in the U S. So we, we reported on this last week or the week before, right? How, yes, this is a move that TikTok has announced everywhere.
Bradley Sutton:
It does not affect Amazon MCF, so you can still do that. But basically now if you can’t do, have your own postage, right? You can’t buy like stamps.com or ship station and things like that. You have to either use fulfilled by TikTok or you have to use, um, Amazon or TikTok shipping. Now this article talks about a couple of anecdotes, which I’m sure are true that there’s a couple of people who are saying, Oh, I can’t sell on TikTok shop anymore because of this. I don’t like to use fulfilled by TikTok.
Bradley Sutton:
But here’s where I take not offense, but like, here’s where I’m like, no, this kind of rubs me the wrong way. This should not be a reason guys that you stop selling on TikTok shop. Nobody’s forcing you to use fulfilled by TikTok. I don’t use fulfilled by TikTok for the same reason that this person mentioned the article. But guess what? You don’t need to use fulfilled by TikTok.
Bradley Sutton:
You can still buy the shipping from TikTok shop. And in some situations that’s actually better because now TikTok is responsible for the shipping. There’s a problem with the tracking. It’s not your fault. You’ve got that late. You got that tracking number from TikTok shop.
Bradley Sutton:
The postman, um, you know, loses the shipment. Guess what? Not up to you to have to follow that claim and do everything. TikTok shop is the one who did it. Now, obviously in the account that I run, it’s going to be more expensive than the special deal that we have with FedEx. You know, I was shipping out of my warehouse here at TikTok shop orders like a hundred, sometimes 300 a day.
Bradley Sutton:
Obviously we had a pretty good FedEx deal, you know, for that, that we’re not going to be able to use anymore. But take, you know, customers on TikTok shop, they’re not as like price sensitive in the sense that everything that happens on TikTok shop is like huge discounts anyways. And that’s what they’re looking at.
Bradley Sutton:
So like, let’s say before you’re like, Hey, it’s not $50. You know, the price is going to be $30, right? But now you can be like, Hey, it’s not $60. The price is going to be $35 or something like that. And people will be like, Ooh, this is still a good discount. Like I don’t think you need to raise your price $5. That’s not how much the shipping price is going to go up. But you guys get my drift. Like you should not be using this as a reason to like exit from, from TikTok shop.
Bradley Sutton:
Uh, this new change, there’s a few weeks, who knows what’s going to happen as far as, you know, what deals TikTok shop is going to make for softwares to be able to, you know, still leverage the TikTok shopping, uh, you know, like a ship station, stamps.com kind of way. We’ll see how it rolls out. But whoever this, this person is modern retail article, who is giving up on TikTok for this. I think you’re making a mistake, uh, sister. So, um, hope you guys not, not other people are making that same mistake too.
Bradley Sutton:
Speaking of TikTok, we have a couple updates here to Helium 10 Ads for TikTok. All right. Uh, some of you guys might not have realized we even have that. And now we actually have a few features that is kind of unique compared to TikTok seller center. So now we have rules in our TikTok ad. So, you know, when you’re doing GMV max ads, maybe you thought, Oh, all I can do is, you know, set it and forget it. But now you can do the kind of campaign where you can like add and remove certain videos and creatives that your affiliates are doing.
Bradley Sutton:
But look at this. I can actually have a rule that says, Hey, if there is a video that is getting this many views or this many clicks or this much gross revenue greater than this, then add it to a certain campaign. But on the flip side, this part is almost more valuable in my opinion. Now it’s almost like a negative match. I could be like, Hey, if a video and an ad has row as less than two or something like that, you know what? Remove the video from the campaign.
Bradley Sutton:
So this can really help your, your control, your GMV max ads a little bit more than you can do in a seller center and TikTok. So make sure to check that out. We also have a new page called creative insights inside of helium 10 ads for TikTok, where you’re going to be able to see tons and tons of data on any video that was made for any of your products and be able to see, Hey, is this an ad, but it’s doing well, let me go ahead and just manually add it to a certain campaign.
Bradley Sutton:
Uh, what about my ads? What about the affiliate posts? What about authorized posts? What is going on here and do I want to take action based on what I’m seeing? So, so a lot of cool things coming to TikTok ads. Let us know, guys, are you a TikTok shop seller? What would help you to run your GMV max campaigns a little bit more? Now the next thing I didn’t even have a bullet point here on my, on my news. It’s, it’s almost an afterthought, but to me I got really excited when I saw this.
Bradley Sutton:
This is in keyword tracker guys. And I’m going to show you something that we just added that they did a whole bunch of like facelifts, like really minor stuff to keyword tracker this week, the team, but watch this guys, for those who use keyword tracker, you notice anything different? Yes.
Bradley Sutton:
Thank goodness. The boost feature in keyword tracker now is red again. I don’t understand why it was blue for like the last year, but we finally changed it to red guys. If you don’t know what a boost is, boost is the feature in keyword tracker, where if you turn it on, it’s going to check 24 times a day in rotating browsing scenarios, rotating addresses, et cetera, to see where you’re ranking at for organic and sponsored. But for the last year, the button was blue. It used to be red.
Bradley Sutton:
And I was like, guys, please make it blue. This kind of, or please make it red. They kind of slid this under the radar. And I was like, yay, this is a cool new feature. Or maybe you guys aren’t as excited as me, but let me know, shout out in the comments below. Were you one of the ones wondering why we had blue rocket ships instead of red rocket ships? Okay. I digress. Let’s get back to the news.
Bradley Sutton:
Last article of the day is an advertising update from Seller Central and it’s entitled new section level shopper engagements, insights on brand store. So you guys, you know, hopefully you’re running or you have brand stores, but you know how your brand store has all these different, you know, sections like your front page and your product selection or different things like that. You had no visibility before like, Hey, what was working?
Bradley Sutton:
What was getting clicks? What were people, you know, interacting with now, you are going to be able to see that. And so check out the link in the article or in the, in the comments below to be able to see more of exactly what’s coming for your stores. If you don’t have a store yet, it’s about time to really set up your store. I’m about to do that for, for Project X, actually redoing the store. Speaking of Project X next week on Monday, 8am Pacific time, we have a live AI workshop that we are doing with an expert about how to prep AI for images.
Bradley Sutton:
You know, we’ve had workshops on like, all right, how do you try and produce AI images yourself? But what about the step before that? How do you make sure you’re prompting AI in the correct way to really get the right output? Because you know, Hey, I can do its own crazy stuff. How can you give your like brand image to AI? If somebody else is doing AI for you, how can you give them some prompts that would help you get better output?
Bradley Sutton:
If you guys want to register for this free workshop, go to h10.me/aimfeb. AIM as in AI Monthly Feb as in February h10.me/aimfeb. You’ll be able to register for that free live workshop on Monday. The following week I will be in Dubai. All right. So I’m going to the WORLDEF Conference h10.me/dubai. I think the conference might be free. I’m not sure. If you’re anywhere in the area, please come by.
Bradley Sutton:
If you’d like to be interviewed for the podcast, you know, reach out to me on my Instagram, go to Serious Sellers Podcast. If you’re going to be there in Dubai, I’ll be filming some, some individuals for doing case studies. And also I’ll be filming some individuals for case studies and potentially some podcasts as well.
Bradley Sutton:
And what our guest expert is going to be doing too is taking the project X images that haven’t been updated in a long time and showing how to prompt AI and actually showing you some of the results of the initial results of what came out. So we’re not just like showing you guys what to do. We’re actually doing it and you guys will be able to see that. All right, guys, thank you so much for tuning in this week. We’ll see you next week to see what’s buzzing.
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