494 – Walmart Has Vine? Alexa+ Rollout and More | Weekly Buzz 2/6/26
Audio version above. Video version below
We’re back with another episode of the Weekly Buzz with Helium 10’s Senior Brand Evangelist, Shivali Patel. 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.
Walmart is rolling out an invite-only “Review Accelerator” (for recognized reviewers) program that lets sellers provide free product samples to a vetted pool of trusted reviewers, similar to Amazon Vine. If you receive the email link, you can enroll eligible items in the Seller Center, allocate review units, and potentially accelerate traction for new or low-review listings.
Alexa+ now available to everyone in the US—and free for Prime members
https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/devices/alexa-plus-available-free-prime-members-us
For our Helium 10 New Feature Alerts: Black Box now lets you paste or upload lists of ASINs (not just UPC/GTIN/EAN/ISBN) in Product Identifiers, up to 500, depending on your Helium 10 membership. This makes it easier to quickly research large sets of competitor or wholesale products in one search.
Drive brand awareness and engagement with Brand+ using Amazon Ads, now available to all globally
https://advertising.amazon.com/en-us/resources/whats-new/drive-brand-awareness-and-engagement-with-brand-plus/
In our Strategy of the Week, Carrie explains how influencer-driven UGC videos can boost Amazon conversions and visibility, then shows how Helium 10’s Influencer Finder for TikTok and Amazon helps you find creators already posting in your niche (and their social links) to outreach. This tool is available to Helium 10 Diamond users.
Want access to the Amazon and TikTok Influencer Finder? Upgrade to Helium 10 Diamond and use code SSP20 to get 20% off, then start reaching out to proven creators in your niche today.
New features and updates to Amazon’s FBA Grade and Resell program
https://sell.amazon.com/blog/announcements/fba-grade-and-resell-updates
Upcoming Events: Bradley and Shivali will be in Dubai February 12–14 at the Commerce City Center—perfect if you want to meet in person, ask questions, and level up your business. Register for WORLDEF Dubai at http://h10.me/dubai
Helium 10’s TACoS Tuesday PPC webinar is a live, interactive Q&A where you can get real-time ad strategy tailored to your campaigns from Destaney Wishon. Ready to get live Amazon PPC help? Join us on Feb 10 at 10 AM PST and bring your questions—register now at https://h10.me/ttfeb26
In episode 494 of the AM/PM Podcast and Weekly Buzz, Shivali covers:
- 00:00 – Introduction
- 00:43 – Walmart Has Vine?
- 01:53 – Alexa+ Now Everywhere
- 04:06 – Bulk Product Research
- 05:35 – Convert with Brand+
- 09:29 – Amazon Influencers
- 13:00 – FBA Grade and Resell
- 15:43 – Upcoming Events
Transcript
Shivali Patel:
Walmart’s now got a Vine program, Alexa+ is available globally, and there’s a little something inside of Amazon ads that’s been helping deliver conversions, not just awareness. This and more on this week’s episode of The Weekly Buzz. Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of the AMPN podcast on Helium 10.
Shivali Patel:
I’m your host, Shivali Patel, 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 let you know what new features Helium 10 has, and we also give you a training tip of the week. So let’s get started and see what’s buzzing.
Shivali Patel:
First up, if you didn’t know, Walmart’s got a review accelerator program. This is their recognized reviewer program. And basically what it does is it allows you to offer free product samples to a select group of trusted reviewers.
Shivali Patel:
It’s a lot like the Amazon Vine program, at least from the sounds of it. And what I’m looking at right now, if you’re watching this on video, you can see I’m taking a look at this guide that tells you how to enroll eligible items inside of Seller Center. You’re going to select specific units for review and then manage those enrolled products.
Shivali Patel:
Now, this is not available, you guys, to everybody. This is by invitation only, and it’s only available if you’ve received a link in your email. So if you haven’t, or if you haven’t spotted it yet, then be on the lookout this week for that email from Walmart to figure out whether or not this is something that you can tap into.
Shivali Patel:
This is brilliant for those of you that are launching maybe new products on the Walmart platform, or if you’ve got really, really low reviews in general to start with. You will be able to just follow this through and hopefully see some revenue and momentum growth as a result.
Shivali Patel:
Then we’ve got Alexa+. Alexa+ is now available to everyone in the US and it’s free for Prime members. Actually, this article that I’m looking at here from Amazon News covers quite a bit of things. For example, who is it available to?
Shivali Patel:
What sort of tiers they have? But the reason I really bring this up inside of the weekly buzz is because I’m really curious on whether we’re going to see an uptick in orders from this mass rollout. Because as you are well aware, ChatGPT has become all the rage as has just about any AI model.
Shivali Patel:
And it makes our life easier. You kind of began to use it as Google. And so with Alexa+ rolling out to this extent, are we going to start seeing a lot more people shopping in a conversational format using Alexa+ instead of going in and manually typing in search results, or search terms rather, inside of the search bar on Amazon?
Shivali Patel:
So here, let’s just kind of run through some of the things that we’re looking at on this article. We’ve got Alexa+ is now available in the US for $19.99 per month. This is if you are not a Prime member, then you can purchase that separately and then have unlimited use.
Shivali Patel:
Or if you are a Prime member, it’s actually going to be included at no additional cost to you. If you are not a Prime member, before you even enroll into the $19.99 per month for the unlimited usage, you can also access it for free just to get that experience and discern whether or not you want that for yourself. So I think there’s going to be a whole lot more people that are going to get excited or be curious in time.
Shivali Patel:
And we’re going to hopefully see that translate into their buying habits, which of course, for sellers like you and I is great news. This was in beta before. And I suppose that it did really, really well because now we’re seeing the mass rollout.
Shivali Patel:
Now, if you are curious on how to start using Alexa+, then we’ve got this right here at the bottom that says Prime members can easily start using this by saying, hey, Alexa, upgrade to Alexa+ or logging into your Amazon account on alexa.com. You can learn more about this. Go ahead and feel free to check that out on alexa.com’s website if you are a Prime member. With that, I’m actually going to pass it off to Bradley to talk about a new feature alert that we’ve got this week inside of Blackbox.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, so here in Blackbox, we have a new feature, small one, but it’s pretty cool. If you scroll down here, you’ll notice that there’s product identifiers. And historically, you’ve been able to enter in a UPC, GTIN number, EAN, ISBN, and even upload them with Excel files.
Bradley Sutton:
This is especially helpful for wholesale sellers, arbitrage sellers. You have big lists of products. However, now you’re going to be able to enter up to 500 of these depending on the plan you have.
Bradley Sutton:
I think 500 if you have the diamond plan, maybe 100 or 200 if you have the platinum plan. But also you can now enter in ASINs, either one by one or a whole list of ASINs. Like for example, let me go ahead and pull the ASIN from my coffin shelf.
Bradley Sutton:
I can go ahead and paste it here in Blackbox under product identifiers and then hit search. And then it’s going to come up here at the bottom. If I would have entered in 10 different coffin shelves, all of those would come out here.
Bradley Sutton:
So it’s just another way to do product research or research on your competitors. You can now just zoom focus your research into up to 500 different ASINs at once. You know, maybe ones that you can’t see completely, you know, just by going to different pages on Amazon and running x-ray, you can all see it in one place by entering it into product identifiers.
Shivali Patel:
Thanks so much, Bradley. The next thing that I want to talk to you guys about is actually something called Brand+. You’re going to be able to drive brand awareness and engagement with Brand+ using Amazon ads.
Shivali Patel:
And it’s now available also globally. So as of January 30th, Brand+ is kind of a conjunction point of their viewership, as well as shopping signals and AI capabilities. And the result of that has been measurable brand growth that drives real business outcome.
Shivali Patel:
It’s been delivering premium video and display campaigns across Amazon properties and the open internet, proving that brand campaigns can deliver downstream conversions, not just awareness, not that top of the funnel, but really focusing on that full funnel. The key capabilities inside of this include AI powered, prospecting tactics that reach perspective, customers highly likely to engage with your brand. You can do campaign setup in as few as four clicks with automated tactics workflow that simplifies campaign management.
Shivali Patel:
You’ve got premium inventory access reaching 300 million US viewers convert, covering 90% of US TV households, display and video capabilities across streaming TV, online video display formats on and off Amazon, campaign insights, giving you clear visibility and then creative association enabling advertisers to select and assign creative directly in the campaign setup flow. That is not to mention the launch and close beta integration with live events optimizer, allowing advertisers to effectively reach audiences during major events like live sports and the Olympics. So really what I’m hearing is this follows you around, right?
Shivali Patel:
This is how you get that brand awareness. There’s something out there that says, oh, you need 12 times of brand awareness before somebody even considers purchasing. And that’s if they don’t have this urgency for it.
Shivali Patel:
Of course, they’re like kind of warming up to it. They’re like, oh, I don’t really need this. I don’t really need this.
Shivali Patel:
But then they keep seeing it and then they become curious about it. And so this is going to follow people around on and off of Amazon. It’s going to be in the middle of streaming and TV and a lot of campaign visibility in general.
Shivali Patel:
So this is really important because if you want to go in as a brand owner and you want to execute upper funnel strategies with just better performance, great transparent reporting,
then Brand+ has already shown really great results there. There’s proven performance results that are actually included inside of this Amazon article. It says there’s been 71% lift in detail page views, 42% lift in new to brand detail page views, 63% higher add to cart rates, 64% lift in purchases.
Shivali Patel:
And then you’ve also got, it drove 8% increase in reach and significant down funnel growth, 115% in brand site page views, 14% in add to carts and 149% surge in conversions. If you’re a geek like me and you like numbers, those sound like pretty good numbers to me. So you guys will want to go and give this a try.
Shivali Patel:
You’re going to be able to check this out inside of Amazon ads. Again, this is available all around the world, whether you’re in North America, United States, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, if you’re in South America, if you’re in Europe, Germany, Spain, France, Italy, United Kingdom, Belgium, Switzerland, Poland, Turkey, Austria, Netherlands, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Ireland, Denmark, Luxembourg. I know you can read this on my screen if you’re watching this on YouTube, but bear with me for those of you that are watching this video because those that are my podcast listeners will also want to hear.
Shivali Patel:
Middle East, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Israel, Egypt, Morocco, Bahrain, Kuwait and Asia Pacific, Australia, India, Japan, China, New Zealand, Singapore. And who can use it as well? Self-service advertisers, enterprise advertisers, small business advertisers, agency advertisers, managed service advertisers, and you can access it, ADSP Self-Service.
Shivali Patel:
Now I’m going to pass it off to Carrie for the strategy of the week. She’s going to come in and talk to you guys about Amazon influencers, because of course you can run the ads and you can have a great listing. You can have a brilliant product, but at the end of the day, it really helps to have a hype train. It helps to have other people talking about your product. And she’s going to show you how you can find influencers who can help create some more momentum for you.
Carrie Miller:
Influencer marketing is huge right now. And it’s one of the most powerful things you can do is you can get this UGC or user generated content on your Amazon listings. When influencers create videos for your products, these videos actually can appear on the mobile browsers, on desktop product pages, in the image carousel, and even in the bottom shoppable videos carousel.
Carrie Miller:
And this kind of content actually boosts conversions and increases visibility on Amazon. And the more influencers showcasing your product, the wider your reach is going to be. Now you might also want to collaborate with influencers off of Amazon and maybe someone with a strong Instagram or TikTok following.
Carrie Miller:
But how do you find the ones that are already making Amazon related videos and determine if they have social presence elsewhere? Well, here’s the good news. You can search an entire database of influencers who have made videos for Amazon products.
Carrie Miller:
For example, maybe you want to find influencers who’ve already made videos for your top competitors products or brand. If your product is also in, you know, like the spooky home decor category and someone made videos for that similar brand, they might be a perfect person to reach out to you. So here’s how you actually use this in Helium 10.
Carrie Miller:
So once you log in, this tool is actually under marketing under influencer finder down here. And once you click into there, you can choose either Amazon or TikTok. So in this case, we’re going to look for Amazon influencers.
Carrie Miller:
So I chose Amazon. And you can filter down a bunch of different ways. But what I’m going to do is I’m just going to put in just Coffin Shelf because you can put in any phrase and I’m just going to put, you can put in ASIN, whatever you want to do.
Carrie Miller:
I’m just going to search Coffin Shelf. And if you wanted to filter it down even more, like say you wanted to see, you know, they’ve minimum posted 10 videos to see, you know, people who have posted or you want to see their social media links, you can choose those. But I’m going to just do a more broad search here and hit apply filters.
Carrie Miller:
And this is basically, oh, looks like we found Bradley as the main influencer here, which makes a lot of sense. It looks like, you know, you can see he’s posted seven videos here and you can see, you know, where his videos are showing up. It looks like he’s got one in the upper carousel and seven in the lower carousel.
Carrie Miller:
And when he first started posting, you can actually see his social media links. So if you wanted to go and contact him, you could actually slide into his DMs there. And we can see other creators here. We’ve got this girl’s TikTok. We’ve got this one, Instagram. So we can see how to contact those people with those different handles if you really wanted to get ahold of them.
Carrie Miller:
So this tool really gives you highly targeted leads, which are influencers who already understand your niche and are proven to engage with your audience. So if you’re trying to boost conversions with UGC or looking to set up an influencer partnership, start using Helium 10’s Influencer Finder today because it’s a powerful way to grow your presence both on Amazon and across social media.
Shivali Patel:
Super cool, am I right? That is available for our Diamond users. If you are not a Diamond member, then you should sign up using the code SSP20. That’s gonna give you 20% off. And then you can go leverage all that really great data to make sure that you’ve got visibility where it matters and that people are talking about it. They’re getting excited about your product. And most importantly, they’re purchasing.
Shivali Patel:
And one of the last news pieces I have for you today also comes directly from Amazon. It’s that new features and updates are being added to Amazon’s FBA grade and resale program. This is going to be for those customer returned items that have been marked as used while giving customers great deals on products that they love. They’ve actually expanded out the categories, meaning that if you have products that are in the watches, jewelry, luggage, shoes, or apparel category, this is gonna be something you will want to listen to. For pricing adjustments, anytime that you’re updating that new item pricing, it might be feeling a little bit tedious to go in and check out all the used item prices or the discount percentages.
Shivali Patel:
Well, there’s been a few changes to that. So when a new item price is updated, the used item price adjusts automatically. When grade and resale discount settings are changed or updated, all eligible used item discounts update based on the new percentages. And when any used item purchase is adjusted manually, that item is opted out of automatic updates, okay? Sellers can reset those settings anytime to rejoin automatic pricing. Something else that I actually quite like is the grade and resale ASIN inclusion.
Shivali Patel:
This is actually taking a opt-in approach as opposed to opting out. Before, a lot of things that Amazon rolls out tends to be, oh, well, we’re doing this and you need to go and find the button in your settings or your account settings to say, okay, I actually don’t want this. Please don’t change my title using AI, right?
Shivali Patel:
We all kind of have to figure out, well, do we want this or do we not? Well, here, of course, if you’ve got used items or there are items that somebody’s returned, they might not be things that you actually want to go in and resell again, unless it’s a very specific kind of product. So that is why you can now opt in and say, actually, I do want you to go in and reprice these products, put them up as used and be able to include the parts of your catalog that do make sense into the resale program, all right?
Shivali Patel:
You’ve also got automatic out-of-stock SKU removal, meaning that this is just designed to help sellers manage their inventory by decluttering those items when it’s ready to be out of stock, okay? So it’ll automatically get removed from the inventory management view and allow you to just focus on your active listings, saving time and enhancing operational efficiency. So make sure that any SKUs that you might have that you want to include in reselling or you do want to resell, then you go and you check this out.
Shivali Patel:
Again, that’s gonna be FBA grade and resell and you can just opt into that program, figure out which SKUs work. The last couple things here that I wanna mention, we’ve talked about all the news pieces today, but this coming week, Bradley and I are actually going to be in Dubai. So if you are anywhere close or you’ve got a little time for a getaway and you’re interested in learning, taking your business to the next level or meeting us in person, or you’ve got questions to run by and you like that face-to-face contact, then come by.
Shivali Patel:
The link is h10.me/dubai. Again, h10.me/dubai. You can sign up for WorldEF and we look forward to seeing you this week between February 12th to 14th at the Commerce City Center. We’ve also got a webinar coming up for PPC and TACoS Tuesday. Those of you that have been around, you guys know all about TACoS Tuesday, hopefully. But if you don’t, then this is essentially where you guys can pop onto a webinar and ask questions live for anything that has to do with ads.
Shivali Patel:
We’ve got Destiny Wish on for the CEO of Better Media on, as well as Bradley. And this is open and interactive. You get real strategy, you get real responses for the questions that you might have. And you can ask very specific things about your business. Well, I set up this campaign and this is happening. And that is where the value really comes into play, right?
Shivali Patel:
Because we can talk theory all day. I can teach you the strategies. Carrie shared a strategy. Bradley showed you a new feature alert on this episode itself, right? This weekly buzz episode. But those things will have far more value to you when you’re actually putting it into practice.
Shivali Patel:
And the same thing is true of the TACoS Tuesday webinar. Come in, put it into practice. Talk to us about your ads. What’s going on? What do you want to learn? And we make it happen. So join us live on February 10th at 10 a.m. PST. Please ignore that says 11:30 p.m. I am tuning in from India. And that’s why my time zone is different. But it’s actually 10 a.m. at PST. Wherever you’re tuning in from, make sure that you’ve got that time zone adjusted accordingly. With that, that is it for this week’s Weekly Buzz. Thank you so much for being here. And we look forward to seeing you next week to see what’s buzzing.
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