#539 – Amazon Deadline Alert, Walmart Adds Negative Targeting, & 35% off MCF | Weekly Buzz 7/23/26
Audio version above. Video version below
We’re back with another episode of the Weekly Buzz with Helium 10’s Manager of Education and Strategy, Carrie Miller. 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 Seller Central News: Updates to improve your product titles begin on July 27
https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-news/articles/QVRWUERLSUtYMERFUiNHV0NZOTdDTktSR0pHQzlW
Helium 10’s New Bulk Optimize Titles feature inside the Listing Builder tool lets sellers quickly generate, review, and sync updated Amazon titles and item highlights across multiple listings. It also helps preserve important keywords that Amazon’s automated suggestions may remove.
Watch Bradley’s full step-by-step training at http://h10.me/bulktitles
Walmart is launching negative keyword targeting for all Sponsored Products advertisers on July 29, giving sellers more control over irrelevant search terms, ad spend, and campaign performance.
Amazon Seller Central News: Add to existing variation families from the Add Products page
https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-news/articles/QVRWUERLSUtYMERFUiNHWUpSM0Q3SkVBNFpMVkE5
Amazon Ads News: Brand+ and Performance+ expand AI, keep advertiser control
https://advertising.amazon.com/en-us/resources/whats-new/brand-plus-and-performance-plus-expand-ai/
Amazon Seller Central News: You must now tag AI-generated people in listings and A+ content
https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-news/articles/QVRWUERLSUtYMERFUiNHR0Y1MkJCWkdGSjgyR0oy
Amazon MCF Discount for TikTok Shop Orders
Amazon Multi-Channel Fulfillment is offering 35% off standard and expedited fulfillment rates for eligible U.S. TikTok Shop orders for 12 months. Sellers can also connect MCF to TikTok Shop through Helium 10 to streamline fulfillment and manage inventory more efficiently.
Lastly, Amazon Multi-Channel Fulfillment is offering 35% off standard and expedited rates for eligible U.S. TikTok Shop orders for the next 12 months. Learn more at http://h10.me/accelerate and use coupon code heliumsellerscomp
In episode 539 of the AM/PM Podcast and Weekly Buzz, Carrie covers:
- 00:00 – Introduction
- 00:43 – New Amazon Title Requirement Deadline Approaching
- 02:14 – New Feature Alert Bulk Upload Titles and Item Highlights
- 05:30 – Walmart Announces Negative Targeting
- 07:00 – Now You can Easily Add to Existing Variations
- 08:14 – 10 New Brand+ and Performance+ Ads Capabilities
- 09:42 – How to Find the Country of Origin of Amazon Sellers
- 11:41 – You Must Now Tag AI Generated Images in Metadata
- 13:25 – Amazon MCF Discount for TikTok Shop Orders
- 14:42 – Don’t forget to sign up for Amazon Accelerate and Seller Cafe
Transcript
Carrie Miller:
The deadline for Amazon title updates is fast approaching. Walmart announces negative targeting and AI images must now be tagged in the metadata. This and more on this week’s episode of The Weekly Buzz. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of the AM PM podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host, Carrie Miller, 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 trainee tip of the week. So let’s get started and see what’s buzzing.
Carrie Miller:
All right, so let’s go ahead and get into the first piece of news, which is actually something we already reported on. And this is an older article, but I wanted to remind everyone that next Monday is actually the deadline for the title updates for Amazon. So let’s go ahead and look at the details. And this is basically going to start on July 27th. So all the titles need to be 75 characters or less, including spaces. So this is basically what they want to do, and they say it down here. They want your content to be searchable and visible with titles in search results and on product detail pages. The actual title itself is going to be 75 characters. And then there’s going to be the item highlights.
Carrie Miller:
And the item highlights are 125 characters that you can basically give a little bit more information about your product in there. And it should show up underneath the title. Now, I actually have been looking to see if this has already been implemented. I haven’t found any examples. But if you’re watching this and you have some listing examples of what this looks like, if you can drop the link in the comments, that would be super helpful for people to take a look at what it looks like. But that is basically what’s going to happen.
Carrie Miller:
And Amazon actually does have a tool, an AI-powered tool that will help you create the titles and item highlights. And so right here, it just shows you exactly where to do it and how to do that. And it’s going to basically help you rewrite those titles and do the item highlights. And then if that is not changed and updated on your end, then Amazon is actually going to do the changes themselves. But the brand owners are going to have 14 days before implementation to review, modify and approve AI-generated recommendations for titles and item highlights. Helium 10 also has an incredible tool to help you update these titles very quickly and efficiently.
Carrie Miller:
And so we actually have a training on that where you can actually see the full video and demo of how to do this. And if you want to see the training, the full training, it’s h10.me/bulktitles. But this is also our new feature alert. So I’m going to go ahead and hand this off to Bradley so he can showcase the new bulk titles update with the item highlights so that you can see a little bit of how it works. So go ahead and take it away, Bradley.
Bradley Sutton:
In Helium 10, go to Listing Builder and at the top of the page for now, hit this bulk optimize button. All right. This is going to disappear probably by the end of August. Once all the titles have been changed either way, you’re going to hit bulk optimize and then select all of the listings that are active that you want to have Helium 10 AI, which is using JBT recommended titles. All right. So like, for example, I already went through this and I clicked a whole bunch of my active listings. And then once I did that, I just hit this rewrite button. OK, so I hit rewrite. And then now the AI gave a recommendation.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, let’s just compare. Here’s the good thing that I like. I look at the Manny’s Mysterious Oddities Coffin Shelf one and take a look at what it has here. It says Manny’s Mysterious Oddities Coffin Shelf set. All right. So it’s a little bit different than what Amazon had. Small, black, 14 by seven inches. Now, here’s the thing. Look at the item highlights that Helium 10 suggested coffin gift box, comma, spooky accessories, cute goth Halloween box.
Bradley Sutton:
So again, looking back at the one that Amazon made, this is almost identical to Amazon’s AI. But instead of taking out the keyword phrase coffin gift box and replace it with just gift box, the Helium 10 one allows me to include in my title highlights the keyword coffin gift box. Is this going to be the difference of me getting a thousand sales versus zero? Of course not. However, this is going to change the relevancy if I had taken away the coffin word from that phrase. So in this sense, I would definitely go with the Helium 10 suggestion.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, the other difference about the Helium 10 one is once I do that, I can select all of these once I’m happy with them. And I can just with one button, I can hit sync to Amazon. What does that do? It is going to go ahead and update the item name and the item highlights to Amazon’s listing. So let me go ahead and do that just with this coffin shelf one since I checked that. Let’s go ahead and hit sync. And now it’s syncing with Amazon.
Carrie Miller:
All right. Thank you so much, Bradley, for that video on the bulk titles. And if you want to see the training, the full training, it’s h10.me/bulktitles. So you have a few different options on how you can update these. Now, again, it’s going to be implemented next Monday. So you really need to get this up and running. It’s July 27th. So make sure that you take care of this situation the end of this week or this weekend to make sure it’s all squared away and ready to go for that new deadline on the 27th. OK, so let’s go ahead and get into the next piece of news, which I’ve actually been waiting for a few years on this.
Carrie Miller:
And I thought that they said they were going to implement this a few years ago from Walmart. And it’s actually that Walmart is announcing that they have negative targeting now. This is an email that I got in my email that says that they are pleased to announce that the negative keywords will be available to all sponsored product advertisers starting July 29th.
Carrie Miller:
OK, so negative keywords, as many of you know, and it shows right here, it gives the advertisers greater control over campaign delivery by excluding irrelevant search terms, helping improve ad relevance and optimize budget and drive stronger campaign performance. So, you know, you’ve been able to run automatic campaigns on Walmart, but you have not been able to negate the keywords that were just not relevant. And so that was a big point of contention for a lot of advertisers because they some of them ended up spending a lot of money and they just keep spending a lot of money on these keywords that really should be negated.
Carrie Miller:
So this is really exciting. And so they said also that to help you get started with negative keywords, they are actually going to host a live webinar, actually a few different ones. They’re going to cover this feature and how to implement it. Best practices. And so there’s two different ones. There’s one on Wednesday, August 5th at 11 AM and then also Tuesday, August 11th at 11 AM Pacific time. So that is very exciting for any of the Walmart sellers. I know this is a huge update and something that people have been begging for and waiting for a long time. So very exciting.
Carrie Miller:
So if you’re advertising on Walmart, go ahead and start implementing those negative keywords. OK, and the next piece of news here is that you can actually add to existing variation families from the ad products page. OK, so this is what this little announcement says right here. It says that they’re making it easier to add new and existing products to a variation. Just a side note, I have a lot of variations in my own Amazon business, and it is actually very challenging to add a new variation. So if you come out with a new size or a new color, it has been a very big challenge.
Carrie Miller:
So I’m hoping that this is actually going to help with this, that where you can just go ahead and add another color, add another size, whatever you need to do easily. Basically, now you can search for a product in ad products and download the full variation family information, including existing variations and their attributes. And then you just fill in the required fields for your additional products upload. So this is how it shows you how to get started on this. So I’m curious if anyone has already used this or if it’s worked really well. But I think this is very, very exciting because, again, I’m telling you, it’s been very challenging.
Carrie Miller:
Sometimes when we’ve done this, the variations have gotten split apart or the listings get suppressed. There’s a lot of different things that have happened. So I’m hoping this is a very new and improved way of adding variations to your listing. All right. So next up, we have updates to Brand Plus and Performance Plus ad campaign. So Amazon basically just announced that there are 10 new updates to the AI-powered Brand Plus and Performance Plus advertising campaign.
Carrie Miller:
So one of the biggest changes is that advertisers can now use their own audience data to help guide Amazon’s AI. So it’s kind of like basically you’re giving Amazon information and data to help them to reach the customers that you want to reach in Amazon. And so if you scroll down, you can see that these are the 10 different types of campaigns.
Carrie Miller:
You can see those right here. And if we scroll down a little bit more, it shows a little bit why it’s important. So it says advertisers can now bring their own audience data directly into Brand Plus and Performance Plus campaigns as AI optimization inputs, not hard targeting constraints via ads data manager in the same way they bring in conversion event data today.
Carrie Miller:
So your audiences accelerate optimization and help the models identify high value customers faster while the AI retains full freedom to discover users beyond those segments. So if we scroll down a little bit here, it says brand outcome optimization predicts user likelihood to take brand relevant actions, moving Brand Plus beyond reach only towards measurable outcomes like branded search, detailed page views, and add to cart. So basically Amazon is trying to give advertisers more control over the information going into their campaigns while still allowing the AI to handle much of the optimization automatically.
Carrie Miller:
So if you’re utilizing those campaigns, go ahead and check that out and let us know what you think in the comments. Next up, we have a strategy of the week with Shivali. So go ahead and take it away, Shivali.
Shivali Patel:
How to quickly see the country of origin of sellers in a particular niche. Maybe you’re the person who likes to compete against Chinese sellers. You believe you’ve got a competitive advantage of some sort, and therefore you are looking for waters where most of the sellers are from China. Or perhaps it’s the opposite, where you might want to compete mostly with USA sellers. You do not want to compete anywhere where you might be getting that product manufactured. Whatever the case may be, there’s a way for you to figure out where the seller is originating from.
Shivali Patel:
In your search results, if you’ve got the Helium 10 Chrome extension installed, the widget shows a flag, and that flag is conveying who has the buy box. You can see right here, I searched for cursive groove handwriting, and in the top row of sponsored ads, we’re seeing three of the product sellers are from the USA, one from Hong Kong, and one from China. In the second line of products, we have two from the USA, two from China, and one from Hong Kong.
Shivali Patel:
The next results, all China and one Hong Kong. You can look at this different ways. You could say, hey, this is great for me, or see it as completely a red flag. Maybe you want to download the entirety of page one, not guess, but visually see where all the sellers originating from. It’s simple. All you have to do is run the Xray tool. And this again is on any search results page. There’s a column towards the right here that says seller country region. And in an instant, you can see where all of the sellers are, including if it’s Amazon, which might be something you are considering is you don’t want to compete against what is shipped and sold by Amazon.
Shivali Patel:
That will show up here as AMZ, as you can see on this page. Wow. Especially at the bottom. Most of these listings have a seller from China. Again, some people take this as a positive. Some take it as a negative. There’s really no right or wrong. It really depends on your risks tolerance, but whatever the case may be, this is a very easy way for you guys to see the seller country of origin.
Carrie Miller:
Go ahead and give this a go. Thank you so much, Shivali, for that strategy of the week. This next piece of news is actually very interesting to me because a lot of people are using AI-generated images in their listings and just doing everything with AI-generated everything. I think this announcement is actually very interesting because Amazon is saying that you must now tag AI-generated images in the metadata. So it says it right here that you now have to tag product images that contain photorealistic AI-generated people with specific metadata before you add them to your listings and A-plus content in any of the worldwide stores. It says recent legislation requires disclosure when images or videos and advertisements contain photorealistic AI-generated people.
Carrie Miller:
So to ensure compliance, you must use the metadata. Basically, it shows you how to do the metadata part here. So when you include this metadata, we’ll add an indicator to inform customers that the image includes AI-generated people where applicable. Now, I don’t know how they’re going to show that on the listing or the images, but it should be interesting to see that actually ends up looking. So it says here that you don’t need to provide metadata if your image or video only features real people. So if you’re doing photography, you don’t have to do that.
Carrie Miller:
Even if you’ve altered them a little bit with AI, you don’t have to do that if they’re actual pictures and then only features characters from movies, TV programs, all that. It doesn’t feature any people or doesn’t feature photorealistic people. So this is very, I think, very good for consumers so that they can tell whether or not something is fake or real. And I think it just is really important to keep being honest with customers. So if you’re doing the photography, you’ll probably have a leg up sometimes on these, not only because the images are usually better, but also because people might trust it a little bit more. So that’s something to think about if you’re using a ton of AI-generated content.
Carrie Miller:
All right. And another piece of news is that Amazon Multi-Channel Fulfillment is going to give 35% off of standard and expedited rates for TikTok shop orders for the next 12 months. So it looks like they’re kind of partnering with TikTok shop MCF. So it says starting July 16th, Multi-Channel Fulfillment is offering 35% off of standard and expedited fulfillment rates for TikTok shop orders in the US for the next 12 months. The promotion applies automatically to orders from a supported integration partner. So basically it makes it easier and faster shipping and it’s integrating with TikTok.
Carrie Miller:
So that’s pretty cool. Again, if you didn’t know this, we actually have a connector to MCF through Helium 10. So if you’re having any challenges with that, you can actually connect your MCF to TikTok shop through our tool. So definitely check that out if you have not done that. This is basically going to help if you maybe run out of inventory in other fulfillment areas, you can utilize this and you get a discount. So obviously they’re trying to incentivize people to start utilizing Multi-Channel Fulfillment for TikTok shop orders for the next year.
Carrie Miller:
And maybe the rates will go up a little bit next year, who knows what’s going to happen, but this could be great to take advantage of the 35% off standard and expedited fulfillment rates. That’s actually a really good deal. So if it makes sense for you, you might want to check it out and start utilizing this service. Okay. And last but not least, I know I’ve mentioned this a few times before, but go ahead and sign up for Amazon Accelerate. If you have not, it’s in Seattle in September, we are going to be there and it’s going to be amazing.
Carrie Miller:
There’s a lot of great information, but one of the things that I think is the best is the Seller Cafe because you can get support for any issues that you haven’t been able to get solved through regular support. So you can sign up for Seller Cafe and meet with a real person in real life and go over and fix the issue. I had some issues fixed last year, definitely sign up for Accelerate and go ahead and sign up for the Seller Cafe.
Carrie Miller:
It is, I believe it’s open to the appointments and they do actually sell out of those slots per se, I guess, or just basically book up. So if you haven’t booked your appointment, you should do that now. And then we also have a code and we’ll put this in the comments or the description actually, sorry, the description is where we’re going to have the code for a discount if you want to go ahead and get your ticket.
Carrie Miller:
So check out that discount code and we hope to see you at Amazon Accelerate. We have a lot of the Helium 10 crew that’s going to be there. I’ll be there, Bradley will be there, Shivali will be there, a few others from the team will be there. So it’ll be really exciting time and we hope to see you there. And that is all I have this week for this episode of the Weekly Buzz. I hope you enjoyed all of this news. I know there was a little bit more news than usual, but I hope it was great for you and helpful. And we will see you again next week to see what’s buzzing. Bye everyone.
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