#563 – TikTok Shop’s BIG Seller Score Changes | Amazon’s New FBA Refund Options | Weekly Buzz 10/15/26
Audio version above. Video version below
We’re back with another episode of the Weekly Buzz with Helium 10’s VP of Manager 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.
Walmart creates 1-hour express pickups as holiday shopping ramps up
https://finance.yahoo.com/small-business/articles/walmart-creates-1-hour-express-141009486.html
Shop performance score update takes effect October 15 on TikTok Shop US
https://kolvant.com/news/tiktok-shop-new-performance-score-october/
Amazon Seller Central News: Return reasons now available for FBA Partial Refunds
https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-news/articles/QVRWUERLSUtYMERFUiNHWFgzWTc3QUtGRVhaTlhQ
Amazon Seller Central News: Sign in to Seller Central easier with a passkey
https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-news/articles/QVRWUERLSUtYMERFUiNHQzZSMjdWNlJCNFpaOFg5
ShipStation Launches Ship with Walmart, Bringing Discounted Rates and Seller Protections Directly In the Platform
https://www.shipstation.com/press/ship-with-walmart/
Join Bradley Sutton and Daniela Bolzmann from Mindful Goods next week for a workshop on improving your Amazon Brand Store with AI. Discover features inside Seller Central that many sellers haven’t seen yet and explore how to turn more Brand Store traffic into sales.
Get fresh ideas to put to work in your own store, just in time for the holiday season.
Go to http://h10.me/brandstorewebinar to register
In episode 564 of the AM/PM Podcast and Weekly Buzz, Carrie talks about:
- 00:00 – Introduction
- 00:40 – TikTok Shop Performance Score Update
- 03:00 – Walmart 1 Hour Express Shipping
- 04:50 – MCP Expands With Keyword Tracking and TikTok Profit Data
- 15:24 – Register for Next Week’s Amazon Brand Store Webinar
- 16:11 – Amazon Partial Refund Updates
- 18:26 – How to Track Keyword Rankings 24 Times a Day
- 20:56 – Amazon Account Security Update
Transcript
Carrie Miller:
TikTok Shop’s new performance score, get your Walmart order even faster and secure your Amazon account even more. 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 training tip of the week. So let’s get started and see what’s buzzing.
Carrie Miller:
All right, let’s go ahead and get straight into the first article, and this is about TikTok Shop. We actually have reported on this in the past to keep you, but I wanted to keep you updated on this. And it’s basically the shop performance score update. It takes effect on October 15th on TikTok Shop US, okay? So the shop performance score update, and I’m gonna scroll down to tell you a little bit about what happened. So it says the shop performance score update moved into trial on September 21st, and it goes live on October 15th. So the product satisfaction narrows from a shop level read to a product level one.
Carrie Miller:
So a single problem skew surfaces by name instead of blending into the store average. Shipping and delivery speed carry more weight than before, and a free shipping item adds score points for covered orders. So this is actually really interesting. I think that TikTok Shop is really pushing for fast and free shipping like the other platforms are. I noticed as a buyer on TikTok Shop that a lot of things that I have tried to purchase, they’re not free shipping and they’re not fast shipping. There’ll be like two week delivery.
Carrie Miller:
And so it’s really something I think that they need to compete on, especially if they want a higher conversion rate for the holiday season. I think that’s why they’re saying, hey, we’re gonna score you on this and you’re gonna get higher scores if you do these things. This might be a reason to potentially look at your profitability and see if you need to raise your prices in order to cover this free shipping. But I think it’s just definitely a good time to kind of rethink your strategy on TikTok Shop, make sure you’re still profitable, make sure you’re keeping your score high so that you don’t lose visibility, that you don’t get to suppress or your products or store getting taken down.
Carrie Miller:
So this could be a good thing for consumers, but it might be a little bit more challenging for sellers. So I just wanted to point this out to make sure that you know what’s happening. And the question might be, who is affected? Basically every seller shop with a scored shop, okay? In the U.S. In this article, they actually are giving suggestions on what to do. And I would basically just check this score and do whatever you can to fix the issues so that you keep your score up, address negative reviews. If there’s something going on with your negative reviews, maybe you can figure out if there’s something wrong with the product or your batch, that’s gonna affect you, make sure you’re fast and free shipping, all those things. And if you wanna access this article, you can look in the description and you can get the link to this so you can have more details about that. But really important to keep an eye on this stuff, especially the fast and free shipping, because I think that’s a big deal for a lot of these platforms.
Carrie Miller:
All right, next we have Walmart and they’re basically creating one hour express pickups in store, okay? So this is because the holiday season is ramping up. And something I was wondering is, I’ve actually gone on walmart.com and I’ve looked for some things and I can order them online, but I can’t get them in stores. And so I think that’s a lot of third party sellers are selling products that are only offered online. And I’m wondering if potentially because we have so many distribution centers of Walmart stores, basically, that maybe we’ll be able to get those products quickly as well, but I’m not sure.
Carrie Miller:
We’ll see how this goes, but Walmart is basically offering hyper convenience is what it says in this article, hyper convenience for American shoppers this holiday season with a one hour express pickup. It says the one hour pickup will be free for Walmart plus members, which are shoppers who pay the monthly or annual fee for perks, like free shipping and store to home delivery. I think some people with Walmart plus also get discounted gas if you have a Walmart gas station.
Carrie Miller:
So it’s kind of a good perk. If you want to know a really good perk and you have the American express platinum, you actually get this membership for free. So if you are an owner of one of the American express platinum cards, this is a perk for you, take advantage of this, especially during the holiday season, you’ll get this free shipping and this one hour delivery. So yeah, check this out and just know that this is available. And I’m sure we’re gonna see a lot more of these kinds of like fast delivery things. I was just at Amazon accelerate and they were showing and demonstrating the drone delivery.
Carrie Miller:
So that’s gonna be interesting to see if they start, when they start implementing that and how that goes with fast shipping and just getting your order within an hour potentially. Really interesting times, especially just for the battle again, like we were talking about for TikTok shop, there’s a battle for the fastest delivery and the best pricing for shipping. So keep an eye on that and we will keep you updated. Of course, with the weekly buzz. Next up, we have a ton of new feature alerts with Bradley. So take it away, Bradley.
Bradley Sutton:
As always guys, we have tons of new features here. A lot of them in MCP, some on agent and some just in the regular Helium 10 app. First up for our TikTok shop tools, we have something new for our influencer messenger. Now before, when you set up your campaigns for collaborating with influencers, do you wanna send a message out in Helium 10? You would actually have to go back to TikTok shop and set your shop ad commission, right? What that is, is you set up a campaign to give samples out to creators, influencers, and maybe you set the commission at 15%, 20%.
Bradley Sutton:
But if you’re running ads on the videos of influencers, you don’t wanna pay them 15, 20% and whatever commission you’re gonna give them because you’re paying 15, 20% to your GMV Max ads, otherwise you’re losing a lot of money, right? So what you would do is you would say, all right, hey, shop ad commission means if it’s a GMV Max PPC ad, in other words, you’re boosting the creator’s own videos, they’re not getting like the full 15, 20%, they’re gonna get 2%, 3%, 5%, et cetera, all right? So now you don’t have to go into TikTok shop to do that. You can do it all inside of Helium 10 under where it says shop ad commission rate. So this is big, saves probably 50% of the time on when you’re creating these campaigns in Helium 10.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, now for the MCP. As you guys may or may not know, in Helium 10, we have an influencer finder, not just for TikTok shop, but for Amazon. Like for example, here in Helium 10, I put Coffin Shelf and here’s all the creators. It’s funny, I am the number one influencer for Coffin Shelf. My creator ID showed up here, but all the creators who have done videos about Coffin Shelf will come up and what you can do is you can add them to like a list. All right, so now that’s available in the MCP. If you’re using the MCP to like search for influencers, now you’re gonna be able to type, hey, let me go ahead and add these influencers to this list.
Bradley Sutton:
Let me create a list, like let me create an influencer folder that is all about people who have promoted Coffin Shelf, all right? So before you had to do that in app, like you guys see on screen now, you can do it with the MCP. We also now have Walmart keyword tracker for MCP. We have Walmart keyword tracker obviously in Helium 10. You couldn’t access it before in the MCP. Now you’re gonna be able to list your keywords that you have, list your competitors.
Bradley Sutton:
You can look at your rank history of your keywords in Walmart, et cetera, now available to MCP. Now, one overlooked feature in the regular keyword tracker for Amazon that to me is one of the best features and I don’t think anybody else has it is you can automatically harvest keywords, all right? Let me show you guys how. In regular keyword tracker, let’s say you have competitors like I’ve got here for this product here. If I hit this button, suggested keywords, I have customized settings. Basically what I’m saying is, hey, I can set things where I say, hey, based on my competitors, let’s say I have five competitors here like I do and the search volume is above 500.
Bradley Sutton:
You can put whatever threshold you want and then I say, hey, at least one or at least two competitors are ranking in the top 10 and I’m not tracking this keyword, suggest to me that I track it. Here’s another one. Based on my own products, I’m like, maybe I’m ranking for keywords, I’m not even tracking. I didn’t even realize I was ranking for it. It’s kind of like Helium 10 is running Cerebro for you automatically. Like we had these automations guys before there was even AI. This is years old. I bet you 99% of you guys have not used this. So basically we’re running Cerebro in the background and say, hey, if you’re ranking for a keyword in the top 10 or top 20 or top 100, whatever you want that has X number of search volume and you’re not tracking it, suggest to you to track it.
Bradley Sutton:
So these are the settings you do and then now if you just go into the suggested, whatever new keywords hit that criteria, you are going to get the suggestions. So what’s new? You can actually do that in the MCP. So I in Claude put here, hey, get new suggestion keywords for and I put it ASIN and so it pulled up at the time based on my settings. There was actually 298 keywords I was not tracking that hit the criteria that I had put in the regular keyword tracker, which was like, hey, anybody ranked on page one or if I’m ranked in the top 10, et cetera, et cetera. And so as you can see here, it came up with 298 keywords and now I can just say, hey, start tracking all of them with one click of the button, not even a click, just a prompt and now it’ll start tracking all of those keywords.
Bradley Sutton:
So again, this is exclusive in Helium 10 for you Diamond members. You can automatically harvest keywords you had no idea was relevant to you or your competitors and now you could do it just with a simple prompt in the MCP. Another thing in Helium 10, you guys can have keyword folders, you guys can have product folders, like you’re doing product research and like, hey, here’s my products that I found for my coffin shelf project of looking for a new coffin shelf to seller.
Bradley Sutton:
Here’s my keyword list that I’ve been building for this new egg tray I’m gonna sell. Well, now that’s available in the MCP. You can actually create folders, you can delete folders, you can add products, add keywords, remove keywords, all from the MCP. You do not have to go into Helium 10 for that. So just start playing with the MCP and Claude and say, hey, create this keyword list and it’s gonna actually save it inside of Helium 10. Next up for Helium 10 follow-up, we have some read capabilities.
Bradley Sutton:
You can just ask it, Claude a question or chat GPT, say, hey, how many products do I have follow-up active, automations going in my account? Follow-up is the tool that all levels of Helium 10 have, where you could set up automatic request review or emails that go out to ask your customers for a review. Now you can do that in the MCP. Say, hey, how many automations do I have? How many emails have been sent out? How many review requests have been sent out? How many were rejected? How many had error messages? You can do all of that inside of the MCP.
Bradley Sutton:
You can see here that in one of my accounts, I didn’t realize I didn’t have a follow-up on. So I’ll say, oh, thank goodness I asked Claude that because now I need to go back into Helium 10 and turn on this automation so I can start requesting these reviews. I can ask questions like, hey, give me the follow-up review request stats. And so here, there’s the last 30 days, there’s 350 orders, as you guys can see here, synced, these are how many that are going out for review requests. These are how many that got sent out and accepted by Amazon, et cetera, et cetera. Another thing that we have now in the MCP is all the profits data for TikTok Shop.
Bradley Sutton:
If you have TikTok Shop connected to Helium 10, I could say, hey, give me a P&L summary of TikTok Shop sales the last 30 days, and it’s gonna go line by line and give me all the stats. Like I can start now mapping stuff, like, hey, give me a chart of my TikTok Shop sales from October 1st to October 10th and graph it over my Amazon sales from October 1st to October 10th. You can’t do that anywhere else, guys.
You can do that now with the Helium 10 MCP if you have your Amazon account connected to Helium 10 and your TikTok Shop account, even your Walmart account, track all three of them, you know, and now start going crazy now. Look for different metrics, like your ad spend and different things like that. Super cool stuff that you now in the MCP can graph together.
Bradley Sutton:
You can’t even do that necessarily in Helium 10. Like we don’t have a graph for that. There’s a graph for TikTok Shop sales. There’s a graph for Walmart. There’s a graph for Amazon, but you can’t do custom graphs in Helium 10. But with Helium 10 data, you can do that in Cloud, ChatGPT, start getting creative with how you pull this data. Guys, we’re living in the future is now, as they say, right? We’re living in 2030 here with some of this stuff that you’re gonna be able to do now. If you’re wondering what all the TikTok Shop capabilities are, just ask Cloud, say, hey, what TikTok Shop functions exist now for Helium 10?
Bradley Sutton:
You’re gonna get a list of like 50 different things. There’s 15 of them that are new as of this week. You also now have Amazon MCP tools to get seller traffic and product traffic, all right? So if you wanna see at the seller level or marketplace level, page views, mobile app views, B2B views, buy box percentage, all this data that normally is kind of like buried in reports in Seller Central, you can now just prompt Helium 10 and the MCP in Cloud to do that. Like for example, look at this prompt I did here. Compare the average Amazon seller traffic for my account during prime big deal days on a daily basis with the daily average for the week before prime big deal days, all right?
Bradley Sutton:
So here we go, look at this. My daily average of sessions before prime big deal days was 268, but during prime big deal days, almost 500. My unit session percentage, which is basically my conversion rate, look at this, 3.5% before prime big deal days, during prime big deal days, 11%, almost three times as much. So you’re gonna be able to just like, be able to compare data. I just came up with this off the top of my head. You guys do whatever prompts you have or you can start comparing this data and getting this information that comes directly from Amazon right here in your Cloud through the Helium 10 MCP. Last, the Helium 10 agent, all right? If you don’t have Cloud, you don’t have ChatGPT, don’t need it. You can use the Helium 10 agent right here.
Bradley Sutton:
We have a new feature here on the bottom. We have fast mode and thinking mode, all right? So if you just need fast answers, I would always have fast on, but if you wanted to do something like deep, deep research, almost none of the stuff I showed you guys in the MCP today would need the deep, deep research. But if you were doing something like next level where you’re just like, hey, I want the Helium agent to take a little bit more time. It’s kind of like, you know, you have Cloud, you have different models and ChatGPT, different levels that you do based on how deep you wanna go. So if you guys ever had that kind of deep project, switch to the thinking mode.
Bradley Sutton:
So now we have two different modes in our Helium agent you guys can use. Have you guys used that yet? Let me know in the comments below if you guys have used the MCP or the Helium agent. Almost all this stuff guys was prioritized by you, the customers who are giving us feedback on what you guys wanted. And so if you guys have a feedback, more feedback on what we don’t have available in MCP or what we don’t have in the Helium agent, let us know. Don’t forget at the very top of the screen in Helium 10 in your dashboard, you hit these little two quotation marks at the top that says send feedback and then hit the button that says give feature ideas.
Bradley Sutton:
One last thing next week, guys, we have a cool webinar coming up. It is gonna be about brand stores, all right? Not a lot about Helium 10. We don’t just push Helium 10 here. We talk about strategies that will help all sellers. And so if you guys haven’t registered for that, we’re gonna show you some new AI stuff in Seller Central that like 95% of you guys have never seen before. Daniela from Mindful Goods will be coming on and doing this workshop with us. So if you’d like to figure out how you can like potentially double the sales that come to your brand store, make sure to register h10.me/brandstorewebinar. See you guys next week.
Carrie Miller:
Thank you so much, Bradley, for all those new feature alerts. Next up we have return reasons are now available for FBA partial refunds. So basically, you can now as a seller, you can actually select reasons that qualify for offering partial refunds if you’re fulfilled by Amazon seller in the US, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and Canada. So basically the partial refunds program, FBA partial refunds program, lets you offer customers a partial refund, allowing them to keep the product instead of processing a full return. This program helps you reduce your return shipping and processing costs. So with this update, you have two options.
Carrie Miller:
You can enable it for all ASINs or you can enable it for selected ASINs. Personally, I think you should choose to enable for selected ASINs so that you can make sure that each product has got the proper reasons for the ability for customers to return it for a partial refund. I’m sure you have different shapes and sizes and things that might not make sense to get them shipped back and have to pay that price.
Carrie Miller:
So I would definitely take a look ASIN by ASIN instead of maybe your whole store. But what you need to know is basically in here as well. So if you’re already enrolled, customers are going to continue to receive partial refunds for all of the eligible return reasons. And you can enroll or manage your partial refund preferences on the FBA partial refunds page settings. Now it’s saying here, note partial refunds are only available to customers who meet our eligibility criteria. And it says they’re automatically reviewing each return request and ensuring that basically these people are not taking advantage.
Carrie Miller:
I do think this could be potentially an issue where people realize, oh, hey, I can just get a partial return on these things. I don’t actually have to ship it back. So I’m going to buy something and then request a partial return and keep the item. I’m hoping they have a really good scanning process for this because I as a seller even have gotten things where basically I sell skateboards and I’ve had an entire complete longboard setup that was shipped out to the customer and they returned their old broken board and they still got credit for that return. And so it’s kind of, you know, a difficult process when you’re a seller. And so I think this is going to help a little bit more.
Carrie Miller:
Hopefully they’re screening really well so that people are not taking advantage. If they see somebody that’s, you know, constantly requesting these partial refunds, I think that, you know, they can block those people and that will be very helpful for the sellers. And next up we have the strategy of the week and it is our keyword trackers.
Bradley Sutton:
You can only have with Helium 10. That is keyword tracker with boost. All right. The base form of keyword tracker is the same as pretty much any keyword tracker out there. We’re going to check once a day, at least once a day. All right. And this is not useless information. You kind of just want to see, hey, day by day, what’s my rank? You know, most keywords, most products, they’re not going to fluctuate too much day by day, especially the higher search volume ones.
Bradley Sutton:
But sometimes, like I said, there’s something called a search shuffle where based on where somebody is searching, you know, keyword ranks might be different based on what browser somebody is using. Keyword ranks might be different based on just whatever Amazon is doing. It can literally have somebody searching right here in my address and somebody across the street. Same zip code, same street. They can show a different rank. Well, if the rank is just fluctuating a little bit, like here in one situations, page one, position five, another one, page one, position seven.
Bradley Sutton:
Is that a big deal? No, but it is a big deal when like here it’s page one, position five, but then somebody across town is page three, position 150. That’s a big difference. If you’re only looking at one browsing scenario per day, even if it’s rotating, you know, which Helium 10 does, you might not be getting the whole picture, especially when you’re launching. You really want a good picture of what’s going on across the country. Also, especially when you are trying to run your sponsored ads, you know, like you want to know, hey, is my bid high enough?
Bradley Sutton:
Don’t just rely on Amazon. Look at where you’re showing up in the search results. And so Helium 10 is the only tool where you can actually see ranks hourly, 24 times a day. The way to do that is by running, turning on boost. So if I want to see where am I ranking 24 times a day for this keyword, Halloween decor, I just click on this rocket ship. Anybody has access to this platinum, diamond, et cetera. And now 24 times a day in rotating browsing scenarios, different browsers, different addresses, et cetera. It’s going to go ahead and check so that you can really see not just like, hey, what happens when I, when I up my bid and sponsored ads, but hey, is your rank kind of consistent across the board or is it fluctuating a lot? Helium 10 is the only tool that has ever had this.
Bradley Sutton:
And we have had this for almost eight years. Now it’s been like this. So guys, keyword tracking is so important. We all know that. Make sure that you are using boost on your most important keywords so that, you know, if your keyword rank is fluctuating or what kind of sponsored position you are getting at the hourly level.
Carrie Miller:
All right, let’s go ahead and get into the last piece of news. And I always highlight this type of news because of a situation that I had, I think it’s been two years ago now where I had my account, my seller central account hacked into and my entire payout stolen. It was a five-figure payout and we never recovered the money. Amazon did not help us. You know, we basically reported it everywhere we could. We tried to recover these funds and no one could help us.
Carrie Miller:
So I am very adamant about teaching everyone to secure your account. Now, some of these things were not available a few years ago. Like you can now, you know, do like a physical key, like a YubiKey, where you have a code and you have to have the physical key present in order to unlock your account. Now you can also sign in with a passkey. So this is what it’s about. So, you know, instead of, you know, all this other stuff, you can actually confirm with your fingerprint, your face, QR code, or a pin.
Carrie Miller:
So this is something that I would recommend as another layer of security to basically, you know, prevent fraud like this. And I’m really just very passionate about it because it is very upsetting, especially going into Q4, you might have some bigger payouts. And I’ve heard some sellers, you know, losing hundreds of thousands of dollars in payouts because they got their account hacked. So do whatever you can to secure your Seller Central account and make sure that no one can get in there and hack your account. All right, that is all I have for this week’s episode of the Weekly Buzz. So we’ll see you again next week to see what’s buzzing. Bye everyone.
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