#565 – Walmart Loves Muse, Amazon Hates It! | 3 Weeks of Black Friday Deals? | Weekly Buzz 10/22/26
Audio version above. Video version below
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.
AI shopping wars: Walmart welcomes AI agents while Amazon blocks Muse
https://www.axios.com/2026/10/21/walmart-amazon-agents-muse
Shopify Soars 33% in a Month on Meta’s Muse Deal: “Partnering Deeply”
https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/shopify-soars-33-month-meta-211440656.html
Amazon Seller Central News: Earn the new Business Discount badge to get always-on visibility
https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-news/articles/QVRWUERLSUtYMERFUiNHNFBIR1FEVjdTWTZLWkNY
TikTok Shop announces three-week Black Friday-Cyber Monday promotions
https://www.retailbrew.com/stories/tiktok-shop-announces-three-week-black-friday-cyber-monday-promotions
Amazon Seller Central News: Customize how your FBA returns are graded for resale
https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-news/articles/QVRWUERLSUtYMERFUiNHRVNBSlc5OFZRTTZURVM3
Amazon Seller Central News: Extended return window for items bought in November and December 2026
https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-news/articles/QVRWUERLSUtYMERFUiNHN0xOTjk5QzVaTEIyUTdT
In episode 565 of the AM/PM Podcast and Weekly Buzz, Bradley covers:
- 00:00 – Introduction
- 00:43 – Ecommerce Vs Muse
- 03:36 – New Amazon Business Discount Badge
- 05:01 – A Way to Save Thousands of Dollars in Fees
- 08:38 – 3 Weeks of Black Friday Deals?
- 10:17 – Create PPC Rules with AI
- 12:44 – Updates to Amazon Grade and Resale Program
- 13:58 – Extended Amazon Return Window in November & December
- 15:10 – Free AI Bootcamp Course for Ecommerce Sellers
- 16:31 – Meet Bradley In Europe Next Week!
Transcript
Bradley Sutton:
Amazon blocks Meta’s Muse AI, but Walmart and Shopify welcome it with open arms. One major platform has three weeks of Black Friday deals coming up. There’s a new business discount badge you might qualify for. 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 the AMPM 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 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 first news article. This is from axios.com and it’s entitled AI Shopping Wars. Walmart welcomes AI agents while Amazon blocks Muse. So I think it was Carrie or maybe it was me, I don’t remember, a few weeks ago, we reported how as soon as Meta started gaining traction, Amazon immediately blocked it and blocked it from browsing the website, checking out and things like that. I myself use Muse. I think it’s awesome. That’s my new go-to tool. It books flights for me, it books rental cars, it’s managing my email, it’s doing all kinds of cool stuff.
Bradley Sutton:
And yeah, I might have wanted it to do some shopping for me. I’m not sure about some of the shopping I want to do. I still want to make the decision on it, but I want it to at least browse stuff for me. But Amazon won’t allow it. However, according to this article, Walmart welcomes it. They announced just this week, Wednesday, that it’s going to debut a new management system to make sure consumers can use the agents they choose to shop with Walmart and Sam’s Club with controls over what each agent can do.
Bradley Sutton:
It’s something called Walmart Agent Gateway, where it’s going to enable customers to set up agentic spending limits, require them to approve or review the purchase, cut off access. However, as you know, a couple of weeks ago, Amazon did the opposite. They blocked Muse from doing these things. There was an analyst who told Axios, the one who made this news article, it says Amazon is betting that its own AI tools will aid customers who want to use that technology. But the calculation could well change if third-party agents start to play a much bigger role in discovery and purchasing. Imagine if all of a sudden people start flocking to Walmart because they can use it with Muse or other agents.
Bradley Sutton:
Well, Amazon, I’m sure, will maybe change their policies. There was another report that actually said 16% only of shoppers are currently comfortable letting an AI assistant find and purchase products on their behalf. I just read this for the first time right now as I’m reading this article, as I’m doing this. I guess I’m one of those 84% who’s like, not feeling too comfortable with it. But who knows, as technology improves, everybody’s including my own viewpoints might change on this. Along the same lines, on the same topic, there was another article here from Yahoo Finance.
Bradley Sutton:
It says Shopify soars 33% in a month on Metamuse deal, partnering deeply. All right, so Shopify said, hey, yeah, we’re cool with Muse agent. And I guess investors are like, hey, this is the future. And this is not necessarily 100% indication of whether something’s going to be successful or not. But at least you can see that there’s people literally bullish on platforms that are adopting and allowing AI agents to shop on consumers’ behalves. Next up, we’ve got an article from Seller Central about a new badge that can show up in the search results.
Bradley Sutton:
Another reason to sign up for this. And we’re talking about business discounts and business pricing. All right, this is not something new, business pricing per se. It’s something we’ve been telling you, hey, like set it up. If you never know, like even coffin shelves, there might be haunted house places that want to buy coffin shelves in bulk and they want to get a business discount. Well, imagine if you’re the only one with a business discount, you’re going to get the sale over competitors.
Bradley Sutton:
But here, there’s now a new business discount badge. It says it’s going to be available on Amazon Business soon. And it says when your single unit business price offers at least 5% savings against a validated reference point, your offer automatically earns the badge displayed with strikethrough pricing and savings percentage across search results and detail pages. This can reach millions of organizations buying on Amazon Business’ article set. Now, businesses regardless will buy your products. But why set up these discounts?
Bradley Sutton:
Look at this stat. In 2026, B2B sales of products with business pricing grew nearly double the rate of those without. All right, so now this badge strikethrough price, it’s going to stick out more in the search results. So check your business pricing. Do you even have it active? And if you do, make sure it’s at least 5%. And now you’re going to go ahead and get this new badge in the search results for business customers. All right, next up, we’re going to do a strategy of the week. Carrie, take it away.
Carrie Miller:
Today, I want to share with you an advanced strategy that actually brought Bradley $5,000 in extra profit. Let’s talk about the alerts tool in Helium 10. There’s a powerful feature in there, kind of like a silent alarm that notifies you if one of your products is close to dropping into a smaller Amazon size tier. And here’s what that means. Let’s say your product is currently considered as a large standard size and its dimensions are nine by nine by nine. Well, did you know that if you could shrink just one of those sides to eight inches, so nine by nine by eight, you could potentially move down to a lower size tier.
Carrie Miller:
That small tweak could mean $1, $2 or even more per unit saved on FBA fees and shipping. If any of your products qualify, Helium 10 will notify you. And that’s exactly what happened to Bradley around July or August of last year. He got an alert that said, you have products with size tier optimization suggestions. Turns out it was three variations of the same product family. And when he dug into the details, Helium 10 showed him that by reducing the length by one inch, he could shift from large bulky to large standard size.
Carrie Miller:
What’s the impact? His fulfillment fee dropped from $10.75 to $7 per unit, and that’s $3.75 savings per sale. So he redesigned the packaging just slightly and got the product to fit in the new size tier. Bradley sells about 1500 units per year of this product, which is not a huge massive seller, but only about four to five units a day. But if you do the math, $3.75 times 1500 units is $5,625. That’s $5,625 added directly to his bottom line, just by making this one inch packaging adjustment.
Carrie Miller:
And that’s thanks to a simple alert from Helium 10. So this is how you actually set up the feature. If you wanna go to Helium 10, you’re gonna go to the tools and then you’re gonna click on alerts and it’s gonna bring you to this page. Then you’re gonna click on settings and it’s gonna bring you to this page. And this is where you’re actually going to set up all of your alerts. And the one that I’m talking about specifically is size tier optimization.
Carrie Miller:
You wanna make sure that that is checked. And if it’s checked, you’re gonna make sure, you’re basically gonna see the alerts in here. So you can see they’re all kind of grouped here and you can click on this event history for each product. And it’ll show you for each product, what all of the different alerts are that you can take advantage of. Now, this feature is available for Platinum, Diamond and above. Check your alerts dashboard, look on the left-hand side and do you see any notifications about size tier optimization?
Carrie Miller:
Of course, it won’t be possible for everyone, but if you have a molded product with custom fit packaging, changing dimensions might not be feasible. But if there’s any flexibility, maybe adjusting the way you package, reconfiguring parts, or even shaving off half an inch, you could unlock major savings. I actually worked for somebody who was selling lighting and he basically engineered these huge lamps to package down into these small packages to save money on all of those fees. So even a $1 or $2 reduction fee per unit can add up fast. And in Bradley’s case, $3.75 per unit meant thousands of dollars back in his pocket. So check those alerts. You could be leaving money on the table without even knowing it.
Bradley Sutton:
Thank you for that. So guys, check your accounts if you haven’t done so. It takes you five seconds on your alerts page. As you can see, like for me, that alert saved me thousands of dollars, literally on a product that doesn’t even sell like that much. Some of you big sellers out there, if you guys had that same alert that I did, oh my goodness, that could have been a $15,000, $20,000 savings or even more for you over the course of a year just by looking at Helium 10 Alerts. Definitely pays for entirety of Helium 10 for life, one of these alerts.
Bradley Sutton:
So make sure to get in there and check it out. Next up, three weeks of Black Friday deals. You know, I remember the day, back in the day, like I’m aging myself. You guys remember, who out there remembers this? You would wake up at like midnight and go stand in line in Best Buy or Sears or something like that for their doorbuster deals. That was a night before Black Friday, right? How many people remember doing that? Then all of a sudden, there was something called Cyber Monday and then there’s like, all right, let’s do a whole weekend of deals. Let’s call it Cyber Weekend or Cyber, now it’s like Cyber Week.
Bradley Sutton:
Well, now TikTok Shop is like, hold my beer, we’re announcing a three-week Black Friday Cyber Monday promotion. It says here, TikTok Shop expects this season to be bigger and better than ever and their Black Friday Cyber Monday will run from November 11th through November 30th. All right, that is absolutely crazy.
Bradley Sutton:
TikTok Shop said that hashtags like holiday shopping rose 263% in September and so people are shopping on TikTok looking for ideas of what to buy, what to gift, et cetera, et cetera. So first of all, if you are a TikTok Shop seller, go in there, check what deals you’re available for and how to participate in these deals, like if you can even afford to have so long of a deal window, maybe reach out to your top creators or find new creators using Helium 10 Influencer Finder for TikTok Shop available on all plans. Reach out, maybe you can get them to do some like gift, if your product is giftable, like do some special videos for this promotion.
Bradley Sutton:
You’ve got only like what, three weeks before this deal period starts. All right, next up, we’ve got some Helium 10 new feature alerts. These have to do with the Helium 10 MCP. Those of you who use Helium 10 ads, you know you can create rules. Like for example, here you can see in my Helium 10 ads, I’ve got a keyword harvesting rule where all of my different campaigns for one product are here. My auto campaigns, my sponsor display, product targeting, sponsored video campaigns, my broad campaigns, my exact campaigns.
Bradley Sutton:
And I have multiple of each type. This is keyword harvesting, right? So these rules, I’m like, hey, if you can find an ASIN for my auto campaign, that’s getting at least a couple of sales. et me see what I put here. I said at least two sales and under 60% A costs. You know what?
Take that ASIN, put it in my video ASIN targeting campaign, put it in my product targeting campaign, put it in my sponsor display campaign. If you can find a keyword in the auto campaign or a broad campaign, put it into my proven campaign, put it into my video keyword campaign. And so this is what we call keyword harvesting.
Bradley Sutton:
You’re using Amazon’s like kind of like auto features to find new keywords and ASINs you didn’t know are relevant to your product. Well, this is a rule that you can set up in Helium 10. Now you can do it in the MCP. So you would just like write in cloud, hey, create a keyword harvesting campaign for all of my campaigns that are for my coffin shelf. You can even put the ASIN. You know, if I get two sales under 50% A costs, make sure to bring it from my auto or broad campaign, a keyword, and put it to my manual campaign and my sponsor product campaign, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Bradley Sutton:
If I get two sales on an ASIN, put it into my sponsor display campaign, put it into my product targeting campaign, et cetera, et cetera. You can all do that. Just even using your voice, talking to Claude to do that. And it’s going to go ahead and set up that rule. In addition, we all have negative rules, potentially, hopefully, those of you using Helium 10 ads. In other words, hey, my research campaign or my auto campaign, if I get 15 clicks, 20 clicks, 25 clicks, zero sales suggest to me to negative match this search term, right?
Bradley Sutton:
You can now also do that with the MCP. Just type that in common language. It’s going to set up those rules, especially this is helpful in bulk. You know, I like putting a negative rule on each of my campaigns. And if you hadn’t done that, it’s a hundred rules you would have to create. You can do that in seconds and say, hey, Helium 10 for every single one of my campaigns, one by one, create a negative targeting rule that has this parameters.
Bradley Sutton:
Boom goes the dynamite. It’s done. So two new features for those of you who have Helium 10 ads and who use the Helium 10 MCP. Next up on the Accelerate floor, we had done a podcast where we were interviewing Amazonians from different departments. And we interviewed somebody from this great and resale resale department. And now there’s an official announcement out.
Bradley Sutton:
It says you can now provide your own criteria for how we, Amazon, evaluates your FBA customer returns for resale. So what that means is, you know, like somebody returns the product and you don’t want it probably just to automatically go back into inventory. At the same time, you don’t want Amazon just taking brand new products and just throwing it away. You know, when it’s totally fine to be resale. So now it says with customized grading, you tell us what sellable as new means for your products, including when items can be restored to new or when to sell them as used. We will use your input as guidance during grading.
Bradley Sutton:
So outcomes better reflect your brand standards. I think this is great news. A lot of people were complaining, like, what the heck? I was looking at what Amazon said was not sellable and it’s terrible. Or what the heck? Amazon put something back in inventory and I got a bad review because this they gave a fully used product and put it back as new. Has that ever happened to you guys? This hopefully will solve that. Make sure to check the description for the link on getting more information on this.
Bradley Sutton:
Last up, another release from Seller Central. It’s entitled extended return window for items bought in November and December. All right, so this is something that you guys all need to be aware about. Again, Amazon is framing this as a positive. Yeah, it’s a positive to buyers for sure, not to us sellers. But it says to provide a better shopping experience will extend our standard 30 day return window during the year and holiday shopping season.
Bradley Sutton:
This extended holiday returns policy requires that items purchased by customers from November 1st. Good grief. All the way through December 31st can be returned until January 31st, 2027. That means next week, November 1st, somebody buys something. They’ll use it for three months, theoretically. And January 27th, they’ll be like, or is that wait? That’s yeah, that’s three months. They’ll be like, you know what? I changed my mind. Let me return it. Like if I’m reading this correctly, that’s what is going to be a lot. What do you guys think about that? Let me know in the comments below. But if you guys start getting a whole bunch of returns in January and it’s for November and you think it’s a mistake. No, it’s not a mistake. This is the new policy. All right. One quick reminder.
Bradley Sutton:
Have you guys watched yet? AI boot camp. This is a free course that we have on YouTube that will help you go from zero to hero in AI. Or if you’re already a AI hero, we are going to give you some advanced modules that will help you take your e-commerce AI game to the next level. So this was done by myself, Carrie, Leo Segovio and Joe L. But guys, if you have not yet seen this program, go to h10.me/aibootcamp. We should have by the time you’re watching this, about six videos on there. Three new ones were launched this week.
Bradley Sutton:
Three from last week. Next week, we’ll launch another three. But make sure to check this out. While we give free Claude skills and free prompts that you guys can use that would definitely help you. It’s a great course and it’s 100 percent free. Make sure to check it out. h10.me/aibootcamp. And do me a favor, guys. When you do it like and subscribe to Helium 10, the channel is on and comment on the video.
Bradley Sutton:
I’m going to be choosing some people to give like some free one on one calls for people who have commented on one of the AI Bootcamp videos. The more you comment on like different videos, only one comment per video, the more entries you’ll get into our promotion to get one on one calls. All right, guys, that’s about it for this week. But just as a quick reminder, my travel is coming up in case you guys are in the area and want to get interviewed. Please email my assistant. I’m going to be in Greece, Athens this weekend.
Bradley Sutton:
And on Monday, I’m going to be in North Macedonia. Tuesday, I’ll be in Vienna, Austria. And Wednesday through Saturday, I will be in Paris, France. OK, so if you guys are in any of those places or want to come there, make sure to reach out to [email protected]. I would love to interview for the podcast or maybe see how I can help you out, maybe get some coffee together or something like that. Always love meeting the healing community out there. But interviewing many, many of you guys over the past few months. This is kind of fun. Looking forward to next month.
Bradley Sutton:
I’ll be in Dublin, Ireland, Wrexham and Manchester. And I will also be in Bratislava and Seoul, Korea, I believe are the places. Oh, yeah. And I’m going to Zimbabwe and Zambia like for long layovers where I’ll be there for a day each. So tons of travel next month as well. E-commerce related and would love to interview you local Helium 10 users. So email [email protected] if you guys want to be interviewed. All right. Thank you guys very much for tuning in. Don’t forget to tune in next week to see what’s buzzing.
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- Does Amazon Owe YOU Money? Find Out for FREE! If you have been selling for over a year on Amazon, you may be owed money for lost or damaged inventory and not even know it. Get a FREE refund report to see how much you’re owed!
- Check out our other Amazon FBA podcasts including the Serious Sellers Podcast.
- You can also listen to the AM/PM Podcast on YouTube here!
