#498 – Tariffs Ruled Unconstitutional & TikTok Halts Shipping Changes | Weekly Buzz 2/20/26
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.
Supreme Court strikes down most of Trump’s tariffs in a major blow to the president
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/supreme-court/supreme-court-strikes-trumps-tariffs-major-blow-president-rcna244827
TikTok Shop halts plan to end independent shipping for U.S. sellers after backlash
https://www.modernretail.co/operations/tiktok-halts-plan-to-end-independent-shipping-for-u-s-sellers-after-backlash/
Helium 10 just revamped its Listing Builder tool to speed up keyword research and create optimized listings in minutes. See how the new AI workflow pulls real Amazon data and helps you write listings built for modern search and Rufus.
Shoppable Collections Beta Ending
https://sellercentral.amazon.com/enhanced-content/content-manager
Amazon Seller Central News: Update to OTDR listing deactivation process as of February 28, 2026
https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-news/articles/QVRWUERLSUtYMERFUiNHVDdIVjdTQ0dQTTlFWlNG
Amazon Seller Central News: Use new dashboard to view changes to your brand’s product detail pages
https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-news/articles/QVRWUERLSUtYMERFUiNHRlQzNllaNURZMzU4WDk0
Lastly, a big Amazon networking event is coming to Brooklyn, and it’s packed with tactics sellers are using right now. Get the details, grab the discount, and see why Bradley’s showing up in person. Go to http://h10.me/asgtg
In episode 498 of the AM/PM Podcast and Weekly Buzz, Shivali talks about:
- 00:00 – Introduction
- 00:43 – Tariffs Unconstitutional?
- 04:01 – TikTok Halts Shipping Changes
- 06:45 – Revamped Listing Builder
- 14:16 – Shoppable Collections Ending
- 15:35 – OTDR Listing Deactivations
- 17:10 – Historical Comparisons
- 21:18 – Review Listing Changes
- 23:06 – Catch Bradley on ASGTG
Transcript
Shivali Patel:
Supreme Court is striking down most of Trump’s tariffs. TikTok shop is reversing its previous updates to seller shipping. And Helium 10 has revamped its listing builder. 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, 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. All right, first up, we’ve got some crazy news.
Shivali Patel:
The Supreme Court just ruled that Trump exceeded his authority, imposing certain emergency tariffs, invalidating many of those country by country or reciprocal tariffs that we were seeing. And as Amazon sellers like you and I, this could mean quite a few different things. For example, one, potential cost relief, especially on those imported inventory goods that these tariffs affect. So if those tariffs are fully rolled back, well, you might not have to worry about profit margins the way you initially thought. Of course, it’s something still to consider and pivot your strategy because this is for now, right? And if this has taught us anything, is to always have a pulse on your business and have backup plans in place.
Shivali Patel:
Secondly, it could mean possible refunds. I was just taking a look at this other news article reporting on the same exact thing, but you’ve got some state leaders, including California governor Gavin Newsom, who’s now calling for immediate refunds with interest. If you’re watching this on YouTube, you can see over my head, it’s reporting that this is right after this news has come out. And this could be on the 130 billion or more collected from importers. If implemented, this could obviously impact cashflow for thousands of sellers who’ve paid elevated landing costs over this past year. And naturally, this also lends itself to some short-term volatility, in my opinion, especially when it comes to sourcing costs, because now there’s this discernment you have to take on of, well, is this category going to be affected or not?
Shivali Patel:
Now, I do want to mention that here it says, this is not across the board. There are certain ones that it imposes. For example, right here, it says this decision does not affect all of Trump’s tariffs leaving in place once he imposed on steel and aluminum using different laws, for example, but it depends his tariffs in two categories. And that’s, as I said, the country by country or reciprocal tariffs, which were ranging from 34% for China to a 10% baseline for the rest of the world. I will say that some things you as a seller will want to pay attention to now is monitor your HS code and landed costs for assumptions. You’ll want to watch for treasury guidance on any sort of refunds, especially making sure that there’s not some money you’re leaving back on the table.
Shivali Patel:
Now, if you’re wondering where this came from, there were actually certain words in the IEEPA, regulate and importation that president Donald Trump was using to assert the independent power for these tariffs. But as you can see right underneath this, it says those words cannot bear such weight. And this comes from the justices. So all to say that here, what is really within our control now, now that this is happening, things might be swaying in the wind a bit. Here’s what you should do. Monitor your HS code as well as your landed cost assumptions.
Shivali Patel:
You’ll want to watch for treasury guidance on any sort of refunds that might be coming your way. So you don’t leave any money on the table. You’ll want to avoid over-correcting your prices until there’s more clarity. And of course, keep diversification strategies open, meaning other platforms and keeping wiggle room in your profit margins in case that this doesn’t pan out the way that you anticipate it to.
Shivali Patel:
Next up, what have we got here? We’ve got TikTok shop is halting plans to end independent shipping for US sellers after the backlash. So if you recall, if you’ve been keeping up with TikTok shop news, you sell on TikTok shop, or maybe you’ve been watching the Weekly Buzz, then you know that February 25th, they were actually supposed to put into effect that you have to use TikTok shop logistics or anything that was on their strict list of approved providers. But now I just received this email where it says at this time, seller shipping remains unchanged and previously shared deadlines are not going to go into effect. You guys, please continue operating as usual. And this is really interesting. This halts the policy that would have required quite a few folks, a lot of brands to pivot their strategy. And I believe it comes from the brands who found it was difficult to keep up if they were to take on TikTok shop logistics.
Shivali Patel:
This reversal comes after modern retail reported last month that some brands were pulling back from TikTok shop in response to the proposed changes and that the shift would raise fulfillment costs, squeeze margins, and make it harder to offer the steep discounts TikTok shop shoppers expect. This would also lead to narrowing product assortments, reducing promotions, or exiting the platform altogether if the mandate moved forward. Now it remains unclear whether this is going to come back and be something that they implement just a little bit later on, but at least there is some time now built in that you guys can use to figure out if it would make sense at some point, if this were to come back where you have to use TikTok shop logistics to actually stay on the platform or at least get a plan in place to be able to leverage it. Because it’s been a really big conversation here at Helium 10 is TikTok shop is where sellers should be expanding to in 2026. We’ve got a handful of tools for that as well, by the way.
Shivali Patel:
So if you’re an Amazon seller and you want to expand without necessarily taking on too much additional bandwidth, we’ve got a lot of tools. They’re usually denoted with the TikTok shop icon inside of our products menu. And you can just go in and bulk convert your listings so long as you are profitable and it makes sense for you using our profitability calculator on any of your product detail pages. And then of course, go on and sync your SKUs, your product pages from TikTok to Amazon and set a safe safety stock. So that way when you go viral, your momentum on Amazon, it increases, but it doesn’t run out. All right. So make sure that you guys go check that out, especially because well, things aren’t really changing for shipping on TikTok shop just yet. Now let’s talk a little bit about our revamped Listing Builder at Helium 10. And to do that, I’m going to bring on Bradley to explain how it works.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, guys. So super excited about phase one of our brand new Listing Builder. This is an absolute game changer if you’ve been using Helium 10. So if you’ve got the diamond plan, you’ve got access to all these new features right here in listing builder. You can actually add a listing, optimize a listing that you already have, create one from scratch. Let me show you a listing that I literally just made. Here’s the listing. I mean, I literally just made this. This is in launch right now, but how did I make this in like less than five minutes using keywords? I can’t get anywhere else. Let me recreate the steps here. So once you add the listing, you first get on this page, you can put the ASIN in here.
Bradley Sutton:
If this is an existing product and then put your competitors into kind of like what you would consider your competitor sections if you’re running Cerebro. Now, interestingly enough, I put in a couple of ASINs here for this coffin makeup shelf that has not been in stock in years. All right. But I am going to do something that only you can do in Helium 10 for. All right. Because this was one of the most popular products of a couple of years ago. And I want to get its keywords. Now, guys, you’re going to be able to run all of these different keyword searches. The first one is find my ABA converting keywords with conversion share of greater than or equal to one percent.
Bradley Sutton:
All right. So that means if it’s your product here and it has a history of brand analytics, converting keywords, guys, this is the only tool where you’re going to be able to get this information where instantly I can go ahead and choose up to like 26 different weeks, like up to half a year, like going all the way back to like 2020 and be able to say, hey, all right, show me where Amazon said I had sales. The next one here is the competitor ABA. All right. That means these are from the competitors. Remember, I said I had one product that hasn’t been in stock in years. So what I did was I actually went here and I chose a bunch of the weeks from 2023 and 2024 when I know was selling well so I can get the list of keywords direct from Amazon that drove sales again. Say it. I’ve said it once.
Bradley Sutton:
I’ve said it twice. I’ll say it three times. This is the only tool, guys, that you can get this data from super valuable. And this was especially important for me because right now there’s almost no coffin makeup shelves out there. So it’s very limited the kind of keywords that I can get. So thank goodness for this brand analytics. The next one is find search query performance sales keywords. All right. So if I had searched for performance data on my product, I can choose up to a whole year’s worth of data dies with one click here.
Bradley Sutton:
Let me find any keyword that brought me at least one purchase to purchase whatever I want right here. Next step are Cerebro. All right. These are Cerebro searches. Find the top keywords that the average competitor rank was on page one and at least two competitors are ranking for. Show me the ones where maybe a maximum of two competitors are ranking in a certain range. You know, this is the opportunity keywords. Next up, another completely exclusive thing, the Helium 10. Find the historical keywords. All right. I can look back up to 24 months, two years of data where I can say, hey, show me where that one product that hasn’t been in stock in forever. But show me where it was ranking between one and five any time in the last 24 months.
Bradley Sutton:
You’re getting keywords, guys, that you can’t get anywhere else. And the last two are also cerebral searches where I can say, you know what, just show me where at least any of these competitors is ranking between one and ten or any of them were ranking between one and whatever on sponsored. All right. Once you do that, you hit apply. And then now it’s going to go into your keyword bank. And you can see I’ve got 247 keywords.
Bradley Sutton:
And it’s pretty cool because now I can see, hey, which are the keywords that really are important? I look at this one coffin shelf obviously is important because look at all of the ones that it came up. All those keyword searches, it came up in historical top keywords. It came up in competitor brand analytics. It came up in my top keywords and it came up in top performing organic keywords. So is that an important keyword?
Bradley Sutton:
You better believe it. So I hit this star here because this is going to help me on my next step because I want to make sure that, hey, this is a keyword I know I have to get in phrase form so I can say, hey, you know what were all the keywords that brought sales and brand analytics with one click? I can just click that here and be able to see that once I am done with all of this. Now I go to the last page and this is very similar, but we redid the formula. I redid the formula for what makes a good SEO listing. All right.
Bradley Sutton:
So this is a new scoring system that we have now that’s weighted in a certain way to make sure you have the right keywords in different places in your listing. I could see here what my rank is compared to the others as far as who’s most optimized for the Amazon search algorithm. What were the phrases I’ve used? And then here’s the other new thing for diamond numbers. You can hit start AI workflow. You can input an image, just put an image, a product image here and hit analyze.
Bradley Sutton:
All of these fields for AI will populate just based on the image itself. All right. So then I can tweak it and I have so much more things I can write here about the product that AI is going to be able to incorporate into my listing, you know, stuff I saw from the reviews or stuff I want to make sure like dimensions of the product, etc. And here’s the thing, guys, this is enhancing with Rufus. All right. So this is also making sure this was made by Andrew Bell, where he designed this to like, hey, let’s make sure that this listing, when we write it with AI, it is made in a way where it answers all common questions about Rufus.
Bradley Sutton:
And I can even throw ASINs in here, my own ASIN or competitor ASIN and be like, hey, whatever Rufus questions are being asked on this page, you know, make sure that it is being answered right. Like on this one, if I were to put it in, you see here the questions that Rufus is asking, is it easy to mount on the wall? What are the exact dimensions? Does it fit perfume bottles? Guess what? Because of that, this listing is going to be made with AI that will make sure that it answers all of those questions in a positive way.
Bradley Sutton:
Another thing here that’s pretty cool is I can describe the tone of how I want it. Or let’s say there’s a listing out there that I really love the vibe, right? Like there’s a listing. I just love how they made their bullet points. I can copy that ASIN and put that ASIN here under brand voice. And it will go ahead and say and make the listing in that general structure.
Bradley Sutton:
You know, it’s not copying a listing, but just give the vibe of that listing. So once I hit generate listing, it is going to create this whole thing with AI. It’s using up all my main phrases. Look at this. It used up all my main phrases that I had starred or that have high competitor performance scores. And it used up so much of my root keywords as well.
Bradley Sutton:
So guys, this is an absolute game changer. If you have been doing your keyword research in Helium 10, you’re going to be able to do it like five times as fast. And you have completely new ways to make sure that your listings are optimized for the latest and what works in Amazon SEO and for AI things such as Rufus. So guys, if you have the diamond plan, hop in there right now. This is still in beta. We’ve got new things coming. Make sure to check it out and let us know what you think.
Shivali Patel:
I absolutely love that. I like that it’s integrated in. So now it’s even faster to find the keywords that are your top keywords or opportunity keywords, your supplementary keywords, and it’s all pulled from Amazon data inside of Listing Builder. And then from there, you can also make sure that your listing is actually going to mesh well with Rufus, because conversational shopping has been a huge trending topic. It’s becoming more of a thing as AI becomes even more embedded within our lives. With that, let’s jump on to the next news bit. And that my friends is shoppable collections. Beta is ending. It says right here that they have decided to end shoppable collections on February 27th, 2026.
Shivali Patel:
From here on out, it’s going to be removed from any product detail pages that had it as well as the A plus content manager. And that if you previously were using brand story, that’s going to just automatically populate back up. It’s going to be displayed to all your customers in place of where you originally had shoppable collections. I know this has been sort of a mixed sentiment to this happening. For some people, it really helped them guide their consumers to a buying decision. It was really interactive.
Shivali Patel:
But even then, I’m sure that this means that there are other ways to get that conversion down because they are saying they’re taking the most successful features from shoppable collections and still incorporating them into brand story to improve your brand storytelling and shopability of your products. Now, whether this happens, I’d love to know and hear from you, whether you are completely covered for this, you’ve got your brand story up, and then also how you feel about it and how you’re seeing those conversions change as this gets taken away. Then we’ve got an update to OTDR listing deactivation as of February 28th.
Shivali Patel:
If you don’t know what that stands for, it stands for on-time delivery rate requirement. Now before, if your OTDR fell below 90%, all of your seller fulfilled listings would be deactivated. But with this new change, only the listings that have had the most impact on that rating are going to be deactivated. All of your other listings are going to remain active, which is nice because it doesn’t feel like an overreaction to all those things. However, just know that if your OTDR is significantly below 90%, again, that’s on-time delivery rate is significantly below 90%, or you repeatedly fail that requirement, then they’re going to deactivate all of those seller fulfilled listings. Go ahead and go to the new section of your Seller Central to read up a little bit more on this.
Shivali Patel:
It’s all here if you’re watching it on YouTube behind my head. Just as a brief rundown, it says for standard shipping, you’re eligible for protection. If you enable shipping settings automation, enable automated handling time, and you purchase OTDR protected shipping labels on Amazon Buy Shipping or on eQuo. For seller fulfilled prime and premium shipping, you are not required to have automated handling time enabled, but to receive protection, you have to of course, enable shipping settings automation and purchase OTDR protected shipping labels for that too. Now, if your listing gets deactivated, then make sure to visit account health and check out those other policy violations tab to get that stuff sorted. I’m going to now pass it over to Carrie, who’s going to talk to you a little bit about historical comparisons.
Carrie Miller:
Imagine you’re analyzing your sales and notice a fluctuation, either an increase or a drop from one month to the next. Or maybe you’re looking at a competitor’s BSR chart and think, wow, what happened this month? Their sales just shot up, or maybe they took a nosedive.
So what would you want to know? Well, there are plenty of reasons sales might fluctuate. It could be due to an increase in keyword search volume, maybe seasonality or something else, but more often than not, it’s tied to visibility and specifically their ranking on important keywords, whether it’s sponsored or organic rank.
Carrie Miller:
If a competitor suddenly lands at the top of page one for high volume search terms, their sales are more than likely going to spike. And conversely, if they lose their ranking, sales can drop. So this is exactly the type of insight you should be tracking both for your competitors and for your own products. So if a competitor’s sales drop because their keyword ranking slipped, you’ll want to make sure your rankings stay strong. And on the flip side, if your sales increase due to higher keyword rankings, those are the keywords you want to double down on. You never want to lose momentum on those really important keywords.
Carrie Miller:
And if rankings start to slip, well, it’s time to take action. So I’m going to just show you how you can analyze this in seconds. Okay. This is actually the coffin shelf. We did an example before. This is actually not listed right now, but if we take a look down here, we’re going to look at their sales data here. And you can see that from June of 2024, they had a really high BSR. So that means their sales were probably not very good. And then you can see that it went down in July of 2024. So that means their sales probably went up if they had a higher BSR. So what we want to do is we want to figure out what exactly happened from June to July to cause this spike in sales. So what we do is we take the ASIN and we do a reverse search here. And so I’ve already done the reverse search on that ASIN. And then what we’re going to do is we’re going to click on monthly comparison.
Carrie Miller:
We want to compare June of 2024 to July of 2024. So you can click these two months and hit apply. You can actually do up to three if you want to. But then the next thing I want to do is I want to see, you know, where the minimum basically was 20 in say June. So this is the first month in June, their minimum rank was 20 on keywords, but then maybe those keywords the next month jump to rank ones between one and 10. And then you’re going to hit apply.
Carrie Miller:
And what you’re going to do is you’re going to see those keywords that maybe could have been a game changer to increase those sales. And we’ve got 18 filtered keywords here. So you can see, for example, Emo Decor, they were ranked 165 in June and jumped all the way to spot 10 in July. So that is a huge jump and that’s definitely going to help increase sales. You can see Coffin Decor, you can see that it went from 21 all the way to spot one, which is absolutely incredible. We’ve got Gothic Shelf went from 33 to five.
Carrie Miller:
Let’s see if we can see another big jump down here. I mean, these are all pretty big jumps, like 48 Gothic Wall Shelves down to spot two. So definitely, as you can see here, you can see that the keyword rank is definitely tied to a lot of keyword sales. You can see that they actually, and you could expand this out a little bit more and you could see even more keywords where maybe they had that huge jump where they actually lost rank and then they got it back. So I could also look at this in another way if you wanted to, if sales were high one month, but dropped the next, where did they lose keyword rank? Where did they pull back on advertising?
Carrie Miller:
So this is game changing information and Historical Cerebro completely revolutionized keyword research when it launched. And before you could really only analyze what’s happening right now. And most tools, including the base Helium 10, show you current data, which is great if a product is performing well in the moment, but to get the full picture, you really need a holistic approach. So looking at what’s happening now, yes, but also taking an extra step and then connect the keyword ranking trends to sales fluctuations. And once you do that, you’re going to see how many actionable insights this strategy provides, and you can take so much action to really make a difference in your sales.
Shivali Patel:
Thanks so much, Carrie. That is really one of my favorite features to talk about when I’m talking to people and helping them prepare for a season or optimize their keyword campaigns, and just use it for a handful of different ways, different reasons to adjust your strategy. Now, here we’ve got the last news bit I want to talk to you about, which is you now have a new dashboard to view changes to your brand’s product detail pages. Brands can now review all Amazon initiated changes made to their listings in the last 60 days with review listing changes.
Shivali Patel:
You guys will want to bookmark this page. All right, make sure that you’ve got a bookmarked or favorited, and that way you can take a look at what’s really going on with your listing, what has changed, and always stay up to date. This is replacing the Excel-based review listing updates tool that previously was on Explore Brand Selection, and it helps you view Amazon listing changes in one place.
Shivali Patel:
It’s sort of a change log and definitely something that you will want to have eyes on. Now, I know I said that the last thing was the last thing, but this is the last thing, I promise. And you will want to go to h10.me forward/asgtg. Again, that’s h10.me/asgtg. This is an event that’s happening in Brooklyn, New York on March 5th from 8.30 AM to 8 PM. You’ve got nine presentations, 40 service providers on site, and of course, food.
Shivali Patel:
Food gets me a lot of places, but what gets me there even better is networking and great content. And that is exactly what this has. Bradley’s going to be there being one of the presenters. And then what sort of content it covers? Well, you can learn how to automate up to 80%. If I can find this again, here we go.
Shivali Patel:
Automate up to 80% of your Amazon workload with AI agents, turn week listings into higher click-through rate, high converting assets. You can learn how to use AI to build winning Amazon images, boost Amazon rankings with off Amazon SEO and AI search, learn what Amazon DSP and AMC really do and what you should skip and much, much more. You guys, this is one of those things that you will want to show up for if you are close by or if you can manage.
Shivali Patel:
I have not been to this event myself, but if Bradley’s going, it certainly has value. Every time I go to a networking event or conference, I always learn something and meet some folks that I can share stories with, learn some strategies from, and sometimes they even turn into lifelong friends. So if you’ve got some time, make sure that you go check it out. And I actually have a code for YouTube before I forget. It’s ASGTG26_BRADLEY. Again, that is ASGTG26_BRADLEY. That is going to give you 20% off the tickets. That’s it for this week’s Weekly Buzz. We’ll see you next week to see what’s buzzing.
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