#515 – Amazon Rufus Can Now Do WHAT? + New MCF Discounts | Weekly Buzz 4/22/26
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.
How to use Rufus to check price history, find deals, auto-buy items at target prices, and more
https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/retail/how-to-use-amazon-shopping-ai-assistant
Walmart reportedly pilots store-based marketplace order fulfillment
https://chainstoreage.com/news-briefs/2026-04-20?article=walmart-reportedly-pilots-store-based-marketplace-order-fulfillment
New ChatGPT App For Amazon Sellers
https://chatgpt.com/apps
Amazon Prime Day 2026 deadlines for deals and shipments
https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-news/articles/QVRWUERLSUtYMERFUiNHOVc3NzNaQlZGQjU2QzQ4
Check review sharing eligibility with Seller Assistant
https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-news/articles/QVRWUERLSUtYMERFUiNHNzc1VUMyTUE2UU5QQUg1
Multi-Channel Fulfillment 2026 Preferred Pricing
https://sellercentral.amazon.com/help/hub/reference/G53QRBEHXR2G5CCT?ref=Mktg_PT_US_MCF_AQ_Partner_Enablement_PPP_Guide
Upcoming Online and Offline Events
h10.me/amaapril
In episode 515 of the AM/PM Podcast and Weekly Buzz, Bradley covers:
- 00:00 – Introduction
- 00:50 – All Amazon Rufus New Updates
- 09:23 – Walmart Soon to Have 3 Hour Delivery?
- 10:38 – New ChatGPT App For Amazon Sellers
- 12:07 – Prime Day Deadlines Approaching
- 13:07 – Amazon Might Owe You Thousands Of Dollars
- 16:38 – Amazon Review Sharing Eligibility
- 17:48 – Amazon Offers Big MCF Discounts
- 20:11 – Upcoming On and Offline Events
Transcript
Bradley Sutton:
Amazon Rufus has some shiny new updates. There are some actual savings that you can have now with a special program with Amazon MCF, how to see if your variation listings are still in compliance. These stories and more on today’s Helium 10 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 Bradley Sutton. And this is the show that is our Helium 10 Weekly Buzz where you give you a rundown of all the goings on in the Amazon Tik TOK 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. All right, everybody. We’ve got a few articles today that are definitely worth mentioning. Let’s go ahead and hop right into it.
Bradley Sutton:
First news piece of the day is actually just from Amazon and some of it is old news. Some of it might be new to you. But the important thing is what do we take away as Amazon sellers with all the new updates that Amazon’s AI shopping assistant Rufus has? So this article is from Amazon. We’ve got the link down below, but in it, you can basically see, Hey, what is a recap of all the things that people can use Rufus for? And again, we’re going to go into how this affects us as sellers. Some of them do affect us.
Bradley Sutton:
Some of them don’t. Some of them are positive. Some of them might be negative. First thing, you know, the, the title here, it says how to use Rufus to check price history, find deals, auto buy items at target prices. That’s a cool new thing that some of you might not have known that they introduced a while back and more. All right. So this subtitle says, Hey, Rufus, our agentic AI assistant for shopping continues to get smarter, faster, and more capable, making personalized product recommendations, tracking price history, purchasing items for you in our store when they hit certain price and shopping other merchants. All right. So let’s go ahead and hop into some of these updates and see what’s new.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, something that’s not new is it says, Hey, Rufus can search for products based on activity, event purpose or other use cases and automatically add items to your cart. All right. So first of all, this, you know, something I’ve postulated on for over a year that, Hey, one of the primary things I would think is that’s driving Amazon’s kind of like goals with Rufus is, Hey, you know, the kind of stuff where you didn’t know what you needed to buy, you know, like, Hey, it’s about an event, like a 50th anniversary party, or, you know, some kind of activity that you haven’t done.
Bradley Sutton:
Like what do I need for rock climbing? If you don’t know what you need for these things, what do you do in the past? You would go and search for these things in Google, right. And or maybe even ChatGPT more recently, or maybe you would find blogs or YouTube videos. But now Amazon’s like, Hey, buyers, you don’t need to go off of Amazon. If you don’t know what to buy it, talk to Rufus and we’ll help you. All right. So first of all, how does this change things for sellers? Well, you know, in the past, maybe you were trying to make a whole bunch of blogs out there and that’s still, you know, important, you know, a lot of AIs out there off of Amazon can can pick up on blogs, but Hey, you don’t have to do too much different to your listing.
Bradley Sutton:
Hopefully your Amazon listings, you have always talked about the use cases, right? You’ve analyzed your reviews to know that, Hey, if people who get your stuff for 50th wedding anniversaries or things like that, hopefully you have that in your listing, even if it’s not a keyword that people search for. So this part shouldn’t change things too much. It’s just kind of cool that, Hey, now there’s less chance potentially of a sale going off of Amazon because if people start their journey on Amazon makes it more likely that they’re going to stick in the ecosystem. A couple of new things. It says, Hey, it can take a handwritten grocery list and add items to your cart.
Bradley Sutton:
I can’t imagine anybody doing that. You know, if you’re handwriting your grocery list, you might not even be on Amazon. I’m not sure, but I don’t think it was anything, you know, any of us have to change because of that. Now, auto buy things at a set price. That’s something newer and cool, right? Now, does this change how you affect or how you do your listing? Obviously not, but could it affect how your pricing strategy is? Like maybe you’re the type type of seller who never does discounts, right? Well, imagine if somebody set a price alert on your product and they’re waiting for it to get to a price, but you never have a discount. Rufus is never going to buy your product. All right. So, so that could affect how you do things along these lines.
Bradley Sutton:
Uh, this article talks about how Rufus can now proactively shop with scheduled actions, a feature that, uh, lets you set up recurring personalized shopping tasks, right? It says, while chatting with Rufus, tap the plus to create a schedule action, such as adding kids snacks to your cart each month, restocking regular household items. Now this part, I don’t know, like this is dumb to me.
Bradley Sutton:
I’m just going to be honest. Like what do we have guys as Amazon buyers, we’ve got subscribe and save, which gives you a discount. So why in the world would anybody do something where it’s like, Hey, order this for me every month at the full price when you could just put it on subscribe and save and save the 5% or 10% or something.
Bradley Sutton:
So this part, I’m not sure how this helps buyers at all. It definitely doesn’t help, you know, sellers because I mean, maybe it helps sellers that if we get more people to use Rufus instead of subscribe and save now, we don’t have to give the 5% discount, but I don’t see many people doing this because of subscribe and save. Now something interesting though, it says, Hey, uh, gift ideas ahead of families and friends, birthdays or holidays.
Bradley Sutton:
Now that could be something, you know, you can’t do that with subscribe and save. So there you go. But does this change anything we do as buyers? Not necessarily, you know, um, hopefully you have in your listing that, Hey, this is a good birthday gift or, or Christmas gift or something like that. So you gotta be searchable. You know, if you don’t have that, Rufus is never going to pick you up for sure. This article talks about price history. This is probably one of the things that people have been using Rufus for the most that I talked to. Uh, great for buyers.
Bradley Sutton:
Again, doesn’t affect you as a seller too much, but if you’re one of those shady sellers who does those fake discounts and stuff around prime day and other deals like that, Rufus users are going to be able to see right through your pricing techniques where no, you’re not going to be able to make it seem like you’ve got some big discount because Rufus will show that now this product has always been this price or something like that.
Bradley Sutton:
The difference though, is that now you a buyer can actually set Rufus to say, Hey, buy this for me when this face cream is $75 or something. So it’s not just a matter of, Oh, what’s the price history. It’s like, let me set a reminder, go ahead and purchase this for me. Check out on my behalf once it hits this price. So that’s something that’s new. It says, Hey, Rufus can now find deals on items on your wishlist, browsing history, past purchases.
Bradley Sutton:
Um, you just ask Rufus what are best deals for me or any items on my wishlist for sale. This doesn’t change anything for sellers. Um, doesn’t change too much for buyers. You know, like I just yesterday, um, you know, Shivali was asking me, Hey, what light did you buy or something like that? Right. And so what did I do? I looked in my, my history of my purchases and I just, you know, searched for light and I found it, but I guess now with Rufus, I could have just asked Rufus that, but basically it’s the same thing. Doesn’t affect us as sellers. Maybe marginally helps buyers.
Bradley Sutton:
Something interesting that Rufus can do is you can ask it, Hey, what do I need to create a home photography studio? Again, this goes back to what I was talking about before, how if you don’t know the kind of things you need, these searches that you used to do on YouTube or Google or chat, you absolutely might be able to now do a right within Rufus. So this definitely helps sellers.
Bradley Sutton:
I think this article goes on and say, Hey, you can find relevant products with photo uploads, not very new. You can always upload photos, take a picture of something, upload it to the Amazon search bar and get things that look similar. Now you might be able to do a little bit extra, hopefully with Rufus.
Bradley Sutton:
Like one thing it talked about was, Hey, uh, select a photo from your gallery and say, Rufus, how do I remove this coffee stain from my rug? That’s pretty cool. If it can answer that in a correct way, once again, as sellers, if your product removes coffee stains, uh, from rugs, hopefully you’ve got that in your listing.
Bradley Sutton:
Otherwise, you know, Rufus or anything else is not going to pick it up. We talked about this a few months ago, but they’re just reiterating it in this article about how there’s a buy for me button where it’ll show products from other websites with this shop direct of products that maybe are not available on Amazon. All right.
Bradley Sutton:
So just be aware that you’re not for people who use Rufus, you’re not just competing with other Amazon products. You’re competing with products that aren’t even on Amazon. Now with this new feature, another cool new Rufus feature or new ish is that you can open the detail page of a product and find the compare with similar button.
Bradley Sutton:
And then Rufus is going to show you a quick comparison of similar products. So a lot of, um, you know, things that Rufus has, you know, been updated with. It’s hard to believe, but Rufus is almost going to turn two years old guys. It was, it was started, I believe in June of 2024. And so we’re almost in June of 2026. And so Rufus has definitely come a long way from where it was.
Bradley Sutton:
Um, but still there’s not too much that makes you say, Oh, I have to completely change the way I’m selling or making listings. But hopefully you guys are optimizing for Rufus, making sure that you are answering the questions that are being asked on your listing on your competitors listings. Remember you can do that with Helium 10 listing builder using our AI function where we’ll do that automatically.
Bradley Sutton:
Next news article is from chainstorage.com. It’s kind of interesting. It’s entitled Walmart reportedly pilots store-based marketplace order fulfillment. All right. So, you know, Walmart has never been able to do the two and three hour delivery times that Amazon can do with their prime network. But this could be a step in that direction, right?
Bradley Sutton:
This article talks about how Walmart is trying to speed up delivery of digital orders from retailers and brands selling on its third party marketplace. And it’s doing this test in Dallas where they’re piloting the direct fulfillment of select orders from test stores. All right. So in other words, Walmart’s trying to take one to two day delivery down to maybe even two or three hours because they’ve got products that are being stored in actual Walmart stores, which there’s like a Walmart store within five miles of 90% of the population or some crazy stat like that. I remember from back in the day. So that will be interesting.
Bradley Sutton:
What if Walmart rolls this out? There’s another benefit of why Walmart white might be a good alternative for those who don’t have Amazon prime accounts. You know, there might be a closer Walmart store than an Amazon delivery point. All right. So something to be on the lookout for.
Bradley Sutton:
All right. Next up is our new feature alert. And this is actually something cool. It’s been, you know, a rolled out to elite members for a while, but now dime members have access to this.
If you have ChatGPT, go to apps and under ChatGPT. And now Helium 10 has the, is the only Amazon tool in the space where we have our own ChatGPT app that is approved by open AI. So once you hit the apps, once you do that, go ahead and hit connect here.
Bradley Sutton:
And then if you be signed into your Helium 10 account, you’ll be able to connect your Helium 10 account to the ChatGPT app. After that, you should have it installed. Once it’s connected to your Helium 10 account, and then just like dropping an ACE and say, Hey, give me some analysis on this ASIN, this is just the temporary thing of what we have. We just have a basic, basic framework. You can’t do too much with the Helium 10 data yet.
Bradley Sutton:
We just want to get it set up so that you can see how it works. You know, start at you start asking it questions about the ACE and about the keywords or it’s performance and stuff, just to give you an idea of how it looks in ChatGPT. And so what we want, we need from you guys is use this and tell us how would you use this?
Bradley Sutton:
All right. What would you be looking for? What data from Helium 10 would you like to do in ChatGPT, or how would you like to visualize this? Or would you like to visualize it? Maybe you’re like, nah, I wouldn’t use this at all. But those of you who are hardcore ChatGPT users, I’m sure you guys might have some interesting use cases, but be honest about it. Tell us how you would, how you wouldn’t use it. Make sure to open up a case with support in Helium 10 and give us your feedback or let us know in the comments below.
Bradley Sutton:
Next article is direct from seller central. Just a reminder we had announced these dates a few weeks ago, but now Amazon’s giving us a reminder that the prime day 2026 deadlines are approaching for your deals and shipments. All right. So the last day to schedule your best deal or lightning deal is April 30th. If you want to get that $50 off and a deal scheduling for prime exclusive, best deals and lightning deals closes on May 26th. All right. As far as inventory goes, don’t forget if you are using AWD, got to get your AWD shipments in by May 27th and also the FBA shipments by May 27th that have the minimal shipment splits.
Bradley Sutton:
That’s like if you’re just sending to one location, right? Uh, June 5th, if you’re doing the Amazon optimized splits, you have a little bit extra time to get your inventory in. So just make sure you have that ready. Uh, stay to the end today. I’ve got this link to, uh, we’re doing a big kind of like hackathon for prime day strategies. I’ll have a link for you at the end. All right. Next up with our strategy of the week, a way to get thousands of dollars back from Amazon. Shivali, take it away.
Shivali Patel:
In this training, I’m going to show you how to use Helium 10’s all exclusive managed refund service to recover money that Amazon may still owe you from fulfillment errors, damaged inventory and incorrect fee charges. Now why is this important and how can it make you money? Well, I think that part’s pretty obvious. What many sellers don’t realize, especially if you haven’t been selling for very long is that Amazon makes mistakes with fulfillment fees, shipments, damaged inventory, warehouse discrepancies, and even incorrect rate charges. Things fall through the cracks. Amazon is supposed to reimburse you and often they do, but sometimes they don’t.
Shivali Patel:
And if you’re not auditing your account, you may never know what you’re owed. And this makes you money because instead of spending hours manually reviewing reports or opening support cases, Helium 10 can identify those discrepancies for you and help recover hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of dollars without you doing the heavy lifting. Now let’s look at how this works.
Shivali Patel:
Well, that is where Helium 10 managed refund service comes in. What you need to do is just activate it. This is available for all of our plans. And then you are going to be able to see, Hey, how much might Amazon owe you? Here’s one of ours that we literally just did from October 1st to October 22nd. They found something wrong with the way that Amazon was charging for FBA fulfillment.
Shivali Patel:
And so we were able to file a claim for $1,200. And this is just one of our smaller accounts. It’s not even a big account. So maybe let’s say we were on the diamond plan of Helium 10. Well, $1,200 after Helium 10 takes its cut that pays for months and months of our Helium 10 membership right there where it’s almost like we’re getting Helium 10 for free, just by letting Helium 10 find money that is owed to us. And we don’t even have to submit anything.
Shivali Patel:
Helium 10 is doing it all for a percentage. You do not have to pay Helium 10 for this service at all, unless they get money back for you. So all of the claim process, the fighting with Amazon about, Hey, this is what’s owed. Please give it back all handled by us. So MRS manage refund service. If you have not activated it yet, go ahead and do so.
Shivali Patel:
It doesn’t cost anything. Nothing’s going to happen. Otherwise, if you’ve never been auditing what Amazon owes you in your account, some people are thousands of dollars like us. Some people are tens of thousands of dollars that they’re owed. So just do a quick audit with MRS. It’ll tell you what’s needed. And then you choose if you want to go ahead and go through with it or not, but you could get hundreds, thousands, tons of money back and your subscription might just be free.
Bradley Sutton:
All right guys. And as an update, since that, uh, strategy, uh, we just recently lowered costs, you know, Helium 10 is all about always giving more value at the different plans. So if you’ve got a platinum plan, I believe the, uh, the rate is a 15% now for what we would take as, uh, our cut for, for getting the money and negotiating the money back.
Bradley Sutton:
You know? So in other words, if we find a thousand dollars for you, you only pay $150 and you keep 850 yourself. If you’re a diamond member, it actually has gone down now to 10%, I believe. So guys, this is a great time. If you haven’t used a reimbursement service before or managed refund service from Helium 10, have us look in your account. You know, Amazon could owe you a hundred bucks. It could owe you a thousand bucks or even more. It doesn’t cost you anything to use this service. We, you only pay us if we find money that Amazon pays you.
Bradley Sutton:
Next up an article from seller central again, and it’s entitled a check review, sharing eligibility with the seller assistant. All right. So this was something we announced months ago, actually in, back in January that reviews would only be shared between product variations that have minor differences that don’t affect functionality. This would be like color pattern pack quantity. All right. So if you’re not sure if your listing qualifies or not, you can now use the seller assistant inside of seller central to be able to ask it.
Bradley Sutton:
And some questions that people have been asking that Amazon talked about is, Hey, how is this going to impact my buying reviews? And the answer is, Hey, if your products are no longer eligible for review, sharing the vine reviews will go to the child ASIN that was reviewed. It won’t show up anymore when you’re looking at a different child ASIN, right? How will reviews be displayed on the search results? It says the star ratings and review count will only reflect the reviews that are eligible to be shared across variations in a product family, a couple of interesting things there. But if you have more information, check this article that we have linked below or ask the seller centrall, the questions now for a change of pace, you know, this is not a common thing.
Bradley Sutton:
Amazon is giving discounts, reducing fees, particularly with MCF multi-channel fulfillment. Remember you can use multi-channel fulfillment to fulfill your Shopify orders. You can use Helium 10 to connect it to your tick talk, to fulfill your tick talk orders. You can now, you know, fulfill your Walmart orders with MCF and guess what? Now there’s a chance to save up to 15%, which is pretty big guys, on your shipping fees with MCF and $1 FBA credit per MCF unit shipped potentially. So, right.
Bradley Sutton:
So this is even in addition. All right. So there is going to be some qualifications on how you can get some of these benefits. So if you’re new to MCF, like as of, you know, March 1st, 2026, you are actually could get 25% off MCF fulfillment on your first hundred units shipped during the 2026 year. All right. However, if you hit other criterias, like maybe you did it, you started since October of 2025, or you started using an API and API integration, you know, like Helium 10 on or after October or you’re a veteran seller who has shipped at least 5,800 FBA units over the last 12 weeks, but less than 1200 MCF.
Bradley Sutton:
These are all ways that you can qualify for this 15% discount for outbound fulfillment on MCF plus a $1 FBA credit for your first 50,000 MCF units shipped. All right. And there’s even a 12 month preferred pricing. So there’s a lot of things that can make you eligible. We have a link in the comments below in the description, make sure to check it out. That goes to seller central where you can see all the details of this preferred pricing.
Bradley Sutton:
And then there’s another link from there. It’s called the incentive programs. All right. So make sure to click it because if you hit the new seller incentives and you hit view details, you might see that you qualify for some of these incentives. Some of them have to do with vine, but then some of them do have to do with sponsored ads, credits, coupon credits, or low, no low inventory fee or the MCF fee. So there’s, there’s different things that you guys can check out to see if you qualify.
Bradley Sutton:
All right. Tomorrow there is going to be a workshop that Carrie is doing. It’s going to have a training tips from myself, Shivali and Carrie all about product research and not just a product research, but researching keywords that nobody else can get from brand analytics. So this is a Helium 10 based workshop. If you have Helium 10 or if you don’t have Helium 10, I think you would still get benefit from it. Completely free workshop. If you want to register for it, go to h10.me/amaapril. And then just make sure to sign up. It’s called fine winning products faster, completely free workshop. Just be about 45, 50 minutes of your time on Thursday.
Bradley Sutton:
Very high value there. We’re going to show you how to get brand analytics keywords for a product from up to 26 different weeks at once. We’re going to show you how to find products that have been out of stock for over a year on Amazon and use that as a product opportunity. A lot of cool features. Maybe you didn’t even know existed on Monday, this coming Monday, anybody in Europe guys, Hey, it’s a $50 Ryanair flight away. Make sure to go to the Amazing Days Summit in Sofia. Go to h10.me/bulgaria. Shivali will be there. I’ll be there speaking.
Bradley Sutton:
I’ll be recording podcasts there as well. It’s a great conference. I went to this one last year, h10.me/bulgaria. Use the code Helium 10 to save money off of your, your ticket. Helium 10 should be the discount code and you know, be great to hang out with you guys in person. And then in a couple of weeks, I told you that there is going to be a workshop for prime day.
Bradley Sutton:
All right. It’s going to be 15 top strategies for prime day for, and for AI strategies that maybe don’t have to do with prime day. All right. So we are having 15 different speakers. Some of the top speakers in the world, Leo Segovio, Mansour, Destaney Wishon, Andrew Bell. The list goes on and on. Ritu Java, the top minds in the world. So we have gathered to give their best quick two minute prime day strategy and or a two minute AI strategy and a bonus strategy. And they’re going to be competing too for some prizes.
Bradley Sutton:
So they’re, they have to bring their best stuff and it’s all free. So if you want to register for this cool workshop at the end of this month, h10.me/primeday26 would love to see you guys in that workshop. All right, guys, that does it for this week’s news. Uh, hope to see you guys next week to see what’s buzzing.
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