#553 – Live Shopping Doubles! & Amazon Changes Seller Insurance Requirements | Weekly Buzz 9/10/26
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.
Livestream shopping is gaining steam in the U.S., thanks to apps like TikTok and Whatnot
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/01/tiktok-whatnot-livestream-shopping.html
New Commercial Liability Insurance Requirements effective November 2, 2026
https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-news/articles/QVRWUERLSUtYMERFUiNHOVI1Q0hRUUNWSlc5VjNE
Your Account Health Rating now rewards great customer service
https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-news/articles/QVRWUERLSUtYMERFUiNHUzJDVzlXWjM0NTJDVVpY
Prime Big Deal Days deals deadline extended
https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-news/articles/QVRWUERLSUtYMERFUiNHN1dWUE5RN0dBSkUzTkNF
New Amazon MCP Features
Helium 10’s Amazon MCP now analyzes ad budget usage, reveals Frequently Bought Together history, tracks CPC bids, Search Frequency Rank, and keyword sales trends, and lets sellers activate Alerts across multiple SKUs at once—all through Claude or ChatGPT.
Create Amazon coupons faster with fewer steps
https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-news/articles/QVRWUERLSUtYMERFUiNHVFZOODhGUEM1VktETkw5
TikTok Shop opens cross-border sales between EU and UK
https://ecommercenews.eu/tiktok-shop-opens-cross-border-sales-between-eu-and-uk/
In episode 553 of the AM/PM Podcast and Weekly Buzz, Bradley covers:
- 00:00 – Introduction
- 00:44 – Is Live Shopping Finally Taking Off?
- 02:44 – New Amazon Insurance Requirements
- 04:47 – Walmart and Ads Updates
- 07:15 – Amazon Account Health Update
- 08:43 – How to do Keyword Research On Amazon Website
- 10:52 – Prime Big Deal Day Deadlines Extended
- 11:23 – New Amazon MCP Features
- 15:39 – Amazon Coupon Creation Simplification
- 16:40 – TikTok Shop UK Update
Transcript
Bradley Sutton:
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 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. All right guys, I’m not wearing my regular Weekly Buzz outfit because I’m actually recording this live in our Helium 10 China office. I forgot to bring my Weekly Buzz shirt for those watching on YouTube. But there’s a number of news articles, nothing completely earth-shattering today, but let’s go ahead and hop into the news.
Bradley Sutton:
So this first article is from CNBC and it’s entitled live stream shopping is gaining steam in the U.S. thanks to apps like TikTok and whatnot. Now guys, if on the Weekly Buzz I had a dollar for every time we had an article like this over the last two years, I would be a rich person right now because they always keep saying, hey is live stream taking and until now the answer has been no, not yet. But let’s take a look at what this article says. The U.S. live stream shopping industry is forecast to reach nearly 20 billion in sales this year, more than double that of 2024. Now of course guys, compared to China, it is nothing, right? They probably do this in less than a month in China, but doubling is a significant thing that I think we should be thinking about. It says like apps like TikTok and whatnot are drawing more live sellers and creating spaces for like-minded consumers. Now here CNBC was interviewing this company called Beach Waver.
Bradley Sutton:
It says, hey we did about $8,000 of sales in the first four hours of a TikTok live stream in late July selling curling iron. Beach Waver does about a million dollars in TikTok shop sales so far and it says 25% of it actually comes from live selling. So yes, for some sellers it is actually working a lot better. Now I just mentioned China probably does that much in a month. Actually take a look at these numbers according to the article here. It says Alibaba introduced Taobao Live in China 2016 within five years the market crossed 50 billion and it’s projected to top one trillion dollars in 2026. So again, America is definitely a lot farther behind, but we can see some growth and I think it’s going to exponentially grow in the future. So if you guys haven’t been considering live selling on TikTok shop, we have some training materials in Helium 10 that will help you with some examples from some TikTok shop sellers who are very successful on live such as Jared Mortensen and others.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, next article is actually from Seller Central and it’s an update to insurance requirements. As you know, a few years ago Amazon made it a requirement that Amazon sellers all had to have commercial liability insurance, but now there’s going to be some new rules starting November 2nd. Take a look at some of these rules. It says starting November 2nd we’re going to have a new rule that first of all, of course, you already knew that if you have sales at least $10,000 in any month, you have to have commercial liability insurance within 30 days and the minimum coverage is one million per occurrence and in the aggregate. But it says now there’s going to be two new additional requirements. It says first sellers with products listed in categories with enhanced safety listing requirements now have to have commercial liability insurance policy that covers those products. Again, a minimum coverage of $1 million.
Bradley Sutton:
So it sounds like regardless of the sales of the $10,000 sales, you have to have insurance. There it goes right here. It says regardless of this $10,000 sale. This applies to both new and existing listings. What are some of these categories? Children’s products, cosmetics, ingestible products, lithium battery products, et cetera. There’s a full list in the comments or in the link below where you can see if yours is going to qualify for this. Second, sellers based in China now must get their insurance through the Amazon Insurance Accelerator Program. All right. So starting November 2nd, they are going to reject any submitted insurance policies from China that are not obtained through this AIA. So if you are a Chinese seller and you had submitted some insurance before November 2nd, you can continue to use it until it expires. But after it expires, you’re going to have to switch to an AIA approved insurance vendor.
Bradley Sutton:
All right. Next up, we’ve got some new feature alerts from Helium 10. The first one doesn’t have anything to do with AI. Let’s talk about these Walmart ones first. Now there’s Walmart’s profits. All right. So before we didn’t have that much information, like as far as your profitability goes and your number of orders and things. But now if you connect your Walmart token to Helium 10, you go into profits, change your dashboard to Walmart. You’re going to be able to see your sales, your orders, units sold, your profitability, as long as you have COGS in, et cetera, et cetera. So make sure to update your COGS in Walmart and start checking your profitability day by day. Another thing that we have updated for Walmart, and this has to do with the MCP, the Helium 10 MCP. For example, here I’m using Claude and I wrote a prompt here.
Bradley Sutton:
I said, show me the keywords that Walmart product, and I put the ID, is ranking for in the top 20 organic positions. All right. So what is this? This is basically running Cerebro for Walmart. That’s not new, but it’s new in the MCP. So again, Helium 10 MCP, you can now do your keyword research on Walmart right here in the app. And then it tells me which keywords you’re ranking for, number of competitor products, and it gives you some analytics as well. In addition, another MCP update has to do with Helium 10 Ads. I can talk about or ask Claude or ChatGPT about my budget usage, like my budget utilization. Like, am I using too much of my budget? Am I using not enough? Am I running out of budget? So for example, I use a prompt here. How well did I use my ad budget in the last 30 days? Actually, that probably is too broad because it’s like, Claude went deep and it’s telling me, hey, this is how much I spend, and this is how much my ad sales and ROAS.
Bradley Sutton:
So guys, probably you should prompt a little bit better than I did here. But it actually answered my question here at the bottom and says, hey, on pacing, account-wide utilization reads 42%. But so again, it means that I’m not maxing out my budget. What you’d want to be looking at is, hey, am I maxing out my budget early in the day? Analyze, say, hey, show me the campaigns where I have hit my budget limit before the day ends. And now you might need to go in there and increase your budget, which again, you can do in Helium 10. Say, hey, increase my budget by 20% on the campaigns where I have exceeded my budget. So now guys, the new thing again, Helium 10 Ads, you can start getting your detailed budget history from your advertising accounts in Amazon.
Bradley Sutton:
Next story here is from Seller Central, and it’s entitled, Your Account Health Rating Now Rewards Great Customer Service. Obviously, as Amazon sellers, we all want to keep our account health rating high. We know that we can do that by making sure that we’re delivering on time and not getting a lot of bad seller feedback. Remember, this can affect your buy box. But now this article says, hey, there’s now a reward for strong customer service on fulfilled by merchant order. So if you guys are doing fulfilled by merchant orders, you are going to be able to get more points for your customer service score. It says here, you can now earn up to 12 AHR, account health rating points based on your performance across three metrics. Number one, if your buyer contact rate is below 0.50%, that means the number of people who have asked for a refund or a replacement. Number two, your average contact response time is less than 12 hours. Now this is important.
Bradley Sutton:
Before, you would only get docked if you go over 24 hours. But now you can actually get points and helps your health rating if you can reply in under 12 hours. Next one is if your buyer dissatisfaction rate is below 4.5%. All right. So if those of you who may not have that great of account health rating, here are three different ways that you can get bonus points to increase your account health rating. Next up, our strategy of the week is by Carrie. And it’s a video about how you can do keyword research without even going into Helium 10. You can do it directly from the Amazon store. Kerry, take it away.
Carrie Miller:
How to see instantly what some of the top keywords in the search results are on Amazon. As you guys know, of course you could use the Helium 10 reverse ASIN tool Cerebro. You can enter an ASIN or a group of ASINs and see what the top keywords are. But maybe you’re just browsing on Amazon, right? Maybe you’re shopping on Amazon. You see a niche that’s interesting and you’re like, hey, this looks like an interesting product. I don’t want to have to go and run it through Cerebro and then look at all the top keywords. Can I just get a quick look and a quick idea on what the top keywords are for the search results on a specific product? And this is how. One of the only ways you can do this is through Helium 10. So here I’m in the search results of this search cursive handwriting groove. And so what I can do on this page is I just hit this button here, top keywords.
Carrie Miller:
All right. This opens up Xray keywords. And now this tells me what are some of the top keywords for these top products on this page just in seconds without having to run a reverse ASIN tool or open up Helium 10 or anything. So let’s say I clicked into one of these products. I’m like, hey, this product is doing pretty well. It’s sold about 237 units over the last 30 days. I’m just, you know, I really quickly without having to go to Cerebro, what are the top keywords that are driving sales for this product? We’ll run the same tool to see the top keywords on Xray keywords on the actual listing. And there you have it.
Carrie Miller:
Here are the top keywords that are probably driving sales. If I want to change the settings, I can be like, you know what? I only want to see where it’s ranked from one to 10. I only want to see keywords that are about a thousand search volume, et cetera. So that’s another feature that you’re able to use. So everyone, this is a very cool tool for you to just be able to instantly see what are the top money-making keywords on Amazon without having to hop into Helium 10 without having to use an outside tool. So it will tell you some of the top keywords in seconds with this Chrome extension Xray keywords.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Thank you, Carrie for that. Next up back to seller central, a news article it’s entitled prime big deal days, deals, deadline extended. That is a crazy title guys. I’m reading that word for word. Anyways, it says, Hey, the deal sourcing window has been extended to September 22nd, giving you more time. So this allows you to still apply for the coupons and the deals of the day, et cetera, et cetera. Before the deadline was going to be earlier, but now you have until September 22nd to do that for prime big deal days. Next up some new tools in the Helium 10 MCP.
Bradley Sutton:
All right. The first one is kind of cool. It’s the frequently bought together history. This is kind of exclusive to Helium 10. You want to be able to see, Hey, what are all the products that have been showing up in frequently bought together in my product, or maybe you’re even your competitor product. Why would you use this? Well, for one reason might be, Hey, I want to find new targets for, um, sponsored product ASIN targeting campaigns or sponsored display campaigns. Right. Um, or maybe, Hey, you, you want to find products that could be potential line item extensions or potential bundling.
There’s a lot of different reasons why you would want to see a history of who is the frequently bought together. When you look on an Amazon page, you usually only can see two or three products, but Helium 10 has the history. So here’s what you do in the MCP.
Bradley Sutton:
I can say, show me the frequently bought together history and then enter in the ASIN so here I entered in our coffin shelf and look at the results that it gave me. It says here, there are 26 observations between October of last year. I mean, this thing goes way back in history and August of this year. And here are eight distinct ones. You know, I can, I can ask it for the full list, but here, here are bat shelf, floating shelves. Um, here’s a spider web floating shelf. Here’s a coffin wall hooks for keys, bat wall decals. So it shows me when it was frequently bought together, like when, um, Helium 10 noted this and, uh, what is the window that it was in and what the price is.
Bradley Sutton:
So these, first of all, are great targets for my product targeting ads, because this is not Helium 10 suggesting, Oh, maybe people buy this product with this product. This is direct from Amazon because if Amazon puts something in frequently bought together, it is telling you a customer bought this coffin shelf together with this bat decals or this spider web shelf. Right? So it’s not like you’re guessing, uh, is do people buy this together? No. So if you, what I would do, I want to target these other ASINs with my product and show up right there on the page, because there’s a lot better chance I can get sales showing up on the page since I already know that people buy these products together.
Bradley Sutton:
So that’s something new that is in our MCP, get the history right from Claude or ChatGPT. Some other new things I’m not going to show you here on the screen, but that you can ask, uh, the Helium 10 MCP is maybe you want a history of the cost per click or PPC bid, uh, of a, of a product. Right? You can do that. You can search for that. Hey, are you somebody who looks at the search frequency rank that is from Amazon brand analytics? So maybe that’s something you’re tracking. You can actually ask MCP now for the complete search frequency rank history of any keyword in the Amazon database. You could also now get the Helium 10 keyword sales history.
Bradley Sutton:
So you know how we have search volume history, uh, history, but there’s also a keyword sales. In other words, the estimated number of sales that a keyword generated in a certain week, you can now see the history of that in the MCP, right? So you could kind of like say, Hey, overlay the history of search volume to the sales over the last six months and show me in a graph, like, like did the conversion rate go up or down? These are pretty cool things that you can now do with the Helium 10 MCP. Another thing is in alerts. All right. So maybe you don’t have your products activated alerts guys. I highly, highly recommend activating all of your products in Helium 10 Alerts, because you might have somebody steal your buy box. Amazon might change your image.
Bradley Sutton:
Somebody might change your title. Your dimensions might change. There’s many things you want to track in Helium 10 Alerts, but maybe you have like 500 SKUs and you don’t want to one by one activate it. Now do it all at once with the MCP and Helium 10 say, Hey, please activate Helium 10 Alerts for all of my SKUs that are in the U S marketplace or something. And now instead of clicking one by one in Helium 10, you can activate it for all of your products. So that’s something new that you can now do in the MCP as well. So guys, if you haven’t started using the Helium 10 MCP and you’ve got the Diamond plan, make sure to connect right now. We’re adding new things you can do every single week as you can see. All right, next article from seller central it’s entitled, create coupons with fewer steps.
Bradley Sutton:
It says the updated coupon creation experience in seller central saves your progress, shows a live preview and lets you reuse past steps. All right. So here’s what’s different in the coupon creation. Number one, it says, pick up where you left off. All right. So if you close your browser or get interrupted, your draft will be there before. If you accidentally close your browser, you lose all of your work. Number two, it says review before you submit. Uh, so there’s going to be a full summary now of your coupon configuration, uh, including every product included in the promotion. So you can catch the errors before they go live. Number three update from Amazon is you can clone previous coupons. All right. So if you create a similar coupon, you don’t want to have to create it all over again. You can now reuse your past inputs as a starting point instead of starting from scratch. So especially if you guys are doing something for prime big deal days coming up, um, take a look at these things. If you’re somebody who does a lot of coupons, you can now create the coupons with a little bit more ease.
Bradley Sutton:
All right. Last article of the day is tick-tock shop opens cross border sales between EU and UK. So for those of you who are selling in Europe, this is an interesting update with the launch of sell across Europe. The platform evolved into a pan-European marketplace, enabling sellers to reach consumers in 12 European countries, but now sellers in Belgium, Germany, France, Ireland, Italy, and the Netherlands, Poland, and Spain will soon be able to offer their products to shoppers in the United Kingdom. So I guess before maybe to sell on tick-tock shop UK, you had to have a UK based entity, but now if you’re based in these other countries, you will be able to, uh, to do it.
Bradley Sutton:
Uh, it says a pilot for selected EU sellers will start on September 21st, followed by a broader rollout on October 19th. So if you guys want more information, you’re a European based company. You want to see, are you now eligible without having a UK entity to sell on tick-tock shop, take a look at this article and then reach out to tick-tock shopping. If you have more questions. All right, guys, that’s it for the news this week. Thank you for tuning in here from China. I’ll be back next week or Carrie will be back next week. So make sure to tune in to see what’s buzzing.
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- Want to Verify Your Product Idea? Use Xray in our Chrome extension to check how lucrative your next product idea is with over a dozen metrics of data! Download the Helium 10 Chrome Extension.
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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!
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