#567 – Get Thousands Off Amazon Fees & Walmart Black Friday Deal Days Announced | Weekly Buzz 10/29/26
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.
Amazon Seller Central News: Enroll in New Selection Program 2026 by March 31
https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-news/articles/QVRWUERLSUtYMERFUiNHUjNWWkY1R1lLMkdEM1VB
Helium 10 New Feature Alerts:
Helium 10’s latest updates include scheduled tasks in the AI Agent to automate recurring reports, plus Deal Event Pulse in Profits, featuring event preparation checklists, a profitability calculator, and a Live War Room for tracking sales during major shopping events. TikTok Shop research now offers 90-day, 180-day, and custom date filters to analyze historical sales and top-performing influencers. Helium 10 also added 11 TikTok Shop MCP tools, including capabilities to view, edit, and delete cost-of-goods entries and manage indirect expenses through AI.
Walmart debuts longer Black Friday, Cyber Monday sales events
https://www.retaildive.com/news/walmart-longer-black-friday-cyber-monday-sales-events/872747/
Amazon introduces returnless refunds in Europe
https://ecommercenews.eu/amazon-introduces-returnless-refunds-in-europe/
Could your keywords or listing content put your Amazon account at risk? Join Or Smamosh for a live Amazon compliance webinar covering suspension risks, prevention, and your questions next week Tuesday, Nov 3rd 9am PST. Register now at https://streamyard.com/watch/xYN5tYNsfaNb
In episode 567 of the AM/PM Podcast and Weekly Buzz, Bradley talks about:
- 00:00 – Introduction
- 00:57 – Get Free FBA Storage From Amazon!
- 02:33 – Schedule Automated Tasks with an AI Agent
- 04:24 – Walmart Black Friday Days Announced
- 05:46 – New Deal Days Tool + TikTok Shop Influencer Research Update & More
- 11:31 – Returnless Refunds Go Live for Amazon EU
- 13:03 – Check Customer Life Time Value And More
- 15:38 – Next Week’s Free Webinar – Amazon Compliance
Transcript
Bradley Sutton:
Enrollment in an FBA program that could save you thousands in FBA fees has been extended. Walmart has announced the dates for its Black Friday deals. 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 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.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, guys, not much going on in the news world today. I’m actually reporting to you live from Paris, France, where I’m recording this. If it looks or sounds a little bit differently. But we’ve got a couple of cool things and some really cool Helium 10 new features. So let’s go ahead and hop into it. The first story is actually from Seller Central, and it’s entitled Enroll in the New Selection Program 2026 by March 31st. That was the previous announcement, but it was updated today or yesterday, October 28th. And it says we’ve extended the enrollment window for FBA New Selection Program to March 31st, 2027. All right.
Bradley Sutton:
So actually, this March date is for 2027. I don’t know what the old date was. It probably wasn’t March for this year, but it was whatever it was. It has been extended a number of months. This article talks about some of these advantages. You guys might not even know or you’re missing out. Remember, if you’re launching new products regularly, you would qualify. All right. So you can get referral fees capped at 10% on your first 100 sales, 5% on the next 100 sales. Free storage, free customer returns, free liquidations for up to four months. No low inventory fees, no storage utilization for your first 200 units, $50 for coupon variable fee credits, $75 in free Vine credits.
Bradley Sutton:
All right. So tons of features. So guys, if you didn’t realize this program existed, well, here’s your news. We’ve talked about this before, but even if you did, and maybe you thought it was too late to join it for the rest of this year, it just got extended to March 31st, 2027. So check the link below in the description. You’ll be able to go directly to Seller Central where you could see if you qualify for this. But this is definitely a program that could save you hundreds, if not thousands of dollars, depending on how many products you are launching over the next few months.
Bradley Sutton:
All right. Next up, a new feature alert from the Helium 10 agent. All right. This is an AI native to Helium 10. You don’t need to use Cloud. You don’t need to use ChatGPT. And this is for scheduling tasks. All right. So for example, take a look at my screen here. You’ll see that what I have here is I put in the Helium 10 agent. For this ASIN advertising in the last 30 days, tell me the top five search terms that produce sales. And tell me the top five targets that have spent, but no sales at all.
Bradley Sutton:
I didn’t even spell it correctly. But the Helium 10 agent does not discriminate against me for not being able to spell. It knew what I was talking about. And it said, hey, you know, there’s 29 different ad groups that advertise on this ASIN for the last 30 days. Here’s the top search terms. Here’s one that has 129 orders. Good grief. Here’s another one that has 26 orders, et cetera, et cetera. Here’s the top five targets that has spent, but zero sales.
Bradley Sutton:
And it gives me a breakdown. But here’s a new thing. Maybe I love this, what it just did on this ASIN. And I’m like, you know what? I want to have this report once a week or once every other week. Now I can schedule. Watch. Look what I said here. Schedule this to run every week on Monday at 8 a.m., please. And so now the Helium agent is literally working for us as an agent. Now it’s going to deliver to me a report about this ASIN here in advertising or about whatever else I had scheduled. And I don’t have to go and run this prompt once a week.
Bradley Sutton:
Every Monday, I’ll come in to sign into Helium 10. I’ll go here and I’ll have this report on this ASIN. All right. So this is slowly rolling out to those. Not everybody who has the Helium 10 agent has this. Elite members, some of who are on our power users of Helium, our agent, have access to it. But the rest of you, all the way down to Diamond, should be getting it soon as long as this beta testing is finished. So exciting new feature for agentic commerce right here in Helium 10.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, last week, we reported on the extended Black Friday deals for TikTok shop. All right. It was running from November 11th through 30th. But this week, now Walmart has announced its Black Friday deals. And like I said last week, I don’t know if it was me or Kerry, but I was like, man, I remember when Black Friday was Black Friday. You know, you go Thursday night, Thanksgiving night, wait out in front of Best Buy, and then boom, midnight hits. And you get in there and get some stuff.
Bradley Sutton:
And that was Black Friday. And then all of a sudden, there was a Cyber Monday. And there was the whole Cyber Weekend. There’s like a week of Black Friday. Well, TikTok shop is going crazy with more than two weeks. Walmart, too, is going a little bit crazy there. This article that came out from Retail Dive says, Walmart’s deal events will total 14 days this season compared to 10. So everybody’s like, hey, we’ve got more deals for you. So it says here, the core Black Friday sale will be live from November 23rd to 29.
Bradley Sutton:
OK, that’s standard. Cyber Monday, November 30th to December 2nd. However, the early Black Friday deals will be available from November 12th to November 15th. So they’re kind of like staggering this out. So anyways, point being, don’t think that you have a lot of time to schedule your TikTok shop deals and you already know about your Amazon. But Walmart, if you guys are selling on Walmart, take a look inside your seller center to see when you have to set these deals up, because it looks like it’s going live early on selected products.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, next up, another new feature. Here’s a brand new tool from Helium 10. It was in beta during the Prime Big Deal days. And now it’s going to be pretty much fully launched for Diamond and Up for upcoming Black Friday activities. And it’s in profits. If you go to Helium 10 and go to profits, I believe this has been available to elite members. It might be available to Diamond now already. I’m not sure. Check your account.
Bradley Sutton:
But it’s called Deal Event Pulse. All right. Some elite members are the ones who actually named that. Shout out to those who are in the Helium 10 Elite Facebook group and contributed their suggestion for the naming of this tool. But we have got under Deal Event Pulse, event list and live war room. All right. The live war room is what’s going to be showing during the events where you’re going to be able to see like this year over last year, over a regular day, like your sales, like in real time.
Bradley Sutton:
You’re going to have a cool heat map of your orders, where as an order comes through, there’ll be a literal amination, no, animation, where it’s going to like show up on this map. Hey, you just got an order from Timbuktu, Tennessee, or hey, you just got an order from Brooklyn, New York, et cetera, et cetera. So really cool thing where you can have a live feed exactly of what your orders are through Cyber Week in real time. But for now, you can go and click in and go to event list. And it says, hey, Black Friday week and Cyber Monday is coming up.
Bradley Sutton:
It says status preparing starts in 21 days. Once you hit this prepare button, there’ll be a checklist of stuff like, hey, you got to finalize your keywords. You got to freeze your listings, you know, like, hey, whatever you’re trying to do for, you know, like if you need to update your listing for a certain reason, because, you know, like 4th of July or something like that, you need to change it to let you know when you should get it in by.
Bradley Sutton:
Making sure your Helium 10 alerts are on to make sure that, hey, if you lose your buy box or, you know, something else happens to your listing during this event, you’ve got to make sure to turn that on. Your ads ready, setting your targets, your actual deals. So a full checklist of kind of like things that people usually do when it comes to the special deal events. And then it says here, here’s when the event starts and here’s when the event does. And so you’ve got this whole checklist. You can like actually, you know, set it here for if you have finished it.
Bradley Sutton:
And then you can actually have a, you have a sales calculator here. All right. So I can add a product and then see, hey, if I were to do a coupon or a deal of the day or a prime exclusive discount, what would my profitability be based on these different kinds of ads that I could run during the time period? And so just tons of stuff here, guys, that you can see, that you can go through. So make sure to check, try it out. Those of you who have access to this, go into profits, go into this pulse and let us know what you think.
Bradley Sutton:
There’s still a little bit of time for us to tweak a couple of things. Don’t forget, guys, how do you submit your feedback to Helium 10? We’ve also got some new things for our TikTok shop tools, right? Helium 10 is one of the only tools out there, Amazon tools that has full capabilities for TikTok shop. And if you were to look inside of our TikTok product finder, and let’s say like here, here’s a product, these Beatles nail tips. I don’t know what the heck this is, but whatever this product is, it’s sold $157,000 in the last 30 days.
Bradley Sutton:
So what I can do is if I were to actually click into here, so it opens up another window where you get details about, hey, how many items has this product sold all time, et cetera, et cetera. What are the videos? Who are the top influencers? And here’s one of the new updates. When you’re on TikTok or you’re using other tools, you know, you have a last seven days, last 14 days, maybe you have last 30 day sales. But now look at this.
Bradley Sutton:
If you’re a Diamond member, you’ve got these two extra buttons, last 90 days or last 180 days. So maybe I’m like, hey, I want to see who were the top influencers for this product over the last 180 days. As you can see, it’s different than the person who was a top seller for the last 30 days. Like here’s somebody, Peyton has sold 577 units from her videos, his or her videos for this product over the last 180 days. Maybe I want to see, you know what? I want to see who was the top ones from August 1st to August 31st.
Bradley Sutton:
I can actually enter in a date range here and it will tell me how much they sold during a certain time. So this is pretty cool, guys. You can’t do this in TikTok seller center. Kind of take a more granular look at what influencers are driving sales at different times of the year, even going back a full year or more. In addition, I’m not going to show it here on the screen. It would take too long, but we’ve got 11 new tools for our Helium 10 MCP for TikTok shop as well, mainly in the profit. So like entering in your cogs. So you can like, for example, one of the tools is, list my TikTok shop cogs and it’ll give you all the cogs. You can edit the cogs, you can delete cogs.
Bradley Sutton:
If you have indirect costs for your TikTok shop business, like creator retainers and stuff like that, you can now enter that in so that you can program that into your cost of goods. If you guys want a full list of what our TikTok shop MCP capabilities are, just ask Claude, say, hey, with the Helium 10 MCP, list all of the different tools available for my TikTok shop account. Guys, we’re very bullish on TikTok shop.
Bradley Sutton:
We’ve got people, you guys have heard them on the podcast. We just had Ryan last week on the podcast, seven figure TikTok shop seller. We’ve had seven figure sellers all over the podcast showing the kind of results that they can have on TikTok shop. You guys need to be selling on TikTok shop as well. So we’re going to make sure to beef up our tools, make sure that you guys don’t need to have 17 different subscriptions out there in order to run your TikTok shop. You can do it right from Helium 10.
Bradley Sutton:
So again, same thing I said before, anything you guys need, hit that feedback button. And what can we do for TikTok shop that would help you guys like cut the cord on another subscription or maybe help you out with a manual process that you’re doing. But we have a full complete tool set for TikTok shop that you guys probably don’t even know we have. And now we’re updating our MCP for TikTok shop as well.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, from ecommercenews.eu announcement from Amazon. Maybe some of you guys might not be happy about this, but we’ve been dealing with this in the USA for a couple of years now. Amazon introduces returnless refunds in Europe. So this is a no return solution for sellers using FBA so that when customers request a refund, they get their money back without having to return the item. I didn’t like this when it came out in USA. I guess some people like it because they’re like, hey, it’s costing me extra money to get this product back. So what this is, it says, hey, this is for marketplaces, UK, Germany, Italy, France, and Spain. Items up to 75 euros can apply for this program.
Bradley Sutton:
And Amazon would automatically assess the return request from the FBA sellers. And then the company says it will consider the customer’s return history, the product category, and the seller’s account status. This article brings out, hey, this has passed criticism from sellers. It says this new option has drawn criticism. Some question whether the savings on return processing, which is, by the way, what the only reason that would be probably good for to having this, outweigh the loss of products that customers are allowed to keep. There’s also concerns about potential abuse as Amazon determines which individual request for return qualify for a refund without returning the item.
Bradley Sutton:
Those of you selling in the USA, when they implemented this, did this affect you much at all? I don’t think it affected me. It didn’t sound good, but honestly, I haven’t really had much of an impact. Let me know what you guys think about this. Are you going to be taking advantage of this and trusting Amazon with the returnless refunds? Or is this kind of like a pain point for you? All right. A feature that most of you might not even know that exists in Helium 10 allows you to look at the lifetime value of a customer. Shivali is going to let you know about it.
Shivali Patel:
This next Helium 10 strategy unlocks advanced analytics most sellers never even look at. And it gives you the power to make smarter marketing decisions and scale with precision. You can only find this in Helium 10, and that is called customer intelligence. I bet 95% of you didn’t even know that this is in here. This is a tool that Diamond members and above can get in their dashboard. It’s going to be on the left-hand side in one of those little menus that open up, and it’s called customer intelligence, as I said.
Shivali Patel:
Now, this is the next level. Let me tell you right now, if you just have one product or if you’re a brand new seller, you might not look too much into it as it’s not going to give you too much value. However, if you’ve been selling for a few years, you will have a few products with insights that you might’ve never even measured before. As an example, I’m taking a look at this hemp cream account. I can see the lifetime value of customers because this is a product that people buy multiple times. So the average lifetime value of these customers is 118 bucks.
Shivali Patel:
That’s about three products that they’re buying because the product is 30 bucks. Here is my average order value, my CAC, my lifetime value to CAC ratio. And if you don’t know what that means, it’s something you should start looking into. You can see this graph over days, weeks, months, quarters, or years going back as far as you have data with Helium 10. And at the product level, I can see what my LTV, CAC, average order value, lifetime value to CAC ratio, and customer lifetime are. And check this, I’ve got a 1.6 year customer lifetime value on my main product. What is the purchase frequency? How many orders overall? How many are new customers?
Shivali Patel:
How many are total customers? How many were new to brand last year? There is so much information. And if you know that your lifetime value is 120 bucks, you’re probably not thinking so much about needing to get down to a 20% ACOS. You’ve got to think about your advertising costs from that LTV perspective, from that lifetime value perspective, okay? Especially if customers are subscribing and saving.
Shivali Patel:
Now, that being said, if you do not have Helium 10, you should still be measuring this. If you’ve been selling on Amazon for a while, you’ve got to figure out a way to download your reports or calculate some of this data for yourself. But for those of you who use Helium 10, hopefully you guys can go try this out. And you find a lot of value in it because those metrics are definitely important and they are going to affect the bottom line of your business.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, thank you, Shivali. Last up next week, we have a live webinar slash workshop. It’s going to be super cool. For the first time on one of our webinars, we’re bringing in, his name is Orr. And he’s going to be talking about the people who kind of like toe the line with their keywords and other compliance things that could get your listing suspended. A lot of people don’t even have the visibility to know like, hey, how do I know if this is kind of like a gray area thing for Amazon?
Bradley Sutton:
He’s going to be doing a workshop on compliance. But a lot of you guys out there, you might have questions about, hey, what happens when my account gets suspended? Or what can I do to avoid getting problems, et cetera, with that? So you guys might have questions about these or others that have to do with Amazon compliance. And so this is somebody who has worked with hundreds, if not thousands of sellers on this. And so he might be able to answer your question.
Bradley Sutton:
So if you want to ask him questions live, make sure to come in and do that. This webinar, if you guys want to register for it, so it’ll show up in your account or go to h10.me/compliancewebinar. I’ll see you guys there. All right. That’s it for the news live from Paris this week. Hope you guys enjoy the rest of your week. And we’ll see you 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!
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