#484 – Will Amazon Keep Blocking AI? And Big TikTok Shop Shipping Issue | Weekly Buzz 1/2/26
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 faces ‘leader’s dilemma’ — fight AI shopping bots or join them
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/24/amazon-faces-a-dilemma-fight-ai-shopping-agents-or-join-them.html
TikTok Shop tightens Postal Service shipping options for sellers
https://www.supplychaindive.com/news/tiktok-shop-usps-label-requirements-change/806303/
TikTok Shop offers incentives to new sellers, as U.S. uncertainty is finally over
https://digiday.com/marketing/tiktok-shop-offers-incentives-to-new-sellers-as-u-s-uncertainty-is-finally-over/
TikTok Shop is offering substantial US incentives again. Start your account now and sign up through Helium 10’s special link at http://h10.me/ttstart
Amazon Hid FBA Listings Regionally for Two Months
https://www.ecommercebytes.com/2025/12/14/amazon-hid-fba-listings-regionally-for-two-months/
The Weekly Buzz has moved to the AM/PM Podcast, while the Serious Sellers Podcast now focuses on real seller and brand stories from Amazon, TikTok Shop, Walmart, and Shopify entrepreneurs. We’re holding an open casting call! If you’ve hit meaningful success and want to be featured in the Serious Sellers Podcast, email your story to mhel.d@helium10.com
In episode 484 of the AM/PM Podcast and Weekly Buzz, Bradley talks about:
- 00:00 – Introduction
- 00:59 – Amazon Vs. AI
- 03:46 – TikTok Shop USPS Issues
- 06:28 – TikTok Shop Listing Conversion
- 08:51 – TikTok Shop Incentives
- 10:06 – Amazon Hid Listings?
- 15:06 – Podcast Invite
Transcript
Bradley Sutton:
Is Amazon finally going to allow chat GBT to shop its website? There might be something that you have to change rapidly. If you’re using the postal service to ship TikTok shop 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 you give you a rundown of all the goings on in the Amazon TikTok shopping 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, today from where I am at, it is new year’s morning. I’m actually in the UK recording this in a hotel room, but Hey, the news doesn’t go away just because there’s a holiday. So I’m going ahead and recording the what’s been going on last week or so in e-commerce. And let’s go ahead and hop right into it.
Bradley Sutton:
The first new story I want to get into is from CNBC. And this was an article a couple of weeks ago or about a week ago. And it’s interesting because it’s entitled Amazon faces leaders dilemma, fight AI shopping bots, or join them. Now, this is interesting because as you guys know, there’s been some different stories out there about how Amazon’s kind of like blocking certain AI’s from accessing the website. As you guys know, part of this crackdown actually affected Helium 10. Amazon wanted us to remove our very popular review insights tool because even though it’s not necessarily AI driven, kind of like has the features of something that they’re trying to block.
Bradley Sutton:
And so they’re like, Hey, take that down. We had to take it down much to the chagrin of, of our customers out there and myself. But this article is interesting because it talks about Amazon’s kind of at a crossroads. They’re going to have to like make a decision soon. Andy Jassy said that, Hey, Amazon expects to partner with third party agents and has engaged in conversations with some providers, although he didn’t offer names. Now this is going to be interesting because a lot of people out there are saying like, this is not sustainable.
Bradley Sutton:
Like if more people are going to start using AI agents to shop for them to discover products, et cetera, Amazon is going to kind of shoot itself in the foot if it tries to continue to block them, you know, agentic browsers and like on the flip side though, you can kind of maybe sympathize, empathize with Amazon a little bit, why they might want to block it. You know, a big part of Amazon’s revenue is being able to, you know, run advertising. What, what happens to the whole advertising ecosystem if bigger chunks of orders start coming directly from AI?
Bradley Sutton:
Amazon has an amazing search algorithm. What if these AIs kind of bypass that in Amazon’s viewpoint, it might be giving a worse experience for customers because it’s not going to be based on Amazon’s very advanced algorithm for search. So, so there, there’s two sides to this, right? But as this article is saying from CNBC, Hey, we might have some more clarity soon as far as what direction Amazon is going to take. Are they finally going to like maybe make a deal with open AI and allow chat GPT and other, um, you know, browsers perhaps in the future, agentic browsers to shop. Oh, what do you guys want as Amazon sellers and brands?
Bradley Sutton:
Let me know in the comments below. Do you want Amazon to keep blocking these other things because you don’t really trust how AI might generate people to your listings? You’re like maybe you have the Amazon algorithm and Amazon advertising locked down and you’re like, I don’t want to throw a wrench in this, have to learn something else. Or do you think opening Amazon up to AI is going to be a good idea? Is going to actually increase your sales? Let me know in the comments below.
Bradley Sutton:
Now next up, I’m actually going to rehash an article that we dropped here on the weekly buzz way back in November. And it was an article entitled TikTok shop tightens postal service shipping options for sellers. It said this article that we had brought up a couple of months ago said, Hey, USPS shipping labels are going to start to have to be purchased through TikTok shop starting January or face rejection. Well, guess what guys? It’s January now. All right.
Bradley Sutton:
So a lot of, um, TikTok shop sellers out there, you know, I saw a post from Jared, our friend, Jared Mortensen, um, on LinkedIn are like, Hey, something that sellers haven’t thought about perhaps is what if you’re using MCF, Amazon multi-channel fulfillment to fulfill your TikTok shop orders, which is a hundred percent. Okay. But as you know, a certain percentage of MCF orders is fulfilled through the USPS.
Bradley Sutton:
So what happens if the integration you’re using, obviously Helium 10 is one of them where you can tie your Amazon listings to TikTok shop. What if, Hey, 10%, 20% of your orders that you tie to Amazon MCF are actually being fulfilled by USPS. And then when Amazon sends that USPS tracking number to Helium 10 or whatever tool you’re using, and then Helium 10 sends that to TikTok shop, doesn’t that mean that TikTok shop might reject it because it’s not a USPS shipping label that is purchased from TikTok as their requirements are as of today?
Bradley Sutton:
Well, nobody knows for sure. We reached out to TikTok. This is obviously something that’s concerning to us because we provide that service. And they said, no, no, this does not apply to Amazon MCF orders. Those are still going to allow it to be pushed through, but still, you know, Jared and others out there are expressing concern because they’re rightfully asking, wait a minute, how would TikTok even know if this USPS tracking number came from Amazon? TikTok said, Hey, they’re going to, you know, check the origin and if it matches like a warehouse.
Bradley Sutton:
But again, this is all kind of hearsay for right now for me, for myself, like I’m not changing my MCF orders. I’m going to see what happens, but what you should be doing, regardless if you’re using Helium 10 or another service or just doing things manually from MCF, check your portals and see is TikTok rejecting any of your orders that are, that have a USPS shipping label because you’re going to want to take different actions because if TikTok shop rejects these tracking numbers, it’s going to treat it as if it didn’t ship. And obviously that’s going to kill your metrics. I had like one maximum two orders go unfulfilled due to some issues or are undelivered, I should say and my TikTok, one of my TikTok accounts got shut down. So this is like not something that you should just think is not very serious.
Bradley Sutton:
All right. Along those same lines, speaking of TikTok shop, let’s go to our strategy of the week. And if you’re not selling or if you haven’t yet started selling on TikTok shop and you want to get all your Amazon listings to TikTok shop, how can you do that in a matter of seconds? Shivali, show us how.
Shivali Patel:
Now we’ve been talking about it for a while now. TikTok shop offers a massive opportunity for Amazon sellers, especially in the USA. Some sellers are able to match their Amazon sales within a couple months. You guys, or even surpass them. That could be you next. But the big complaint in the early days of TikTok was, I don’t know what makes a good TikTok listing.
Shivali Patel:
I don’t want to have to download all my Amazon images, one by one listing per listing and upload them to TikTok. And I don’t know how to optimize my listing. TikTok doesn’t even do bullet points. So what the heck do I do with my Amazon bullet points? Well, that is where the TikTok listing converter from Helium 10 comes in. What we do is we take all your Amazon listings and in seconds, publish them to TikTok shop.
Shivali Patel:
That’s right. We completely got rid of a reason for you to complain. So here is how you can do that. Go inside of the tool. This is for any diamond members and up, go to listing optimization and then listing converter. It’s going to show you all the listings that are in your Amazon account.
Shivali Patel:
And after that hit the next step, once your products show up, you just want to select as many as you want to actually convert over and then select bulk convert. And there you have it within 30 seconds or less. Your listings are now up on TikTok. That doesn’t guarantee sales. There are other tools from Helium 10 to help you with that. But imagine all the time that we just saved together.
Shivali Patel:
It takes 30 seconds to do what would have taken 30 minutes or more in any other scenario. And we’re even using AI to optimize your listing for TikTok shop. We’re not just copying and pasting your Amazon title or bullet points, which TikTok does not even use. We’re using AI to optimize based on best practices for TikTok shop listings. So make sure you’ve got your Amazon listings converted and I’ll catch you on TikTok shop.
Bradley Sutton:
Thank you very much Shivali for that. Now, one extra thing, uh, that’s actually the new feature alert for this week. We don’t have too much going on. Our engineers are on holiday right now, but they right before they left, they did actually add something to that where you’re going to now be able to select multi ASINs inside of the TikTok shop, uh, Amazon conversion, uh, listing conversion, and a couple other features have been released as of this week for there. But if you haven’t used it yet, go in there, connect your TikTok shop token, get your listings migrated from Amazon to TikTok shop. So you can get started.
Bradley Sutton:
Speaking of TikTok shop, uh, the next article from Digiday is entitled, uh, TikTok shop offers incentives to new sellers as US uncertainty is finally over. So this was an article from a couple of weeks ago. Uh, but there’s, there’s a lot of perks now that you can get with TikTok shop. Like, uh, one of these says, Hey, earn up to $6,000 in coupons, et cetera, et cetera, according to this article. Now, this is critical because if you haven’t started yet, first of all, shame on you. You know, you should have jumped on this bandwagon a year ago, if not more, but now is the time.
Bradley Sutton:
All right. Uh, TikTok is back to offering a lot of incentives like they did a couple of years ago when they were trying to get more people to use the platform. So if you haven’t gotten started on TikTok shop and you’re based here in the U S I don’t know what’s going on in, in UK or other countries, you’re going to have to check what incentives locally, but if you’re in the US and you want to sell on TikTok shop US, go to h10.me/ttstart, T as in Tom start, or I should say TT as in TikTok, right? h10.me/ttstart. That’s a special link where you can get some of these incentives and actually get some access to a different level of customer service because you’re signing up through Helium 10. So make sure to get your account started now.
Bradley Sutton:
Now another article from e-commerce bites from a couple of weeks ago, you might have missed this one kind of flew under the radar, but it, but it’s, it puts an interesting idea out there. Amazon is always testing different things. You guys have noticed recently how the last couple of months you’ll see multiple child items show up in the search results for one keyword.
Bradley Sutton:
That wasn’t a thing before. Now Amazon is testing that out, but another test that they were doing, uh, according to this article, it says Amazon hid FBA listings regionally for two months. Now what this article talks about is, is from the Amazon forums where somebody is like, Hey, my, my, my products are showing up in, in like Texas, but they’re not showing up in New York or Miami.
Bradley Sutton:
And it’s really impacting my sales. And somebody said, uh, from Amazon support, our technical teams have confirmed that your ASIN is no longer affected by the region related restriction. The issue has been resolved as of November when your products were D regionalized from an experimental program that we are still investigating.
Bradley Sutton:
Your listings should now be properly visible across all us regions. Now we know that having different browsing scenarios and having different ranks has been a thing for what, 10 years almost, you know, like I could be on a Google Chrome browser and see my product rank five, but then at the same location, I can switch to a Safari browser and I’m on page two, right? Maybe two people with the same Chrome browser.
Bradley Sutton:
One person is on this side of the street. One person’s on the other side of the street or on the other side of the country, you might see different ranks. Sometimes it might disappear from the first couple of pages of search results altogether at different times. That’s why, you know, eight years ago, Helium 10 keyword tracker developed our boost technology, which allows you to check 24 times a day, rotating browsing scenarios. No other tool has that, but it was because of this is because you, you don’t have just one rank, right? But this is something interesting that, that Amazon says it was testing.
Bradley Sutton:
It was like, sounds like it’s like hiding completely your product from being indexed or searchable in certain regions, be it a city, you know, be it a state where they didn’t really specify, but you know, it’s kind of curious why would they be doing that? You know, people have incorrectly postulated in the past where it’s strictly because of where Amazon inventory is. No, it’s not that, especially when you, you can disprove that when you have FBM inventory or I’ve run tests that show where you have inventory in a certain, you know, DC distribution center, right next to a certain address.
Bradley Sutton:
And it still gave the same, you know, like rank or the same, you know, delivery time as opposed to an address where there wasn’t, you know, FBA products nearby. But, but it, it, it’s kind of like logical that sometimes, you know, there, there might be some kind of like optimization based on like Amazon doesn’t have enough inventory around. And plus two, depending on the delivery time, that’s going to affect you.
Bradley Sutton:
That’s why I’ve always said, Hey, when you’re launching new products, don’t turn your listing live until it’s distributed across the country. Because if it’s all, if you send all your inventory like to a California DC your listing goes live, somebody in New York or Florida, they still will see your product in search results, but it might say like four weeks delivery time, right? And is anybody going to click through that and purchase it?
Bradley Sutton:
Probably not. And so that’s, that could affect, you know, your ranking as well, not necessarily just because your inventory is not there, but because people in that region are like not even clicking on your product or, or clicking through. But now what if there’s just a random test being done?
Bradley Sutton:
Like this obviously had nothing to do with that. This was a person who was selling 300 units a month. So obviously they had, you know, product hundreds and hundreds of units spread across the whole country. It sounded like a separate test that Amazon was doing where they just decided to turn off your listing in certain regions. I’m not sure I fully understand it. You know, like you could say, Hey, you know, beach balls in winter in North Dakota might not be relevant.
Bradley Sutton:
So maybe they’re going to hide, you know, certain results, but, but still like, like what if you’re trying to buy a beach ball for your niece who lives in Miami beach? If you’re in North Dakota, you still want to see those in the search results. Or I’m not exactly sure what the reasoning or what Amazon is going for by having this test about regional restrictions. What do you guys think out there? Do you think this is something that they might do? And if so, how would you react to that?
Bradley Sutton:
I’d be pretty pissed off if I didn’t have control over. Hopefully there’ll be something you could tie with advertising or something, or at least being able to control your inventory being sent to more places. I really don’t know, but this is just something to be on the lookout for.
Bradley Sutton:
If you see something like this, maybe open up a case to Amazon and say, Hey, Amazon, make sure that I’m not in this experimental program here or something like that. But it’s another reason to make sure to use Helium 10 keyword tracker with the boost so you can see if something like that could be potentially happening to you. All right, last up is a special invite to some of you. As you know, this, this Weekly Buzz used to be on the Serious Sellers Podcast. Now it’s on the AM/PM Podcast, which is what you’re probably listening to this on. But now in the Serious SellersP, we are focusing on seller stories, Brand stories.
Bradley Sutton:
We’re not doing like the trainings, the weekly buzz, things like that. Every week we are interviewing a real Amazon TikTok shop, Shopify brand. I’m not an agency, but, but somebody who actually runs a brand in order to kind of like, Hey, get to know their seller story a little bit more. So with that in mind, we have an open casting call. Are you interested in perhaps being on the serious sellers podcast? Have you reached some level of success?
Bradley Sutton:
Doesn’t mean you have to have be a $30 million brand, but Hey, you’re doing a quarter of a million dollars a year since you, since you started, it’d be great to talk to you. So if you’d like to submit your story to be considered to be on the Serious Sellers Podcast, I’ll write my assistant. He’s actually the podcast producer for the show. Mhel.d@helium10.com let us know your story.
Bradley Sutton:
Also let us know if you’re willing to share your brand on the program. I know a lot of people aren’t willing to share the brand. It’s not a complete deal breaker. Like maybe you’ll still get a chance to be on, on the show, but it’ll be a more of a chance if you’re like open enough to go ahead and talk about your actual brand. We can take a look at some of your listings on the show. Maybe you can even be part of a case study and get some added benefits. But either way, make sure to submit it if you are interested in being on the show. So again, mhel.d@helium10.com and tell us why you’d like to be on the podcast.
Bradley Sutton:
All right guys, that wraps up this special new year’s edition of the weekly buzz. It’s been a great year of stories. Hopefully 2026, we’re going to have a lot of great stories and not too many of those kind of like sad stories about raising fees or lost inventory or things like that. But here is to another full year of Weekly Buzz. Don’t forget to tune in next week to see what’s buzzing.
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