#480 – Alexa Plus on your Browser, New 3 Euro Duty on imports, & Tools for Saudi Arabia | Weekly Buzz 12/19/25
We’re back with another episode of the AM/PM Podcast and Weekly Buzz with Helium 10’s Principal Brand Evangelist, Carrie Miller. 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.
Introducing Alexa+, the next generation of Alexa
https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/devices/new-alexa-generative-artificial-intelligence
https://alexa.amazon.com/about
EU to impose 3 euro duty on e-commerce parcels from July 2026
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/eu-impose-3-euro-duty-small-e-commerce-parcels-july-2026-2025-12-12/
New Helium 10 Tools for the Saudi Arabia Amazon Marketplace
Brand Store quality rating now reflect sales performance
https://advertising.amazon.com/en-us/resources/whats-new/brand-store-quality-rating-now-reflect-sales-performance/?ref_=a20m_us_wn_gw
TikTok Shop is driving social commerce growth
https://www.retaildive.com/news/tiktok-shop-drives-social-commerce-growth/807665/
Amazon Seller News: View updated Customer Service Insights in Feedback Manager
https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-news/articles/QVRWUERLSUtYMERFUiNHSDIyVjY1QzRVNllYVUNO
In episode 480 of the AM/PM Podcast and Weekly Buzz, Carrie covers:
- 00:45 – New Alexa+ Web Browser
- 02:36 – New 3 Euro Duty
- 06:06 – Saudi Arabia Tools
- 07:57 – Brand Story Quality Rating
- 09:32 – Advanced Keyword Research
- 14:54 – TikTok Shop Driving Growth
- 16:26 – Customer Service Insights
Transcript:
Carrie Miller:
Amazon launches a new Alexa+ web browser, Europe is adding new fees to small imports, and Helium 10 has more tools for the Saudi Arabia market. These stories and more on this week’s episode of The Weekly Buzz.
Bradley Sutton:
How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.
Carrie Miller:
Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of the AM, PM podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host, Carrie Miller, 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. Okay, so let’s go ahead and get into the first article, which is Alexa Plus is now on a web browser. Now, back in February, we announced that there was a new Alexa Plus that basically was going to be kind of your assistant where it would help you to plan things, help to schedule trips, schedule appointments, help you to find products, all kinds of things.
But now, Alexa Plus is on a web browser, so I think this kind of takes it to a next level, and I’m gonna show you what this browser looks like. So it looks kind of like this. If you go to alexa.com, it actually redirects you to this site, and it has kind of a little chat box there, and they wanna make it more conversational. So they’re saying it’s still an all-in-one planning tool, and they’re saying you can dive deep into topics and pick up conversations anytime and anywhere, and Alexa keeps all the context across all of your devices like Echo and Fire TV. It says all-in-one planning, so it’s an all-in-one planning tool. You can create checklists, help write invitations, all doing this from your browser.
So, and again, it’s gonna go across all of your devices, so something that is up and coming in the Amazon world. Not everybody, I think it’s in beta. I’m not sure that everyone has access to it, but if you scroll up, you can actually request access at the top of this browser, and if you have eligible devices, you do get early access for free.
So that’s something, if you wanna check it out, how it works, you can request Alexa Plus there, but that is pretty interesting, knowing that this is kind of up and coming, that they’re really trying to improve it, and to me, it looks a lot like ChatGPT or just some of the other AI tools, so I’m not sure if they’re wanting to kind of be the all-in-one, like where you shop, where you search for information, all that kinds of stuff, so really interesting to consider, and think about maybe optimizing for Alexa. I know we’ve talked about optimizing for voice and things like that in the past, so something to keep in mind. Okay, next up, we have something that I think is very interesting.
I think that the European Union might be following in Trump’s footstep in regards to the de minimis, when a few months ago, or maybe it’s been at the beginning of the year, basically, Trump closed this de minimis loophole where you could ship in small parcels under $800 and not have to pay any taxes, so people were ordering things from Shein and Timu directly from those sites, and they were being shipped directly from the factories in China, and they were not having to pay any duty on those, and even another thing that was kind of a burden on our system was the post office service would have to continue shipping that product, so when it came into the United States, we were actually footing the bill for the rest of the shipping, so really interesting kind of situation there, but we’ve kind of fixed it, I think, quite a bit with closing this loophole so that these small parcels can’t come into the U.S. without being taxed, so I think that kind of levels the playing field when especially when a lot of sellers are bringing in big containers and they’re having to pay these big tariffs, well, then all these Chinese sellers are shipping directly, and that was kind of a difficult thing to compete with because they weren’t having to pay these taxes, so the European Union now has decided, and I’m gonna show you this article, they are going to impose a three-euro duty on e-commerce parcels, so these are the small parcels from July 1st, 2026, and it’s gonna be in place until a permanent solution is found to eliminate the de minimis duties exemption from online purposes below 150 euros.
This is really an effort to crack down on cheap Chinese e-commerce imports. There’s a lot of things that go on when you import these things, and there’s no regulation on it. There’s safety issues, there’s quality concerns, there’s all kinds of things that are going on, but this temporary measure is just really in response to all of this, the health and safety risks, the high levels of fraud, and the environmental concerns, and there’s also the unfair competition, so there’s a lot of things that they’re concerned about, and Europe does have very strict environmental concerns, but these parcels are able to just kind of slip right in through there without any of those same regulations, so that is why I think they’re doing this. A council source said the duty would appear per product type based on six-digit tariff codes, so that means, for example, and they give you this example in the article, that if you have 10 pairs of socks of the same type, you would incur a three-euro charge, but if you had five pairs of socks that were made from wool and five from cotton, that would count as two item types, and that would incur a six-euro charge.
Due to the customs waivers, the number of low-value e-commerce packages arriving in the block actually doubled last year to 4.6 billion, which is more than 90% of them from China, so this is definitely an issue that they wanna take care of and make sure that they even the playing field, and then also make sure that these products are safe, and I think a lot of the retailers are probably pretty excited about this because now it’s gonna help them to, if they’re having to pay these duties now, China also, and these Qin and Timu-type companies are going to have to pay some tariffs as well, so curious to know what you all think about this.
I think, you know, I remember when the diminishments happened everyone kind of jumped, all Qin and Timu kind of jumped all their advertising over to Europe, and they were really focused on Europe because they’re like, oh, we can just keep going with Europe, but now Europe is like, ah, you know what? This isn’t working out too well for us, so we’re gonna impose these taxes, so curious to know what everyone else thinks about that. Okay, so the next thing is our new feature that we have in Helium 10, and this is a shout-out to Crystal from Amazon Seller Society from Dubai and her community because they’re the reasons why we did this.
If there’s ever a tool that we don’t have yet and you want it, you really need to go ahead and write us and give us a reason why we should do this, and we, a lot of times, we actually review these things every week, and we decide what we’re going to implement, and so she actually gave us a lot of feedback on this, and we had a lot of people asking for this, so if we are in Helium 10, if you wanted to request a feature, you see these little quotation marks? If you click on those, it will actually show you these boxes.
They’re gonna pop up, and it says Give Feature Ideas, and that’s where you’re gonna click and give those feature ideas, so if we have enough people requesting certain features, then we can go ahead and create those and make sure that we expand and help all the e-commerce sellers, but let’s go back to Saudi Arabia, and thanks to these people who are requesting this market, we have the Chrome extension, which we announced back in July, but now we also have all of the black box tools, so for product research, we have the Products tab, we have the Keywords, Brand Analytics, the ABA Top Search Terms, Competitors, Niche, and Product Targeting All for the Saudi Arabia market, so this is really big news.
It’s really awesome that now sellers can utilize all these tools for those markets. They’re kind of emerging markets, and I have talked to sellers one-on-one saying that they have actually seen a lot of good sales within Saudi Arabia, so that is something to keep an eye on and if you’re interested in selling in that market, or if you’re already there, these tools are available for you to help you to find new product ideas to sell, and you can use these tools for a lot of other things as well, so check those tools out for the Saudi Arabia market.
Okay, let’s go ahead and get into our next article, which is the Brand Story Quality Rating That Now Reflects Sales Performance. This is actually from Amazon. They’re saying that your brand quality rating now is going to show your sales performance, so the Brand Story Quality Rating now uses sales metrics to help you understand store performance.
The updated experience provides a rating which is high, medium, or low based on sales attributed to your storefront rather than visitor engagement time, so you can also compare your sales performance with similar brands in your category. While you can still see how long customers spend in your brand store, which is the dwell time, and how your peer group is doing, the quality rating now focuses on sales performance. The optimization recommendations also show potential impact on sales in addition to dwell time to help you make more informed decisions about your storefront improvement, so these sales insights are gonna be able to help you to identify opportunities to enhance your brand store performance, and you can also use these insights alongside the optimization recommendations to help you create engaging shopping experiences for customers browsing your brand store and help increase sales because the quality of your brand store can help you to see more sales, so high-quality brand stores can see up to 97% more sales than low-quality ones and up to 39% more sales than medium-quality ones, so brand store does actually matter, and so that is something that you should be taking a look at. I’m gonna just scroll and show you the little dashboard here so you can see all this information. So this is just another tool in your toolbox to help you to increase your sales and also to increase your brand awareness as well, so if you haven’t checked out this, go ahead and check it out.
All right, next up, I’m going to pass it off to Bradley, and he’s going to be giving you the tip of the week, and he’s gonna be talking about an eight-in-one tool that Helium 10 has to help streamline your optimization workflow.
Bradley Sutton:
So this strategy is completely unique to Helium 10, and it’s about having eight different keyword research data points that you can instantly access within seconds for your product and your competitor’s products. Now, why is this important? How can it make you money?
Keywords are still important to Amazon, despite what people might try and tell you that everything’s about AI. No, we’ve run countless proofs that so far, keywords are still the most important thing for indexing, getting you searchable, sending those initial relevancy signals to Amazon, and you want to know all the keywords that can potentially bring you sales, and what happens is if you’re just using maybe not even a tool like Product Opportunity Explorer to find keywords, or maybe just Search Query Performance, you’re limited in what you can do. If you’re just using Search Query Performance, you can only do that on existing products.
If you’re just using Product Opportunity Explorer, you’re only gonna find maybe a maximum of 10, 15 keywords. There’s potentially hundreds, if not thousands of keywords out there that are relevant to your product, at least hundreds that are highly relevant, and with Helium 10, you can find eight different resources of keywords in just seconds. Here’s how.
Go into our Listing Builder tool, and when you go into the Add Keywords section, now you guys have this new section where you can create your keyword bank, and it finds eight different keyword sources. The very first one here is something very unique, and that is ABA Converting Keywords. This is Amazon Brand Analytics.
This is the only tool where instantly you are gonna see for your products, if you had chosen your own product here, out of a whole half year of data. I actually was just doing something for a Halloween product, and I didn’t wanna look just at the middle of the summer. I was looking at October and November of 2025.
I did 2024, I did 2023, I did 2022. I was going back in time to all of the brand analytics data that Helium 10 has to say, hey, what had a conversion share of at least 1%? This goes back to before there was even such a thing as search query performance.
And this is the way you can find out what were the keywords that Amazon is saying brought you sales. The same thing, what are the keywords that Amazon says your competitors had sales from? What keywords?
Anytime I can pick up to a half year, 26 different weeks of brand analytics data, I can search in seconds that had over a 1% conversion share, all right? Search query performance, instantly, I like to look at the months. I’m gonna look back at the last 12 months, any keyword that brought me sales from search query performance.
There’s top keywords, opportunity keywords. That’s not unique to Helium 10. We’ve always had that, you can do that in Cerebro.
Another one that’s unique to Helium 10 though is right here in this same search, I can find historical keywords. Hey, what were the keywords in the last two years that these products were ranking for? Either my product or these competitor ones.
I can look at the sponsored rank. I can look at organic rank, eight different keyword research sources. And then I hit apply.
And instantly, I have got a list of keywords that hit one or more of these factors. Like what is the most important ones to you? Maybe it’s my search query performance keywords, right?
Well, now I can see, hey, coffin letterboard. That’s an important keyword, let me star that. And where did this one come up?
Wow, coffin letterboard came up in my brand analytics competitor keywords. It came up in my search query performance keywords. It came up in historical keywords.
It came up in sponsored keywords. Obviously, this is a super important keyword, all right? What if I wanna find the ones that were only Amazon brand analytics keywords?
Look at this keyword here, Halloween party decor. If you’re using any other tool, you never would have seen this keyword, why? It’s only showing up in two different data points that only Helium 10 has, the brand analytics converting keywords and historical top keywords.
So here’s a keyword that you never would have found if you weren’t using Helium 10 and is very relevant. This product, Halloween party decor for this coffin letterboard obviously is important. So I can star the ones that are important to me.
And then once I go ahead and make my listing, now I can see, hey, which keywords did I star? Or hey, where are all the keywords that brought me sales from search query performance? Let me make sure I have those keywords in phrase form.
So this is like probably one of the coolest things that Helium 10 has launched in years is the listing builder eight-way keyword research tool where you’re gonna find keywords that literally nobody else can find because you’re using the best data with Helium 10. So make sure that you guys are using the listing builder eight-in-one keyword research tool to find all of the relevant keywords for your listing.
Carrie Miller:
Thank you so much, Bradley, for that tip. So if you haven’t checked out the listing builder, go ahead and check that tool out because it is absolutely incredible. And we made it so much easier to do everything all in one place.
Next up, we have an article about TikTok Shop and that is that TikTok Shop is driving social commerce growth. Now this is not a surprise because really they’re the leaders in this market. In this article, it talks about some actual stats and it says that TikTok is driving social commerce growth with TikTok Shop making up nearly 20% of social commerce in 2025.
According to a new report from eMarketer, TikTok Shop sales are forecast to exceed 20 billion in 2026 and surpass 30 billion in 2028. In 2026, half of the US social shoppers are projected to make purchases on TikTok. So that’s pretty amazing.
If you have not gotten on TikTok Shop, we actually have some tools that will help you to literally in one click to convert your listings over from Amazon to TikTok Shop. So if you haven’t utilized these tools in Helium 10, it’s really a great thing to do, especially if you wanna increase your sales, super easy. And we use kind of an AI to help convert your listings so that they’re optimized for TikTok Shop.
So that is something you should definitely consider because not only are they growing this social commerce, like this article is saying, it’s social commerce really is the future. So a lot of people are buying on TikTok Shop, but a lot of sellers are actually seeing a lift on their Amazon sales when they’re promoting products on TikTok Shop. So if you’re promoting on TikTok Shop, people are like, oh, I wanna buy this on Amazon.
They’ll look for you on Amazon. It’s helping to increase your organic rank and your presence on Amazon. So that’s not even included in this number.
So that’s something to really consider if you want to expand and increase your sales in the e-commerce world. Okay, let’s go ahead and get into the last article of the day, which is that Amazon updated customer service insights in Feedback Manager. So customer service insights on your Feedback Manager page actually helps you to better understand your customer service performance.
So you can also use it to compare your performance to other sellers. To help you understand your customer insights more easily, Amazon has made the following updates and they have them listed in here. The preventable contact rate has been renamed to buyer contact rate to make the insight clearer.
This metric tracks contacts related to product quality, fulfillment, or shipping problems, and is now calculated as a percentage instead of a fraction. And the second thing is your average contact response time now includes only the contacts you’ve responded to instead of all the contacts received, helping you to identify when you can make changes to your process if this number is too high. So basically, if you want to keep up to date on this customer service Feedback Manager, it is really important to make sure you’re up to date on this because you can get your account shut down if things go awry with this.
So it’s important to keep up to date and on top of all of this. And that’s all I have today for you on this Weekly Buzz episode. I hope you enjoyed all of these articles and we’ll see you again next week to see what’s buzzing. Bye everyone.
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