#503 – Ad Fees During Thursday Amazon Outage & Walmart Goes Digital! | Weekly Buzz 3/11/26
Audio version above. Video version below
We’re back with another episode of the Weekly Buzz with Helium 10’s Senior Brand Evangelist, Shivali Patel. 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 convenes ‘deep dive’ internal meeting to address outages
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/10/amazon-plans-deep-dive-internal-meeting-address-ai-related-outages.html
Sellers Say Amazon Charged Ad Fees throughout Thursday’s Outage
https://www.ecommercebytes.com/2026/03/07/sellers-say-amazon-charged-ad-fees-throughout-thursdays-outage/
Amazon Seller Central: Refresh your product detail page videos this spring
https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-news/articles/QVRWUERLSUtYMERFUiNHTUZaTlU3VlNDTUZVQVRH
Walmart to add digital price labels to all US stores
https://www.newsnationnow.com/business/walmart-digital-price-labels-stores/
Seller reactions to TikTok Shop changing stance on shipping and fulfillment
https://www.retailbrew.com/stories/2026/03/05/seller-reactions-to-tiktok-shop-changing-stance-on-shipping-and-fulfillment
In episode 503 of the AM/PM Podcast and Weekly Buzz, Shivali covers:
- 00:00 – Introduction
- 00:41 – How Will Amazon Address Ad Fees Charged During the Outage?
- 04:27 – Listing Builder Updates: Consolidated ABA & Keyword Research Experience
- 09:13 – Download our Helium 10 App for Improved Visibility
- 10:48 – Add Videos to Listings for Up to 23% More Sales This Spring
- 12:09 – Walmart Replacing Paper Tags with Digital Labels Nationwide
- 13:30 – Search Query Analyzer
- 17:06 – TikTok Shop Shipping Shakeup Sparks Seller Debate
Transcript
Shivali Patel:
How will Amazon address ad fees that were charged during the Thursday outage? Gain up to 23% more sales this spring. And Walmart is now rolling out digital labels nationwide over physical tags. This and more on this week’s episode of The Weekly Buzz. Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of the AM/PM podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host, Shivali Patel. 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.
Shivali Patel:
All right, our first news piece today comes from e-commerce bites. It’s regarding what some of you might have experienced on Thursday. Amazon was seemingly down for about six hours and a ton of customers were experiencing that classic dog. As you can see inside of this article, if you are watching this via video, one frustrated shopper reported, I met a lot of Amazon dogs today. Let’s see, there was Bailey, Barkley, and Emma, Barney, Bowser, Brandy, Butters, Marge, Cannoli, Clancy, a lot of names there. I’m not going to read the full list, but Amazon told media outlets in a statement that some customers may have experienced issues while shopping due to an issue related to software code deployment.
Shivali Patel:
And this didn’t just apply for people who were looking to buy. It was also for customers who had already purchased actually. So there was one instance where I read about this inside of this article, somebody went to go pick up an item they’d already purchased at an Amazon locker, and they were essentially not able to pick it up because the app would just show a spinning wheel. And this wasn’t just on the app. It was also on desktop. So if you were on the Amazon page or the app, maybe you experienced something. And I’d love to know, did you also experience something like this? And how so? Were you a customer?
Shivali Patel:
Did you experience it as a seller? Members of the Amazon Vine review program were unable to post reviews and Amazon’s Kindle eBook program while people weren’t able to view the description or even download or get a new book. Sellers were impacted due to loss of sales because customers were, first of all, unable to complete their purchases. And when they would go and visit their listings, if I went and visited my listing, I would see no listing at all. All right. Some of these listings that previously had the buy box wouldn’t have the buy box.
Shivali Patel:
You wouldn’t be able to add it to cart. And on top of all of that, sellers were impacted not just by the loss in sales that they experienced, but they weren’t able to access their listings. They didn’t have the buy box anymore. If they previously had it, you couldn’t add it to cart. And on top of all of those things, you had seller info, product info missing, ad fees still being charged. AWS just in general impacted really terribly.
Shivali Patel:
Price is not showing up, just options. And then you get suspenseful music it says, and then it would go back to an item page with no additional info, lots of unavailable things and 404 dogs. People of course took to threads and even that seemed to have some sort of error occurring. Sometimes people would post something and it wouldn’t show up or they replied and it said they didn’t reply and Amazon seller support seemed to be out of reach. But that tends to happen, right guys? That’s part of the nature of being in business.
Shivali Patel:
And what’s more important than these little setbacks that occur is figuring out how you navigate them. And typically Amazon does a pretty good job. So that leads me into this next article, which says Amazon convenes a deep dive internal meeting to address outages. They are going and looking into this. They’re trying to ensure that this sort of generative AI assisted production change doesn’t occur again. They’re trying to set up some safeguard practices to prevent further issues as they say, especially considering how many people are impacted and for six hours straight.
Shivali Patel:
And there has been a few instances here and there where something similar has happened. And so they are trying to the best of their ability to meet, go into a deep dive of why this happened and what to do to prevent it further. So luckily, hopefully that is the last we’re seeing of the situation. But of course, I’d love to hear, is this something you were impacted by as a seller, as a customer, and how have you pivoted since? Next up, let’s talk about a new feature alert. You know, at Helium 10, we are always trying to innovate.
Shivali Patel:
We listen to your queries and implement things accordingly. And we’ve got some changes to our much loved Listing Builder. So just when you go into Listing Builder from the very top, if you’re in create and optimize listings, you’re going to select Listing Builder or inside of your classic view, you’ll see it underneath listing optimization.
Shivali Patel:
In doing so, the first thing I want to draw attention to that’s new is scribbles history. So many of you maybe are avid scribbles lovers. If you’ve been around the book for quite some time, then you might know what scribbles is.
Shivali Patel:
And what you can now do is actually import all that information into Listing Builder and check out what you’ve got going on from that tool. Something else is let’s go ahead and actually click into a listing. I’m going to click into this Manny’s mysterious oddities makeup organizer set.
Shivali Patel:
And let’s just actually run back to this first tab, which is add keywords for listings. Something else we’ve recently adopted, and this is going to be for our Diamond and up users. We’ve actually consolidated the ABA converting keywords filters that you were seeing before.
Shivali Patel:
So before you would have to go in and for your products, as well as for your comparison filter, you would have to select, okay, I want to see keywords with conversion share greater than or equal to 1% and then go through and select which weeks. But the truth of the scenario is, is maybe you were looking for the same exact timeframe and the same amount of conversion share for both of those things, for your own products, as well as competitors. So we’ve just kind of tried to unify that experience and speed up the process by saying, Hey, just put it in once. And we’re actually going to pull all of that data for you in one go. Very convenient. Then we’ve got search query performance, sales keywords before you’d have to select your ASINs.
Shivali Patel:
Now we just go in and select your information, your ASIN for you. And then you can just focus that way on keywords with my purchase being greater than or equal to one during the month or during the week of, and then you can select however many weeks. And that way now it’s just going to pull that information a whole lot faster.
Shivali Patel:
Now, the last thing that we’ve really changed inside of Listing Builder is when you’re in the create listing content tab, that’s going to be your last one over where you’re actually seeing all those keyword phrases you selected, or that this tool just pulled. Once we input it in our filters, you’re going to see that on the left. And then on the right-hand side, you can go in and actually write out that listing that includes title, bullet points, subject matter, as well as generic keywords, and then your description, of course.
Shivali Patel:
In doing so, before what we used to have is all the key phrases that were being used were to highlight green that included root keywords. And that is great. It worked, but it can muddle how many times things are being used in the sense of now you don’t know maybe where they’re showing up if everything’s already highlighted green, right? So for example, we’ve got CC cream. Again, I am currently taking a look at a coffin shelf, Gothic makeup organizer set, which is why you might see some makeup related things. Now inside of my listing, it says I’m using CC cream once.
Shivali Patel:
Now, if I went in and just for the sake of this example, if you were watching this on any sort of video platform, let’s say I typed in CC cream here as well. Now all of a sudden I’m using it twice, right? And you can see on the left-hand side, it now tells me that, yeah, I’m using CC cream twice. I’m going to select it. It’s going to show me the keyword sources. So this is being pulled from historical top keywords.
Shivali Patel:
It’s also a top performing organic keyword and sponsored keyword. And when I select it, it’s going to highlight green now and show me exactly where in my listing. So in the title and in the bullet points that I have added that. All right. So a little bit more convenient again for seeing where you’re using your keywords inside of your listing. And as opposed to having everything highlighted green, now you can be very specific.
Shivali Patel:
Hey, you know what? I’ve used this too many times. It’s already showing up and you can click it to see where it’s showing up and then consolidate from there. So hopefully that makes sense for different new things being added as an enhancement to Listing Builder. You’ve got scribbles history. You’ve got a more consolidated version of the ABA converting keywords.
Shivali Patel:
Search Query Performance keywords are automatically pulled from your ASINs that are integrated into your Helium 10 shop. Because of course that’s naturally pulling from your seller central token. And then the last thing is we’ve updated the way that the highlight system works, just so you can more easily see where those key phrases are being used.
Shivali Patel:
All right. All this to follow up with, make sure you guys go download our Helium 10 app. That is also something that we’ve been working on for some time. You guys were asking, where’s the Helium 10 app? Well, we’ve got it back and it’s updated. So you can go in type in Helium 10 into the search bar, go ahead and download it.
Shivali Patel:
Like I have what you’ll see once you’re inside of that app is at the very top, you’ll be able to change marketplaces. You have access to Amazon, Walmart, and TikTok shop. Now from your phone, you’ll be able to toggle into whichever one you want. You’ve got profits at the top, as well as ads. You can change periods going into last seven days, this quarter, last quarter, last year, whatever you want. PPC spend, tacos, ACOS at the top, performance.
Shivali Patel:
You can quickly at a glance, see your highest ACOS campaigns from your phone. So much better than having to go to a desktop. And of course, as you go through and navigate even further into ads manager, you’ll be able to filter down, see the status, update the status, turn things off, pause it out, change your budget as you see fit.
Shivali Patel:
When I’m underneath the profit section, and I scroll down, I’ll also be able to see my P&L, check out all those products, any refunds that I might be due. And then going into that second tab, you’ll be able to see all the alerts that are there. So go in, see if you’ve lost a buy box or Amazon’s changed dimensions, and you can update the as always.
Shivali Patel:
In learning, we’ve got some stuff about our podcast, as well as our blog, go in, stay up to date. And that is all the jazz, my friends. All right, moving into seller central, refresh your product detail page videos this spring. Spring’s almost here. Of course, this is a good time as any to make sure that your listing is up to date. Sellers who add videos to their product detail pages, see an average increase of up to 23%.
Shivali Patel:
I would love an increase of 23% on my listings. All right, that’s a significant boost. So make sure that you guys give shoppers the confidence they need to go and click add to cart. There’s a number of ways that you can create video. Shoppers like to see their products in action, as in what the heck am I buying? How do I use it?
Shivali Patel:
How easy is it to assemble, et cetera, yada, yada, yada. And being able to visualize it in their own lives gets them going to make that purchase. So some things you can do for videos is you’ve got product demonstrations, show it in how to videos, highlight key features and benefits, variations showcase.
Shivali Patel:
If you’ve got multiple variations, or maybe things that even work together, guys, this is a great way for you to upsell customers on buying things together. If you’ve got a brand and real life applications, of course. So if you sell some fitness gear, go out and shoot some fitness videos. And once you’ve got those videos shot, you’ll want to go to upload and manage videos and seller central under catalog to add or update video management is available to eligible brands and sellers with three months or more selling on Amazon, which I believe many of you probably are. Next up, we’ve got Walmart ads, digital price labels to all us stores. I actually didn’t know what this was, so I had to Google it.
Shivali Patel:
It’s basically electronic digital display tags that are replacing traditional paper price tags on shelves. And it’s just designed to speed up price updates, improve inventory management. Of course, this is something that we like seeing across the board, better logistics, better shipping, happier customers.
Shivali Patel:
And of course, hopefully more sales for us because they leave great reviews. It’s a cycle, right guys. So rolling out to all us stores nationwide, you’ve got some things that this digital shelf label will affect that includes instant price changes. Anytime you want to change, it’s very fast. Stock to light for inventory replenishment and pick to light order, we’re picking enhancing efficiency for associates. So of course, that’s Google.
Shivali Patel:
Let’s go back into this article we were looking at. Walmart said it would phase out paper price tags in favor of the digital ones. So it’s controlled by a centralized system. This was first introduced in grapevine, Texas location in 2024, and it’s been added to about 3,200 additional stores. Obviously, I’m not with the times because I had to look up what the digital label was. But as it says here, using a device, employees can activate LED lights on a label to identify where items need to be restocked or where items for online orders are located. Now, since I’ve been yapping for a little bit of time, let’s go ahead and pass it over to Bradley, who is going to speak to you about Search Query Performance Analyzer.
Bradley Sutton:
Another unique strategy that is important to do, and it’s unique in the fact that Helium 10 can do it in seconds. But even if you don’t have Helium 10, you can do this in a few hours inside of Seller Central. And that is looking up to one year of your search query performance data instantly.
Bradley Sutton:
All right. So any of you who have Helium 10, you’ve already got access to this because as soon as you connect, we’ll go ahead and download up to a year’s reports of your search query performance. But what are the things that you want to look at?
You want to know, hey, what were the keywords that are driving sales for me? What are the keywords where my conversion rate is better than the market conversion rate? What are the keywords where my click through rate is better than everybody else’s click through rate?
Bradley Sutton:
These are all important things. But the way you can look at up to a year’s worth of data in seconds is by going into Search Query Analyzer, go ahead and select month of, and just select the last 12 months here of your account. And then go in and choose the product or products.
Bradley Sutton:
Let me go ahead and type in coffin shelf here and put on my main product. I select it. I also am going to have AI analysis on. That’ll give you some other options here I’m about to show you. And then I just hit apply AI analysis. The first thing it’s going to show is all 12 months of search query performance data, all the keywords that have ever come up in any of those months.
Bradley Sutton:
So I can see here, for example, I can sort by my purchases and I can see, oh my goodness, I’ve got 50 purchases for the keyword coffin shelf. I’ve got six purchases for coffin box. I’ve sold for coffin shelves. I’ve sold for coffin bookshelf, et cetera, et cetera. But then if I go ahead and look at the AI analysis, I hit this button, view AI analysis here. Now I could see instantly, Hey, what were the best conversion rate keywords for me?
Bradley Sutton:
What were the market top sales keywords? All right. Or the top search volume keywords here in my keyword performance matrix. I can even see, Hey, what got me low a costs, right? Because it ties into my, my PPC data. I can look at funnel analytics and see, Hey, how are things going overall?
Bradley Sutton:
How, how do things progress between the impression all the way down to the purchase for my product? What are some of my high value, low visibility keywords? In other words, where I might not be showing up at the top of search, but I have really good data that AI summarizes a lot of what you need to look at when you’re looking at your search query performance data, because sometimes it might be a little bit overwhelming that will help you kind of like laser focus on what actions you need to take.
Bradley Sutton:
So again, if you want to be able to look at 12 months of search performance data, almost instantly use Helium 10 for that. Even if you don’t have Helium 10, well, guess what? Go to seller central, go to your search performance, download the 12 different reports, do a pivot table and put all that data together because it’s still important data. And then, yeah, you can maybe use some outside AIs to give you some summaries, but with just two clicks, you can do that all inside of Helium 10.
Shivali Patel:
So guys, a few things that I mentioned on this week’s weekly buzz, for example, the Listing Builder enhancements, as well as what Bradley just talked about with the search query performance analyzer, those things are really exclusive to diamond members. So if you don’t have a diamond membership, I do think it’s really valuable. And you guys can take 20% off the next six months by using the code SSP20.
Shivali Patel:
Make sure you use SSP20 to take 20% off six months for a Diamond. And last but not least, we’ve got seller reactions to TikTok shop changing the stance on shipping and fulfillment. Of course, no buzz is complete without me hitting the trifecta, Amazon, Walmart, and TikTok shop.
Shivali Patel:
And here, as you guys know, TikTok shop had originally said that they were going to make it mandatory for you guys to use a TikTok shop plan for shipping. Then they paused that out. I actually covered this in weekly buzz some time ago, but this shakeup has still instigated some conversation of why that might be the case, whether it’s going to come back.
Shivali Patel:
And the truth is, nobody really knows. Some people speculate that the decision is because they would lose business. Some folks, it just doesn’t really make sense to use TikTok shop fulfillment just yet because they’re using merchant fulfilled.
Shivali Patel:
And even though they weren’t going away with merchant fulfilled, they felt maybe it was a matter of time. And at the same time, other people speculate that it’s not so much that they would lose business as much as it is. It closes out people who are small business owners.
Shivali Patel:
It’s a wider audience to keep being able to have the sort of fulfillment that makes sense for your brand. This is no different from that very popular phrase. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket, guys. This applies for shipping. This applies for selling on one marketplace. You want to branch out, sell in different marketplaces, maybe Amazon Brazil, Amazon Mexico, Amazon Japan, UK, TikTok shop, Walmart, whatever floats your boat and makes sense from a profitability standpoint, as well as an inventory standpoint, that’s what you want to work on doing.
Shivali Patel:
Meaning if it doesn’t make sense for you to go out and have a bunch more inventory created for the Walmart platform, well then maybe you can bulk convert your listings, especially if you’re on our diamond plan at Helium 10. We let you bulk convert all of your Amazon listings over to TikTok shop within minutes. I’m not exaggerating within minutes.
Shivali Patel:
So make sure you use the code SSP20 to upgrade if you haven’t already, and then bulk convert those listings because you can actually set it up in a way that’s automated after you’ve bulk converted and any sort of placement that occurs on the TikTok shop platform, the inventory is going to be pulled from Amazon and automatically shipped out. So very cool, very nifty. And with that, I am done with this week’s weekly buzz. I will catch you next week to see what’s buzzing.
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