#505 – Amazon Is Sending Customers Away?! and 1-Hour Delivery Is Here | Weekly Buzz 5/18/26
Audio version above. Video version below
We’re back with another episode of the 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.
Amazon Opens Shop Direct to More Merchants in E-Commerce Pivot
https://www.techbuzz.ai/articles/amazon-opens-shop-direct-to-more-merchants-in-e-commerce-pivot
Sponsored Products prompts and Sponsored Brands prompts
https://advertising.amazon.com/en-us/resources/whats-new/unboxed-2025-sponsored-products-and-sponsored-brands-prompts/
For our new feature alert, Helium 10 Review Insights is back, helping sellers instantly see what buyers love, hate, and what is hurting ratings so they can fix listings faster, beat competitors, and drive more sales.
Amazon launches 1-hour shipping in US cities to challenge Walmart
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-launches-1-hour-shipping-100457426.html
Walmart quietly makes a key change in every store
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/walmart-quietly-makes-key-change-181000250.html
Advanced sellers should consider upgrading to Helium 10 Diamond to unlock deeper historical data, brand analytics, search query insights, and share-of-voice tools that make competitor and market analysis much easier. Use code: SSP20 to get 20% off for 6 months.
That’s it for this week’s Helium 10 Weekly Buzz. Thanks for tuning in, and we’ll see you next week with more updates, tools, and strategies to help you stay ahead in e-commerce.
In episode 505 of the AM/PM Podcast and Weekly Buzz, Carrie talks about:
- 00:00 – Introduction
- 00:41 – Amazon Sends Traffic to More 3rd Party Websites with Shop Direct
- 03:40 – Sponsored Product Prompts and Sponsored Brands Prompts are now Available for US Amazon Sellers
- 07:51 – New Feature Update: Helium 10 Review Insights Is Back!
- 12:00 – Amazon Launches 1-hour Shipping
- 14:39 – TikTok Influencer Finder and Messenger Tool
- 18:29 – Walmart Rolls out Digital Price Tags in Stores
- 21:16 – Special Offer From Helium 10
Transcript
Carrie Miller:
Amazon is sending traffic and customers away from amazon.com. New sponsor prompts are now available. And Amazon launches one hour shipping in select cities. 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, 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.
Carrie Miller:
All right, let’s go ahead and get into the first article here. And this is actually probably the most interesting that I found this week. And that is that Amazon just made a move that is basically going to change, I think, how online shopping works. And surprisingly, it actually involves sending customers away from Amazon. So Amazon is expanding a program called Shop Direct. And I don’t know if any of you have seen this, but some people have posted about it on LinkedIn.
Carrie Miller:
I started seeing it when I was shopping. But basically, you could actually go to actual sites that are not Amazon. So they’re actually being advertised kind of on Amazon.
So Shop Direct allows more merchants to show their products on Amazon. But instead of buying on Amazon, customers are redirected to the brand’s own website. This is a huge change. So for years, Amazon has obviously operated like a kind of like a closed ecosystem, keeping shoppers inside its platform from discovery to checkout. And now it’s opening the door and letting brands keep control of their own sales and customer relationships. So this program actually is very massive.
Carrie Miller:
There’s over 1 million products already in this program. And then there’s more than 400,000 merchants. So that’s quite a big deal already. And Amazon says that it’s already sent shoppers to external sites millions of times. So the key update here is that Amazon is making it much easier for brands to join. I think a lot of people are like, how do we even get involved in this? How do we showcase our website? A lot of people are just really confused on how to even do that. So merchants or sellers can now plug into Shop Direct using third party product feeds, which means they don’t even need to sell directly on Amazon to benefit from this traffic.
Carrie Miller:
So you even if you’re not on Amazon, this is good news for you. There’s also an AI layer involved. And that includes features like Buy For Me, which can help users purchase items even if they’re not sold on Amazon at all. So this is where things get interesting. Amazon is basically evolving from a marketplace into a more of a discovery engine for the entire internet. So instead of competing with every brand, it’s saying we’re going to help customers find products even if we don’t sell them.
Carrie Miller:
And this could be a smart move, especially with everything that’s changing with AI and how people are finding things. So also brands want more control over their customer data. Platforms like Shopify are pushing direct to consumer models. And it also really raises the questions of, you know, will sellers rely less on Amazon’s marketplace long term? That’s that’s always a question that I have. And does this weaken Amazon’s dominance or actually make it stronger? I think it probably makes it stronger. It’ll be kind of the go to place where people find and already is really the go to place where people find products. But even more interesting, that Amazon is actually sending products to the actual websites.
Carrie Miller:
So basically, Amazon isn’t just trying to be, you know, the place where you buy things anymore. It’s trying to be the place where every purchase begins. And that means even if it ends on another website, they want it to begin there because they’re obviously going to get a piece of that pie. So I think this could reshape, you know, how everything works on Amazon as we know it. And so I guess we’ll just see how this continues to grow. I know it’s grown since it started, but we’ll see how it continues to go on.
Carrie Miller:
The next article I want to share is that Amazon just dropped a new AI feature that could completely change how shoppers interact with ads, turning them into conversations instead of clicks. So we actually already knew about this feature back at Unbox because they announced it at Unbox, but it’s now actually going to roll out to everyone. And that is sponsored products prompts and sponsored brands prompts.
Carrie Miller:
And they’re now just basically available to everyone. Before it was only beta. So some people were already using them right away after Unbox. But if you weren’t a beta user, you haven’t been able to see them until now. So this really isn’t a new ad type. It’s a new AI layer on top of existing ads. So advertisers are still running sponsored products and sponsored brands like normal. But now Amazon enhances those ads with AI generated prompts. So these prompts pull from product pages, reviews and brand content and turn them into instant answers, comparisons and recommendations for shoppers.
Carrie Miller:
So instead of just seeing like a static ad, shoppers get what Amazon calls a 24-7 virtual product expert. And that helps them to decide what to buy. So here’s where it gets really interesting. And this is kind of where the placements are. We have some screenshots here. So you can see up here, this is kind of a, looks like a sponsored brands prompt. Down here, this looks like a sponsored products prompt. It looks like basically just a question that they recommend if you’ve ever used Rufus. It shows that, but it has this little sponsored by it.
Carrie Miller:
This one is, why choose the brand in general? And there’s just a bunch of different placements that they have for these different prompts. Basically, the two key places that these are showing up are first of all, inside Rufus, which is Amazon’s AI shopping assistant.
So for example, when a shopper asks something like, what’s the best laptop for students? Amazon isn’t just going to give an answer. It’s gonna blend sponsored products directly into that response. So your ads are no longer just showing up on a page. They’re showing up like inside of a conversation. And second, these prompts also appear throughout the shopping journey, like during browsing or on product pages.
Carrie Miller:
So shoppers might see things like, compare similar products, or is this good for beginners? Or like, in this example here, why choose Accent Athletics shirts? And when they click, Amazon opens a guided AI powered experience and that helps them decide what to buy while also featuring sponsored products. So instead of the old flow, which is search, click product page, Amazon is moving towards question, answer, recommendation, and then purchase. And so this is automatically enabled in campaigns. So there’s no extra setup required at all. And let’s talk about why this matters. I think this is part of a much bigger shift towards AI driven conversational shopping. These prompts were first launched in beta last year, like I said, and are now rolling out more broadly, meaning that this is about to become a standard part of Amazon advertising.
Carrie Miller:
So the goal is, answer shopper questions earlier, build confidence faster, and drive more conversations. Amazon isn’t just adding a feature, it’s building kind of an entire AI powered ecosystem. And this comes on top of innovations like these are other things that have been released, sponsored products audiences. And you can already do that in your same ads. You basically kind of layer audiences on top of sponsored products, sponsored products video, and interest AI targeting. So all of these are pushing ads beyond simple, just keyword targeting into something much more dynamic and personalized.
Carrie Miller:
So we’re basically watching in real time, Amazon kind of changing from search based ads to kind of intent conversation based advertising. And I think that’s a big deal because now being successful on Amazon isn’t just about bidding the highest, it’s about kind of feeding the algorithm the best content and signals so that the AI can actually sell for you. So it raises a few questions. If Amazon is answering shopper questions inside the ad itself, do traditional product pages start to matter less? Like, for example, on TikTok, a lot of people don’t even go and look at the product pages, they’re just clicking after a video. So it might be kind of the same idea there.
Carrie Miller:
So we’ll see how this kind of trends and how it shifts. So basically overall, Amazon ads, they’re starting to look a lot less like ads and more like AI shopping assistance. And for brands, that means one thing, that means that you need to adapt to AI driven advertising or kind of fall behind. So you wanna make sure to learn these things, start implementing them in your advertising.
Carrie Miller:
Okay, so let’s go ahead and get into the new feature update with me. This one is a huge one, and I’m really excited to share this. And it is our Review Insights tool is back up. Now, six months ago, I think it was, we had to actually take the Review Insights down. We had a lot of customers running in, they were angry with us. There were posts all over the place, they were just super mad at us. But the truth is that Amazon actually made us take the Review Insights down. And for the past six months, we’ve been working with them.
Carrie Miller:
And they’ve actually released some information and data with reviews that we’re able to utilize and present Review Insights in an even better way for you. Because you wanna see basically, what people are saying about your products, what are the positive things that they’re saying, what are the negative things so that you can make sure to stay on top of it. So for example, if all of a sudden, maybe you had a bad batch of product, and you’re getting all these bad reviews, you wanna kind of keep tabs on that.
Carrie Miller:
Or if people are liking something a lot about your product that you’d never even realized, you can start writing that into your detail page, because hey, that’s another selling feature. So let’s go ahead and take a look at the new Review Insights tool. You’ll just go to the Chrome extension like usual, and click on Review Insights. And once you’re on Review Insights, this is what it’s gonna look like. Now, if you wanted to change the different variations, you can analyze the variations by clicking on each one of them. As you know, Amazon kind of separated all of the different variation reviews.
Carrie Miller:
So it might be best to kind of look at each individual variation on its own. And we also have an overall kind of view of what the customers are saying. So for example, it says most customers like the quality overall. They’re saying advertise versus actual product. Most customers said that it’s exactly what it is being advertised as. So it’s boosting the rankings. So that’s kind of like an overview of what we have. Now, let’s take a look down here. And this is top customers like, and then this is top customers dislike.
Carrie Miller:
So this is something that was basically a lot of people were saying. So it’s very good quality, great product, well made. And it has 75% of the mentions are saying that, which is pretty good. If you wanted to kind of dive a little bit more into this, you can actually click on this graph. And you can see kind of an overall quality overall. So if you want to see quality overall and compare it to maybe the category, like as everyone else that’s selling a coffin shelf are getting the same reviews.
Carrie Miller:
Well, it looks like we’re actually beating them in quality overall. If we want to go to advertise versus actual product and we compare it to the market, it looks like we have actually pretty good customer satisfaction over that. Now there’s dislikes as well. So for example, size overall compared to category, looks like people are just liking the size of this product a lot more. So that’s something we would probably want to take a deeper look at and see what’s, is it too big? Is it too small?
Carrie Miller:
What’s going on with the actual size of this? And that this gives us kind of a heads up on that. Or maybe it means that we need to do some more explanations of the exact sizing with dimensions and infographics and things like that. You can also compare to the parent ASIN as well, if you wanted to do that right there. But that’s basically the overview of this little graph. And in addition, you can actually see both things at the same time, overall quality versus advertise, which sentiment is more important to people.
Carrie Miller:
So you can kind of make sure that you put the most important sentiment on the top of your advertising and kind of in the top of your listing to make sure that you showcase that a bit more. And then if you scroll down, you can see more topics where it says, see more. And then this down here kind of shows what the topic rating, how it’s basically affecting your rating. So if we click on this, we can see that this ASIN advertise versus actual product is actually positively affecting our product ranking. It looks by like 2.45 points. So that’s kind of interesting.
Carrie Miller:
And then it looks like there’s not a whole lot of negative feedback on this one. So we don’t have the negative kind of comparison here, but you would see negative things. And so you could see maybe something’s really dramatically affecting your reviews in that negative. It’ll showcase it there. So this is kind of an overview of our Review Insights. It’s really helpful because, you know, now you can kind of see right away the insights of your product reviews instead of having to kind of download everything and then go to ChatGPT. It’s basically telling you everything right here already analyzing the reviews and showing you customer likes and dislikes all in one place.
Carrie Miller:
All right, so the next article is about how Amazon is launching one hour shipping. So Amazon is pushing delivery speeds even further. And now it’s testing something that could get you your order in just one hour. So according to a new report, Amazon is working on a system that would allow customers to either receive orders or pick them up within one hour, which is absolutely insane. The idea is to combine Amazon’s online inventory with its physical retail location.
Carrie Miller:
So shoppers can place one order and get it fulfilled almost instantly. And this would likely roll out first in major cities with testing expected as early as this year. And it builds on what Amazon is already doing. They’re expanding same day delivery across thousands of US cities. And they’re also testing ultra fast services like Amazon Now in select markets. So this isn’t coming out of nowhere.
Carrie Miller:
It’s really the next step in Amazon’s long-term push towards instant fulfillment. I also think it’s probably a push to compete with Walmart, who is also kind of doing this really fast shipping and they have the stores. So they kind of have an advantage in this way. But I think that’s probably the biggest thing is they’re competing with Walmart as well. Okay, so how is Amazon gonna do this? So instead of shipping from far away warehouses, Amazon is going to try to fulfill orders from nearby locations, which cuts delivery time down dramatically.
Carrie Miller:
And this matters because faster delivery directly increases how often people buy. I guess there’s statistics on this that show that they’re gonna increase the buying if they have faster delivery, which makes sense because otherwise people just run down to the store to get it. But if they can get it delivered in an hour, that is gonna make them wanna buy more on Amazon than say, go down to Walmart to get it. In fact, Amazon itself has said that when delivery gets faster, customers shop more frequently and complete more purchases. So that’s obviously from them. They know that this is true, which is why speed is important.
Carrie Miller:
So Amazon, along with Walmart, they’re in a full on kind of race to eliminate waiting in e-commerce. So we’ve gone from like two day shipping to one day shipping, now to same day, and now to one hour delivery, which is crazy. But at this point, Amazon isn’t just competing on price or selection, it’s competing on time.
Carrie Miller:
But there is a trade-off because super fast delivery is super expensive. So that means more warehouses, more drivers, more logistics complexity. So the question is, can Amazon scale this profitably, or is it gonna be kind of pushed to the sellers to cover that price? Who knows? Or is this just the cost of kind of staying ahead in the e-commerce war? So basically Amazon is getting closer to a world where you don’t plan purchases, you just get them instantly.
Carrie Miller:
And if they pull this off at a major scale, it could really completely reset what consumers expect from online shopping. So that’s kind of an interesting thing. And let us know what you think. And do you want this? Or do you think that we should keep it as it is? How do you think this is going to affect sellers and our costs? Okay, so let’s go ahead and go to the strategy of the week with Bradley. So take it away, Bradley.
Bradley Sutton:
Another very unique tool to Helium 10 is our Influencer Finder and Influencer Messenger. It’s kind of like two tools in one. And this is specifically about TikTok. On TikTok, you win at TikTok, not necessarily for having the best SEO strategy, not necessarily having the best advertising strategy like on Amazon. It’s about having the best strategy for finding creators who are willing to promote your product and having them convert sales for you. So how can you find these creators on TikTok, right?
Bradley Sutton:
And by the way, it should go without saying how this can make you money is because that’s pretty much the only way to make money on TikTok is by getting creators to promote for you. So how can you do that using Helium 10? Go to the TikTok Influencer Finder. And then one thing I like doing is I wanna see, hey, has there been anybody who has maybe made videos about Coffin Shelf before? So I’m just gonna type in Coffin Shelf. And now what’s gonna happen is I’m gonna have all of the influencers out here that have either talked about Coffin Shelf or maybe made a video about it or maybe they’ve literally made a video of a product that has a Coffin Shelf, all right?
Bradley Sutton:
So there’s different aspects. So I can look here, you know what? I maybe wanna see, hey, somebody who has generated at least $100 of GMV or maybe even between one and $10,000. And now I can also say, hey, you know what? I want this person to have mostly female followers, right? Well, this narrows it down. And then I can just start looking at different influencers here that I think might hit my niche. So here I am in the TikTok Influencer Finder. And let me just search for a keyword, Gothic Decor.
Bradley Sutton:
Let me filter by sellers who, or by creators who have generated at least like 100 to $10,000 worth of GMV. And I can do other things. Like I can say, hey, I want their followers to be male or female. I want them to have at least X number of followers. How many items have they sold? Things like that.
Bradley Sutton:
But once I do that, I can just start scrolling here and looking for creators that might, you know, seem like they’re very relevant to my product. Like here’s somebody that talks about Halloween. Let’s just take a look at her TikTok channel. And then I look at her page and oh my goodness, like this is kind of a freaky looking Gothic person here with a lot of Halloween mask and promoting spooky products. You know what? Maybe I think that she would be good to, you know, promote my product.
Bradley Sutton:
And so what I would do is I would then go ahead and just select, you know, the ones like her that I think I want to message. And I can invite them directly to a campaign. I could say, hey, which product I’m going to offer them. Hey, auto approve the request, offer free samples. What is my commission going to be, et cetera, et cetera. So Helium 10 has one of the largest databases of TikTok shop and Amazon for that matter, creators out there.
Bradley Sutton:
You’re going to be able to search that entire database of people who have made videos about a certain product type or have a word like Gothic or Gothic decor in their profile. And then you’re going to be able to reach out to them right there in the app, offering them the products that you want to promote, locking them in. It’s going to be all automatic.
Bradley Sutton:
If they accept it and they make a video about your product, it’s already locked in. Whatever percentage you said, you’re going to give them the 12% commission and they’re going to start promoting your product as soon as they get the product that you send them. So this is a great way to make money on TikTok shop using the Helium 10 TikTok Influencer Finder.
Carrie Miller:
All right, this next article is about how Walmart is changing how they display pricing in their stores. Basically, they made this change across all of their stores that I think could really reshape how pricing works in physical retail. Walmart is actually rolling out digital shelf labels, which is replacing traditional paper price tags with the electronic displays across its stores.
Carrie Miller:
These labels allow Walmart to update prices instantly from a central system instead of having employees manually swap out the tags across the aisles, which is a process that used to take hours or even days for them to do. Walmart has already deployed this technology over 2,300 stores and they’re planning to expand it nationwide, actually chainwide, worldwide probably. Walmart says its goal is to save time for employees, improve accuracy and free up workers for customer service.
Carrie Miller:
Now, I hope that they do free up this for customer service because at my local Walmart, you actually have to get a person to unlock a glass door to get like deodorant or toothpaste. So maybe this could help with that a little bit. But on the surface, this is really looking like basic efficiency upgrades.
Carrie Miller:
But I think that it might actually mean a few other things because if you have a digital shelf label, that means that Walmart can now just change prices instantly. They can do this across thousands of products in real time. And so Walmart is actually saying that the prices will stay consistent for all shoppers.
Carrie Miller:
But this technology really opens the door for them to kind of change things. So this is the kind of infrastructure you would need for like dynamic pricing, where prices can change based on demand, time of day or other factors like weather. So for example, online prices, they already are changing constantly on Amazon, flights, Uber, it’s actually pretty normal online.
Carrie Miller:
But in physical stores, it’s not really been possible to scale until now. So even though Walmart says they’re not planning to kind of surge pricing, I think this kind of might actually allow this. And it says it in this article, it points out, it says Walmart has denied that it plans to use the technology that way. Prices are the same for all customers in any given store and are consistent regardless of demand, time, day or who is shopping. So that’s what they’re saying. So obviously this kind of sets it up so that they could actually do this more dynamic pricing.
Carrie Miller:
Retail is becoming maybe more automated, more data-driven and more responsive in real time. So this could mean that the line between e-commerce and physical retail is starting to disappear. And as we were looking at with the delivery time on Amazon, this could be kind of a whole new era that’s coming our way with how they utilize physical retail with the digital world.
So this might be kind of looking like a small change, but I do think that this could mean some big changes for e-commerce in general and just how things work overall with pricing and all that. So basically if dynamic pricing does come to physical retail, shopping in-store may never feel the same again. All right, so I wanna end with a special offer for our diamond plan.
Carrie Miller:
So if you are an advanced seller and you are not using the Diamond plan, it is definitely time for an upgrade because you are completely missing out. There is some historical data up back to 24 months. So you can see historical search volume or search rank and sponsored rank for yourself or for your competitors.
Carrie Miller:
You can also go back and see five years of brand analytics data and filter through that to see kind of trending products and trending keywords easily. We have our Search Query Analyzer so you don’t have to download all of your little spreadsheets all one at a time. It all pulls it in one at a time.
Carrie Miller:
Not one at a time, but you can actually download up to 20 ASINs and up to 12 months of search query analyzer data, search query performance data so that you don’t have to do all those little manual activities with spreadsheets. We have got share a voice so you can see how your brand is doing on the shelf compared to your competitors in the market. So there’s a ton of data in there that you are missing out.
Carrie Miller:
That’s just the tip of the iceberg. So much more that we offer in Diamond. So if you want to try it out for six months, you can use the code SSP20 for 20% off for those six months.Again, that’s SSP20 for 20% off of those six months. And I hope that you enjoyed this episode of the Weekly Buzz. We will see you again next week to see what’s buzzing. Bye everyone.
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