Weekly Buzz 11/20/25: Black Friday Live | Rufus Gets Upgrade | New TikTok Shop Tools

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, 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’s next-gen AI assistant for shopping is now even smarter, more capable, and more helpful
https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/retail/amazon-rufus-ai-assistant-personalized-shopping-features

TikTok Is Making a Major Holiday Shopping Push
https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/tiktoks-making-a-major-push-on-holiday-shopping/805710/

Seller Challenge launches for Account Health Assurance
https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-news/articles/QVRWUERLSUtYMERFUiNHV005OU5XUEtXSFM4U0U3

Helium 10’s Scale Stories follows real entrepreneurs overcoming roadblocks and scaling their Amazon and TikTok Shop businesses with expert help. Watch Scale Stories episodes now on YouTube!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJ-e6UGh_I8&list=PLZhJ7LRjHHEU4iGcpDAXZ1kHVlGUrELTV

In this episode of the Weekly Buzz by Helium 10, Bradley covers:

• 00:41 – Black Friday Week Live!
• 02:34 – New TikTok Shop Tools
• 04:58 – Rufus Gets Upgraded
• 12:20 – Ebay Listing Check
• 14:38 – TikTok Holiday Push
• 16:13 – AI Assistant
• 17:51 – Seller Challenge

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Amazon’s Black Friday deals are live as of today. Rufus gets some upgrades, TikTok shop has a record-breaking quarter. 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 Series Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that is our Helium 10 Weekly Buzz, where we give you a rundown of all the goings on in the Amazon TikTok shop and e-commerce space. We let you know what new features that Helium 10 has and we give you a training tip of the week that’ll give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Let’s see what’s buzzing, all right. So hopefully, if you’re watching this right, when we release it, today is Thursday, the 20th. And guess what? Believe it or not Amazon Prime Week or not Prime Week, but Black Friday week is already started, even though Black Friday is a week, more than a week, away. It seems like these things are starting earlier and earlier, doesn’t it? But yes, Black Friday is now live. So if you guys did deals, you’re going to start seeing it. There’s doorbuster deals already. Remember when doorbuster guys back in the day? How many people are old enough to remember when doorbuster for Black Friday meant you go to Best Buy at like 11 pm on Thanksgiving night in preparation for Best Buy to open up the next day.

Bradley Sutton:

To get like a you know, $50 big screen TV or something. That was what doorbusters meant back in the day. Now I guess doorbusters mean over a week before actual Black Friday there’s actual deals. But anyways, I digress. Black Friday is live. Now You’ll see Helium 10, you know our Project X, our coffin shelves. We’ve got some Black Friday deals. Now it’s not too late to get these. So how did I get this Black Friday deal badge on the listing? Well, this one. All I did was I went to advertising in Seller Central and then I hit price discounts and I chose the Black Friday deals. Now it’s not cheap anymore. I think it’s like a $250 charge. But let’s say you’ve got 10 products. Don’t make 10 different Black Friday deals. That’s going to cost you over $2,000 because it’s $250 each one. What you do is you put all 10 products in one Black Friday deal and then you set the discounts there. That’s what I did. I figured, hey, it’s worth a try, $250. I get the badges on all my listings. Let’s see how it goes. What are you guys doing out there? How many of you are doing like a deal of the day, or are you doing these price discounts? Are you doing coupons, just keeping the price as is. Let me know in the comments below.

Bradley Sutton:

Next up, switching gears to TikTok shop. We have now launched our full suite of TikTok shop tools for all members of Helium 10. Before it was just Elite, then it went to Diamond. Now, if you’re a Platinum member, you can now see our TikTok shop tools. And which tools are those? We’ve got a number of them. First one up listing converter for TikTok. So if you’re selling on Amazon and you have a TikTok shop account but don’t have your products live, we use AI to bring all your listings and all of your images to TikTok shop within minutes. Next tool we have is the product mapping tool. Let’s say, you don’t have your own warehouse to ship products to you don’t qualify yet for fulfilled by TikTok. We have a map products feature where you can map your TikTok listings directly to your Amazon listings and fulfill them via MCF.

Bradley Sutton:

Another tool we have how do you get traction on TikTok shop? It’s through the finding influencers and creators, reaching out to them, offering them free products. And so here in Helium 10, our influencer finder allows you to search the full database of TikTok shop creators, and the influencer messenger, which is also in this tool, allows you to go ahead and offer them free samples, and it ties them to your product so that they can get commission on it. Next tool we have is the TikTok product finder. You want to see what your competitors are doing on TikTok shop. You want to see what the trending products are, what trending creators are doing. We have this brand new TikTok product finder tool and next up, we’ve got the TikTok hot videos tool, where it’s the full database of TikTok videos that tie to products. You can see, hey, which videos are generating the most sales by category. What are these videos made up of? You know like you can get some ideas about who’s making videos. What are they saying? Get some ideas for your own video making endeavor.

Bradley Sutton:

So again, latest new feature alert from Helium 10 is all of our TikTok shop tools that are available, have been available for a while, are now available platinum. So right now, if you’re a platinum member, you have a TikTok shop account. You have not been able to use these tools. Go into your Helium 10 account, hit your name on the top right, hit connections, and then add your TikTok shop token. All right, now you can start playing with all these tools. So what are you waiting for? Get started now.

Bradley Sutton:

Next news article is from Amazon itself and this is about Rufus and it’s entitled Amazon’s next Gen AI Assistant for Shopping is now smarter, more capable, more helpful. So, little by little, they are adding cool features to Rufus. As you guys know, I don’t use Rufus almost at all for my shopping, historically because I found it was useless for me for my shopping and I shop on Amazon a lot it didn’t help me. The only times I would use it is, let’s say, I was on my mobile phone. I could. I could get like price history. That was pretty cool for Rufus, or I needed to summarize the review. So you know, like maybe one out of every 20 things I buy I was using Rufus, but the rest of it it was, you know, kind of not useful. Now guess what guys Rufus is getting useful? There are some things that just got released that I would absolutely use in Rufus. Take a look at this. It says Rufus can search for products based on activity, event, purpose and other use cases.

Bradley Sutton:

Well, you know, even the Amazon search bar has been able to do that, but the here’s where the kicker is automatically add items to cart. So you, you wouldn’t even be on necessarily a product listing, you could just be in the AI assistant, rufus, and you can tell it hey, add this to my cart, take a look at this, tell you if you’re getting the best price, all right. So again, that that’s part of the price history thing that it’s been able to do, but that’s pretty cool. Now I’ll tell you hey, are you getting the best price in the last 30 days, in the last 90 days? It can find top deals every day of the year, all right. So let’s say you search a keyword and then say, hey, well, what’s the, what’s the best deal out of all these pages of search results? Here’s a. Here’s one that I think I would use auto buy items at a set price. You guys ever been shopping on Amazon and you see a product and you’re like this looks good, it’s like the only one out there, but man 29 bucks.

Bradley Sutton:

That’s just like a little bit too steep. You know what? I would absolutely buy this product if it’s 25 bucks or 20 bucks, right. And then what do you do? Maybe every few days you go back and refresh, see if it’s on sale, or something like that. Guess what. With Rufus, now you can actually set a price where you’re like you know what, if this gets down 25 bucks, buy it for me. It doesn’t give you a reminder to go back to Amazon, but it’ll literally buy it for you and have it shipped to you. So pretty cool. You can also even take a handwritten grocery list and add the items from your car. So you like write something by hand and then take a picture of it, upload it to Rufus and then it’ll buy those products. Now some more updates, is it? Basically, you know what. You can kind of tell what Amazon is trying to do People who don’t know yet what they’re going to buy right, they don’t have that keyword ready.

Bradley Sutton:

They’ll use Google, they’ll use ChatGPT to like research, things like all right, what’s the weather like in Japan in November? Right, like me, I’m going to Japan next week, visiting our China office as well, so I might Google search like what’s the temperature like in China at the end of November? And then I’ll notice that it says, oh, it’s like in the low 30s. And then I’ll be like, oh shoot, I need to order a winter coat or something like that. Right, but what Amazon wants is, like you just do everything, search everything in Amazon, like don’t forget about Google and chat. So look at what it says right here. It says in this article our AI system can solve customer problems and answer a wide range of questions, from broad questions such that inform a shopping trip, such as what’s the weather in Rome in April, to highly specific questions about a product detail. So, again, you don’t know what to buy. Yet Instead of having to Google things, rufus is saying, hey, go ahead and search here. Hey, go ahead and search here. And then, once you do that search, now go ahead and you know, stay in Amazon and go buy the product based on what the answers were about, like whether, where you are going. Another update it says here our Rufus AI assistant now has account memory, understanding customers based on their individual shopping activity.

Bradley Sutton:

So let’s say, I’ve been buying a whole bunch of winter clothes or something like that because I’m going to Japan and China. Well, now, if I’m interacting with Rufus and I mentioned something that I’m trying to buy for a trip, without even mentioning the Japan, it’s probably going to be able to say, oh, this is probably for his Japan trip, right? Or, potentially, if I start buying, you know, some bunch of basketball products and I search for paper straws, maybe it might say, hey, would you like these basketballs? You know theme straw, something like that. So it’s going to start, you know, looking at your you know, uh, shopping activity. One thing I want to try on it is I always like take things on and off my subscribe and save products as a consumer, but it takes me forever to find where my subscribe and save is. So I will I bet you, rufus, either can or we’ll be able to soon. Uh, I can maybe say, rufus, rufus, you know, I don’t need the cat litter this month. Can you take that off my subscribe and save, instead of me trying to figure out where the heck I can find that subscription and edit and cancel? So a lot of cool updates coming to Rufus. Make sure to check this article to see all of these updates, because it gives a list of even some like questions you can try Like does this blender crush ice?

Bradley Sutton:

Are any items on my wish list on sale Show deals for me? What about deals on a birthday present for a mom who enjoys gardening and yoga? But remember, guys, does this have anything I mentioned today? Does this degrade the importance of having the right keywords in your listing? No, there’s nothing that Rufus is doing yet that makes keywords irrelevant or something. These are all things now that Rufus is doing. That’s net new. But even under this situation about find deals on a birthday present for mom who enjoys gardening and yoga, how would an Amazon listing know like a newer product is for somebody who likes gardening and yoga? Well, you got to have those keywords in your listing, right? Like, hey, this is great for somebody who likes gardening and yoga. Well, you got to have those keywords in your listing, right? Like, hey, this is great for moms who enjoy gardening, this is great for moms who enjoy yoga. Now for a mature listing. It won’t need that right A mature listing. It probably knows, oh shoot, 75 moms who were buying gardening equipment and who happened to buy yoga mats. They also bought this one product. So does Amazon need keywords or stuff like that to know to offer that product? No, because Amazon’s got like a year of data right. But remember, when you are creating listings in the first place, how do people searching for gardening stuff or for yoga stuff? You can find your product right. So you’ve got to put the right keywords in your listing.

Bradley Sutton:

What Rufus is doing is not replacing yet for now traditional search I’m not searching any different but what it’s doing is allowing buyers like you and I to to understand how products work more. It summarizes the reviews. It can tie things together. You know more than than just, like you know you, trying to read a whole listing. So Rufus is really coming a long ways. But remember it, this does not mean that, like you know, keywords and regular listing, optimization and stuff is completely irrelevant. Now, no, if you, if you started doing that, rufus is never even going to find your product If you don’t even have the right keywords from day one in there. All right, now it’s time for our strategy of the week, and this is about eBay, because you might not know that eBay has a few ties to Amazon, both positive and negative. Shivali, in this next training, will let you know exactly what ties those are, what the dangers are and how a tool in the healing can help you.

Shivali Patel:

Wondering why your buy box is disappearing or why are your sales suddenly dropping, even though everything seems fine inside of your Amazon account? What if you discovered someone was reselling your product on eBay or drop shipping it from your Amazon listing at a lower price, causing Amazon to price match and lower your buy box price? Or what if someone was selling return units or using your UPC without you even knowing? No way? We don’t like that stuff, especially as Amazon sellers. So, for example, let’s take a look here We’ve seen people with our coffin shelf where they’ve ordered 15 times. We know these people aren’t buying 15 coffin shelves for their 15 bedroom spooky mansion, but what probably is happening is they’re drop shipping your product to eBay. So let’s talk shop about the helium 10 eBay price checker, which you can’t find anywhere else.

Shivali Patel:

Literally no other company has this and it can help you solve this conundrum, showing you if your product or your competitor’s product is being sold on eBay, by who and at what price. You can protect your margins and buy box. All you do is go to any of your listings or your competitor’s listings on Amazon and, in the Chrome extension, click the eBay price checker button. It opens up to show if that product is being sold on eBay and you can see if people are reselling your product and at what price. For example, here we’ve got six people reselling our product, but they’re all like 45, 46, 47 bucks, which is okay because they were just drop shipping. But if somebody was selling below our price, we would try to get them removed from eBay because we don’t want the buy box to be messed up and this is a really quick and easy tool. So if you notice that you’re losing buy box we’re seeing suspicious ordering activity you can just hit that button and instantly see what’s happening with your product on eBay.

Bradley Sutton:

Thank you for that, Shivali. So, guys, you want to check out if your products are being sold or drop ship, potentially on eBay, from Amazon? Use this tool. You want to make sure that nobody is selling your products on eBay at a lower price, which could put you in danger of losing your Amazon buy box? Use this tool. That’s in the Chrome extension. Next article is from Social Media Today and it’s entitled TikTok is making a major holiday shopping push. Now, the first thing I wanted to mention. A few articles were talking about. Like Q3 was one of the biggest sales, if not the biggest sales quarter, for TikTok shop. I think it was something like $19 billion of sales. It had year to date or in the quarter, something like that, but basically that was 1 billion off from eBay. All right, what eBay did? So you know eBay has been around for what? 20, 30 more years, and just in the couple of years that TikTok shop has been around, it’s pretty much caught eBay already.

Bradley Sutton:

Now this article talks about, as part of an expanded effort it says, to get more people buying products in the app, TikTok is offering retailers a lot of incentives, ranging from covering the cost of delivery to significant cash incentives based on sales growth. So check your email if TikTok shop has given you any kind of offers or incentives to increase your sales and you could be eligible for some of these deals. It says TikTok is even offering some TikTok shop merchants up to $20,000 in incentives based on sales growth. So you know there’s a reason why helium 10 invested so much in Tik TOK shop tools. Uh, the like I was mentioning a few minutes earlier is because this is the one of the hottest marketplaces in the world, guys, and if you’re already selling on Amazon, it is a no brainer to start selling on the TikTok shop platform. Sales are booming on there.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. Next up, another new feature alert in Helium 10, and this is our AI assistant. All right, so right now this is only available to elite members. It’s going to be to Diamond and Platinum real soon, but we have a full AI interaction. We’ve had this for a couple of months now for elite members. If you click this button at the very top of your Helium 10 dashboard, it’s called AI assistant. This is based on our knowledge base of courses and all of our pro training videos about how to use the tools. So I can say ask questions you know, such as how can I find influencers to promote my TikTok shop products? You know a pretty general question and it is going to go ahead and give me an answer based on what we can do in Helium 10. And so, for example, it says right here the answer the AI gave. It gives a long, step-by-step kind of like guide on finding the influencer finder, influencer messenger, et cetera, et cetera. You might be like, hey, how can I use the historical trends in Cerebro? Maybe you don’t have time to watch my wonderful training videos that we have in the app and you’re just like I need a quick answer, a step-by-step guide on how to do this. Play with our new AI assistant guys. This is really going to help you get the most out of Helium 10 and let us know what you like about it After the answer is done. There’s a thumbs up or thumbs down right here. Make sure to hit if it answered right. As we know, ai is not perfect and we need to know if it answered the questions right for you. So a pretty cool new feature there in Helium 10 for Elite members and going to Diamond and Platinum soon.

Bradley Sutton:

Our last article today is from Seller Central. Any Law Order fans out there, you probably recognize that theme song right. But now imagine if your account gets suspended or a product gets suspended. Actually I should probably say and you said objection, your honor hearsay. That’s kind of like what we can do now, guys. It’s kind of like a Law Order episode. There is something now called Seller Challenge, kind of like objecting for account health assurance. You can use a Seller Challenge to request more detailed information about enforcements on your account after you’ve used the standard appeals option More courtroom vocabulary here. It says Seller Challenge provides you with the opportunity to request reviews of eligible listing level policy decisions three times every 180 days. I hope you’re not getting policy issues on your account, you know pretty much every other month here. But it says you can submit this challenge, submit additional documentation, and helps you get resolve your issues and get your listings reinstated faster than other methods. So this is interesting, all right, just like law and order. You know somebody’s giving you a hard time. You can say objection and this is why you think that it’s unjustified, whatever is happening. This is another kind of like safeguard then, to make sure that your products or listings are not unfairly suspended or something. You know, maybe there’s a policy violation that was not correct. So make sure to do some research. If you’re one of these people who gets these account violations every couple of months, well, you need to be using the seller challenge to kind of like protect you know your interest for your listings.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, guys. That’s it for the news this week. Don’t forget, if you haven’t seen it yet, go check out Scale Stories by Helium 10. That is our reality TV show series that we did with a film crew from Mr Beast really high quality and different scenarios of entrepreneurs out there. We have a couple of sellers who were plateaued or stuck or having lots of obstacles. What are we doing to try and double their sales? We have somebody starting a brand new business on Amazon. We got somebody starting a brand new business on TikTok shop. We’re showing you every step of the way on how we’re helping these entrepreneurs and these brands reach their entrepreneurial goals. So go to YouTube, type in Scale Stories by Helium 10 and start watching those episodes and there’ll be links to actually go to like more breakout episodes on our website or might be there on YouTube, but really educational. This is basically kind of like Project X Season 2, but it’s just called Scale Stories, so make sure to check that out. All of our episodes have now been released. All right guys. Thank you so much for joining us. Don’t forget to come back next week to see what’s buzzing.

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