Weekly Buzz 6/28/25: Walmart & Target Summer Deals vs. Prime Day | New Amazon AI Tool | MCF Fees Waived

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, 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.

Walmart, Target announce competing Prime Day sales
https://www.retaildive.com/news/walmart-target-competing-amazon-prime-day-summer-sales-events/751328/

Amazon temporarily waives seller fee tied to Walmart orders
https://www.supplychaindive.com/news/amazon-mcf-walmart-surcharge-waived/751236/

Amazon Seller Central: Update product listings with new Fix Recommendations tool
https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-news/articles/QVRWUERLSUtYMERFUiNHNU5XTFdHUVNUUzNNN0Ja

Amazon Seller Central: Ensure compliance documentation comes from compliant labs
https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-news/articles/QVRWUERLSUtYMERFUiNHWE5LQVZaRjk3SkQ1NE41

Amazon Seller Central: Add or change price discounts in bulk with new template
https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-news/articles/QVRWUERLSUtYMERFUiNHRldHV0JMUk5HWUJNS1VT

Amazon Seller Central: Quality guidelines for promotions
https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-news/articles/QVRWUERLSUtYMERFUiNHUVNMM1MzNzMyMzQ2SDVM

Walmart testing ‘dark stores’ to fill online orders, according to report
https://chainstoreage.com/walmart-testing-dark-stores-fill-online-orders-according-report

Wrap up the week with us as we share insights and highlights buzzing through the e-commerce world, preparing you for the upcoming trends and discussions.

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

• 00:54 – Big Box vs Amazon
• 02:22 – Training Tip: Index Checker
• 05:53 – Waived MCF Fees
• 07:22 – New AI Listing Tool
• 08:16 – New Compliance Req
• 09:22 – Helium 10 New Feature Alerts
• 16:25 – New Buk Template
• 17:19 – Promotions Guidelines
• 19:16 – Walmart Dark Stores

Transcript

Carrie Miller:

Walmart and Target announced competing Prime Day sales. There’s a new AI tool to optimize your listings in Seller Central, and Amazon is waiving some multi-channel fulfillment fees for Walmart orders. This and more on this week’s episode of the Weekly Buzz.

Bradley Sutton:

How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Series Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. 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 that Helium 10 has, as well as give you a training tip of the week that will give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Today’s host is actually going to be Carrie Miller. So, Carrie, take it away and let us know what’s buzzing.

Carrie Miller:

We’ve got a lot of great news articles today, so let’s go ahead and get into the first one. So this first article is about how Walmart and Target just announced competing Prime Day sales. Okay, so this is kind of like the battle of the big box stores, because everyone is really just competing against amazon. So this is the article. If we scroll down a little bit, it’s basically talking about how summer savings are pretty much going to kick off. There’s going to be a lot of summer sales.

Carrie Miller:

Target Circle Week is back from July 6th to July 12th, with a big focus on back to school savings, so theirs is really back to school focused, while Walmart is launching its competing Walmart deals event from July 8th through July 13th, and both of these retailers are actually giving early access to their paid loyalty members. So if you’re a target circle 360 member, you can actually start shopping on July 5th, and Walmart+ members get early access the evening of July 7th for the first time, and deals are going to be available both online and in stores. So Walmart actually extended its summer sale to six days this year, up from four in 2024, which brings it nearly in line with Target’s week-long event that they did last year. And all this is time to compete exactly with Amazon’s Prime Day, which is now a four-day event, which is double the length in previous years. We’ve never had one this long.

Carrie Miller:

So, whether you’re stocking up on school stuff or hunting for all these deals as a consumer, this could be great for you as sellers. Definitely a really good time to start strategizing and making sure that all of your deals are squared away for all of these sales, if you’re selling on all of these platforms. Up next is our strategy of the week with Shivali. She is going to be talking about our Index Checker tool. So making sure that your keywords are indexed is extremely important for advertising ranking and visibility overall. So take it away, Shivali.

Shivali Patel:

One of Helium 10’s most powerful yet often overlooked tools is Index Checker, a feature so important that it was actually one of the first tools Helium 10 ever developed. Originally known as 5k checker, it’s evolved into a resource for sellers who want to understand the difference between indexing and ranking. Now let’s clarify what these terms really are. Ranking refers to where your product appears in search results, typically around the first seven pages, which is about 300 listings, while indexing means your product is searchable for a given keyword even if it’s not ranking yet. For instance, while only 300 products rank for a keyword like queen size bedsheets, there might actually be 30,000 index products competing for that term. So why does indexing matter? Imagine you’re selling a coffin shelf and you suspect that you’re missing out on potential sales because Amazon doesn’t see your product as relevant for key search terms. You compare that listing to a Helium 10 coffin bookshelf and notice something interesting 36 keywords where the Helium 10 version ranks on page one, but your product isn’t ranking at all. At this point you have to ask am I just ranking poorly for these keywords or am I not indexed at all? And the thing is, if you’re indexed for a keyword but not ranking well, you can run sponsored ads to gain visibility, but if you’re not indexed, you could bid $5,000 on PPC and Amazon still is not going to show you your ad because, according to their system, your product isn’t even relevant. And that is where Index Checkers beauty really steps in. Index Checker can save you time while boosting your visibility. Rather than manually searching for each keyword one by one, which could take you well over an hour and a half, you can drop those 36 missing keywords into Index Checker and find out instantly whether your product is indexed for each one. Here is how it works. The tool checks if you’re indexed at the phrase level for each keyword. If yes, you can immediately start running ads to boost visibility. And if no, you now know that Amazon doesn’t recognize your product as relevant, so you will need to adjust that listing.

Shivali Patel:

Sometimes a product isn’t indexed for the full phrase, but the issue comes down to one missing word. For example, say you’re selling a belt for sumo wrestlers and you’ve included sumo and belt in your listing, but not wrestler. Because of this, amazon does not index your listing for sumo wrestler belt. Does this mean you need to force the entire phrase into your listing? No, not at all. You only need to add the missing word wrestler somewhere into that title, bullet points or backend search terms section. Index Checker breaks this down for you, showing you which words are causing indexing issues, so that way you can make the targeted optimizations that are required, instead of blindly stuffing in keywords. The bottom line on this really is that it gives you instant clarity on whether you’re indexed for the right words or not and, if not, exactly how to fix it as well. Without it, you would be stuck manually checking keyword by keyword inside of Amazon, wasting time that you could probably put in somewhere else for something else and potentially miss out on huge revenue opportunities. Index Checker is only available in Helium 10. So if you are not yet using it, I would recommend and urge you to start now, because understanding indexing is the first step to unlocking more sales and better ad performance.

Carrie Miller:

Thank you so much for that strategy, Shivali. If you haven’t used Index Checker, go ahead and try it out. Okay, let’s go ahead and get into the next article, which is all about how Amazon is temporarily waiving seller fees tied to Walmart orders. Now this seems kind of confusing. Why would they do that? But a few weeks ago we actually announced that Walmart used to suspend seller accounts for fulfilling Walmart orders using Amazon’s multi-channel fulfillment, especially when packages showed up in Amazon branded boxes or if they were delivered by those Amazon logistics vans that they have. But now Amazon’s kind of responding to Walmart’s allowance of the sellers to use multi-channel fulfillment to fulfill Walmart orders and they’re basically temporarily waiving the five percent surcharge on multi-channel fulfillment shipments going to Walmart customers and normally this fee is charged when sellers use non-Amazon carriers, but for Walmart orders it’s being waived through January 14th of 2026, so that’s a lot of time. Walmart still requires sellers to use neutral packaging and to block Amazon logistics to stay compliant. But this move really could make MCF a more cost-effective and attractive option for Walmart sellers and maybe that’s kind of the point that Amazon could be using this incentive to gain even more fulfillment business from sellers operating across multiple marketplaces. So if you’re selling on both platforms, or if you wanted to sell on Walmart but struggled with splitting up your inventory I know this is a struggle for a lot of sellers this actually might be the perfect time to give multi-channel fulfillment a closer look, to kind of save on those extra fees that they’ve been charging, and maybe you can streamline all of your inventory using multi-channel fulfillment.

Carrie Miller:

Okay, let’s go ahead and get into the next article, which is that you can actually update product listings with the new fixed recommendations tool. So the voice of the customer dashboard has a new fixed recommendations tool that can improve your product listings and descriptions to help reduce returns, which is definitely something we all want, right? The tool uses artificial intelligence to analyze customer feedback and offers strategic guidance on listing improvements, along with data that shows how these changes could impact customer satisfaction and return rates. So to try this fixed tool you’re going to go to the voice of the customer now. This, I think, is probably really going to be helpful for a lot of people. If it’s, if it really works the way it says it is because you know we always want to reduce those return rates, and getting that kind of data and feedback real time is going to be super helpful for optimizing listings and improving those conversion rates and then potentially also reducing the return rates.

Carrie Miller:

Okay, this next article is actually within Seller Central as well, and it’s about ensuring compliance documentation comes from compliant labs, and I actually really like this announcement by Amazon because, as a consumer, I really and it’s about ensuring compliance documentation comes from compliant labs and I actually really like this announcement by Amazon because, as a consumer, I really think it’s going to help improve product safety, or at least I hope that’s the situation. So here is what the announcement says it says that, starting July 13th, amazon is only going to accept product compliance test results from compliant labs that meet their safety standards, and this change is going to ensure that all test results are accurate and help keep customers safe, which I like.

Carrie Miller:

No one can argue with that. Amazon has compiled a list of labs that don’t meet their safety standards and they recommend that you check the list before you request test results or submit product documentation. The list of unapproved labs will be updated periodically based on Amazon’s findings. So if you submit a compliance document issued by a laboratory on that list, it will be rejected during the document review process. So if you have products that need testing from a third-party lab, then you’ll want to check out that announcement and make sure that your labs are approved, and if you want to know exactly where to go, you can check out the announcement on Seller Central. Ok, up next is some new Helium 10 feature alerts with Bradley, and he’s going to be talking about our new share of voice tool and keyword tracker translation feature.

Bradley Sutton:

Thanks, Carrie, for our first new feature alert of the week. This is kind of a new tool. I say kind of, because it was a tool that actually lived only for Helium 10 ads users inside of ads, formerly known as Atomic, and it’s called our share a voice tool, but now it’s open to all diamond members, so let me show you guys exactly how to use it. Now. Where you can find this tool is go to your tool menu and then, under analytics, you should see share a voice If you are a dime member. Once you hit that, uh, the share of voice window is going to come up. Now, I’ve got a few of them here already, but let’s go ahead and hop into it as if I started one. All right, if you were to start a new report, uh, what it’s going to ask you is to go ahead and name your report and add some keywords, but let’s go ahead and hop into this one that I had created for the coffin shelf and bat bath mat. All right, Now, what is share a voice? First of all, like I think you guys all kind of know what is keyword tracker, right, when you’re tracking your organic rank, you’re tracking your sponsored rank. Share a voice kind of takes it to that next level. All right, this is kind of like a term that’s used in the industry to say what kind of real estate do you have on page one, and not just at a given time, but throughout a different time or like a longer time period, right? So share a voice would be kind of like all right for my brand and, uh, or for this keyword, where do my, how much of a page one do have I occupied in the last month? And basically what that means is, you know, for, if we’re talking at the brand level, uh, for a keyword, you know, like I’ve got two different coffin shelves, I’ve got a bat bath mat and on some keywords like Gothic decor, who knows, maybe all three of those products are on page one.

Bradley Sutton:

And imagine if I had a sponsored brand ad and a sponsored product ad and a video, et cetera, et cetera. Well, each of those is kind of like represents, um, a piece of real estate on the whole entirety of page one. And you know, if I only have one product, I’m not going to have a big piece. But imagine if I’m in a niche and I’ve got multiple products. Well, there might be some keywords or some niches right when you know I could have, you know, 5% of everything that shows up on page one.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, so that’s kind of like a rough definition of what share of voice is. So here’s an example of one I created and the first tab here is called brand share a voice. All right, so I can actually select my own brand here, or maybe one of my competitors brands, and I can graph a certain things right here, like I could see the share shelf, I could see the paid share a voice. This is just like kind of like all sponsored ads non-organic and then it breaks down sponsored ads even at the level of hey, what’s the sponsored product share of voice out of all the regular sponsored product ads? What percentage of page one do I have? What about the sponsored brand share of voice out of all the sponsored brand which is sponsored brand headline, sponsored brand video? What’s my share of voice? Uh, and I’ve got ads frequency and my organic share of voice. Uh, like I said, this is over a period of time. So, as you can see here, I’ve selected about, you know, a month, from May to June, and then I scroll down here and I can see, all right, who is the top share of shelf and thank goodness it is Matt Me, Manny’s Mysterious Oddities is the top share of shelf and thank goodness it is me, Manny’s Mysterious Oddities.

Bradley Sutton:

I’ve got four products and organic share of voice 3.2 percent. Paid share of voice 20 percent. I’m dominating page one, advertising overall. Maybe I want to see what’s going on at the keyword level. So here let me go ahead and select one keyword. Here I’m going to select coffin shelf and then let’s just see hey, how is Manny’s Mysterious oddities doing? For this coffin shelf keyword I’ve got almost 7% share of voice. My organic is 4%, so I probably have a two out of the 50 organic listings. My paid share of voice for the keyword coffin shelf 32%. I am dominating share of voice when it comes to overall sponsored ads, when it comes to just sponsored brand ads, also dominating 35%, and sponsored brand product oh, that was video, which is 35%, and also 35% of sponsored brand share of voice. So this is looking at so many data points. You know there’s no other tool that’s like this out there. So if you want to start, you know, not just looking at hey, where’s my organic rank at this exact moment in time. You want to be looking at a wider picture and see what kind of real estate share or share a voice, as we call it you have on certain pages, certain keywords, certain niches. Well, make sure to hop in. If you’ve got the diamond plan to this new share voice tool, all right. So the next new feature alert this week is highly requested feature Since we added translation in our Magnet and Cerebro tools.

Bradley Sutton:

Another keyword tool that you guys are using a lot is keyword tracker. And so for those of you who maybe English is not your first language and you’re looking at Amazon US or Amazon UK and you’re not sure what all the keywords mean and you speak Japanese or Italian or something like that, well, we’ve got an instant keyword translation. If you are based in the USA, English is your first language, but you don’t speak Spanish, or you don’t speak Japanese or Italian and you’re tracking all these keywords and you don’t know exactly what they mean, well, you are instantly going to be able to see keywords in your language. Here is how you use it. So whenever you’re in Keyword Tracker and you open up the list of keywords that you are tracking, there is now going to be a button that says Translate. So here I have English.

Bradley Sutton:

So let’s just say, maybe I am a Japanese speaker, I can select, actually, from this long list of languages, Japanese, and then what’s going to happen is right underneath the keyword that is in my keyword tracker. It is going to translate into Japanese. I happen to read this it says egg holder. Right, so that’s like the Japanese, like kind of like katakana word for egg holder. Here is some other keywords that are kind of roughly translated to Japanese. Here’s one in kanji I can’t read the kanji letters and here’s some more kanji I can’t read. But anyways, if I was Japanese and I didn’t speak a word of English, now, instantly, I am going to be able to understand what keywords are performing in my own language, and so the current languages that we are showing right now, or with the ability is to translate, English, Spanish, German, Chinese, Japanese, French and Italian, all right. So again, for those of you who are tracking keywords in a language that is not yours, make sure to use the instant translation function in order to get a better idea about what these keywords mean.

Carrie Miller:

Thank you, Bradley. Okay, let’s go ahead and get into the next article, which is also another announcement, that is within seller central, and that is that you can add or change price discounts in bulk with a new template. Amazon announced a new add or change price discounts in bulk template. It says that, based on your feedback, amazon has added a bulk template to make it easier for you to add and manage price discounts on multiple products. With this template, you can upload discounts and quantity limits for up to 500 SKUs at a time, which is useful when you’re creating a price discount with several products or variations. You can also use this template to upload changes to your existing price discounts, including those with errors or warnings. When you edit a price discount, download the list of your discounted SKUs to the template and reload any changes. To learn more, you’re going to go to the price discount template and to create a new price discount, go to the price discounts dashboard.

Carrie Miller:

Okay, let’s go ahead and get into the next piece of news, which is an announcement on quality guidelines for promotions, and this is extremely important as we go into prime day, especially because there’s been a lot of manipulation with these kinds of things in the past, so amazon really wants to make sure that they are taking care of the customers. So there’s some guidelines you want to make sure that you are compliant with, and Amazon says in this announcement. It says we are dedicated to providing our shared customers with exceptional promotional offers and authentic discounts. To preserve customer trust, we regularly update our promotion eligibility standards. It says carefully review our guidelines listed below to ensure your promotions are approved. It says, first of all, all deals and price discounts must offer equal or lower discounted prices than the lowest price point for the product within the last 30 days, including any previous promotional prices, coupons and price discounts. Note that your current promotions may influence future promotional pricing benchmarks. So this means if you have coupons usually some sellers have them running kind of all the time you’re gonna want to make sure that you take those coupons down at least 30 days ahead of Prime Day. The announcement continues to say that all products featuring deals and price discounts must have a discounted price that is as low or lower than any other reputable retailer outside of Amazon stores, and products with high return rates will be ineligible. For deals and price discounts To be eligible for any promotion, your product must have a minimum of 2.5 star rating with at least five reviews, and the threshold might be different based on the promotion type. It also must not be unsafe, offensive, embarrassing or inappropriate. Obviously, that’s probably a good guideline. These guidelines are particularly important during major shopping events, including Prime Day deals, Black Friday and Cyber Monday. So if you are, you know, wanting to do those deals again, just make sure that you’re aware of what your pricing needs to be the 30 days before. So if you need to take off some of those discounts that you’re running all the time, you want to make sure to do that so that you can do those Prime Day deals.

Carrie Miller:

Next up is our last article, and that that is that Walmart is testing dark stores to fill online orders, and that’s according to this report that we have here. It says Walmart is now testing dark stores, which are locations that are like regular Walmart stores on the inside but are closed to the public and act as mini distribution hubs for online orders. One pilot is actually underway in Dallas, and then another is planned for Bentonville, Arkansas, which is funny I would have thought it would have been reversed because Walmart’s headquartered in Bentonville, but very interesting and these dark stores, this article says are stocked with Walmart’s most popular online items to speed up delivery and to make fulfillment faster and more efficient, and there’s a spokesperson that talked a little bit about it and said that.

Carrie Miller:

The spokesperson said that they’re always testing new tools and capabilities to better serve customers, wherever and however they shop, and they continue to say that, regardless of the channel, their goal remains the same to deliver a fast, seamless and engaging customer experience. So I don’t know if you all remember that they actually had some of these during COVID and so, after putting them kind of on pause post-COVID, Walmart is actually back at it, which shows kind of a new, renewed focus on faster, more seamless e-commerce experiences. Alright, that’s it for this week’s episode of the weekly buzz. I hope you enjoyed all the news articles and updates and we’ll see you again next week to see what’s buzzing. Bye, everyone.

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