Weekly Buzz 7/31/25: Big Amazon Review Change | No More Amazon Google Ads

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.

Update to Amazon seller feedback experience: Introducing star-only ratings
https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-news/articles/QVRWUERLSUtYMERFUiNHOU1HS0pZSkJERVVBTVBD

Amazon Halts All Google Shopping Ads Globally in July 2025
https://www.webpronews.com/amazon-halts-all-google-shopping-ads-globally-in-july-2025/

Walmart bets on AI super agents to boost e-commerce growth
https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/walmart-bets-ai-super-agents-boost-e-commerce-growth-2025-07-24/

No More Amazon Prep
https://sellercentral.amazon.com/help/hub/reference/G201023020

Temu Hits Roadblock in Efforts to Compete With Amazon
https://www.pymnts.com/news/ecommerce/2025/temu-hits-roadblock-in-efforts-to-compete-with-amazon/

TikTok expands efforts to move beyond the phone
https://www.retaildive.com/news/tiktok-out-of-phone-westfield-malls-rockbot/756324/

Offer faster regional deliveries with Premium Shipping
https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-news/articles/QVRWUERLSUtYMERFUiNHTERCUENBVThUSDdBMjQ0

With these insights, we aim to equip our listeners with valuable strategies and knowledge to navigate the ever-evolving e-commerce landscape.

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

• 01:01 – Seller Feedback Change
• 06:23 – Amazon Says Bye to Google
• 07:39 – Auto Keyword Harvesting
• 11:01 – Walmart AI Super Agents
• 13:12 – No More Amazon Prep
• 15:02 – SQP With AI
• 19:21 – Temu Trouble
• 20:20 – New TikTok Placements
• 22:09 – Premium Shipping

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

A new Amazon review and seller feedback policy has sellers up in arms. Amazon is no longer advertising on Google. You might start seeing TikTok videos and ads in your local shopping mall. These stories and more on this week’s Weekly Buzz. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that is our Helium 10 Weekly Buzz. We give you a rundown of all the goings on in the Amazon, Walmart, TikTok Shop and e-commerce world. We let you know what new features Helium 10 has, as well as give you a strategy of the week that will give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Let’s see what’s buzzing. If you’ve been tuning into the show the last few weeks, it’s been slim pickings, like almost nothing for the news, like we’ve been scraping the bottom of the barrel to get some news articles, but this week we’ve got some doozies, all right, so let’s go ahead and hop right into it Now.

Bradley Sutton:

The first story is actually something you might have seen in an email. You might have seen in seller central as an update, but it says update to seller feedback experience introducing star only ratings. Now, thank you, amazon for at least not gaslighting us and trying to say, oh, this is going to make it better for you. They kind of do here, but not as bad as they usually do. You know how they usually do. These like articles that sellers get all mad about. They’re like, oh my God, to provide more value and more ease, you know, for Amazon sellers. We have done this long awaited feature when everybody’s like not one person has ever asked for this, but they’re getting a little bit better. But still, let’s take a look at this. We launched a simplified seller feedback. Well, simple for who? I guess? For the customer. Simple for people to do fraud. As you can tell, I do not like this update at all. I have no idea why in the world Amazon did this, but anyways, it says we’ll launch a simplified seller feedback submission experience so customers can give a star-only rating with optional written feedback. This is the seller feedback, not the customer reviews. So this is where it goes to your metrics. Now, the first thing that does it. I don’t understand is what 80% of sellers use FBA and you’re not even supposed to do FBA for seller feedback, right? So like I don’t even know why they’re even trying to like, optimize this experience. Like who’s this? Even for Right. Anyways, it says the simplified review experience can help you get more seller ratings faster. There’s the mini gaslighting there.

Bradley Sutton:

We’re not concerned about the number. I don’t think any seller is concerned too much about the number of feedbacks we get in the seller ratings. We care about the star rating, right? There’s rumors that if your star rating goes down a little bit, it might hurt you algorithmically or even mess up your account health. So we’re not really concerned about a numbers game, unless maybe you’re a wholesale or arbitrage or dropshipper. That might be more important. But anyways, I digress. Let’s read this article. It says honest and authentic star ratings are important for customers to know how past order experiences were preserved, uh, were perceived by other customers. Okay, all right, like that makes sense. Um, so now we are making written feedback optional, right, that used to be a mandatory. You can leave a star from one to five and then leave a rating. Now, why was it important to leave an actual written rating? Well, what would happen is a lot of these orders were FBA and then we could actually see it. And then, oh, this was an FBA order. This is not a feedback that should be on, like if we got a one star, two star, we could actually easily with one click get it removed, right?

Bradley Sutton:

The other use case is a lot of people they mistake this section for product reviews and so they leave a product review there and if it’s a bad review, that that hurts your seller feedback rating. But reviews are not supposed to be on there. So if you see that it’s a review right, and I would say like 50% of the bad ones are like reviews, product reviews, if not 75%, so what would we do? We would go into seller central and we would ask for that to be removed and be removed instantly, right? So then our star rating is not affected because they’re not supposed to leave product reviews in that section. So now you don’t have that anymore. All right, and now they’re like oh yeah, this is going to help increase rating submissions and give customers more information to confidently make purchase decisions. Yes, by taking away the ability to actually explain what your experience was, this is somehow giving customers more information on how to make decisions.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, maybe I was too nice by saying they weren’t gaslighting in this. They obviously are right, but anyways, it says now, when the customer submits seller feedback without text or with or without text, we automatically look for signs of abuse. I’m not sure how much abuse you could have if there’s no text. Right, you know like there’s nothing against the ratings, unless maybe they’re just like spam. You know spam, one starring everybody or something. But it says here here’s the key when there is no text, the feedback appeal feature in Feedback Manager will be disabled. In other words, if you now get a bad rating, you’re not going to be able to get it removed. It looks like, and most likely it should have been removed. Like 95% of any bad ratings I get, I get removed. Why? Because they’re against policy. And now what? All of those bad ratings are just going to get stuck on my account. So this is just not a great move.

Bradley Sutton:

Here it says if you believe the star only rating violates a community guidelines, like like how could I look at that star? Like Ooh, forced that that four star violates community guidelines because it looks too yellow. I don’t know what the heck this means. Like if the star only rating violates community guidelines, it says I can request additional review through report of violation. So I guess I can try and do that for the, or you guys can try and do that for your orders. But what do you guys think of this? Like, I just I just don’t understand. Sometimes, like, is there somebody over there at these marketplaces Like thinking of? Like what useless change can I do that will piss off sellers? That has no benefit for either Amazon customers or sellers. Well, you won the award buddy this week. Anyways, enough of being negative, let’s go talk about something else. Some might consider this negative. Some might think it’s positive.

Bradley Sutton:

An article that came out from where is this? From Web Pro News. It says Amazon halts all Google shopping ads globally in July. So Amazon was doing ad placements of Amazon products throughout Google shopping and all of a sudden, over 48 hours, it went from impressions to 60% to zero. All right. This article says that this strategic shift redirects resources in its thriving internal ad ecosystem and it lowers the cost for competitors. So, like maybe you know might lower some of the cost per click rates that you’re paying for Google shopping, because that’s a huge player that’s all of a sudden gone Now. It says here that you know there’s opportunities for competitors. It says the void left by Amazon’s already being filled by rivals such as Shein, Target and Wayfair, who are increasing now their share of voice on Google Shopping. But what do you guys think of this? Is this good? Is this you know? Like I’m wondering, like, how much of you know? Are you going to start seeing an impact in some of your sales, Because maybe there was a lot of it driven by these Google shopping ads and now you’re not getting that traffic. Have you guys noticed anything? Any of you larger sellers? Probably, if you’re a smaller seller, you’re not going to notice too much, but anyways, interesting story, all right. Next up, we’ve got our strategy of the week. Shivali, take it away.

Shivali Patel:

Automatic keyword harvesting is something that is completely unique to Helium 10. In the old days, how did you discover new keywords for your products? And these old school ways actually still work. You might put your competitors into Cerebro once a week or every other week and take a look. Are they showing up in sponsored ads, organic placements for new keywords on page one that you didn’t know about or are not ranking for? You’d have to take all 10 of your competitors, run them one by one through Cerebro and then compare the results. This is a really good strategy if you want to do things manually, but obviously time consuming and I’ve got plenty of other things that I’d rather be doing. So with Helium 10, we have two different ways that you can just set it and forget it and get notified when any new keywords show up that meet your criteria. Here’s how. The first way is inside of your insights dashboard. This is for our diamond members, and the second way is through keyword tracker for platinum members. You just need to make sure that your competitors are set up for each product. For example, for my coffin shelf, I’ve got a couple of competitors here.

Shivali Patel:

Once you’ve set that up, go into your insight settings, create a new insight under keywords and choose whether you want suggestions based on your product or your competitors. If it’s based on your product, you can set something like notify me if a keyword has at least 500 search volume and I’m organically ranked between position one and 10, but I’m not currently tracking it. You’ll then get a notification to start tracking that keyword. You can do the same thing based on your competitors. Say, if my product ranks between position 50 and 300, but the competitor is ranking between one and 10, notify me If there are new keywords your competitors ranking for. They’ll show up on your dashboard. If you’ve got a platinum account and use keyword tracker, you can do the same thing. Just go to suggested keywords section, hit customize settings and set the criteria for suggestions based on your products or your competitors.

Shivali Patel:

This essentially eliminates the need to run Cerebro manually. Unless you want the historical insights and I personally love that For all your active products, Helium 10 will automatically surface any new keywords that you or your competitors are ranking for that you’re not already tracking. Again, this is completely unique to Helium 10. It does not mean you can’t get this information manually. Like I said, you can just run Cerebro every two weeks if you’d like. But the competitive advantage here is automation. Instead of spending 30 minutes every two weeks doing keyword discovery, you now spend zero, zero, and that is how it can help make you money by helping you discover keywords your competitors are getting sales from that you haven’t tapped into yet, and doing it at no additional cost to you. From a time perspective, make sure you’ve got automatic keyword harvesting set up on as many of your products as you have using Helium 10.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, thank you very much, Shivali, for that note. Enjoy your vacation First, a long vacation of the year. I think what she was talking about is very important Keyword harvesting. You know a lot of you, frankly, aren’t probably doing what you’re supposed to be doing, which is running Cerebro once a week or every other week, on all your competitors listing trying to see, hey, are they ranking for new keywords that you’re not? Are they advertising for new keywords? Well, this allows you to like not have to do it once a week. You may have like a hundred products. How are you going to run Cerebro a hundred times every week or every other week and try and figure out which keywords are new? This is a way that you’re going to be able to just automate that process, saving you tens of minutes or even hours, depending on how big your catalog is. So make sure you guys are taking advantage of what you’ve already talked about, all right.

Bradley Sutton:

Next article is from Reuters and it’s entitled Walmart bets on super AI agents. I don’t know Does this have to do with because of the Superman movies out super AI agents to boost e-commerce growth? So it’s talking about like, hey, we want to have um AI like all over you know the app, um, all over the way that people you know communicate with. With Walmart, we’re going to have agentic AI, it says, designed for Walmart shoppers, even store employees. They’re just going all in on AI. Some of the things that it’s going to try and do is help discover new products, help with returns, improving delivery speeds Now those secondary things. I think those are the instant wins. You want a smoother return process. Ai is definitely going to help with that.

Bradley Sutton:

Discovery new products I don’t think it’s going to change much, just like Rufus hasn’t changed discovery of new products too much on Amazon, because it’s just doesn’t really help the you know, if you already know what you want. Ai cannot make the, the, the ordering process any simpler. It’s when you’re not completely sure where you’re, like hey, I want to see something that has less than two carbs. That’s not going to be in search results, but AI can help you do that. I think what AI has been helping a lot of people and you’ll see more and more people doing it, whether it’s Amazon, rufus, whether it’s Walmart is these AI bots where it can tell you things that maybe you can’t normally see on the page, like hey, what’s the price, history of this product. What’s the lowest price in the last 180 days? What do the reviews say about this and things like that? I think more and more people are going to be using AI for that, as well as the discovery of products. Uh, like, maybe you didn’t know what you’re going to get and maybe before you would have started the search on Google, like, hey, what are the best? Um, you know, accessories for a disco, ball, party, theme, whatever right, and then you find whatever you want on Google, then you go to Amazon, then you go to Walmart. You’re going to be able to start doing that more and more right from Amazon, right from Walmart, with these agents. So it’ll be interesting to see what happens with this agent. Like, for example, it says here it’s even going to be able to reorder items or even plan an event. So, yes, there are definitely some innovations coming thanks to AI on these platforms.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, another fairly big update. Maybe it doesn’t affect a lot of you, but I was actually kind of surprised at this. You might have gotten an email about this, or if you just look at the page on Seller Central which I have up here on the screen about FBA prep service, it says, starting January 2026, we will no longer offer prep and item labeling services for FBA shipments in the US store. This applies to all inventory that is sent to our US FBA service, including inventory that you send directly to FBA. Now this is interesting to me because the prep kind of makes sense. I don’t even service including inventory that you send directly to FBA. Now this is interesting to me because the prep kind of makes sense. I don’t even know anybody who used that lately where you have to tell them to put a I don’t know fragile label or maybe polybagging products and stuff.

Bradley Sutton:

But the labeling I think a lot of sellers still did that, the sellers who aren’t able to label their products at their factory for whatever reason, or maybe they’re wholesaling or something they would just like. Hey, I’m going to pay Amazon whatever it is 60 cents per unit to put the FN skew. You know the FBA sticker on it that, if I’m reading this correctly, you’re not gonna be able to do that anymore. Right, so makes tools like you know Helium 10 portals even more important. You know it makes tools like Helium 10 portals even more important. You can create your barcodes in Helium 10 and print it on your own label printer and put it on, or design one in Helium 10 portals and then send it to your factory so that they can put those FBA labels on the box. A lot of people are like, no, I just print my… UPC, right, and then when I send to FBA, I’ll just have Amazon cover up my UPC with the FN SKU label. Can’t do that anymore, right? If you’re not going to do it at your factory, that means you have to physically somehow put labels on yourself to cover up the UPC. So interesting move by Amazon there, all right.

Bradley Sutton:

Next up for our new feature alerts. This is a new feature alert for the tool search query analyzer in Helium 10. Before this was only available to elite members. Now it’s going down to all of the thousands and thousands of diamond members out there. This is AI powered search query performance. So now you’re going to have the ability to go in and do some things that maybe you hadn’t done before. So now when you enter in your item in search query performance, like I put one of my products, remember, you can do multiple products. That’s one of the benefits of using it in Helium 10.

Bradley Sutton:

I’m doing months, I’m searching like a whole bunch of months at once the button, I can say apply AI analysis. Even if I’m not going to do the AI analysis, I still hit this button in order to get the regular search query performance and it’s going to come up here. If I don’t want to even have to have it do that, I just turn off the AI analysis. But down here everything is the same as you normally would see in search query performance. I can see all my keywords that had purchases and where my organic rank, my sponsored rank, was, what’s my impression share ratio, what’s my clicks, et cetera, et cetera. But now there’s this button on the bottom right that says view AI analysis. If you hit that it’s going to open up a new window and instantly you’re going to get some AI kind of like summaries of some of the highlights of your search query performance.

Bradley Sutton:

Like here top query overview. I can see what were the top keywords that brought me sales per search query performance. What were my best conversion rate keywords like coffin gift box large. It’s kind of interesting. I don’t even sell a coffin gift box large, but people were buying my coffin shelf for that keyword a casket bookshelf. What in the world? I didn’t realize that that was a. That was like a thing that people were searching for. I just found out that, hey, this is one of my my top conversion rate keywords. I might want to double down on that, um, and then I could just see other things like the market top sales keywords.

Bradley Sutton:

I personally don’t find any use for this uh, top search volume keywords, because the reason why I don’t like this, or I’m not going to use this per se, is like shelves is in my search query performance. Obviously, I’m not going to get any attraction with coffin shelf. So if you guys don’t like this, like I don’t like it, I’ve already given feedback. This is why we put stuff to elite members and dive members. We want to get your feedback. So what I want you guys to do is make sure to play around here. I bet you’ve got some presets that you think would be cool that AI could summarize before you. You think would be cool that AI could summarize before you know, like that might be better than the search volume keywords and others. Or if you like those things, let us know. There’s a feedback button right here on the main page of search query performance where you can submit your feedback. Now, scrolling down here, there’s tons more.

Bradley Sutton:

We’ve got some like again, some presets that you know you might like, you might not like, might find value, might not find value. We want to know if this is valuable to you. If not, we’ll change it to something else, like, for example, the first one here is high value, low visibility keywords. In other words, what are some keywords where maybe I don’t have enough impressions on it, right? So it tells me the keywords that my impressions might be lower than my search volume and my keyword ranks are low, all right. Here’s one that says organic gold mines, like keywords that are performing for me, and yet I do not have any sign of advertising for that keyword. So I might be able to to maybe double, you know, my, my visibility If I start advertising for that keyword. We’ve got another one here that says underrated, uh, converters All right. So this is something where there might be keywords that have converted for me but my rank is super low and I could potentially increase it by increasing my bid.

Bradley Sutton:

And you can just read these other ones that we have here Performance drops, high search, low rank keywords, long tail converters, uh, and then like a summary here at the bottom. So a lot of stuff here. This is just version one. Like I said, some of you guys might like this. Some of you guys might be like why would I use this? We don’t want to have something here that’s just collecting dust. We want to make sure this page is exciting to you and giving you instant value and saving you time. So you know, we can pretty much do anything now that there’s AI and we’ve got a strong development team. So if you want to see some other summary or some other preset or tweak some of these, give us that feedback now. Please do that, because our team is working hard on getting this ready for you guys.

Bradley Sutton:

It’s entitled Temu hits roadblock and efforts to compete with Amazon and it’s a bit. It’s a lot of a speculation. Just some quotes here, but you know it’s not really telling us stuff we don’t know. But it quoted like hey, sellers have been telling Temu was like hey, you guys can’t be putting prices cheaper than Amazon, because they might be, they might want to price match later, because remember that that’s the thing that holds people back from Teemu is because they don’t control the price and they’re afraid that Teemu is going to put the price too low and then one day Amazon’s going to start price matching and Amazon will make you lose the buy box on Amazon, right? So this article talks a little bit about that, but it’s talking about hey, they’re still trying to make a splash here in the United States and change their business model. I think Teemu is definitely worth giving it a try here in the United States and changing their business model. I think Temu is definitely worth giving it a try. Don’t forget to go if you want to sign up for a Temu account with special onboarding goodies. It’s h10.me/temu, get signed up. Take a look at the platform, see if you think it’s going to be good for your brand.

Bradley Sutton:

Next article here is from retaildive.com and it is entitled TikTok expands efforts to move beyond the phone. Now, this was interesting. It’s partnering with Westfield malls and other like car dealerships, it looks like. So there’s going to be screens. You might be walking in the mall and all of a sudden you’re going to see TikTok videos. You might see TikTok advertisements, maybe TikTok shop products, all right, so this is going to be interesting. It says shopping malls, fitness centers, airports and more. All right, so this is going to be interesting. It says shopping malls, fitness centers, airports and more. All right, well, I’ve got a Westfield shopping mall near my, near my house. I might have to go check that out. But point of this, it’s just more brand visibility in places that, like Amazon is, is not there, or even TikTok right now is not there where you know. You think all your visibility for TikTok is just on people’s phones. That’s not the case anymore. Uh, TikTok is trying to be in different aspects of your life and show up, and that’s just going to have a halo effect, I think, to us e-commerce sellers, for those of us who are at least selling on TikTok a lot, you know, to be able to get more visibility for our products. Don’t forget, if you’re selling on TikTok guys I don’t care what planet of Helium 10 you have connect your token. It’s completely free to connect your token. You’re going to be first up to get some like special invites to try new tools and have you know, be the first to see when new TikTok tools are available to you. So, if you are selling on TikTok shop, connect your token. Click on your name at the top right of the Helium 10 screen, uh, on the dropdown menu, hit connections and then add a token and then you just go through the process of adding your token to TikTok is completely free and will help give you some tools that can help your TikTok business.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, last article of the day, a little bit confusing to me, but let me just throw it out there and see what you guys think it was from Seller Central and it says offer faster regional deliveries with premium shipping. So it says you can now offer customers one and two day regional deliveries through premium shipping. And it says this lets you set competitive shipping rates or offer free shipping which can help your sales with faster delivery time. So I assume this is for fulfilled by merchant. But what I don’t understand is this saying like I have my own carriers that do the fast shipping, or Amazon is now allowing me to buy the postage from Amazon, which it always has, but to buy actual one day and two day regional deliveries? So when it says regional, maybe if I’m living in California I can’t economically ship something next day via my own carrier or even Amazon’s carrier to Florida, right, but maybe I can ship it next day to somewhere else in California and so this is gonna allow you to have those offers. What I’m not sure is Amazon offering some of these, like special rates, or you have to bring your own carriers. If you’re interested in it, go ahead and ask Amazon for more clarification. All right, guys. That’s it for the news this week. Thank you for tuning in. Don’t forget to come back next week to see what’s buzzing.

---

Enjoy this episode? Be sure to check out our previous episodes for even more content to propel you to Amazon FBA Seller success! And don’t forget to “Like” our Facebook page and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to our podcast.

Get snippets from all episodes by following us on Instagram at @SeriousSellersPodcast

Want to absolutely start crushing it on Amazon? Here are few carefully curated resources to get you started:

• Freedom Ticket: Taught by Amazon thought leader Kevin King, get A-Z Amazon strategies and techniques for establishing and solidifying your business.
• Helium 10: 30+ software tools to boost your entire sales pipeline from product research to customer communication and Amazon refund automation. Make running a successful Amazon or Walmart business easier with better data and insights. See what our customers have to say.
• Helium 10 Chrome Extension: Verify your Amazon product idea and validate how lucrative it can be with over a dozen data metrics and profitability estimation.
• SellerTrademarks.com: Trademarks are vital for protecting your Amazon brand from hijackers, and sellertrademarks.com provides a streamlined process for helping you get one.