Weekly Buzz 8/22/25: Amazon Will Break Your Variation Listings Soon?!

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.

Removal of irrelevant variation themes will start September 2
https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-news/articles/QVRWUERLSUtYMERFUiNHRVozVFk2UlpLQ0xSUk05

Alexa+ tests product discovery through conversational AI
https://advertising.amazon.com/en-us/resources/whats-new/alexa-test-product-discovery-through-conversational-ai/

TikTok’s new AI mandate is getting backlash from big advertisers
https://www.businessinsider.com/tiktok-gmv-max-september-shop-ads-big-brand-pushback-2025-8

Amazon Deal Types
https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-news/articles/QVRWUERLSUtYMERFUiNHQlFYRTJDR1RLTVlBS1lG

Protect your account health by preventing trademark violations
https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-news/articles/QVRWUERLSUtYMERFUiNHVUZVVFlUWFhENE5VQlJB

Boost Labor Day sales with Outlet deals
https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-news/articles/QVRWUERLSUtYMERFUiNHNDVYMks1RlU4NE4zRzNU

Update to percentage-off promotions without claim codes
https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-news/articles/QVRWUERLSUtYMERFUiNHTEdEQzc0UzRKOTVZQlZR

As we prepare for episode 700 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley is excited to share our new global launch strategies and keyword research adventures. From an upcoming Maldives trip to a Bali blast episode, we offer insights into optimizing listings and securing top search results for key product launches. With practical tips and strategies, this episode is a must-listen for anyone looking to thrive in the evolving e-commerce landscape.

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

• 01:04 – Huge Variation Update
• 05:46 – Alexa + Showing Ads
• 09:21 – EU Inventory Heat Maps
• 11:07 – TikTok AI Ads Change
• 12:29 – Amazon Deal Types
• 16:19 – Amazon Influencers
• 20:39 – Trademark Rules Reminder
• 21:43 – Labor Day Outlet Deals
• 23:00 – % Off Promos
• 23:41 – 2 PPC Workshops Next Week!

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Amazon is going to soon break up your variation listings. Sponsored products are now showing up on Alexa’s. All TikTok shop sellers have to use a native AI-based PPC tool soon. 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 Serious 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 e-commerce world. We give you a training tip of the week and we let you know what new features that Helium 10 has. That’ll give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Let’s see what’s buzzing. I feel sorry for Shivali.

Bradley Sutton:

Last week there was like that literally was the worst week of news I’ve ever seen. Like as far as not much going on in e-commerce. Well, the e-commerce world has blessed me with a plethora of news this week. I couldn’t even decide which articles to choose, but let’s go ahead and hop into the news this week. The first article this is from a seller central and this is something we had talked about on the Weekly Buzz a few months ago, like there was a minor announcement about it, but now things are getting real, because now Amazon is giving us a date on this new thing. And what is that thing? It says removal of internet or irrelevant variation themes will start September 2nd. That’s right around the corner. So it says between September 2nd and November 30th 2025, we will remove variation themes from our product templates that aren’t frequently or relevant or frequently used or relevant, to simplify the listing experience. Now, this is one of those things that I can understand. It’s going to be a pain in the neck, but hey, there’s like I could not believe how many millions of different variations, types and stuff there are out there Now. So you’re not going to be able to create new listings with these things. It already is going to say hey, this is deprecated. Do not use in the product template a variation theme name field. However, here is the kicker that maybe some sellers were not anticipating.

Bradley Sutton:

It says if you try to update a deprecated variation theme so what does that mean? That means you’ve got a listing that is a variation. So it says if you try to update a listing that has that deprecated variation type theme, you’re not going to be able to edit the listing. You won’t be able to change the image, you won’t be able to change your title, change your bullet points, whatever. You’re going to get this error message that states the value specified is invalid, and then the update will not be successful. Okay, so what Amazon is saying you should do if you have a deprecated theme go in and take the following steps. It says go into manage inventory. Now, guys, I’m going to breeze through this stuff. You should be looking at this with a fine-tooth comb, because what Amazon is telling you to do should not be taken lightly. Listen to this Go into manage inventory. Delete the parent ASIN. All right. Whenever you’re deleting ASINs, you got to be very careful. Let me just say all right, I don’t want to hear people saying, oh, Bradley told me to delete my ASINs, I deleted everything. Now I don’t know where. Everything is. All right, Just be very careful when you’re doing this. Follow all the instructions that Amazon says Anyways, delete the parent ASIN.

Bradley Sutton:

It says then remove the parentage level, child relationship type, parent SKU and variation, theme name attributes from the child ASIN that were tied to the parent ASIN. Okay. And then it says create a new parent ASIN. Now, something that doesn’t mention here, but you just got to know. If you want to use the same SKU, I believe you have to wait 24 hours after you delete that parent ASIN in order to use the same SKU. I believe you have to wait 24 hours after you delete that parent ASIN in order to use the same SKU. But if you just want to use a different SKU, just go right ahead and do it, and then the last step is assign your relevant child ASINs to the new parent theme.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, here’s another kicker, and this is the doozy. Guys, Let me read this slowly. If you are unable to update your impacted variation themes and this is not even if you, if you’re trying to update it, like you’re trying to update your listing if you just do nothing, all right. If you do nothing, your child ASINs will remain active as standalone ASINs, so customers can continue to purchase your products, All right. So, if I’m interpreting that correctly, if I were to take that at face value it’s saying that, hey, if you don’t do anything, they’re going to break apart your listings potentially. Now I’m not a hundred percent sure I’m reading that correct, but that’s what it sounds like to me. What about you, guys? Do you think that’s what it says where hey, you got, like you know, 30 listings, you know because of size and color, but you’re using, like the weird ones like size or color name or something like that that’s deprecated Technically. Now you’re going to have 30 listings just sitting out there by themselves, you know. So this is kind of serious. So I, like with many things, I’m sure Amazon is going to, you know, release more information soon. That that’ll clarify some of this.

Bradley Sutton:

There’s a couple of links. If you click the link in our description to get here, there’s another link for FAQs. It gives other instructions on how to update variation listings. Some of them say, hey, you know, delete a child item and re resubmit it again. Like I said, look at this stuff carefully. I do not have a deprecated theme type myself. There’s a list in that link where you can see, you know, if maybe you have listings that are uh, that qualify under that. But again, be very careful whenever you’re messing with flat files or whenever you’re deleting ASINs, uh, et cetera. But this is something that you need to pretty much take care of, uh, because potentially, starting September 2nd, this could affect your variation listings.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, next up, we’ve got a story from Amazon Advertising. It’s entitled Alexa+ Test Product Discovery Through Conversational AI. So this has been rumored for quite a while, but now Amazon officially has says right here, hey, sponsored products campaign will now be automatically integrated into shopping conversations when customers chat with Alexa+ about products. All right, so now if you’re chatting with Alexa+, you can start getting product recommendations from Amazon, etc. This is like a new gen AI kind of experience, and it’s this article says there might be organic listings that will show up, might be sponsored, but the interesting thing is, as you can see from their screenshot here, it doesn’t tell you if it’s sponsored or organic. Like, like you know, when you look in search results on Amazon obviously has a little moniker that says sponsored. It doesn’t show that here. All right, so this is available in North America.

Bradley Sutton:

What I did was I went to my Alexa and I don’t know if you guys can hear this. I’m going to kind of describe what’s happening on my own Alexa. I went on there and here is what I said. I said I’m looking for a bat shaped bath mat on Amazon. It says one moment, and then it gave me three different results. It only mentioned the name of the first one. It didn’t mention the name of uh, of all three. So that’s the first thing. Like if you’re not the first one that comes up, as it’s not Bobby Boucher, who was it? What was Will Ferrell in that one movie, Talladega nights? Was it where he’s like if you’re not first or last or something like that. Anyways, it only mentioned the first one.

Bradley Sutton:

But here our product from Project X, Manny’s mysterious oddities bath mat, came in third, All right. So it said, hey, here’s the three products I’m like, hey, show me more information on number three is what I said. And because you know that was the Manny’s mysterious oddities product and so they’re like all right, cool, Uh, Alexa said let’s see what it came up. It pulled up the actual listing, started talking about it. I could buy it now or add to cart right there. So that’s interesting. What is going on with Amazon Alexa? How, hey, you can start showing up a little bit easier because of Gen AI. Interesting enough, when I search on Amazon at the same night that bath mat you know how. Helium 10 at the very top.

Bradley Sutton:

If you have the Chrome extension installed, it’ll tell you if which products were the number one, number two and number three most clicked per Amazon brand analytics. Guess what, Just for this keyword. Now, I’m not saying that this is the case for everything. Obviously, not even every keyword is in brand analytics. But the three products that were chosen for what Alexa was showing me just happened to be the top three most click items from last week. The top three most click items from last week the Manny’s Mysterious Oddities one, this other competitor out there and then this other weird bat-shaped one where the exact top three products clicked. And those happen to be what Alexa was doing. But again, I don’t know if it was a sponsored. I don’t know if Me saying, hey, give me more information on that, Are they going to charge me a click? And if so, what is the click going to be attributed to? Bat-shaped bath mat. I don’t know which campaign that’s going to be attributed to. I actually was talking about it in a conversational way. I was like, hey, give me information from Amazon on bat-shaped bath mats, so is that going to come up in one of my search term reports, bat-shaped bath mat? So is that going to come up in one of my search term reports, bat-shaped bath mat, or is it going to be under the full phrase that I said? Who knows, this is all kind of like new territory. But, guys, something to be thinking about. How you optimize your listings, how your advertising works. Keep Alexa in mind, because now it’s going to be easier to shop on there. All right.

Bradley Sutton:

Next up is a new feature alert, and this is something that our European sellers have asked for for a long time, and that is the inventory and sales heat maps for Amazon Europe and the different countries there. What are the inventory heat maps? Let me show you how I have it in my Amazon USA account. I don’t have inventory in Europe, but basically I can go day by day and look back at my inventory and where all of the warehouses in America where my inventory is. I can also go in to my sales heat map and say, hey, based on the state, where are my orders coming from From this week or this month, this year, et cetera, et cetera, this month, this year, et cetera, et cetera. So we now have mapped out all of those locations for your Amazon Europe warehouses. It’s still in beta, so please give it a try.

Bradley Sutton:

Those of you who use Helium 10 Profits, go into Helium 10 Profits, hit inventory heat maps or sales heat maps and let us know how it looks. I think you have to look at least three, four days back. Let us know how it looks. I think you have to look at least three, four days back, but this is useful because, first of all, you’re wondering where’s your inventory being stored and also where is the concentration of sales, Because that might affect where you want to send your inventory to or where you might have deficits. Are there correlations between high inventory in a certain location and sales in a certain location? These are all different things that you’re able to see with this. Uh, though, the reason I like using inventory heat maps is when I’m launching a new product, I want to make sure my inventory is distributed to multiple warehouses across a country that I’m selling in before I make my listing fully active, and so this is a way to also see that. So you European sellers, go check your profits, check your inventory heat maps, let us know what you think. All right.

Bradley Sutton:

Next article is from business insider, and it’s entitled TikTok Shop tells advertisers they have to use this new AI tool, whether they like it or not. Now, this is something that we knew was coming. Uh, what AI tools is talking about? Talking about GMV max ads? So before like similar to, like Walmart and Amazon and Tik TOK shop. You could do advertising campaigns where you had, you know, a lot of control over it. Not anymore. Basically, all you can say is, hey, turn on ads for this product or multiple products and then do you want us to show, you know, ads for all the videos that are tied to it? Right, and that’s it. There’s no optimizing, there’s no negative matching, there’s no increasing your bids or cost per clicks, or you know stuff like that, Like you just can have control over the budget and you tell Amazon, or Amazon, you tell TikTok what your uh, I believe, is ROAS, that you’re, that you’re trying to shoot for and it’s going to try and get you that. All right. So that’s what’s coming. You can fully manage your TikTok shop ads, Don’t forget, right there in Helium 10. So if you’ve got Helium 10 ads, you have full access to go ahead and manage it, but it’s kind of like not much you can do, whether you’re talking about Helium 10 or just in TikTok shop, because, again, GMV Max Ads is going to be mandatory. That’s the only thing you can do starting in early September. All right?

Bradley Sutton:

Next up, we have a crash course in all of the deal types. This is from Amazon seller central and they’re like letting you know what are the deadlines. I think um Shivali last week or the week before gave us a deadlines of when we have to get inventory in for like a prime big deal days and other you know, black Fridays, stuff like that. But in this article Amazon is telling us what kind of promotions are available around these states. And it’s interesting Do you guys know all the promotions and how much they cost? The first one it talks about is best deals. All right, these best deals, it’s a thousand dollar flat fee. You have to do a minimum of 15% discount. So if you’re a small seller or you have a product that doesn’t sell much, absolutely you should never, ever even think about this, unless for some weird reason, you think you’re going to like 1000 X your sales. But it’s going to be a thousand dollar flat fee and you can apply for those for prime big deal days. You only have until September 12th to do that. Uh, to do it for black Friday or cyber Monday, you have to get those deals in by October 28th.

Bradley Sutton:

The next up is lightning deals. Now, these are short time discounts that are that run for 12 hours on main event days and there’s a you know there’s good placement for these on Amazon’s, you know, special merchandising days homepage. Uh, either there’s cool event badging that you might have for it, et cetera. To really stick out in the search results. Uh, you have to have a minimum of 20% discount for this one $500 flat rate minimum or actually just flat rate for the lightning deal, so it’s not a thousand dollars like the best deals, but still $500 for some of you might be a little bit steep, especially since you’re having to add on 20% discount to it as well. You can submit for big deal days right now, through September 12th, and again through for black Friday through October 28th.

Bradley Sutton:

The next one is prime exclusive discounts. All right, Prime exclusive price discounts. These have nice badging in the search results. This is what I use, I use, I’ve been using these a lot, even though these are now also more expensive, and this is available for prime FBA products as well as qualifying seller fulfilled items. All right, that’s different than the other two. You have to have a minimum of 15% discount and for big or prime big deal days, it’s a hundred dollars per campaign. For Black Friday, Cyber Monday, it’s two, 45 per campaign. Now here’s the thing it says campaign. It’s not going to be per product. So you can like, let’s say, you’ve got 20 products, you just want it all to be in this one campaign. You can put 20 products in there and you only pay one. So that’s kind of like why this is still a lot cheaper, All right.

Bradley Sutton:

So if you want to do Prime big deal days, you can do that now all the way up to through the actual date. And, however, if you’re trying to get a prime exclusive discount in for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, uh, that’s not going to be available until September 10th. Lastly, coupons that’s the last kind of promotion that you can do on these days and these will show on the search results, of course. Minimum 5% only discount. However, there’s a flat fee of $5 per coupon, which is pretty steep, plus 2.5% of sales from units sold on coupons. So they kind of get you right there as opposed to that one other flat rate and submissions will be open once the event dates are planned. So if you guys want to get a crash course you didn’t catch something I said go check the link in the description below to check those dates and to check those details which ones are you going to be doing?

Bradley Sutton:

I’m probably still going to just do Prime Exclusive Discounts myself. Let me know in the comments below what you guys are going to do for Prime Day, or the big deal days, I should say, and Cyber Monday and some of the other deals this holidays. All right, next up, we have got our training tip of the week, our strategy of the week, and this is going to be given to us by Shivali. Shivali, take it away.

Shivali Patel:

How to find influencers to reach out to you on Amazon. Why is this important and how can it make you money? Influencer marketing is all the rage nowadays. That’s no secret. That is why it’s that important to get UGC on your pages. If you don’t know what that stands for, it means user generated content, getting influencers to basically create videos about your product or service. That will appear then on mobile browsers, on desktop browsers or, if you’re on Amazon, in your picture carousel. That usually appears either at the top, where all the videos are located, or in the bottom carousel. This is going to help you with your conversions and it’s going to give you more reach out there on Amazon as well as off the platform.

Shivali Patel:

If you have influencers that are going out and actually creating videos for your brand, maybe you want to do a collab with a very unique type of influencer off of Amazon, but you want to find out who are the ones who are making videos on the platform. You want to see hey, do they actually have a following on Instagram or TikTok? Have they created videos in my niche before? Do they have experience? So what you can do is actually go into Helium 10 and check out the influencer finder that’s going to let you search up the entire database of anyone who’s ever made influencer videos for Amazon products. You can even search up for, let’s say, I want to figure out who’s made videos for my number one competitor brand. Like I said before, if they’ve made product videos for similar products in my niche, then they’re probably going to be the perfect person to reach out to make videos for my products, correct? Let me show you, guys, how you can do that. This is a tool that’s available for our diamond members. Just hit tools and then, underneath marketing, go to influencer finder. All right, so I’ve gone into tools, gone in and selected influencer finder for marketing, and this is the dash that I’m taking a look at.

Shivali Patel:

Now. We’ve got access to both TikTok and Amazon as a workspace. Make sure you are doing your research in the right one, depending on where you’re trying to get influencers sourced from Right. And then what I’m going to do is either type in my ASIN so if I wanted to type in a competitor ASIN, I could do that here or I could just go in and type in, for example, coffin shelf instead to find anybody who might’ve made a video for any kind of coffin shelf out there, all right. So if I just type in my ASIN, I’m getting a couple of responses, but let’s go in and just type in coffin shelf to get a way broader search results, all right. And in doing that you’re going to see.

Shivali Patel:

Now, all of a sudden, I’ve access to 500 different influencers, including Bradley, who, as we can see here you have his product category listed. I think he’s made like seven videos before Yep, seven videos that he’s posted up, and then he has an idea list created. You can check out what his average video length is. I can figure out not just the frequency but also his social media links, meaning if I thought he was a great influencer. Sorry, bradley, I’m not going to be reaching out to you because we already have videos posted for the coffin shelf, but if you guys are going in, as you can see, there’s a lot of really great information and now you can slide directly into the person’s DMs that you are interested in collaborating with.

Shivali Patel:

Now, as you go through and you guys do this, know that you always have access to the filters, like you do for any of our other tools. That will help you refine that search, meaning you do not have to go through all 500 influencers that are listed. The whole point of us giving you these filters is so you can quickly refine the search. And, as you saw, the social media links are tagged. You don’t just get to take a look at them, you can actually click them and then directly go in and check it out. And here’s some shameless self promotion, as Bradley would say. But go and go and subscribe to crazy sock TV guys. If you want to check out his old Zumba stuff, you can go, follow along. Anyways, that is it for me. Let me pass it back to Bradley.

Bradley Sutton:

Thank you. You know, reaching out to influencers you might think, oh, that’s only necessary in TikTok, Amazon. It can definitely help you as well. And really cool how you can find influencers from your competitors, influencers from other brands, influencers in your niche, and reach out to them right there in Helium 10 so that you can ask them to promote your products. All right.

Bradley Sutton:

Next story from the news from Amazon. Again, Seller Central says protect your account health by preventing trademark violations. I was about to say variations. We talked about that before. Now. If you’re doing like something like phone case where it’s for an Apple iPhone, or if you’re doing a refrigerator filter and it’s for a Samsung or something like that, there’s specific things that you have to do to be compliant, All right. So if it’s a branded product, first you got to put your brand name, then the product name what is it and then you have to use one of these terms for, or compatible with fits or intended for, and then the trademark word or brand All right. So you have to use this exact formula, guys. Uh, check this article that I linked to in the bio below. That will help you understand all the different kind of regulations there are about your title and how you mention it, because you can’t just throw Samsung in there in your title. That’s going to easily get you suspended if you don’t use the terminology that Amazon wants, All right.

Bradley Sutton:

Next up, we’ve got another article from Amazon, and this one is entitled Boost Labor Day Sales with Outlet Deals. All right, this is something that I don’t think we’ve talked about too much on the show, but you can get visibility on outlet deal starting today, the 22nd, through September 1st All right, Now, this is if you have like overstock or excess inventory. 1st. All right, Now, this is if you have like overstock or excess inventory, so you’ve got to discount it at least 15%, and then this is going to get on the Amazon outlet landing page for the labor day special labor day event. All right, Now, this is going to be interesting. For this labor day event, Amazon customers are going to get mobile push notifications and even email campaigns, it says, to drive customers to this page. So you’re going to get increased visibility and traffic for this page, All right. So if you want to go ahead and check out these outlet deals, just go to inventory, select FBA inventory, go to the recommendation filter and then select create outlet deal All right, and then follow the steps from there. So I have never done this before, but I’m curious anybody out there ever done a outlet deal? Well, now might be the time, especially for labor day, If Amazon is going to be sending extra traffic there.

Bradley Sutton:

Another article from seller central. This is entitled update to percentage off promotions without claim codes. All right, so if you are trying to do a percentage off promotion, like we’ve been able to do for the last 10 years on Amazon, and you’re trying to do it without a claim code, all right, you’re going to now have to do a minimum buyer purchase quantity of two units instead of one, All right. So not a huge change. But for those of you who are are still doing those percentage off promotions, you either have to use a claim code or, if you don’t, that’s fine, but just know that the minimum quantity has to be two going forward.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, guys. That’s it for the news this week. I told you there was a lot, Uh, now, next week we have got two different workshops that are PPC, Amazon advertising related. Now, the first one up is going to be with Vince, the founder of TacoS Tuesday he’s going to be talking about how to potentially double your orders, but with lower spend in advertising. So that’ll be an interesting one to visit live and be able to ask him any of your questions in the live AMA. If you want to register for Vince’s session, go to h10.me/tacosaugust. And then a few days later there’s going to be a live workshop with destiny, who’s going to talk about the difference between doing rules based advertising versus like AI advertising, and how you can do both uh, both inside and outside of helium 10. Advertising and how you can do both uh, both inside and outside of Helium 10. If you want to register for that one, go to h10.me/tacosseptember. All right. So if you want to register for both, then to make sure you get the replay, h10.me/tacosaugust or h10.me/tacosseptember. We will see you there. Uh, for me I’m not going to be there, though, because you know where I’m going next week.

Bradley Sutton:

We’re getting close to episode 700 in the numbering right, so what does that mean? It’s time to go back to the Maldives. So I’ll be in the Maldives next week. Watch my Instagram Serious Sellers Podcast on the Instagram to get my pictures checking out a new place, and I’m going to be giving you guys the 2025 update of the Maldives honeymoon Amazon launch strategy. I’m launching three, four products this month and already seen some results about what’s working, what’s not working, what’s different on listings and launch and getting to the top of the search results on a certain keyword. So look forward to that information along with. I’m also flying to Indonesia because I do my Bali blast episode, where we’re going to be talking about keyword research. How do you do all of the keyword research to set up for that Maldives honeymoon launch? I’m going to be going to a few countries next week to be filming these special episodes. I can’t wait to share them with you guys. Thank you, guys for tuning in and next week you’ll have Carrie back here on the Weekly Buzz so that you can see what’s buzzing.

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• 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.
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