Helium 10 Buzz 4/20/22: Amazon Seller Fee Increase, Product Liability Insurance, And QR Codes Tutorial

We’re back with another episode of the Weekly Buzz with Helium 10’s Brand Evangelist, Shivali Patel. Every week, we cover the latest breaking news in the Amazon and E-commerce space, interview someone you need to hear from, and provide a training tip for the week.

Amazon is taking a step to offset its rising costs, announcing Wednesday it will add a 5% “fuel and inflation surcharge” to the fees it charges third-party sellers who use the e-commerce giant’s fulfillment services.

Here’s the latest article written by Bradley Sutton regarding the latest on this issue.
https://www.helium10.com/blog/amazon-fba-fee-increase/

Effective April 18, 2022, Amazon is offering another storage type, extra-large, in addition to the oversize storage type. This new storage type gives you more flexibility in how you manage your inventory and quantity limits for larger items.

And lastly, FBA Small and Light will increase the price threshold for eligible products from $8 to $10, effective April 28, 2022. This change allows more of your products to become eligible for the program and receive fulfillment discounts. Other program eligibility requirements, such as weight limits and product dimensions, will remain the same.

We also go on to interview the Co-founder of Spott, Amit Batzir! Spott is an eCommerce native insurance startup, providing sellers with liability insurance and tailored insurance solutions, protecting businesses from loss.

Helium 10’s Brand Evangelist, Lem Turner, closes out the episode by getting into how you can create and leverage QR Codes within Portals to use on your landing pages or product inserts!

In this episode of the Weekly Buzz, Shivali talks about:

• 00:54 – Amazon’s Increased Seller Fees
• 02:06 – Article Written By Bradley Sutton About This
• 02:25 – Amazon Additional Storage Type
• 03:16 – Amazon Seller Fee Increase
• 03:40 – Q&A With Amit Batzir, Co-Founder of Spott
• 05:18 – Who Needs Product Liability Insurance?
• 07:21 – How to Create QR Codes Inside of Helium 10’s Portals

Transcript:

Shivali:

Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Helium 10 Weekly Buzz. My name is Shivali Patel, and this is the show where we get you familiar with the latest news in the Amazon and e-commerce space. Interview people in the industry. We think you need to hear from and provide a training tip of the week that will give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the Amazon, Walmart, and e-commerce world. Let’s see, what’s buzzing this week today. We’ll talk about the latest 5% set increase among other breaking news pieces. Have a conversation with the co-founder of Spott and dive into how you can generate your own QR codes to better scale your growing business. Let’s get started. Up first. We have some news that was released right after last week’s Weekly Buzz episode to offset rising costs. Amazon recently stated they will be adding a 5% fuel and inflation surcharge to seller fees for those third party sellers who use the superstores’ fulfillment services.

Shivali:

Now don’t panic, understand that this is not the Amazon commission nor an arbitrary fee that’s being taken off the retail price. This is the pick-pack and shipping fee that Amazon charges you to deliver orders to your customers. And according to the notice that was sent to sellers on Wednesday, this is largely attributed to the increased company costs since the start of the pandemic. So they’re hoping that the surge will absorb those increased hourly wages, the hiring of workers, and the construction of more warehouses. Now, although those new changes are subject to change, they’ll apply to apparel and non-apparel products ordered before April 28th, but shipped and delivered after that date. And this is effective April 28th. If you’re interested in understanding exactly how this impacts your profit margins, then be sure to head over to Helium 10 and check out the blog section. There’s an article there written by Bradley Sutton that talks about an example, which showcases that this change actually has the equivalent, or less than 1% impact.

Shivali:

And odds are, even if you have oversight items, your products are unlikely to take as big of a hit as you are probably thinking. Now, moving on as of two days ago, effective April 18th, 2022, Amazon is now offering an additional storage type, extralarge. And this is in addition to the oversized storage types. It’s meant to give you more flexibility in how you manage your inventory and quantity limits for larger items. Now, quantity limits for FBA are to be determined by the fulfillment center capacity alongside your past and forecasted sales. However, you don’t need to take additional action. If you have existing inventory that qualifies as extralarge, then the inventory should be automatically reclassified as the extralarge inside of Seller Central. Now take a look at the monthly storage fees report inside of seller central to crosscheck. If the dimensions of your items are actually applicable to the extralarge sizing. Last but not least, starting on the same day as the 5% seller fee increase, April 28th, FBA small and light will also increase the price threshold for eligible products from $8 to $10.

Shivali:

And if you’re not sure what that is, FBA small and light is meant to help you reduce the cost of fulfilling orders for inventory of small and lightweight products priced underneath $8. Products enrolled in the program are available for free shipping for Prime customers and then standard shipping for non-prime consumers. As of this moment, products that classify are those that measure at 18x14x8 inches or less weigh three pounds or less or are priced under $8. Of course, again, that is up until the 28th. When that will be changed to $10. This is amazing news because sell more at reduced fulfillment costs on qualifying items. Now that is all the breaking news that we have for you today. Let’s move on to the next segment. Now I am thrilled to bring up the co-founder of Spott. Spott is an e-commerce native insurance startup providing sellers with liability insurance and tailored insurance solutions, protecting businesses from losses. Let’s welcome, Amit from Spott.

Amit:

Hey Shivali.

Shivali:

Hi. How are you?

Amit:

Doing well. How are you?

Shivali:

Good. So great to have you on board. Thank you so much for being here.

Amit:

Thank you.

Shivali:

Now, I’ve brought some questions for you naturally. So let’s begin with asking the first one, which is, why is product liability insurance essential?

Amit:

It’s essential because things can, and sometimes they do go wrong. And when that happens, especially if you’re a private label and you manufacture your own product, you want to make sure that you are covered. You want to make sure that there is no claim that can take you out of business. And in order to do that, you need liability insurance and you need it to cover everything that you sell and to do it properly.

Shivali:

Right. Right. And who would you say needs product liability insurance?

Amit:

Well, I would say if you sell online, you need it, especially if you sell on Amazon. On September last year, Amazon mandated all sellers to have liability insurance in place. Because customers started claiming against Amazon. They bought an item on amazon.com and they say, okay, Amazon you’re liable. And Amazon is usual. Say, okay, if you are selling on my platform, you should be liable as well as a seller. So they mandated it all sellers that sell above $10,000 a month to have liability insurance in place and upload it into seller central. They started enforcing it, and started sending threatening emails. So far we didn’t see a lot of stores being shut down by that. But as you know, you don’t want to be caught when Amazon decides that, okay. Now you need to have it in place otherwise. If you sell on Amazon, you definitely need liability insurance in place.

Shivali:

Yeah. And it’s good to be proactive about that stuff for sure. So how can online sellers then get product liability insurance?

Amit:

You can get product liability insurance from multiple carriers, all the good carriers sell liability insurance. But when you buy liability insurance, you want to make sure that you do it through someone who knows the e-commerce, someone who knows Amazon, who knows all the requirements and can represent you in the best manner or possible to the carriers or for the carriers or with the carriers. Because you do want to make sure that what you have in place is right for you. And this is what we do at Spott.

Shivali:

Wonderful. Well, thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure to have you on and I know your knowledge and expertise are so very appreciated.

Amit:

Thank you.

Shivali:

All right, with that. Let me pass it forward to Lem Turner to talk to you guys a little bit about How to Create QR Codes Inside of Portals.

Lem:

Hi everyone. My name is Lem Turner. I’m a brand Evangelist here at Helium 10 and in this video, we’re gonna be getting into how can we utilize QR codes for our business, so let’s get started. So the first things we’re gonna get started with is to go into our helium 10 dashboard here and go to our Portals, or we can go to, and once we go to our Portals can go and click on QR codes in the left side of our screen. And that’s, we’re gonna pull up this tab right here from here. We’re gonna go ahead and click on new QR code. We have all sorts of different QR codes that have already been established right here. And we have our different categories of if they’re using Portal link, track URL on track URL, and we’ll get into what those mean. And just a little bit, right now, we’re gonna click on New QR code and you can see, we have different options here, as far as the QR code type can choose.

Lem:

So we can see that we have Portal link, which is a link to an active Portal. Webpage. We have tracked URL, which is a link to any URL that can be tracked in terms of location and where it’s getting tracked. And also when, and what day it got tracked or when it was scanned. And then we also have our untracked URL, which is just gonna be linked to any URL that you provide, but it won’t be tracked. And won’t provide you with any statistics that we typically do for our consumers. So we go to our Portal link, you can see it could going to populate all the current Portals that we have available on our page. So we have different ones here. We can see some of our PO ones and active one here. If we wanna do a track URL, we have our different gems here within our track URL page.

Lem:

We can do custom URL, which is gonna be a redirect link for any cost, and non Amazon related URLs. Then we have our Canonical URL, which is just a search engine, friendly Amazon URL, where it has keywords integrated into the actual URL when you’re looking at it on Amazon listing. So we can include those as well. We have our ad to cart, which is gonna send traffic directly to our ad cart page on Amazon, which can be a tactic that you can utilize to increase the organic rank of your products. Then we have targeted ASIN search, which is just gonna make sure that you’re looking from a specific list of ASINs, or we can do a buy together that combines two more products. That way you can kind of get yourself in association with certain products. And we even have it for Walmart using a two step via brand, by making sure that we’re looking at the specific brand and keyword via Walmart.

Lem:

We have an untracked URL, which you can just go ahead and like type in a random URL, whatever you want track. But in this case, for this example, we’re gonna get into our Portals tab right here. So we’re gonna click on, let’s just click on this one. We’re gonna select this Portal’s URL and we’re gonna click on save and continue. Then we come to our configuration step where we can utilize custom domains, either going through Helium 10’s domain of heliuim10.us or if we have a different one that we’ve uploaded it, like in this case, we have coffinshelves.com. So we can do that as well. So we’re gonna put QR code example, and I’m just gonna name this as well example, we have an integration that we can populate into here. We have another video that kind of gets into how you get these Facebook pixels or Google Analytic Tracking Numbers.

Lem:

So be sure to check out some of our other videos that go into the more advanced steps of landing pages and Portals and that. So we’re gonna go ahead and click on save and continue from there. We can include a logo in the QR code if we think that it’s gonna be helpful. So we have our Mannys Mysterious Oddities logo in there. We can put it as the center image are the background. In this case, we’re probably gonna do the central image. We can include the URL in the QR code as well. If it looks attractive in this case, this probably doesn’t look the most attractive here. So we’re probably not gonna include that in there. So we’re gonna go ahead and not include that, but it is up to you. If you wanna include that we can choose from the colors that we want to put into our QR code, whether it’s black or we do it as white, or we can even do a custom color.

Lem:

Like let’s say like what I really like about this is that you can kind of match it with whatever your brand colors are. So let’s say like our brand color was, this was F F O 0 2 0 2. We can make that more of our QR code colors, but in this case, we’re gonna keep it simple and go with black. We can also manipulate dot scale here. It’s really up to you if you wanna do that. We do know that occasionally you can experience errors if you go like super small, but so it’s best to just kind of keep it normal or a little bit, at least intermediate around here, but again, entirely up to you and your business. So once we feel comfortable with where we are at with our QR code, we can go ahead and click on save and Finish. And there we have it. We have our QR code.

Shivali:

Isn’t that neat? I genuinely hope you found value in that clip, as well as this week’s Weekly Buzz episode. Before we end, I want to end by mentioning a COVID data report. We just came out with to help us process and understand what is the new normal with. COVID 19, a lot has changed over the last couple of years, and we wanted to use Helium 10’s, Powerpack data to shed some light, not on product trends and uncover hidden consumer purchasing habits, but also to chart the course of COVID 19 through the eyes of the Amazon search bar. So be sure to head over to helium10.com/datareport to gain a better understanding of how isolation and social media led to a shift in our purchasing priorities, as well as which be behaviors are here to stay. With that, we wrap up this week’s episode of the Weekly Buzz. We will catch you next time on the Weekly Buzz.

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 Bradley on Instagram at @SeriousSellersPodcast

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