Amazon Catalog Hijacks, Return Fraud & the 1.6% Takeover

Amazon Catalog Hijacks, Return Fraud & the 1.6% Takeover Speaker 1: mature approach to your business. But then also, you know, it makes it so that a lot of those meet you private label brands that worked because OXO wasn't on the platform. A lot of them, you know, unless they started a long time ago and they, you know, they have that ranking and if you know, the kind of the sales history, it is very difficult to maintain competitive against the bigger brands as they're entering the place. I think this culling was, I think we'll continue to see a culling of kind of like Me Too private sellers and resellers. There will of course be many that survive and do great business because they're operational minded. But I think that it's not harder to sell on Amazon, but it takes, it's harder, but in the way that it means that you need to come with a more business savvy approach and less of a root and toot and cowboy approach. Speaker 2: Basically going, oh, I'll just sell that, you know, scan this item. I'll sell this on Amazon for a 300% profit have been being eroded for a long time. And now that erosion or probably a better word to explain would be attrition of People that can just really easily go out and grab a product, slap a label on it and sell it is gone. You now have to know logistics. You have to be able to basically all the unsexy things that didn't matter. Early days now matter an extraordinary amount because that's where your profit is. Because Amazon is so expensive to sell on, you have to locate your profit and optimize it in other places. Unknown Speaker: Very true. Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah. A hundred percent. I mean, you got to run a real business now, right? I think we've said that a bunch of times before and anybody who was really good in the space and not just a Fly by Night Guru was telling people this, you know, build an actual brand. Speaker 2: Correct. Speaker 3: Websites being on multiple marketplaces, potentially even in retail and things like that. So you can still jump on Amazon and potentially make money. But you're competing with companies now that are on there that are selling Billions of dollars in some cases, hundreds of millions for sure. And they've got large advertising budgets, full content teams and everything behind them. So you just, you've got to treat it like a real business. And it's a, it's not just a, for hobbyist sellers anymore. Yeah. Speaker 2: Not to mention that once you get to those levels, you get dedicated Amazon employees to help ensure that you're making money. We're at least making sales on Amazon. Well, I know I see you bobbling your head there, Robyn. They still get dedicated people. Speaker 1: They do get dedicated reps and it's more likely to be a captive rep at the higher margins, for sure. But, you know, the effectiveness of some of those programs varies by the directives that month and, you know, restructuring. Speaker 2: Yep, absolutely. Whereas we get us lowly sellers. Eric, I don't put you in that category, but us lowly sellers, we don't get dedicated bad support. Speaker 1: There are amazing support people in all of the programs, and there are also some that might be phoning it in. Speaker 2: Oh yeah, for sure. Speaker 4: And even with those support programs, I mean, I've been enrolled in, in, in, I don't even remember, SAS, I think it's called for years. And then we canceled it. I mean, because what happens is you get a, you get a rep They're typically terrible, and then they change the rep in three months. This rep might be phenomenal, but then that rep changes in three months, and then you get a new rep who's terrible, and a lot of the solutions that you're expecting to get don't even get resolved, and the cost for SaaS has greatly increased as well, so it's like, well, after weighing the pros and the cons and the cost, we were up to almost seven grand a month paying for this rep, and we're like, you're not doing anything for us. We're just burning money. Speaker 3: Yeah, because any good rep sooner rather than later moves up the chain to a higher level inside of Amazon or to another company that can pay them better. Speaker 4: Yep. Yeah. Speaker 2: Amazon needs to take a look at like Amex, Platinum and Chase. Sapphire and go, what is their program? Why do people pay them for a credit card? And then go, oh, they provide value. Why don't we do that? Why don't we provide value? Speaker 1: I think SAS can provide value if you don't have an agency and you don't know anything, but I think you'd be better off paying for an agency support. Of course, I'm totally biased because I have an agency, so I just want to say that. I think a lot of the things that SAS can help with now because they restructured it like two years ago, so now they can't really help you with a lot of escalations. They can, but it takes them so long. We can usually escalate it faster within the agency. I think that if you were coming in blind, then they can help you navigate some of the craziness that is Amazon. But I think that usually people end up saying we're going to have to cut one or the other and they end up cutting SAS. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, it makes sense. That's $7,000 a month. That's a lot of money if they're not providing you at least that in return. Now, if your account got shut down, it might be worth that $7,000, but that's such a rare event if you're doing things properly. 7,000 a month adds up quickly. Robyn, I'm curious in your agency, do you see anything that sets apart the brands or companies that do really well versus the ones that maybe kind of stay mediocre or decline? Speaker 1: When I'm looking at a brand, what do I see? Like, okay, this is going to go well or this is not going to go well? Speaker 3: Yeah, just for companies. Obviously, I'm sure there's some companies you work with that are just awesome and do everything really well and others that don't and so they kind of stagnate even with you guys doing excellent at your work. Speaker 1: Yeah, so I mean like we're actually dealing with a client with clients on both ends of the spectrum right now. And so one is I think that they need to be business minded, preferably having some business experience before. They need to have the cashflow because sometimes people spend all of their money on product development and forget that they're going to need to advertise. And we're going to have to have operational costs. And so they don't have enough money to cover their burn. And then I think patience, because if you are looking for a get rich quick, let's get the money back in fast. And then a lot of times that's not sustainable or it's going to be black hat, which can end up burning you more in the long run. If you're up for that risk, that's totally okay. That's not what we do particularly. We're pretty white hat. I think those things make a big difference. Without that, we see things where inventory isn't available. You know, they forget to reorder, they don't reorder in time or they don't have, they haven't built the relationship to make sure that they're important to their suppliers. And, you know, so I think that those are the big things that's coming in. I think before it was, you could just have more of a tolerance for risk and be successful because you'd make big swings. I think now those, you still need to make big swings, but they need to be calculated and have a lot of muscle memory behind them, if that makes sense. Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, one thing that, you know, I've seen between companies that we've worked with, for example, on more of the inventory management logistics side is we had one company that was doing quite a good volume, you know, not huge, but, you know, around 50,000 or so a month of their private label products that they manufacture here in the United States. They primarily were not Amazon first. So what they were doing is they were just sending out weekly UPS shipments to Amazon FBA and paying those high UPS rates. In some cases, they were just sending to a single location, paying the placement fees and stuff like that. And so a simple operations fix on that by getting them to be able to send every couple weeks or every month and sending pallets to direct the FBA or AWD, save them, you know, thousands of dollars, just right there. So it's little operational things like that, that if you're not Used to it can you can kind of forget about or not understand that you can be saving a lot of money by optimizing those pieces of it. Speaker 2: Yeah, I was, I won't name the brand, but I was working with a brand that They were on Amazon, but the vast majority of their sales were D2C through meta ads and their own website. And I took a look at their Amazon listing, and there were so many violations in there. And I'm not talking like, hey, you can't use that word. I'm talking like, hey, if by stating this thing, you can get your account permabanned from Amazon. These D2C companies, the thing is is that what's perfectly acceptable everywhere in the world when it comes to marketing your products and stuff like that is a gross violation on Amazon and can get you banned and there goes 20 or 30 or whatever percentage of your sales. To roll back on what Robyn said earlier, you need an expert to help you make sure everything is done right the first time. Because sometimes, I mean, I've seen accounts where it's like, this is ridiculous. Why aren't you banned, right? Or at least suspended? Why isn't this product suspended? And then there's people like me where I get a product suspended for no reason. And then we find out later like, Hey, what, what happened? What was the thing? And they said, yeah, this, this ingredient is not allowed. Like we don't have that ingredient, you know? Stuff like that. But yeah, definitely having, having it done right the first time is, Amazon is no longer an option or shouldn't be an option. Amazon is not unilateral in their bannery, but it definitely is not worth the risk. Speaker 3: Yeah, especially with the automated systems nowadays, you think they would catch that more often than not. A good example is like every time that I make an update to a fly fishing listing, Amazon's like, oh, you said flies, pesticides, down goes the listing. And then we got to submit all the paperwork. Like, no, it's fly fishing. It has nothing to do with flies for pesticides or anything like that. It's just funny how every time it's just like clockwork, the listings. Go down and I got to submit all the pesticide. Speaker 2: I mean, at least you're good at it now. That's one benefit. Speaker 3: Yeah, for sure. But the automated systems catch that. But then, yeah, there's tons of times that you see stuff. It's like, OK, how how is that working? But, yep, that's the way it goes on Amazon. Speaker 2: Yep. Speaker 3: All right, cool. Any other input, Eric, on your side about this? Speaker 4: No. I just want to mirror what Robyn said. I mean, it's now more important than ever to operate a legitimate business. I think in 2025, I've talked to more, well, in 2026, about talking to sellers about 2025. I've talked to more sellers that have decided to either Close down their business right due to their inefficiencies and inability to make the profits to sustain future growth or greatly downsize their business, right? So people are dropping like flies and it's the people who aren't operating and treating Amazon like an actual company. It's you can't run into it with a side hustle mentality anymore. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: Yep. Speaker 3: Yep. Not anymore. You used to be able to get away with that because there was just so much profits to go around, but now things are getting tighter. You got to be fully optimized to keep things going. Speaker 2: Yeah. One benefit to that is that it trains us to be better business people, which ultimately, you know, if you're going to like wildly succeed, you need to be. Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, that's what you got to do. Become a real business, like you said at the top, and that's what it's all about. Speaker 2: Yep. Speaker 3: All right, let's go ahead and jump on to this next one here. Kind of an interesting case, I think. So foreign language contribution blocks brand updates in Amazon catalog. Online Seller Solutions details a case where a foreign language hijacker contribution ranked over a brand owner's update, which was silently rejected due to a character limit validation issue that Seller Central did not surface. So to explain that in more detail, what actually happened is there was a Chinese seller that apparently was trying to hijack a listing. And so they added a bunch of Chinese characters to a field in the backend that was not filled out by the brand. Amazon gave them validation or ranking for that field. And because it was Chinese characters, it didn't display in the us.com marketplace. So it looked like nothing was there. So when the brand went and tried to update it, They accidentally put in too many characters that more than the field would accept. And so even though they hit save and Amazon accepted the updates, it did not publish their updates to the listing. And so, in essence, gave the hijacking company in China semi-control of this listing. Now, thankfully, they got it fixed, but this is typically a way that these companies try to take over a listing, change the brand name, change the title and everything and use your reviews to sell some random phone case or something like that. Unknown Speaker: I mean, this isn't new. Speaker 1: Yeah, it took a lot of escalation. It's not uncommon. It does take a lot of escalation and a consistence. I mean, you have to have somebody who's following up every 24 hours, really. But it can be fixed. It does take time. That's why you have to make sure that you're on top of it. And as soon as you see it, really attacking it pretty quickly. Speaker 3: Hey, Amazon sellers. Tired of losing money on storage and shipping fees? Well, Amazon Storage Pros is here to take the headache out of logistics. We manage everything from inventory and creating efficient shipping plans to working with 3PLs and Amazon's AWD so that you can focus on growing your business. Start with a free storage cost audit and discover exactly where you're overspending and how to fix it. Don't let logistics eat into your profits. Visit AmazonStoragePros.com. That's AmazonStoragePros.com to get your free storage cost audit and start saving today. And now back to the show. Yeah, the key lesson here is to make sure that you're filling out all of the fields in the back end for your products. Obviously, that can be a lot of work. There's a lot of fields. But if you don't, then this kind of thing can happen. And once a hijacker gets their foot in the door, They may be able to start chipping away at the rest of the listing. Speaker 4: Yeah, and I think additionally, they just need to make it easier for brands to visibly see what's controlling, you know, those data points, right? I mean, Amazon has this pyramid of hierarchy for contribution starts at Amazon retail and to brands and then just regular sellers. It's sometimes even impossible to get, well not impossible, but highly unlikely to get an attribute updated even when you are the brand owner, right? And it's like you have to stay on the phone with Amazon for multiple hours, create dozens of cases, weeks can go by, and that greatly impacts your business. So it's disheartening. That it's so complex to update something as simple as this. I mean, clearly there's an issue. It's the wrong language. It's taking up too many characters. It should be a simple fix from a seller's side. Speaker 2: This is 100% an issue that we have had for nearly two decades as Amazon sellers. Hijackers and listing changes and all these things. Amazon has implemented all these programs, brand registry, transparency, all this stuff to handle the hijacking issue and the issue or really just listing issues and brand issues. And the issues persist. They just change, you know, but it's, they've never truly resolved it where like it was going to be the most amazing thing. Brand registry came out. I have full control of my brands now. No, you don't. And like they should, I don't know what the, like, And on one side, Amazon's whole premise was one listing for one product. Anybody can sell it rather than eBay's model, which is a thousand listings for the same product because it's this individual selling this thing. Right. And so they aggregated that. And that is very convenient from a search perspective. Right. But when you have these people that go, I invented it, I manufactured it, I own it. And Amazon goes, yeah, cool. That's awesome. We don't care. It sucks, you know, because to me, it's simple. I own the brand. I own the trademark. I own the rights. I own the IP. It's my shit. Don't let other people on it. I want a checkbox. No, other people cannot sell on it. And then it actually works. Nobody can make changes but my account. You know, you have in so like let's take WordPress for your own website. You have an administrator level account. And then you have approved users. That's it. Nobody can modify your stuff unless they actually hack you and get into your DNS or whatever settings, you know. But otherwise, you own it. Speaker 3: It should be that simple. I mean, there should be a checkbox that says no other sellers can sell on this listing. Speaker 1: That's never going to happen though. It's not in Amazon's best interest. The more sellers are on the listing, the more likely is somebody's got to pay a credit card bill and the price goes down. That's what they want. Speaker 2: At face value, it's not in their interest, but the amount of trouble that it causes Amazon and the amount of work that it causes Amazon to get these things fixed, somebody needs to do a cost analysis of if we just made it simple, how much money would we save on On technology and investigations and staff and time servers, blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, they own all the servers, so they don't care about that. But, you know, like there is actually a value in simplifying it and making it like legitimate businesses allowed to be legitimate business on Amazon because and having full control. Because it's going to save them a lot of time in terms of support. Speaker 1: I totally get it. I mean, we've got multiple full-time people that just escalate tickets for compliance issues and things like that. So, you know, listing changes because it does take a lot of time. So I totally get what you're saying, but it's also a complicated, you know, it's a complicated ecosystem. So I don't know if there's, I think if there was a simple solution that would make everybody happy, they would do it. But I, there's, I'm sure that they have run the cost analysis on it. And, you know, like in Vegas, you stay at the top floor and it rains, it leaks. And I, I would ask them why they would allow that. And they're like, it doesn't rain often enough for us to worry about fixing it. You know it's less, it's more, it's less expensive for us to comp those rooms or to, you know, have a couple upset customers then to fix that. Then so, you know, I think a lot of businesses do kind of end up triaging care, you know. Speaker 2: That's a good analogy. Speaker 3: Yeah, it's unfortunate though because then you force brands into the situation of Incorrectly using programs like transparency and IP complaints and stuff like that when you know that it's not a real IP complaint but you want to get that seller off so you do it anyways because it's probably going to be fine and not come back and bite you. Same with transparency. You're supposed to put transparency labels on every product that you manufacture. But, you know, a lot of brands just put it on the ones that they send into Amazon so that other sellers can't sell that product without those codes. Speaker 2: Yeah. The other, the opposite end of that is people weaponizing those abilities like IP complaints, people weaponizing that to get listings booted so that they can capture those sales. That's another issue. Speaker 3: Yeah, now obviously I have my history in reselling. I try to do brand partnerships and stuff more than anything nowadays. I know like you, Eric. So we try to have a partnership with the brand. So yeah, I'm kind of working against myself a little bit in that area saying this, but you know, I got to put myself in the brand's shoes and look at it from their angle that having a thousand sellers on a single listing and not knowing Where that product came from, what kind of condition is it in? Was it sold on clearance and they removed the stickers with a knife or whatever and scratched up the box and now it's got sticker residue all over it or whatever the case may be. You wanna control those things when you're the brand. So it'd be really nice to have more tools to be able to do that. On the same side, on Amazon's side, What happens if the brand stops selling a product and then resellers want to sell that product? You'd want to have a way to kind of do that as well. Like, okay, if you run out of stock of this product and don't replenish it in so many days, then now it opens up for resellers or whatever the case may be. Speaker 2: Yeah. Big boy pants problems. Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah. It's a hard one, but to go back to this, this issue that we're got on the screen here, the main thing is just fill out all your listings or all the fields in the backend of your listings, especially your top ones. You know, if you got a thousand plus listings, obviously that that's going to be a lot of work, but start on your most important ones and just kind of work your way down. Speaker 2: In mention of that, I haven't built a fresh listing in a long time, but I do know that you want to have everything filled out, but if you don't have information to fill into a section, like say you don't have a battery operated thing and there's a field for battery, do you guys add like NA or just put something in there just to have some text in there or do you just leave it blank? Speaker 1: We leave it blank, but. Speaker 4: Yeah, I leave it blank as well. Yesterday, I started the process of uploading 189 new, completely not new to Amazon, but new to our storefront listings. And I mean, when you have, I'm doing a bulk import. When you export that bulk import, I mean, there is 90 to 100 different columns of information that you can input. So it's a lot, especially for your everyday seller to be able to fill out all of that information. It's a lot. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: And some of them have valid values. So if you put N-A, you're gonna air out the whole form, so. Speaker 4: Yeah. Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah. If it has a dropdown, you know, you got to try to select from that dropdown. Not always. That's kind of the funny thing. Sometimes even if it has a dropdown, they'll let you put your own text in there and then you can kind of Take advantage of that for a little CO juice or something. It depends on the field for me. If it has a dropdown and there's no option for not applicable, then I'll leave it empty. If it's just a text field, then a lot of times I'll put something in there like NA or no battery or something like that. Speaker 2: Listing field masterclass coming soon, I think. Speaker 3: Yeah, that would be a lot of good information, but kind of boring information. Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure. Unknown Speaker: It'd be a horrible class to watch. Speaker 2: That'd be such a terrible video to watch. Speaker 4: I'm pretty sure the woman who wrote this article, Vanessa, who's a great friend of mine, I'm pretty sure she offers or did offer listing creation masterclasses because it's not a commonly known topic in the Amazon space, how to do it properly. Speaker 3: Yeah, it's definitely a niche thing. If it's something you want to get really good at, it'd be a good area to find a class or make a class. But you said they offer a class on it, Eric? Speaker 4: Yeah, I know they used to. I don't know if they do anymore, but it's like her whole thing is backend Amazon. And that's a huge part of the backend is creating a listing. Speaker 3: And you know, that's the unsexy stuff that we were talking about in the first article, right? The companies that are in that 8,000 sellers that are 50%, they're doing this kind of stuff that's annoying and slow and tedious. They're doing that kind of stuff to set themselves apart. All right, let's jump on to the next article here. So Amazon launches review listing changes dashboard for brand edits. Amazon introduced a new review listing changes dashboard that lets brand owners view and respond to Amazon initiated AI listing updates from the past 60 days, including AI powered content suggestions that auto publish after 14 days if no action is taken. Keep that in mind. The 14 days, you're going to want to be checking this dashboard at least every couple of weeks, if not every week, to make sure Amazon's not trying to change your listing to something that it shouldn't be. Speaker 2: Yeah, I know. You know, it's funny. My wife is sitting next to me and she's like, ah, right now. I know that it was a big issue that AI was making changes to just like pushing changes. So it sounds like rather than, and there was a lot of backlash that sellers went to Amazon with like, don't change my stuff. If there's one entity on earth that doesn't know how to sell on Amazon, it's Amazon. And so sounds like what you're saying is, They just went, oh, well, we're going to continue doing this, but give you an option to... Unknown Speaker: Dispute it. Speaker 2: To prove it. Yeah, dispute it. Speaker 1: You know, when I saw this, I got kind of excited because I was like, oh, great. It's a way that resellers can submit changes and suggestions and then the brand can approve it. It'll be great. And I was like, oh, no, this is the thing from Accelerate that the feature that nobody asked for, you know, like wanted. Yeah. Like everybody, they were like, isn't this great? And all the sellers were like, No, I can think in the example that they had, they had like an IP infringement, like it created like an IP infringement. Speaker 3: Yeah, right on the presentation there. Speaker 1: Yeah, I remember everybody was like, okay, clearly you haven't had to sell on Amazon because you don't know that this is going to cause an issue. We have some products that are pretty technical or even that they're not technical, they're like they're steel wire, but there's minor differences and AI can make that go very, very wrong very, very quickly. So I think that this is not, I'm not super stoked about this. I mean, it's another deliverable that my agency has to do now where we're going to have to go through and clear these every week. You know, I think that but I think that there are some sellers that. The AI suggestions might be better than nothing. Um, so I think it's kind of one of those things that if you're a savvy seller, it's just annoying. If you didn't know what you were doing and you were already having a hard time, maybe it might help. Um, so yeah, that's kind of my bit. That's my official opinion. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 3: Yeah. For me, uh, I, I don't think it's great that, They're doing the AI thing automatically and you can't opt out of it. It's really good for those listings that I resell, for example, and maybe I don't have control to make changes all the time because I jumped in there this morning and I had two products in there that I wanted to make changes. And there were actually good changes to resale listings that I couldn't update anyways. So I just said, yeah, go ahead and do it. It looks like good changes. So those kind of listings, cleaning up that part of the catalog, it could probably be good as long as AI gets it mostly right. But I think having this dashboard is nice because before this, they were just sending you CSV sheets or Excel sheets and you'd have to open it up and then select in there if you approve or deny and why you approve and deny and then upload the sheet. So this dashboard is an improvement to that, but there should be a way to opt out for private label brands that are spending tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars to optimize their listings to make sure they're perfect. Speaker 2: Yep. So I just checked mine and I have no listing changes for review, thankfully. Speaker 3: Okay, very good. Speaker 2: But on this page, it says new feature announcement for brand owners, review listing changes across your brand's catalog on Amazon, and three bullet points are review recent and upcoming Amazon-initiated changes for your brand's listings, including AI-powered updates, provide feedback on proposed or published detail page changes for greater control over your brand's representation, and streamline listing management with a centralized tool for reviewing and responding to updates. So, I do like that they, bullet point number two says provide feedback. I just hope that Amazon, I mean, Amazon does everything at huge scale. So, you know, they're gonna have to, they're gonna take two years, two to five years before they've aggregated enough people saying, I don't like this, I don't like that. But you were saying that it's gonna, if we don't check it within two weeks, it's gonna automatically push those changes. Speaker 3: Yep. Speaker 1: The changes that I see on the brands that I'm looking at are things that are like, one area has like changes the number of pieces. It was not a filled field. So I haven't seen anything really egregious yet, but you know, it's also new. So I might have different thoughts next week. Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. I mean, it'd be good though. Speaker 3: When I first saw this news, my hope might've been kind of like yours, Robyn. I'm like, oh, this is really cool. So they're gonna have a dashboard that if I have brand registry and someone else tries to make changes, say to a field that I haven't updated, it's gonna put it in here and then let me approve or deny it. That was my first thought that what this dashboard would be for. And that would be really cool outside of the AI side of this thing. But unfortunately, it doesn't look like that's what we're gonna get. Yeah. Speaker 1: And I think it's a bigger issue when it changes like a title change versus like the structured data. But, you know, yeah, that time will tell. Speaker 3: Yeah, and you said you had, did you have a screenshot that you wanted to share? Speaker 1: Yeah, if somebody wants to see it, I had to blur out the, I had to blur out the customer. Yeah. Somebody wants to see what it looks like if you're not a brand registered owner. Can you guys see it? Yeah. Okay. No. Speaker 3: No, not yet. I think I got to remove mine and add yours. There we go. Speaker 1: This is what it says at the top. Then this is what it actually looks like. There'll be the title here and then it will say when you were notified, so you know when it was. Then the change details, see where it says number of pieces changed to one. Then you just click the thumbs up or thumbs down. Pretty simple. It does look like you're going to be able to sort by brand name and category. If you have a lot of them, you should be able to. I like the interface. I think it's a lot more user-friendly than the CSV. The question is, how many times is it going to re-suggest the same thing? We'll see, but the interface looks nice. Speaker 2: Yeah, it'll be like websites that have the pop-up where they don't put a cookie so that if your IP comes back, it doesn't keep popping up and every page you navigate to on the site pops up the same pop-up. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: That's what it's going to be like. Speaker 3: Yeah, and the bad thing about it too is that there's no option to deny the update. There's just an option to thumbs down that, no, I don't really like this update, but then it's still up to AI, I'm sure, to decide if your reasoning for not liking it is valid or not. Speaker 4: Yeah, so I'm on their help page in their TOS. It says, you remain in control of which upcoming AI updates made by this tool are published to the product detail page, but you must respond before the soon to be published on date. And then there's an appeal process. So if you click thumbs down and Amazon doesn't agree, you then have to go through our appeal process and present your case of why that change is inaccurate. Speaker 2: That's going to be a, I mean, I have clients that have many, many hundreds and even some of them with thousands of products and that's going to be atrocious. Speaker 1: That brand that I showed you has over 10,000 SKUs, so it only came up with four. Unknown Speaker: Okay, well that's good. Speaker 1: Yeah, so I mean, it's a pretty, and that's why I picked that particular brand is because it's a pretty large product mix. So yeah, and that's, the way that Eric said is the way I read it too, is that you will get to reject things, but Amazon keeps providing a lot of job security for me, so. Yeah, right, that's true. Yeah. Speaker 3: I got to imagine though now that they have this dashboard, the AI updates will just escalate from here. Maybe not, but that would be my guess, is now that they got this, they're going to like, okay, let's go full bore now. Open the floodgates. Speaker 1: I wish I had some anti-AI Kool-Aid that I could give at Amazon. I know they're really super stoked about AI, but I've seen people that have had books done with AI, their financial books done, and they've been off by a ton. I've seen people use it to analyze data and it was making up numbers. So I am very concerned that we're barreling towards Like a bunch of people being like, Oh, I don't need my agency. I don't need my creative people. We can get rid of all of them. We're going to lose all of this talent and all of these businesses. And then we're going to realize, Oh, we just fell for a grift. You know, like it's like, I think the AI has a great role and there's ways to utilize it responsibly, but I think we're moving too fast, but I'm an old curmudgeon, so. Speaker 2: Well, I mean, let's just take Amazon's machine learning when it comes to recognizing issues with listings, violations with listings. That literally doesn't work a large percentage of the time. It either doesn't do it or it does it and is quite wrong. You know, like I had my account suspended, three of my seller central accounts suspended all at the same time. And there was no, you look at the health, there were never any warnings. It's 100% over the last 12 months. And nobody at Amazon could tell me, why was I suspended? They'd, you know, they'd look in like, everything looks great. You know? Speaker 4: Sounds about right. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: Yeah. So, I mean, I think part of the problem with Amazon, it's a good solution in some ways and a terrible problem in some other ways is that Amazon operates heavily siloed. There are teams that work on detail pages that don't talk to each other ever and yet they're part of the same overall page on Amazon. And so, you know, when you have these teams that are developing products or services or whatever and they don't talk to each other and they don't know what each other are doing, you can have a rogue problem because one thing doesn't talk to the other. I mean, heck, And granted, this is a massive undertaking, but even Amazon's own terms of service and their policies contradict each other sometimes. Speaker 3: Yeah. Speaking of policies, I didn't have this one pulled up for us to talk about, but Did you see the new AI policy that Amazon just put out? Speaker 1: Yes, I did see that. Speaker 2: No, what is it? Speaker 1: We love AI except when it happens to us. Speaker 3: Yeah, let me pull it up. Speaker 1: It basically said that if you're going to use an AI agent, you need to disclose that it's an AI agent. They don't want AIs running rogue in the back of their systems, which I think that there are people using things like CloudBot and OpenCloud that don't have enough background to do them safely, so. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 3: Yeah, this here is classic. Speaker 2: Do as I say, not as I do. Speaker 3: Yeah, so requirements for AI usage and automated systems. So where is it? Speaker 2: We'll add requirements for the use of automated software AI agents to access Amazon services. Amazon services is capitalized. Speaker 3: I thought there was a breakdown of it here, but essentially it says that if an AI agent accesses Amazon, they must first announce themselves and that they are an AI agent to Amazon. They must follow all of Amazon's policies and procedures and they must terminate activity if asked to do so at any time. Speaker 2: Yeah. Can you put the link to this in our live stream? Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely. So it's once this goes live March 4, it's going to break a lot of tools that have been hacked together to kind of do, you know, automation of Amazon tasks. That people have been building and because they've, with these agents, a lot of these tools are kind of going around the API and instead of using the API, just using the web interface to do whatever tasks they need to get done. Did that come through? It says there's an error occurred. Wait a moment. Speaker 2: I see it in the chat. Speaker 3: Okay. See, so yeah, Amazon, kind of trying to shut down the AI agents before they take too much of a foothold and are operating people's Amazon seller accounts. Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, Amazon has always done what they can to block scraping. You know, they, despite being a public facing website, they say, hey, nobody's allowed to scrape our data. But also the data that scrapers scrape are the data that like millions of Amazon sellers use to operate their business more efficiently. And Amazon doesn't provide the data in a downloadable manner. Like early days, I think, what was it? The MWS API, I think it was, which we now have the SPAPI. The MWS API used to actually, in some cases, provide more data than the SPAPI did and vice versa. But back in my Managed by Stats days, I know that when SPAPI first released, first of all, it was broken, much like many things are when they first get released by Amazon. But also the data, it didn't match up. And then they stripped out data that was critical for managed by stats to be able to give people their true profit numbers. And so we had to we had to download from both sources and then make Basically cobble that together to make the most accurate version of whatever that number happen to be you know. If once again this this goes down back to what i said earlier in that if amazon would actually allow businesses to be a business. Because by giving the data and allowing control over it, basically on your own little mini businesses on Amazon, it would actually ultimately make Amazon a better place. And I'll stop my rant right there, actually, before I go on. Speaker 3: Yeah, I think the one of the interesting things is So if you're an A.I. agent, you have to announce yourself. So I guess, like, what does that look like? Like, does the A.I. agent like speaking to the microphone and say, hey, I'm an A.I. agent, Amazon? Speaker 2: 0-1-0-0-1-1-1-0-0-0-1. Yeah. Speaker 3: And then some seller support rep says, please stop, go away or something like that. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 3: I guess that that'll be interesting to see what what that actually means, like how do they announce themselves and then how does Amazon And I'm going to talk a little bit about how you can tell them to stop if they want them to stop. Especially like, let's say, OpenClaw. I don't know how familiar you guys are with the new OpenClaw, which is literally an AI agent that you can install on a desktop computer, and it operates your computer as if it was a real user, essentially. So how would something like that work with something with the open claw accessing Amazon through a Google Chrome browser and stuff like that? You know, there's different ways to detect these kind of things, but it's just interesting that they have to announce themselves and then stop if Amazon tells them to stop. Speaker 2: Honestly, the technology behind that is beyond my comprehension right now, but I'm sure there's going to be... I don't know. I mean, when you set up these agents to operate a browser, I don't know if it moves the mouse for you or just locates the link that needs to be clicked and just hops the mouse over there. Amazon tracks this stuff. Once you're on their website, they know your scrolls. They know where your mouse is moving. This is part of the way that they block scrapers is because scrapers can move through pages and links and stuff like that at the speed of light or the speed of electricity. And and so Amazon knows, hey, this IP address is loading a thousand pages per minute. Block it. Right. So one of the ways if you want to scrape data is you have to actually operate a scraper as an individual would and go through the pages. And that takes time and massive computing power. So I just I don't I don't see how how is this agent supposed to How does it announce itself? Is there going to be some addendum to the IP address that says, Hey, agent IP address, blah, blah, blah, or, or what is going to have to be some protocol? Speaker 3: Some backend protocol that they set up. I don't know that they've set that up, so they may or may not be able to do that. But it also says that AI, Cannot learn from any of Amazon's content. Speaker 2: Yeah, I saw that. That's that's going to be a problem. Speaker 3: Well, it's gonna be a problem for me, for example, because if I get a listing that maybe is throwing some kind of error on the product description, a lot of times what I'll do is I'll just take that description, throw it in a ChatGPT or Claude or something, and then copy and paste the entire policy that it says I'm violating and say, hey, what is violating this policy in here? And then it usually very quickly can pinpoint We're the issue is and then I make the changes and we're good to go. Would that be considered AI learning from Amazon's content or policies? Speaker 2: I don't think I actually don't think that that is because you are just getting an answer as opposed to an agent. Going and scraping data and then using that to some unknown ends, you know, but like putting it into the LLM as a learning in the day. Precisely. Yeah. Like, I don't know. I, I, I'm not that great at AI. I have not built my own agent. I've built my own GPTs, but not my own agents. So I can't really comment enough, but I just like, That's a blanket policy for Amazon to basically say nobody can use AI on our website. Speaker 3: Pretty much. And it's broad enough that it can encompass really any kind of AI use. So I think it's just kind of one of those things that Amazon is like, hey, We have a gotcha now if we want to kick you off of our platform. Speaker 2: Yep. I think that's what that is. It's just a blanket. If we decide to boot you, that's it. You're booted. Yeah. And this is going to be, I mean, yeah, the AI world will develop beyond Amazon's ability to track them as an AI and new tools will come out to scrape and push data into some other system that is a dedicated LLM that you can You know, grab this information and, but you know what I wonder is all the SPAPI, all the API access that these tools have that grab and download all the data. And then you can use, you can use a chat bot. You can use their LLM to chat and see how did I do last week compared to the week prior. That technically now becomes a violation. And they didn't even use an AI bot to go scrape that data. They downloaded it as an approved third party to gather data from SPPI, but they're putting that into an LLM so that it's making it convenient for the client, for the seller to get the information that they need. Speaker 3: Yeah, that could be an interesting one, violation for sure. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 3: Now, I did see someone on LinkedIn talking about this and they framed it in potentially a positive way and it kind of connects back to our earlier story about the big sellers being really good operators where Instead of these AI systems and agents utilizing the browser to do whatever, when they could be using the API to do things much easier and faster and more efficient, You know, this forces them to go back and maybe rebuild these programs in a way that they should have been built in the beginning, you know, in a more efficient, better operating way for building their tools. Speaker 2: Yeah perhaps i mean i think that just the progression of things. It's gonna have it has to happen anyhow people have to always be iterating or or their whatever they built becomes outmoded. Speaker 3: Yeah, it's important to stay up to date on all of this stuff and build a real business, I think. Speaker 2: Yeah, that's what it boils down to. Yeah. Speaker 3: Yeah, that's kind of the overarching theme here across this whole episode. All right, guys, we're at the top of the hour. Any final thoughts? And then we'll wrap it up. Unknown Speaker: No final thoughts for me. I appreciate everybody's time. Speaker 2: I try not to drink. Speaker 3: Robyn, Dana, and Eric, appreciate you guys as always coming on the show. Speaker 2: Yeah, good to be here. See you next time. Speaker 1: Thanks. Speaker 2: Bye. Speaker 4: Everybody out there watching. Speaker 3: We'll see you next week. Speaker 2: Oh, wait. There is one more thing. There is one more thing. So we've got Prosper coming up. I have a parties document. I'm gathering all the parties that are happening and the links so that you can register for them and all that stuff. I'll just put it in the link here. There's, or the chat, there's no like a subscription or anything. This is an open doc, but everyone that's going to prosper that wants to know what's going on, it's going to be listed in that doc. It's under construction now, but it'll be listed there. Speaker 3: Okay. Speaker 1: Cool. Speaker 3: Let's throw it in there. That'd be awesome. Yep. Speaker 2: It's in. Speaker 3: Appreciate it. Everybody have a great one. Speaker 4: We'll see ya. This has been another episode of the Amazon Seller School podcast. Thanks for listening, fellow Amazon seller. And always remember, success is yours if you take it. Speaker 3: Hey, if you made it this far in the show, I really hope you enjoyed it and I'd like to ask you a favor. Could you head on over to Apple or Spotify or wherever you're listening to this and leave us a review? It would be greatly appreciated and would help us continue to grow the show and offer more episodes for you. Thank you. God bless and have an awesome day.