Amazon News: AI Images Win, Faster Shipping & Consumer Pressure

Amazon News: AI Images Win, Faster Shipping & Consumer Pressure Unknown Speaker: Welcome fellow entrepreneurs to the Amazon Seller School podcast, where we talk about Amazon and how you can use it to build an e-commerce empire, a side hustle, and anything in between. And now, your host, Todd Welch. Speaker 3: What's going on everybody? Another episode, Amazon Seller School. Live, Marketplace Pros, Eric Weiser with us and of course, Danon from Econ Triage and Kevin Sanderson with my Amazon guy. Appreciate you guys joining me today. Nice that we're having some full houses lately. It's good to have four people to get lots of different opinions on everything. And we've got some fun news articles today. We're going to be talking about whether AI images are better than human made images, perhaps. Some volatility of e-commerce kind of starting to settle down with some historic numbers here jumping in. I'm going to be debating some shipping speeds as to what kind of sales rates you can see with various different shipping speeds. And then if we get to it, we're going to be talking about the economy a little bit as well and how that's going to affect Amazon sellers out there. Appreciate everybody joining us out there live. I see y'all streaming in. If you have any comments or questions related to Amazon or the news articles we're going over, throw them in the comments and we will dive into those throughout the show and bring them in. But without further ado, let's go ahead and dive into this first article here. This is actually a blog post that I wrote about a research, an in-depth research article that researched AI images and how they compared to human-made images when it comes to advertising and sales and things like that. So, let me read the verbiage here quick. AI images for Amazon sellers boost clicks and conversions. New research shows high-quality AI-generated images now match or outperform human-made visuals on realism, appeal, and click-through rates, even in real Amazon ad campaigns. For Amazon sellers, this means AI images are no longer a backup option. They can be a primary driver of high CTR, stronger PDP performance and faster creative testing. Because AI images are cheap and fast to generate, sellers can iterate creatives far more frequently, tailor visuals to keywords and seasons, and outperform larger brands with slower design pipelines. Used correctly, natural colors, minimal text, strong realism, AI visuals give sellers a measurable advantage in listings, A plus content, and sponsored Ads. Um, so with all that said, uh, essentially, uh, the research said that, uh, AI graphics can be a superhuman visuals, uh, and actually outperformed, uh, human made banner ads was one of the things that they tested in this specific, uh, I'm wondering on your guys's thoughts if you guys have played with AI images for your ads, listings, things like that, and how you've seen those perform. Speaker 4: I'm not running ads, but I do think that This is true for the person that understands how to appropriately prompt AI. If because you've got the graphic designer that knows, I want this scene, I want this aspect ratio, I want blah, blah, blah, blah, all the things. Right. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 4: And and they'll get at least pretty close to what they want the AI to produce. Then you have somebody that is like me, says, I want a bottle like this, right? So I want a bottle that looks like this, and it will recreate this bottle, but poorly in comparison to somebody that says, go take a look at the dimensions of this bottle, blah, blah, blah, blah, and it's partially translucent with a blue hue to it, black top, et cetera. It used to be that it was just text prompting to create images. You can now feed images into the AI to have it use that as a base. All that to say that I think that the educated user is going to be able most certainly to be to perform excellent and produce excellent results. But the average Joe that does not have AI experience will not necessarily get those same results. Speaker 3: Yeah, I agree. Prompting is definitely something you need to know how to do to make this effective. And one of the things that did mention is what AI can be really good at is you create, say, your main image. And then you upload it into AI and say, enhance this image, enhance the lighting and everything else, and it can greatly improve the click-through rate potentially of the image. Speaker 4: Yeah. If you took a look at, this is becoming less and less the case, but if you look at those older images that were the lifestyle images, where it was literally, not even Photoshop, I'm talking like Microsoft Paint, Import an image, import your other thing and paste it on top. And you're like, the colors are all wrong. The shadows are all wrong. The dimensions are wrong. It's just wrong. You will fully eliminate that. You could take that same trash image and put it in the AI and say, fix this and it'll fix it. So you're definitely gonna get better results from less astute Graphic designers, if you could even, I mean, I'm not even a graphic designer, but I would get much more superior results as a, due to AI coming out. So, but again, you're not gonna get, I personally don't believe that you're going to get that crisp, beautiful converting image out of just saying, hey, make me a hero image for Amazon. Speaker 3: Yeah, other thoughts, Eric or Kevin? Speaker 2: Yeah, so we're actually gonna start running tests on, so we have an in-house photo department and we use, but we use AI as well to do some editing and whatnot. I still think, I'll tell you what the test is first that we're running, but I still believe that The content of the photo is the most important, like if size matters. You should have a ruler that shows how big something is or in, you know, the reason that lifestyle images worked were it gave size proportions. It showed people what this looks like in use and that converted for a while. And I think that's still going to be the case for certain items. Water bottles seem like a ruler makes a lot of sense. Maybe even with some other, you know, you're not supposed to put other items and they're supposed to be white background, but nobody tends to listen to that. But what, What we're running a test on is the new Amazon Banana Nano, their AI, which to Dana's point, their AI might have the prompts that Amazon believes are correct built in. And it's just been our experience when Amazon thinks something is correct, they tend to give it lift and search. Case in point, the big one is FBA. Amazon thinks FBA, for the longest time, maybe that's changed now. But Amazon believed FBA was what everybody wanted and so you got the lift in search and buy back percentage. So we're gonna be running that with Banana Nano to see if there's any correlation. But that is just starting for us this week. Speaker 4: And for clarification, it's Google Nano Banana. Speaker 2: Got it. Speaker 4: Not Amazon Nano Banana. Speaker 2: I called it. Speaker 1: We knew what you were talking about. Speaker 4: Well, yeah, once I've heard anyone listening that wants to go search for it, search for Nano Banana, you'll find it. It's an incredible image generation tool. Speaker 1: It is. And one tip that I've gotten from John Aspinall is like, let's say you have an image from a competitor or something that you like and you want it to be similar. You take that image, you put it into Google Gemini and you say, give me the JSON code. Now, JSON code for people that aren't familiar is basically like when APIs talk to each other. So computers talking back and forth, they're talking in JSON code a lot of times. And so it's like you're basically giving. The AI, the code for how to write the picture. So rather than like this kind of like rambling explanation, you give it the JSON code and you say, hey, make it, you could tell it, you know, what changes you want it to make. And it's usually pretty in the ballpark. In fact, you can even say, change the JSON code to reflect instead of blue, I want it to be a green theme, this hex code or this RGB or, you know, I'm going to give you a different image of the product and then it'll come up with it. And it's usually pretty good. And you probably still want to have a designer work on it, but it could save a lot of going back and forth with a designer because you can go back and forth with Nano Banana of like, you know, make this change or actually put it more to the left or something rather than, you know, you tell a designer and then you're waiting three days for them to get back to you and all this, whereas Nano Banana will make the change in seconds. Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Speaker 3: Yeah, so JSON code, where are you getting the base for the JSON code? Speaker 1: Literally, you just take the picture and you upload the picture as an attachment into Gemini and you say, give me the JSON code for this. Intuitively, it makes no sense. But it's going to give you basically a structured format of how computers would think about that image. Speaker 3: Okay. Speaker 1: And then you use that JSON code and nano banana to say, create me an image like this. Speaker 3: All right. Interesting. I'll have to try that out. Speaker 1: I would have never have thought of that because it's not, you know, how you would normally think. But I think it's a lot of behind the scenes, how the AIs are actually thinking. Speaker 3: That's where it comes in to be an expert at the prompting and learn this kind of stuff. If you're a graphic designer out there, you better be learning this stuff or you're going to get replaced by a five out of 10 star designer who does know this stuff. Speaker 4: I just put in the private chat if you want to share that. This is very simple. It's a photo that I took. It's a screenshot I took of one of the podcasts that I record in the off-road space where I was just putting some arrows on it. I just asked ChatGPT to give me the JSON of this and that's what it came out with. Speaker 1: Okay, cut off a little bit. Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm not sure. Let's see how I can could display that, but maybe put it in a notepad and then open it up in Google might work. Speaker 4: Yeah or throw it in the chat. But it's very very simple JSON is JavaScript code a simplified version of JavaScript, which is yeah, there you go That's that's pretty much what it looks like. Speaker 3: Yeah, so that is JSON code for anybody interested if you're not a computer person probably doesn't I mean, it's relatively English, but it's just code that's describing the photo essentially. So you may or may not have to have this JSON code. It's probably more readable by the computer, but you could also just ask the AI to describe this image or create a prompt that would generate this image and you'd come back with something relatively similar. Sure. And that's something that I've done in ChatGPT quite a bit. Speaker 1: Nice. Speaker 3: Um, what's, so what I came away with, um, if we scroll down here, um, just to what makes things work. Um, so these were kind of the main takeaways. Number one is that cult natural color beats over saturation. Um, so the higher saturation, which, which AI tends to try to make like super vibrant, Color schemes in images, and that actually ranked less than, uh, creating natural, uh, coloration in your images. Um, so people just felt that the natural colors were more realistic, uh, than the super high vibrant oversaturated colors. So you want to focus more on natural real life colors in your images was one of the main takeaways. So skip the neon Instagram filter look. Speaker 4: Yeah, I think that the novelty of getting these hyper realistic photos is worn off. And now people are going, that looks fake. Speaker 3: And that's one thing that I was gonna just say as well. So perfect takeaway is that it could just be that people are tired of seeing that, you know, because everyone's using it. And now if you're the one shifting back to natural tones, you stand out versus the ones that are oversaturated. So this is something that can change. Over time, depending on the market. Speaker 4: Yeah. Speaker 2: The visual number two that we talk about on this is of course you need your image to create a click, but at the end of the day, if you're selling something that 30 other sellers are selling or a hundred other sellers, if you're lucky enough to be above the fold, you still need to win above the fold. And so you certainly need to have the best image, the most convertible image above, you know, with those you're competing against. And I think it starts there. Now, if everybody's the same, then you have to dig a little deeper. Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, you got to play with this. Every market is going to be different. You know, this is a mass research paper that went out to did hundreds of thousands of clicks and such they calculated on different images. So you got to play with your with your market for sure. Um, the second one here was visual complexity. Simple is tends to be better than highly complex images. Um, so less text is better than lots of text on an image was one of the big, um, takeaways from the research as well. Speaker 4: I mean, I think that's dependent upon what you want to achieve, right? If text is needed, then it needs to be in there. Speaker 1: Well, you want, I do find that when you have too much text, it's more likely that like text is like not actual letters. Like it starts coming up with weird. Unknown Speaker: Oh, yeah, yeah. Speaker 3: Gotta be careful of that. Speaker 4: Yeah. You know, what's funny about that? I had someone. It's totally fraud. Somebody said, Hey, I need a refund on this order because, and this is like 35 days after they ordered, this is supplements, right? It's a 30 day supply. Said, I need a refund on this order because it came filled with oil and bugs. And we're like, Oh my gosh, that's horrible. Send us a picture. Like I threw it away. And later, this has been going on for a month. Actually, it's been going on since before Accelerate. And I actually brought this to Seller Cafe. I'm like, hey, look, this guy's threatening. They basically threatened, hey, either refund us or we're going to buy all your inventory and return it and leave negative reviews. And so and I did see a doubling in my in my return rate after that. But anyhow, Later they sent a picture of an Amazon box with oil all over the bottom and on the box it said Amazon. Speaker 3: Amazon. Speaker 4: That's a real cool AI photo, bro. But thank you for the evidence that you are 100% scamming us. Speaker 3: Oh, wow. That's crazy. People do anything. Speaker 4: Yep. Speaker 3: But yeah, AI is not good at text for the most part. ChatGPT has gotten much better. Perplexity is pretty good. Grok is so-so. But I found right now of the more general AI, ChatGPT is the best, but I'm sure NanoBanana is probably even better. Speaker 4: Perhaps so but you know it's also very very simple to take it into a free take an image like if you get the image you want to take it into a free photo editing program. And just pop the text on top, put a shadow behind it, whatever. Or you can then take that photo, go to Fiverr and five or ten bucks say, hey, can you please use this font? Write it in these spaces. And so and that for any graphic designer is like seconds of work. Correct. Speaker 3: And it does say specifically that adding your logo to images you want to do manually because of course it's not going to generate your logo properly for the most part. Speaker 4: Right. Speaker 3: People and images was the next issue. It had very high appeal. It added to the appeal when there is people in the image. But AI is really bad at generating details of people, especially emotional expressions on the face, fingers, as we all know, and strange things. You got to handle it with extreme care and make sure you zoom in on an image and make sure that something doesn't look funky because the human eye is really good at picking up abnormalities on the human face and things like that. You got to be really careful with it. Speaker 4: The man with six fingers or somebody with three arms. You know, you can have one hand over a shoulder and then another one around the waist, but then the left hand is over here. That sort of stuff. Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: I saw an ad for McAfee, the, you know, security software. Speaker 4: Yeah. Speaker 1: And it was a video of a video. It didn't even make sense to like what they were trying to accomplish, but it was a woman. On the beach and she's standing there facing you and then suddenly her head turns and it's like what was her front is now her back and a third arm comes out and makes like a millennial heart because I've learned the Gen Z heart is different fingers, having a Gen Z daughter. Anyway, it was awful. I'm like, who approved this? Speaker 4: Yeah, no kidding. Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, it's really bad with that. So you got to be careful. Um, but yeah, so essentially AI images have gotten to the point where they're good enough to use in your creative, but you got to be careful with it and test. As Eric said, you got to test over and over and over and see what gets you the highest click through rate. Um, as I know you guys like to say over there at mag click through rate is everything. So yeah, you got to A-B test it and see what works the best. Speaker 1: It's easier to increase your traffic than increase your conversion rate. Speaker 3: Yep, absolutely. All right, cool. So any final comments on AI images? Speaker 4: I mean, For all my gripes about you got to be good at it, you need to get good at it, no matter what. That's just one thing that I would say is that we used to say AI is the future, but it's the present. And if you don't conform to using it and optimizing your business with it where you can, you need to start today. Speaker 3: Yeah, and we're in the infancy of AI still. So what we're seeing today, we're going to laugh at in a couple years from now. So you've got to learn this stuff. It's going to get more and more Enhancing and refined, you know, and if you, you know, people are worried about losing their job to AI, it's definitely going to happen if you don't learn how to incorporate it into your job and turn what you can do yourself a hundred fold increase with the use of AI. Speaker 4: Yeah. Speaker 3: That's really it kind of like industrialization, right? When the industrialization age turned the productivity of a single human into many more fold, and now AI is just going to supercharge that. Speaker 4: Agreed. If you're worried about losing your job to AI, then do something about it, because you've got a warning already. Speaker 3: Yep, it is coming. Get ready for it. All right, let's jump on to the next article here. A decade of e-commerce volatility ends. U.S. e-commerce has entered a stable growth phase with 2025 holiday sales rising a steady five to 10% Despite tariffs, inflation, and supply chain pressure signaling that online retailer is no longer easily shaken by external shocks. Black Friday and Cyber Monday both grew year over year. Mobile shopping now dominates transactions and e-commerce penetration returned to pandemic highs through normal consumer choice rather than crisis behavior. For Amazon sellers, this means planning for predictable, sustainable growth instead of boom and bust cycles with success driven by execution, pricing discipline, mobile optimized listings, and long promotional calendars rather than sudden market disruptions. The takeaway is clear. Volatility is no longer the strategy. Operational efficiency and incremental gains are. And we were talking about this kind of before we jumped on that we're seeing kind of a mixed bag between us in terms of Q4 growth, but definitely not any huge spikes or huge reductions. It's just kind of a steady momentum that e-commerce is seeing. Speaker 2: Yeah, I can comment on that just a little bit. The majority of our business is in automotive. Supplies, masking tape, sandpaper, drill bits, boring things like that. And in previous Black Friday years, pandemic excluded, we would outperform on Black Friday, Cyber Monday, thinking that folks were shopping for the Black Friday deals, they want a flat screen TV, and they're like, I might as well order some sandpaper while I'm here as well, or Amazon puts that in front of them. But we did not see that same expansion this year. But outside of those days, we've seen a little bit of growth year over year. Not like the crazy pandemic growth or crazy early year growth, but exactly what the article says. I would just say like sustainable, normalized growth. Economy-wide, I'm sure there's data around this, e-commerce is still growing and it's likely growing at the expense of somebody. The main street, maybe now it's maybe not main street, maybe it's big box. I'm not quite sure. We'll find out as data rolls in, but that's what we're seeing on our end. 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. Speaker 4: Me being in supplements, I basically, my statistics over the last decade are roughly the same. Speaker 3: Really? Speaker 4: Yeah. Like we do typically see a lift in supplement sales in December for whatever reason. And then a dip in January, which you would think it would be opposite, but See a little dip in January and then February, March, April, it starts swinging back up. But we've seen steady growth over the last three years and we're probably actually up about 30, 40% this year, year over year, which is actually pretty good now that I think about it. But it's always been steady. That's probably the best way that I can explain our sales. They've always been steady. Speaker 3: Okay. Very good. Myself, I sell a lot of sporting goods, fishing products, and it's been going relatively well this Q4. I would say it's definitely better than last year's Q4. We're seeing a rise overall in sales. Some of that is a little bit better inventory planning this year than last year, I would say. But I'm definitely happy with the increase in sales. And while I did see a spike on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the last few days, this last week, I would say each day has probably been as big or bigger than the Black Friday and Cyber Monday days for sales. And you, Kevin, you do a lot of custom. Speaker 1: I do some custom stuff and a lot of giftable custom stuff. I did pretty well. It's starting to taper off now, whereas the rest of it is still going strong until about the 20th to the 22nd ish, depending on when the delivery times are. But one of the things I'm finding is I have a lot of products that are very like niche, we'll call long tail products. And so I have found The life cycle on a lot of those products is becoming shorter than it used to be, whereas it used to be maybe I'd get three to five years out of them. Now one that hits, I might get one or two years and ones that were really good even like a year or two ago are starting to taper off. In fact, my hero products, the one that had always done the best and this is its 10th holiday season, it's starting to take a dip, whereas it had been going strong for We've been doing this for nine years in a row over the holidays. It's still going strong. It's still my number one product, but not as number one product. Speaker 2: Kevin, are you seeing increased competition on that product? Speaker 3: I have been for years. Speaker 2: That's the tough part. All of us, even though we can do tens of millions of dollars in business, Inventory's still a thing, as Todd points out. We're small businesses, we make mistakes. But competition, Walmart likely isn't gonna have another big box coming right next to them. Certainly not six Walmarts or Targets, where we might see a dozen competitive products come right next to them. To me, that makes the biggest difference is how much competition is out there. Speaker 1: That's such a good point. Speaker 4: I mean, you've got a total addressable market, right? Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. The pie might be growing, but the slices of the pie are smaller. Speaker 3: Even though the number of new sellers signing up for Amazon has decreased, and the number of sellers who are growing on Amazon has decreased as well. It's, you know, yeah, the pie is expanding slightly slower, but potentially in the long run, you might see less competition. But the exact knockoffs is what's the problem on Amazon a lot of times. One of our products, it's like these flashcard type of products. And we had a knockoff come on Amazon. Literally, they copied the whole thing. They just took the logo image off, but they left the logo name on it. We got it taken down after ordering the product and everything, of course. And then the the Chinese sellers had the gall to email us and say, hey, could you withdraw this so that we can keep selling this? There might have been a mistake, perhaps. Speaker 1: Like, no, no mistake. The mistake was, you know, not a mistake. Speaker 3: It may not be illegal to duplicate a product in China, but it is here in the US. Speaker 1: Right. Speaker 4: Yeah. Speaker 3: So, yeah. It's a never-ending battle with that kind of stuff, especially if you become successful on Amazon in any way. Speaker 4: Right. Speaker 1: But one other point about this graph, I'm going to show you Black Friday and Cyber Monday. I think the significance of Black Friday and Cyber Monday are becoming less and less important over the years. You don't have the visuals of people camping out in front of Best Buy for all week to get a TV. Everybody does their deals sooner and they run them longer. I remember back in the day, when the internet became a thing, you'd start hearing of people would find the newspaper articles that were going to come out about the ads, what the stores were going to sell. Those would go online and people were like, oh my God, it's such a big thing. It comes out on Thanksgiving or on Black Friday, so people find out about it. Over time, it's such a less compressed thing and it's just not as big of a deal. Speaker 4: Yeah, I remember Black Fridays, there would be people being trampled over getting into a store, getting to an item like gunfights over Tickle Me Elmos, you know, and then you started having stores barricade their doors and only allow a few people in at a time, you know, and then police being out there and stuff like that. So, you know, There's a definite change in Black Friday to Cyber Monday. Realistically, they're the same thing, right? But it has probably saved lives. Yeah, now they are. But it's probably saved lives taking those special deals and spreading them out and making them available online and stuff like that. Speaker 2: That certainly plays a big role, spreading out I'm the CEO of Cyber Monday, Black Friday. They're kind of muddled. And I wonder if the tariffs aren't playing somewhat of a role where I just call it 10 years ago and 15 years ago when the big flat screen TVs were half price, double the quality and half the price you've ever seen. That might be worth it for some folks to stand in line. And we're now with tariffs. The quality might have increased and the price might be okay, but tech on a tariff and it's not half price anymore. Speaker 3: Yeah, that and you know, I can't, you know, maybe it's because I'm older as well. But I can't remember the last time that I worried about something running out of stock and not being able to get it. Speaker 1: Right? Speaker 3: Because that was the big thing on Black Friday, Cyber Monday, you had to be there, you had to be at the store, you had to be online, or you might miss out and not get it. Now it's like, well, if I don't get the The item that Kevin sells, there'll be 10 other ones for the same price or better that I'll grab instead, you know, so you don't necessarily worry about missing out on a sale as much as he used to. Speaker 4: Very true. Speaker 3: So yeah, flattening out, growing, you know, and as, as it mentioned there in the, the summary in the beginning, You really have to get good at all the minutia now. You can't rely on a one-hit wonder or being able to magically get ranking because you gave away a bunch of product and got a bunch of reviews. Those little gray hat, black hat tactics, while some of them still work a little bit, Gone are the days where you can just blow up a product and not have to worry about optimizing your supply chain and maybe expanding into other marketplaces and other stores and things. You really have to run a real product business and focus on all the different aspects of it. All right, let's go ahead and jump on to the next story here. The importance of fast shipping on Amazon. So Isaac Gross shares Amazon brand analytics data showing that same day shipping converts 19% better than two day shipping, a meaningful lift that directly impacts purchases after the click. The insight highlights that while sellers focus heavily on bids, keywords, and creatives, delivery, speed, and inventory placement can be just as critical to conversion performance. For Amazon sellers, especially during peak and holiday periods, failing to qualify for same-day or one-day delivery can create a hidden conversion tax, even with strong PPC execution. The takeaway is clear, optimizing FBA inventory distribution to enable faster delivery is a powerful growth lever, not just a logistic detail. So plays right into what we were just talking about, you know, having a holistic view of your business and not only focusing on one aspect of your product and focusing on the entire supply chain essentially. Speaker 2: We definitely see this. We sell metal detectors and our main warehouse is in South Dakota, far away from any beaches where people like to use metal detectors. Typically, when we send our inventory to FBA, we always say we consider ourselves to have a super account because we've been on Amazon forever, almost a billion dollars in sales, all the things that make a great account and we cannot win on metal detectors and part of that is we can't force FBA. We haven't figured out a way to force FBA to overship to Texas and to Florida where the beaches exist. We have some competitors that are based down south. That are winning in that market. And we're just not outperforming like we normally would in a typical listing because of our location. We've investigated like going to a 3PL. 3PL costs are very, very high. I'm not speaking of our own 3PL. So if anybody needs 3PL work, we're not high up north, but the ones down south, we just, we can't figure out how to make that work yet. So we're just sucking hind teat on metal detectors right now. Speaker 3: Yeah, and that's all FBM shipments, right? Speaker 2: Yeah, they're FBMing it from down south in Texas and Florida to Texas and Florida, and we just can't win. Unknown Speaker: Win at the clip we're used to. Speaker 2: We'll sell some. Speaker 3: Do you do them FBA at all? Speaker 2: Yeah, so we do both, FBM and FBA, and we just can't force enough of it to get down south. And we're still selling enough, but we're used to outperforming our competitors on listings and we're just not outperforming right now. Speaker 3: Yeah, and interestingly, you know, looking at this graphic here, the the so the conversion rate went up by 19% for same day shipping. But interestingly, as well, even the click through rate goes up slightly, it's not a huge bump, like two day, shipping had 1.06% click through rate, one day had 1.09. So slight increase, but then same day had a 1.14% click rate. So it's not a huge but even the click through rate went up compared to the two day and one day shipping rate. Speaker 1: That's interesting because I usually am looking for like the same day if I need same day or overnight I need it fast. I look for those options. If I don't care, I don't care. But I'm usually looking for it on the search page, but maybe I'm different than the average consumer. Speaker 4: Yeah. I mean, I don't. I rarely need anything same day, but I don't look at that. And I was just thinking to myself, Does, is same day a factor in the click rate? Until Kevin said that. Speaker 3: Slightly. Yeah. It's about, uh, I calculated and it's about seven and a half percent increase from two day to same day for the click through rate. Speaker 4: Well, I mean, it makes sense. I mean, people want this to like the typical American consumers, like, Oh, I need X. Great. Somebody get it to me right now. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 3: You know, and it could be, you know, occasionally I don't do this very often, but if it's something that I do need really quickly or else I'm going to run to Home Depot or something and get it, I'll go on Amazon and I'll check the box that says, you know, same day delivery. Now I had a lot of that when I was near Tampa. Now that I'm near Greenville, not as much, but there's still some next day delivery anyways. So that could play a factor, I guess, because you're going to, if they turn that filter on, there's going to be a lot less competition that shows up. And so therefore your click-through rate is likely to go up. Speaker 2: It can't hurt you. That's what I would say. Speaker 4: Yeah, that's true. Speaker 2: And it really depends on the product. If it's some weird drill bit and you have to have it on Friday, First of all, it's probably not going to be available same day. But if it's supplements and I'm out and I think I need those supplements, And I can get it the same day. What's a couple bucks? Who cares? Speaker 4: Yeah. Speaker 3: Yeah. Or the most recent for me was a dog food. You know, you run out of dog food. And so I, for those, I usually jump on Instacart and have it delivered. But if we don't need it till the next day, then maybe I'll look on Amazon or something. But yeah, it's, it's definitely important. And that's where having enough inventory comes into play, you know, especially for your, your high volume products. You've got to have at least that 30 to 45 days worth of stock in there so that Amazon can distribute it around the country and then probably some stock in AWD as well so Amazon can ship it to whichever fulfillment center it thinks it's going to need it. And then you're going to be more likely to have that same day and one day shipping. Speaker 2: Todd, are you using AWD? Speaker 3: For some stuff, yes. It depends on the product, but yeah, I just created a shipment sending a pallet of stuff into AWD this morning. Speaker 2: We hate the cost of AWD. We just can't quite figure out how to stomach that yet, and so we don't. We start our own warehouse and then fulfill it. Someday. Amazon, I know, wanted it for a while, but now the price has gone up as per usual with Amazon. Speaker 3: It is a little too high. And the product I sent in today, Their case packs are too small. So I'm working with them to increase the quantity in the case pack because the more quantity you can put in a case pack, the more affordable AWD is since they're charging by the box rather than by the unit. So if you have a product and you can fit 200 units in a box, you know, it's a lot more Profitable or a lot cheaper, I should say, per unit than it is for something that has six in a box. Speaker 4: By the way, a little off topic here, but I was talking to someone at Amazon a couple of days ago, and he mentioned that one of the things that they're looking into, or his team is looking into doing, and he works on the FBA team, is making it so that, basically melding the B2C and B2B, where you can have the option to buy cases of products. So I thought that was pretty interesting because that could really lead to some significant increase in sales depending on the type of products you're selling. Speaker 2: We have an account rep at Amazon that is highly incented for the B2B Amazon business program. The big time manufacturers are coming in and asking for quotes for a thousand boxes of sandpaper, a thousand paint masks. It splashes out to a number of sellers that are involved in this. I don't know if it's beta, but we're in the program. It's nice to talk to someone at Amazon that is highly incented in helping you grow. It's been, it's been really good actually. Speaker 4: Yeah. It's like the old days. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 3: Yeah. I get those quotes every once in a while. Most of the times it's for like products that I don't even have in stock, which is interesting. But yeah, some of them are really big to the point, like, is this even real? I don't know. Are you fulfilling some of those big quotes like that? Speaker 2: We are, yeah. Never a thousand pieces. We've quoted a thousand pieces a number of times. We're skeptical, not of Amazon, but of the people requesting quotes if they're using us to find where the bottom is on a price and they're going back to their regular distributor and asking for a better price. For now, anyway, it feels like they can just ask for as many quotes as they want. Eventually, because there's a little hand-holding on these big, let's call it like a million-dollar order of paint masks or whatever. We'll get a call from the rep that says, here's the terms, blah, blah, blah, and then it doesn't go through. And the rep will say, yep, this is the best price, or that's a great price, and then it doesn't go through. So eventually, Amazon's going to get tired of taking those types of requests. Speaker 3: Do they inform you if they just didn't take any bid or if they accepted somebody else's bid? Speaker 2: They don't. Speaker 4: Amazon divulging information? Speaker 2: They don't. Speaker 3: That would be good to know because then you would at least know, was it a serious buyer and your price wasn't good enough? I mean, it's technically in Amazon's favor, right? Because that could encourage you to bring your price down next time more to try to win that. So you kind of create a pricing battle there. Speaker 2: All we've got are thank you and that's a good price. And then we've got that's not a good enough price too. Other than that, we don't know. Speaker 3: Okay, cool. So same day shipping, better than one day, better than two day. Speaker 1: But it's not really something you can even really control that much. Speaker 3: Just with volume of inventory and utilizing the Amazon splits can help a lot versus sending into a single location. You're still going to get your inventory split up, but it's just going to take a lot longer when you pay that fee to send to a single location. So you kind of got to weigh that as to what will be best depending on how many days of stock you have. All right, let's go ahead and jump on to our last story here. Speaker 4: Just so you know, Todd, I've got a hard stop in like eight minutes, seven minutes. Speaker 3: Okay, yeah, no worries. We'll make her quick. All right, so household debt hits record $18.6 trillion as delinquencies remain elevated. U.S. household debt climbed to a record $18.6 trillion with serious delinquencies rising to their highest quarterly increase since 2014, driven largely by young borrowers and missed student loan payments. While overall delinquency levels remain near pre-pandemic norms, Americans age 18 to 29 are following falling behind at double last year's rates, highlighting growing financial strain among younger consumers. We talked a little bit about this before we went live as well, that the economy kind of feels like it's balancing and it could go any way with everything that's going on from the medical insurance battle that's going on in Congress right now to people seemingly have used up all of their savings and prices have gone up due to inflation and tariffs. Um, so I guess real quick, uh, we'll just kind of get each of your guys's takes as to where you see the, um, the economy going and how that's going to affect Amazon sellers in the future. And, uh, we can start with you, Dana. Speaker 4: It's my answer is simple. It's all getting more expensive. So prepare to raise prices and, and make less money. Speaker 3: I hear you, definitely. Prices have gone up for sure on most of my products. Not all of them, but most of them I've seen some kind of price increase. Speaker 4: Yep. And, and since this is just about debt as a whole, like, you know, groceries have gotten like during COVID and after COVID, I think they went up like an average of 40% or something, at least where we are, but roughly our bill went up about 40%. So, you know, like it's no matter what, how we feel about things, things have gotten more expensive. A truck, a brand new truck is 20% more than it was just a few years ago, you know, five years ago. Used cars are way more expensive than they've ever been historically. So just things are more expensive. Yeah, but when it comes to the economy, you also the American culture is groomed to hold debt, particularly credit card debt. And we have all these commercials that say, hey, travel the world, use this anywhere, you know. And in these credit card companies get fat on the bills that are racked up by people. I was one of those people, you know, and Amazon actually We saved our financial future through Amazon, but we had to make a family policy like no more buying shit on credit cards because it isn't $10. It's $10 plus another $12 if you don't pay it off on time. And then it became like, well, okay, but if we paid off in 30 days, We don't get charged interest. No, there's daily interest, you know, and it's compounding. So the interest accrues interest on the interest. And so part of the problem is one, us, particularly Americans as consumers are groomed to be a buy, use and trash, whatever that thing is. Right. So there's that. So we have recurring purchases. And companies figured out, well, if we put in, um, you know, uh, engineered obsolescence on our products and they break more often, nobody's going to fix them anymore. They don't want to do that. So they'll just buy another one. Speaker 1: Right. Speaker 4: And, uh, so, you know, it there, I think we've gotten into a whole other subject, but I think that particularly younger consumers, They need education on how money actually works their precious few people actually understand how money really works when you get a loan from the bank. They don't just have that money sitting in the bank. They can take your $100 and loan out $900 on that $100. Stuff like that. Speaker 3: Absolutely. Speaker 4: Education and better responsibility will go a long ways into ensuring that the economy writes itself to some degree, but that's going to hurt people that sell trinkets. Speaker 2: I was ready to go to the mattresses with Dana on this, but I think he finally got there at the end. I don't think rising prices are the reason that we're 18.6 trillion in debt. We're in debt because of overspending. And so the question is, as spending needs to get cut, eventually the money, the credit card gets maxed, where does the spending get cut? And Dave Ramsey has this great quote that says, The only reason you should be in a restaurant is if it's your part-time job. If you're looking to get out of debt, stay out of restaurants. I think the new version of that is probably DoorDash and Uber Eats. To me, that's going to be an interesting one. To your point, Todd, with Instacart, it's more expensive to do it that way. But I don't think, in general, Amazon is not any cheaper than Target. It used to be always cheaper than Target and Walmart. That's not the case anymore. However, I think that's just a shift of, it's $20 at Walmart, it's $21 at Amazon, I'm just going to buy it on Amazon. survive this this debt crisis other than the fact if credit gets gets pinched as credit cards get maxed out, but the way that they're They're dealing with that now is the buy now, pay later. And so that's been fully vetted and almost on eBay, I see it's like one of the payment options now on eBay too is through Clarita, you can do buy now, pay later. And Amazon sure has an investment in one of these firms that are doing that too. So e-commerce is prepared. I don't know if DoorDash is ever gonna be on the buy now, pay later method. Speaker 4: It'd be try now pay later. That was terrible. I'm not paying for this. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 3: Yeah. That'd be a tough one, but it's a, I can see him doing it at some point, at least testing it out and see how it goes. But yeah, you're exactly right, Eric. It's, it's a, you gotta be able to say no to things when you're in debt like this. And, I've seen other articles that say people's savings have mostly been used up. And so now they're using credit card. It looks like the credit card is 1.23 trillion of that 18 trillion. So not a huge comparatively most of its mortgage debt. But Credit cards cost the most you're talking like 34% interest rate if you're carrying those that balance over month to month and that can add up and kill you real fast. Speaker 4: Yeah. Speaker 3: And so that's where we're going to see people focusing and buying more on the staples and the mandatory stuff that you need to buy. For the house and the family and maybe a decrease in the more luxury goods and things that you can kind of put off later and wait for that black friday deal next year and look i've done something i've done. Speaker 4: Actually, exactly this in the past. If you see your life savings decreasing as a result of trying to keep up with your bills, you need to make a drastic change because that is your financial future there. I got to jump, guys. Speaker 3: Definitely. All right, cool. Talk to you later, Daymond. Speaker 4: Bye, everyone. Speaker 3: See you. Evan, you want to wrap us up with some thoughts on the economy and how it affects you? Speaker 1: Economy is a fool's errand. It's one of those things that if you watch enough financial stuff, you'll always see the people who say, It's going to be worse than 2008. And they've been saying that for 10 years. And a lot of times they also are selling gold or crypto or some sort of alternative financial instrument. So it's almost impossible to tell because this coming recession I've been hearing about forever and maybe the debt is something that's going to knock people over. But you know, mortgage debt is higher, but you know, people's equity in homes is also higher too. So it's like, yeah, it's harder to get into houses, but you know, auto debt, well, there's also, you know, the value of the cars. So how much is underwater? So credit card debt is just basically completely underwater. Student loan debt is completely underwater. But a lot of these like relative to what they're backed up by, is it that much higher? I don't know. I guess smarter people than me are going to have to figure that one out. Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah. Again, the economy I think can go either way depending on potentially forces outside of any of our control for sure. And the feeling of the American people that can go a long ways towards pushing things over the edge or bringing things back into stability just by what the masses think is going to happen. You can kind of manifest that. And that happens a lot. So we'll have to see how it goes. But yeah, make sure you run your businesses solidly and you've got your inventory forecasted properly and things are ready to go because you just don't know what's going to happen. Speaker 1: Very true. All right. Speaker 3: Awesome, guys. Well, I appreciate you coming on the show. This has been a good one. This is our last one before Christmas. So the next two weeks we are off because they line up on Christmas and New Year's Day. So I'll see you all in a few weeks. Thanks, Todd. Speaker 2: Merry Christmas. Speaker 3: Merry Christmas. Have an awesome one. Unknown Speaker: 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.