Amazon News: AI Search Manipulation, Agentic Ads & CTR Power Plays

Amazon News: AI Search Manipulation, Agentic Ads & CTR Power Plays Unknown Speaker: Welcome, fellow entrepreneurs, to the Amazon Sellers 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: Hey, hey, hey, everybody. Welcome to another week of Amazon Seller News Live. We got Blair with us today from AMZ Prep for the first time. So welcome, Blair. Appreciate you joining us. And we got Chris McCabe here as well, who's just being really still down there. He's not wanting to make a lot of movement, but his video is locked up right before we went live, unfortunately. So hopefully he will join us here again. But I appreciate everybody out there streaming in and watching us live. We're gonna be going over some of the top news here. And we love getting your comments and feedback and bringing those into the show. So for sure, if you have questions related to the news or just anything Amazon in general, throw them in the chat and we will try our best to bring them into the show. But without further ado, let's go ahead and dive right into the first news article here. So here we go. And there I just heard Chris pop back in. Let's bring him in. And do we got Chris? No video yet, but hopefully he'll get that on. So let's read the first article here. Brands pay to manipulate ChatGPT recommendations Wall Street Journal finds. A Wall Street Journal investigation reported that companies are spending thousands on generative engine optimization tactics to influence how ChatGPT recommends products as referral traffic and conversions from AI tools grow quickly. This points to a greater reliance on AI-driven discovery where visibility is shaped by how algorithms interpret brand mentions, credibility signals, and distributed content rather than just traditional search rankings. So really cool, I thought on this, especially with another post that I have in the news article is Amazon is investing $50 billion potentially into chat GPT. So what do you think Blair on this news? Not really a surprise to me, but what do you think? Speaker 1: Yeah, I completely agree. It's not like how someone will break the rules. It's more about like how it's just going to change over time. I think the rules just of engagement change. We chat on the service side. You guys are the wizards of all things Amazon. In my logistics world, chat, Gronk, Claude, all of those have become like huge prevalent sources for us on like how we drive inbounds. And now we have a gentleman named Ari. He kind of runs our whole marketing team. There's now a whole strategy of how to rank inside of these from like an LLM perspective. So it's interesting. I would predict internally probably like 30% of our inbound business is probably going to come from like Chad or any of these LLMs over the next year, which is just huge. So Todd, I'm not surprised to be honest. And naturally, Google is just becoming like such a search platform in terms of everything from Google, like natural, I'm even going to chat. My wife was using chat to search up and I'm like, she was searching up, we have a baby shower happening and so my Amazon bill got racked up. She was going to chat to get recommendations on top and then reference link into the Amazon store and I was like, oh, we're in trouble. I was like, now that my wife's on it, that's usually an indicator of like, all right, now we're in. Now it's got total adoption. Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah. You know, my wife, uh, I've kind of put her on to using like Grok and perplexity and ChatGPT and stuff like that. So now we'll, we'll be having a conversation or she'll be looking up something on her phone and she'll be like, Hey, can you ask Grok this or ask ChatGPT this? Speaker 1: Yeah. I even noticed like now I watch what my wife does all the time from like a shopping patterns. Cause sometimes there's like marketing ads like that she'll click on and I'm like, Oh, like why'd you do? So now I watch her with like TikTok shop. I'm obsessed with the marketing behavior stuff, Todd. I think you are too. I'll watch how she scrolls through TikTok and chat or how she uses chat to be like, oh, what are your search behaviors? And I just kind of geek out with it. So I see her scroll through Instagram and see what actually catches her. Does she go to the checko page? I've geeked out on it over the years. So in summary, I'm not surprised here. I think it's, I think it was about time. I actually think it's just going to get crazier with like Todd, like Claude bought coming out and things like that too. Like it's changing so fast. It's hard to even keep up. Speaker 3: Yeah. It's you know, we get packages and stuff at the house and anytime that it's not an Amazon package, I kind of pay more attention and ask my wife like, Where did this come from? And she'd be like, oh, I got it from this place or that place. And I'm like, well, how did you find that? Instagram usually is how she found it. Like some influencer that she follows posted a video or a link or something like that. And so still a majority of her packages that she buys comes from Amazon. But more and more, I'm seeing outside of Amazon packages being delivered to the house. And for stuff that she's finding on Instagram, a lot of times it has to do with stuff related to our little girl. So she's seeing stuff for that or health-related stuff are kind of the two categories that I see that happening with her the most. Speaker 1: You know, I'm a bit of a psycho, Todd, because I do the same thing, but when it arrives, I look at the shipping label. Just naturally because of just my logistics wired brain. And so I'll look and I'll be like, what was their delivery promise? Who are they using for shipping? And then I'll also see where is it shipping from? And then depending on those, like we have like, I have all of our sales guys in one group. And so if it was like an international shipment or it took too long, or maybe it was from a carrier, I'm like taking a photo of like, hey, can you like, can you stand with the box? And then I'm going to take a photo and then we'll email the brand. Yeah, but it's it's a it's a funny way for us to do it and then I'm also going like oh like. She orders from like Aloe and then they're using some like new carrier that I haven't heard of. I'm like, oh, that's interesting. Why aren't you using, or I can know it's coming from like Amazon Multi-Channel Fulfillment or 3PL. It's so funny. I'm way too deep, Todd. I need to just enjoy the smaller things in life, but it's funny. Speaker 3: Yeah, no, I like that because I don't usually think that deep about it, but I do look at the label and see where it comes from. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 3: You know, especially if it's not an Amazon label just to see, Does it say that it came from the brand or does it say that it came from, you know, AMZ Prep or some other 3PL or something like that. So I'm always curious about that as well because I do always get asked, you know, what's a good 3PL or who should I use and things like that. You know, those kinds of questions come in and you know, it is really difficult to recommend a 3PL because they're, There's a lot of bad ones. There's some good ones. There's some good ones that become bad ones and bad ones that become good ones. And so it can be very difficult. And obviously, you're going to be biased. You are a 3PL. But in your opinion, since we're on the topic, what makes a good 3PL? Speaker 1: I think it's changed over the years, Todd. The 3PL landscape has gotten very competitive. A lot of new entries. It is a whole different world, Todd, than probably back in 2020, 2021. I think what we've seen a ton of is this hyper-specialization. This do-it-all is just not a good infrastructure. We're also seeing, Todd, we see a ton of brands that are actually segmenting D2C and Amazon. So they might actually have like hyper-specialized silos. And it's because like Amazon's kind of doing the same. They have multi-channel fulfillment, you have AWD, you have FBA, like they've almost styled their own logistics because there's efficiencies across it. So Todd, I think what we've seen is that they just need to be obsessed with the category or industry-specific, and that's been traditionally a huge win. Again, there's bad 3PLs, there's good... If you can sub-segment down to like, oh, there's a niche that they hyper-specialize in, that's usually a win, whether it's channel-specific or it's category. They're big in apparel or cosmetics. Sometimes that's a sweet spot. If it's Amazon, we're speaking to a brand that wanted seller-fulfilled primes and they're like, hey, we spoke to like 30 warehousing and we just grilled them on SFP metrics to know if they actually know their stuff. And you can start to weed out the noise immediately. So I think it's a bit of that, Todd, and I think it's a level of diligence of like, We encourage brands now to be like, hey, because of how noisy the category is, if you're speaking to warehousing, go visit them. Talk is cheap. The good thing about warehousing is you can't bluff it to some extent. You either have the warehouse or you don't, which is great. And sometimes seeing it on the ground floor, I don't know, people kind of, I think in the past time, people treated it like just a service provider. And they're like, oh man, actually, this is like 50% of my business is like held with these guys. They kind of have They kind of have you by the chain if like things go wrong. And so I think there's just been a lot more diligence that have happened in that category. Our biggest function is referrals now. So I think there's a lot less of like hard outbound or trying to win opportunities by just like going at it versus like it has to come from Todd saying he's great or Chris or whatever it is. So I think that's changing. And I think it's going to continue to evolve. I truly think, especially with robotics coming in and where Amazon MCF's going, like you saw the news with TikTok Shop. They're also now forced brands to use their own fulfillment services now. It's just getting crazy. So I think all the big boys are seeing the money in that business too. And so Amazon, TikTok, Walmart, they're all going to have some sort of force function to use their facilities just because they see the business. So I'm curious how that dynamic actually changes over the next few years of like, Do you actually have a warehouse for every channel that you sell on? Amazon, then TikTok, and then Walmart, and then does Shopify? They tried to build their own. Do they have that in the future? It's a rabbit hole, Todd. We can go there. Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. So, Chris, welcome back. Thank you. Glad to be back on. Speaker 2: You can hear me. Speaker 3: We can hear you. All right. Speaker 2: I had to reboot. I'm sorry about that. Speaker 3: Yeah, no, it happens. That's tech. But we kind of went down a rabbit hole here. So we started talking about, you know, ChatGPT being manipulated and search engine optimization. And then we got into how our wives are shopping and finding stuff on Instagram. And we look at the boxes when they come in to see where it came from. It was not an Amazon package, just to kind of get an idea on how that Traffic is coming in and then if that kind of translated into 3PLs and stuff like that. So curious on your thoughts, I guess we can circle back around to ChatGPT being manipulated. To me, this is reminiscent of, you know, back in the days of white text on a white background at the bottom of your website kind of thing for Google, right? I'm curious if you have any opinions on what this looks like and how it moves forward from here. Speaker 2: Did you talk about people referring to TikTok and whether or not TikTok will find a way to develop order fulfillment infrastructure? Did that come up at all? Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, Blair did mention that. Speaker 2: I've heard that this week a lot. Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a big one. The big scare with that was that you couldn't use MCF, but they either backtracked on that or corrected it in the email that they sent out because it was rather vague on that. It sounded like you couldn't, which I think would have been a death knell to their business if they would have done that. But yeah, what are you guys' thoughts on that overall for the future of TikTok shop? Speaker 2: I mean, I think TikTok isn't going to be a one-stop shop, no pun intended, for a while. I think they're still going to have to integrate with everything Amazon because Amazon is still the number one place people go to buy things and to search for product, right? Speaker 3: Yeah. Speaker 2: I mean, I know product search has changed and is going to keep changing. And eventually, nobody will be typing anything into a toolbar, right? AI will take over all of that. The ChatGPT manipulation was interesting just because it made me think of like, who's in charge of that? What are the guardrails? Is anyone watching it? Is anyone monitoring it? And a good parallel would be like, if you put, you know, Crazy, radical speech on Facebook. Would they delete it or would they say this is a free speech platform? So is it the same approach where like, oh, it gets reported? Like when I worked at Amazon, all kinds of crazy stuff that you can't sell was being listed, but they wouldn't take it down until it was reported. It wouldn't be caught on the way in. And they got better at it, but it still happens, you know? Speaker 1: You know, I think what, uh, so two new styles have almost come out of this whole new TikTok wave is like one, Almost every Omnichannel brand that we talk to, a lot of our brands aren't just Amazon now, surprisingly, from our name. Boy, that was a decision to make and now maybe Amazon's like 40% of our business in relativity. But all these new brands that come in, almost all of them have some level of TikTok presence. And so what we've also seen over time is that some are Some are trying to take their flag in the sand and be like, hey, we don't want to use TikTok shop and they want to do it themselves, which let's see how that plays them. And then the other ones is that we have a whole new silo, which is like TikTok shop prep, which I think is super interesting, which is like, oh, because like the same way like we replenish Amazon, like we're like a mini AWD. So they might just bulk store with us and then we'll replant Amazon. We're not seeing that for TikTok shop. So now that they're force functioning, we have like a drip feeding system into the TikTok shop facilities, and it was just like not a thing 12 months ago, which I think is super interesting. So I don't know. I think I get the methodology what TikTok shop wants to do, but to Chris's point, I think they're going to have to gear back on a little bit of the flexibility. I think they want that for control. I think that they want that because they'll be able to realize they see the profits of what like FBA can produce and I think they want to try to mimic that. I think it's just a stronger offering and also the amount of data that you get to collect by doing the fulfillment infrastructure is just huge. You're getting all the data on delivery metrics. You get to basically touch every home in the country that's going to be fulfilling, which is going to be huge over the next few years based off the size of how fast TikTok shop's growing. So I think they're going to be a little more flexible, but this whole idea that the 3PL also has to use TikTok shop labels and stuff like that, I think it will work for now, but I think they're going to get a little bit of noise, especially if some merchants It will be like Amazon where, to Chris's point, they'll kind of take everything, but we're going to have to start really peeling back. They're going to learn quickly. They don't want big and bulky, just like Amazon. They don't want the hazmat. There's going to be cold chain issues if they have a protein bar during the summer months. These are all things that Amazon learned over the years because someone arrived with a melted box and then the TikTok shop got hit. Who's liable? Is that the brand? Is that TikTok shop? Are they going to result that? Do they want hazmat and hairspray? I think they're going to be going through that teething pain. So I think they'll gear back on how hard they're going to be holding them accountable. And then also some brands, just because of the size, they get really good negotiated carrier rates. And so while TikTok Shop's competitive, these guys ship millions of orders. Like some of our carriers might be more competitive. Some of them won't be. So same with some brands. I think if the brand's big enough, they might just flex their muscle and be like, we don't want to use your carrier labels because that's like, we need to give FedEx as much volume as possible to get our total discount down. So I think the bigger the brand, the bigger the muscle that they'll be able to pull to. Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, control is probably the key thing there is what it is that email came down to is that they want more control over it. I don't really understand the you have to use our labels kind of thing. That didn't make a whole lot of sense because I can't imagine they're making much money, if any money off of the labels. You know, I doubt they're marking those up maybe a little bit. Maybe that's what they're trying to play there. Even Amazon doesn't require you to use their own labels. They give you lots of incentives to use their own labels, but they don't require it. So that one was a bit of a head scratcher for sure after the initial scare of not being able to use MCF. Speaker 1: I think they'll set parameters. So I think for now they want to do that. But to your point, Todd, I think just like how Amazon FBM did, it's like, hey, we can't control all of it. But the big play that like all the top 100 TikTok shops is the TikTok shop promise badge too. So it's going to be in this weird place where like, Okay, maybe they will allow you to, but you're just going to get de-indexed on all algorithms. You won't feel up into the feed, like all things they do to like almost like penalize FBM. And then maybe there'll be a place, hoping state of like same way that we do like Seller Fulfilled Prime, where it is an unbelievably rigorous process. We can get the prime badge. Maybe they'll have some sort of enabling to be like, You can use your own carriers, but the gold is going to be with the Shop Promise badge more than anything. If you can make sure that you have a guaranteed two-day, I think they're going to keep that to be like, maybe they can use your own carriers, Todd, but then you're not going to get the two-day eligibility, so you're going to cut your sales in half. It'll be like an FBM model and they'll make it so unsexy to almost force your hand to some extent is what I think will happen. Speaker 3: Yeah, that's what they'll have to do. Yeah, I'm curious Chris if you have seen any kind of Manipulation issues on Amazon itself with Rufus like has there been any Punishments that you've seen related to that at all hasn't come up hasn't come up All right Eventually somebody will try to game it and. Speaker 2: In a way that we haven't thought of yet, I guess. I mean, what are the kind of one or two top avenues where it might be gamed that you think people are keeping an eye out for? Because I haven't heard of anything like that where Where Amazon's accusing a seller of manipulating search algorithms. Speaker 3: Yeah, Rufus is going to be a little bit more difficult to game, I think, versus ChatGPT, because obviously Rufus is pulling in Amazon's own data, which hopefully they've already policed in some way. I could see more kind of like Q&A style stuffing, if you want to call it that, in the A plus content and text and things like that to try to get Rufus to pick up on things like that. One thing I noticed, and I don't know for sure if this is 100% accurate yet, but I've seen on a number of listings now where I'll scroll down and the A plus content will be shrunk up and cut off and there's like a more button to see the rest of it. And what I've noticed so far is that all the ones that have the A plus content collapsed, A lot of people have text in their A-plus content and the ones that are not collapsed have just images. I don't have a huge sample size on that yet, so I just recently noticed that and I need to do more discovery on that, but I wonder if that's an attempt at Amazon to kind of be like, okay, you're trying to game the system here a little bit and so they're collapsing the A-plus content or something visually. It's hard to say. Speaker 2: There's a long history of A-plus content related violations, but I haven't seen anything tied to this yet. Speaker 3: Okay. Speaker 1: Have you guys been seeing anything? Obviously, that whole new news with Claude Bot. Are you guys up to speed with everything happening there in this whole new bot model that they're building? Speaker 3: Are you talking about the MOLT book? Speaker 1: Yes. Yeah, it's a part of MOLT book. And so this whole like Claude bot where it's like new AI assistant that came out, you actually have to download it hard drive onto your MacBook. So it has access to everything. But it's like a very deep assistant in terms of it can run everything for you, meaning like it can go do your emails, it can run feeds, it can do uploads to YouTube, it can check through all your drives and then send Slack messages, and then they end up building... Unknown Speaker: Too much. Speaker 1: So then Multbook is like the Reddit, but it's only for the AIs, like all the Claude bots inside of it. So now they're producing their own. I just think it's cool because I wonder how that will end up shaping up. Is there going to be biases with AI towards certain catalogs? I also think even like chat running ads in the future, how will that influence it? Because there's a huge money in the advertising positions there, just like how they did with Google Ads. So I'm curious how these channels, how do they isolate it? And then how they have Fair advertising practices, because Chris, you mentioned like Mecca 2000s SEO where you could put the white text in the space and you could outrank everything. This is like two-cent Google top of search paid ads where you could just dominate it. So I'm curious how they control that level of regulation and also keep it fair advertising practices. And the ones that solve it will probably make a killing. Speaker 2: Well, Amazon invested $50 billion with OpenAI right last week. And I wondered, is that just because they're trying to corner product search basically forever? Is that what that is? To take over all retail product search? Speaker 1: Well, because Google Shopping never really came a thing, right? Like I know Google Shopping tried to really come out, this was like 2018, 2019 to become like the listings on Google and they thought that that was going to be, and it never really got the hit. So I'm wondering with chat and Amazon, if they get it there and create like the Google Shopping in the chat world and they do it well the first time, oh boy, it'll be unstoppable. Especially with like the TikToks coming, if they're influencing that over to Amazon directly, huge opportunity. 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. I'm pulling up this here. I wanted to share this. Speaker 1: This is fun, guys. You do this every week? Speaker 3: We do, yeah. Speaker 1: Awesome. I'm just going to keep tagging along. I'm learning a bunch of stuff from the vets here too, so this is fun. Speaker 3: Good, good. So this is the the AI traffic share, which I thought was interesting. And since Chris, you just mentioned about the Amazon investing in open AI, open AI is still dominant in the AI space, but they are shrinking relatively quickly. This is just a six month timeline. They went from about 80% down to what is that maybe around 60% 65% hugging face. Yeah, I don't know what hugging face is. I've never heard of that one. They're one of the small ones up in here somewhere. Speaker 1: Oh, it's Gemini. I thought the red was Hugging Face. I was like, who are these guys? Unknown Speaker: I thought they were taking a market share. Speaker 3: Yeah, no, no. Gemini is second, Grok is third, then DeepSeek and Claude, Perplexity. I'm surprised Perplexity is so small. I really like Perplexity a lot. But I don't think it's a big surprise that Amazon is throwing money at OpenAI since they're the biggest AI tool. And they're going to want a piece of that, you know, even if they're running their own Rufus systems, if they can hedge their bets with OpenAI as well and own a piece of that, you know, why not? $50 billion to Amazon is You know, not a ton of cash though. Speaker 1: You know what I also think is interesting is like now on the aimsieprep side, we're like, we're putting all of our chips to try to rank through each one of these LLM models. And what's interesting is like our marketing team is now testing their specific signals that each chat wants to see. So for example, chat has a really strong correlation with like our Trustpilot reviews. Clutch doesn't do anything. G2 doesn't do anything. But the second you do Trustpilot, it signals that we're the best. And if you ask on chat, now there's a correlation between that. So it's like each one of the LLMs also have their own playbook of how you almost like manipulate it. And so it's like your playbook, if you're a brand on Amazon, the playbook between the Gemini versus chat versus perplexity. Probably to be a little bit different, like Grok will probably index towards maybe like social references through X versus like a chat may not care at all. And so anyway, so I think it's cool because I think that is an entire off-channel strategy that will probably need to happen for a bit, like which one of these channels will like index how good you are on TikTok? Will they even influence that? The followers on Instagram, will that reference to chat? Like will that even index on how, if someone asks best toothbrush brand, are you the one that's going to be ranking? I think it's going to be interesting. I actually have a metric here that might be, I asked our head of marketing, I was like, what's the percentage? And so it's like chat is a, this is like search, how many times were indexed in each SEO piece? It was like chats around a thousand searches, perplexities 240, Gemini's 400, Copilot's 200. And 25% of our qualified leads come from one of these LLM now. This is from Ari, our head of marketing. Speaker 3: 25% of your leads come from an LLM? Speaker 1: 25% of our qualified. So if we get 1,000 leads and 20% of them are qualified, meaning they're okay to work with us, from those 200s, I call it, yeah, 50 to 100 of those might end up coming from, it's one of these, but chat is still, and from that 25, chat is taking up close to 70% of ours. And then perplexity, Gemini is number two, which is 400. Perplexity is 240. So out of 1,500, Chat takes up 75%, Gemini takes up another 20, and then Perplexity and Copilot are the other ones, and that's pretty much all we're seeing. Really cool though. Speaker 3: Very nice. Yeah, that's a pretty cool stat to know. Um, and I'm surprised that it's that high considering that, uh, you know, like e-commerce wise, um, LLMs are only like 0.15% of the e-commerce share. Um, but it makes sense that somebody would, if they're looking for a 3PL or in your case, Chris, someone to help them with account health, um, you're probably going to jump over and ask chat GPT. In your case, Chris, I know you like to talk about this. They're probably going to ChatGPT first and saying, hey, write me a letter for Amazon that I can use to fix this. And then that screws it up deeper. And then they're like, okay, help me out here a little bit more. I need someone who actually knows this stuff. Speaker 2: Well, ChatGPT is dated information, right? When you ask ChatGPT, it's giving you stuff from like two years ago or something? Speaker 3: Not anymore. I think that's changed. Most of these LLMs now are going out to the live internet for data a lot of the times, so it's much more up to date, but it's still reliant on what other people have posted. Speaker 2: People are posting templates and generic content, so if you're borrowing from somebody else's generic content, It's no different than being in a seller group, which people do all the time in post. Hey, does anyone have an appeal for blank? And somebody says, oh yeah, this is the one I used and it worked. You would know if that worked more than once out of a thousand times. Like that's the same concept. And anything generic is going to get rejected. Speaker 3: But that's what the LLMs are really great at right now is helping you to answer those kinds of questions. And what is a good 3PL? What is a good account health specialist? And things like that. The e-commerce side is still a work in progress. They've got to figure that out, but I think they'll get there. As I've mentioned in the past, I think with the e-commerce side, it needs to be more integrated with other things and more of like an easy flow. Like for example, with Gemini, I could do it very easy. With Google, if you're in Gmail and it pops up and says, hey, do you wanna order some more of your coffee filters? Cause you're probably already out or almost out. And it could say, you know, Walmart is a couple dollars cheaper right now than Amazon. You want us to put in an order for you or something like that, you know, or it's doing that work for you in the background. And yeah, last time you ordered from Amazon, but now it's cheaper directly on the brand's website or whatever the case may be. And where it's coming from becomes less important as, you know, is it coming from some workplace trustworthy, obviously is important, and can it get to me fast? And is it a reputable company that you're ordering from? Speaker 1: My wife historically is using TikTok for like product search now. So we have a baby shower happening. And so that is all like everything baby. She'll be like top five or like top sleeper for baby or top crib or top stroller. And she's searching that up on TikTok shop almost as like a Google search feed, which I thought was interesting. I'm seeing her adopt that a lot more for like high-level, top-of-the-funnel product search and then going to like chat afterwards to get like pinpoint recommendations on like why each one. We just did this for a damn really expensive stroller and this is my first one so I'm learning. Humbly, how expensive a little one is, but she came to TikTok, then it was chat, then we're going in person to the store. It's cool. So I think, what's your guys' take on this whole TikTok becoming the search engine then? And do you see that impacting how these brands do it versus Amazon? Speaker 3: A search engine? I don't think so. Discovery engine? Yes, 100%. That's what TikTok is, is a discovery engine. You know, same with Instagram. Instagram's a discovery engine. I mentioned at the top of the show, my wife is buying stuff that she finds on Instagram. You know, influencers recommend it or she sees it somehow and she's buying it and ordering it direct from the brand or whatever. So TikTok's the same thing. It's going to be a discovery engine. ChatGPT and Grok and Claude and all those are going to steal and Gemini, of course, are going to steal all of the search traffic. Speaker 2: Yeah. I don't have a wife, so I have to say something like, when I'm shopping on Instagram or TikTok, which doesn't happen all that much. Speaker 3: Yes. Speaker 2: I agree with you on discovery. Instagram and TikTok, I think, are still pretty much the same with, you know... Speaker 3: Very similar. Different age range. Speaker 2: Watching news videos, product experience videos, you know, demonstrations, right? But I think TikTok isn't quite taking over e-commerce just yet. I mean, maybe a corner of it, but I've been talking to some brands on Amazon who are acting like it's the panacea for all things that might not be going well on Amazon. And I'm sure that's a bit of a trendy thought right now. There'll be a comeback to earth moment where it's like, okay, well this is good for some things and not so good for other things. Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, like we mentioned, you know, Amazon has matured and we were talking about how there's less, you know, People promoting like start selling on Amazon and wholesale on Amazon, resale, that's died down. And I think most of that has shifted over to TikTok shop. So that's why you're seeing all that. Yeah. TikTok shop is become a millionaire or billionaire on TikTok shop in the next week kind of thing. You know, all those Lamborghini gurus are going to be all over the place for TikTok. So and, and I've, I've always, I've been a supporter of TikTok Shop. And even now, so more that now that it has, you know, a USA-based side ownership of it, I really hope it explodes and gives Amazon a run for its money. I would love to see that because for us sellers, the more competition, the more pressure back on Amazon, the better for us, you know, if they have to lower fees or do whatever to compete, right? Right now, they just, They're going to raise the fees, we're going to all complain, and they're going to be like, well, what are you going to do about it? Are you going to go somewhere else? I don't think so. Speaker 2: Right. Account suspensions, maybe suspend a few fewer sellers. Speaker 3: Yes. Speaker 2: Instead of discouraging them from selling. Speaker 1: We have a cosmetics brand. They probably do around like 500,000 orders monthly on Amazon, like decent sized cosmetics brand. They're a top 50 on TikTok shop and they do around 50,000 orders. So they're a top 50 player in the TikTok shop world, which is still $50,000 a month is huge. But in relativity to their Amazon store, now they've been in TikTok for only a year. Amazon, they've been there for a while, but still 10% of the business. But Todd, to your point, the noise It makes it sound like they're almost on a one-to-one basis point. So they're a big player in the TikTok world, and that's still only 10% of their Amazon sales. So it's a good stepping stone, especially with where it's going, but Chris, to your point, it's not the end-all, be-all to solve Amazon. Speaker 3: Yeah, definitely not. All right, let's go ahead and jump onto our next news article here real quick. All right, so Amazon Ads open beta for MCP server to connect AI agents with campaign tools. Amazon Ads has launched a beta for a new model context protocol server that connects advertiser software and APIs to agentic AI systems, acting as a translation layer that helps automate campaign setup, optimization, and reporting tasks. So I know none of us on here are purely in the PPC space. I definitely do PPC, but I think you guys probably don't do as much in the worlds that you're in. But this is really cool because you're gonna be able to set up advertising campaigns, get reports, make changes to campaigns and everything Just by using plain English in an LLM and then the LLM communicates with Amazon to make those changes and updates for you in the Amazon ads. So I think it's, assuming it works the way it's advertised, it's gonna be really impressive for more layman kind of people to be able to create ad campaigns and understand what is happening in their ad campaigns and how they can improve them. Speaker 1: What does this mean for like software providers that do Amazon advertising and so forth, Todd? Speaker 3: I don't think it necessarily changes anything other than they're going to have to integrate with this system as well and give people the ability to communicate from their software to Amazon ads. You know, a lot of these softwares basically make a better interface, a visual interface to understand your ads and make bulk updates easier. Um, I don't think that's necessarily going to change anytime soon until this, you know, gets proven and make sure it's really good. Um, but you could eventually see a day where, you know, just the, your average person who understands ads can communicate to the LLM what you want done. And then the LLM, goes and does all the technical details for you. So in the long run, it definitely could hurt PPC companies. And that is why I think you've seen kind of a shift away from being a PPC only company to being a PPC company plus, you know, something else plus a bunch of other things along with that. Speaker 1: We are seeing that Todd. It's like the agencies want to become almost like full service. Like we even see them getting a lot deeper into like the logistics world where they're now managing like inventory, forecasting, replenishments. They might be like, sometimes they're like, we're the back end logistics and they're still managing all the flow. It's, they went from like ads only to like, oh, we need to like plug ourselves into the engine of the overall operating system, which I think is a net good thing for brands. Like now they're just, Where tech and this AI piece is going, it's like, well, you need a team. Depending on the average brand, do you really need a dedicated team just to do that now or do you need them doing all this gunky admin stuff that's maybe not the sexy part of the business but has to get done? I like to call it eating the broccoli. Speaker 3: Yeah, and since Amazon has matured, brands are looking more for someone who can do all of it, not just, okay, great, you're really good at PPC, but does my PPC suck because my graphics and copy are no good? Who's working on that? Yeah, sure, I'm selling a ton of product, but I'm out of stock all the time because my logistics sucks. Amazon's taking three weeks to receive my products or whatever the case may be. You've got to have, and I hate to use this word because I think it's overused, but you've got to have a holistic view of it, right? Everything all encompassing if you're going to be able to scale and grow on Amazon nowadays that it's matured. Speaker 1: Interesting take. 100% agree. 100% agree. Speaker 3: And I think we may have lost Chris again. Chris, he's still with us? Speaker 1: You guys are talking to a world that I'm not in, Todd, so I need you guys to tap in on this AI ad stuff. You're taking me out of the waters, Todd. Speaker 3: Yeah, no, that's fine. And that's what's cool about this and with AI. We've got to be careful. Yeah, Chris, we don't hear you and you're locked up. But what's cool about this is that AI is taking us to a world where you don't need to know all of it. If you know it, it's helpful. But really, when it comes to Amazon now, there's no single person who can know all of it perfectly, right? You've got to have a team of specialists. I have a PPC specialist. I have a graphic specialist that I work with. I do a lot of copy and stuff myself because I have fun with that kind of stuff. But you've got to have those different specialists to do everything on Amazon. But AI agents and such are going to become a lot of those specialists over time. And that's going to be the key thing, whether you can trust them or not. You know, a lot of people are very leery of AI and I am as well, even though I love tech, my background is in computer programming and computer networking, so I geek out on this stuff. But a lot of people are very worried about it, rightfully so, I think, because if it goes wrong and your ChatGPT is running your ads, Who are you gonna hold accountable if all of a sudden it blows $50,000 on ads and you're like, you're fired? No, you're not gonna fire a ChatGPT agent. What is it gonna carry? You have less responsibility around that if it goes wrong. Speaker 1: And you think image design too, Todd? Is that coming to a place that like, I see a lot of it coming out with Amazon that like, it's getting pretty damn good. Do you think the age of like product photography and product video is nearing its end? Speaker 3: Yeah, I think graphic designers, they're going to have to use AI. And Chris, I see you back in here, but we don't see your video or your audio. My graphic designer is utilizing NanoBanana, ChatGPT to make mock-ups. So for example, I told them what I wanted for one of these products main images. I'm like, I want this redone. I want some water droplets on it. I want some dirt around the bottom to make it look rugged. And he threw it into the ChatGPT or he might have used NanoBanana and it came back with a result and I'm like, he gave me four different options. I'm like, this one is awesome. And he's like, okay, sounds good. Now I need to fix the text and everything on it because all the text was like garbled and incorrect on the box and stuff like that, you know, cause it's still really bad with that. It gave us the mock-up and I'm like, yeah, that's perfect. I want that. Now go ahead and make that correctly. Speaker 1: For mocking stuff up, it's awesome. Speaker 3: For just generating a bunch of ideas and then the graphic designer can make that because That's always been what's been hard, right, is getting what is up here and giving that to the graphic person and having them understand what I'm actually trying to say. Speaker 1: Ideating it more than anything, the MVP, the beating it up 10 times to get where, yeah, that makes it, it just accelerates what an individual can do. Speaker 3: Yeah, because otherwise in the past, you know, I would explain all this to the graphic designer They would come back and be like, no, that's not, I didn't mean this. I meant this and not that, not that, not that, this and this and this. And then they would go back, change it and come back. Okay. This is right, but this is still wrong. And so AI really helps with that iteration really fast, you know, cause you don't have to take hours to make a new mock-up. You take minutes to make, you know, five or 10 mock-ups and then decide which one you want to iterate off of. Speaker 1: So cool. Speaker 3: Yeah, so that's that's where graphic design really is. And AI is just gonna make, it's gonna, it's not gonna, it's gonna replace people, but it's going to replace people with other people who use AI. Speaker 1: We'll replace the bottom, but then if you just upscale to become leveraged with the AI, I think that's what we're seeing too. Now we can hire more strategic client success managers, account managers that are able to utilize it. They can manage maybe more merchants because they have all their data go to one spot. They can personalize emails. They can just do more. It's funny. It's like different categories, but same motion that we're running. Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a really cool time we're in and you're going to have to be careful too. If you follow Gary Vaynerchuk at all, he mentioned about how his prediction for this year is that there's going to be a video that comes out that's AI generated, but it's going to look really real and it's going to come from a politician or someone really well known and it's going to set the world on fire. And then it's going to come out that the video was fake. And so you're going to see a big uproar in that area when it comes to ChatGPT and all these AI video generation, image generation, because you're not going to know what's real anymore. AI has gotten to the point where it's really hard to tell what's real and what's AI generated. Speaker 1: Crazy. The last thing I was going to ask you guys about was the whatnot. Now, that was the other thing Gary Vaynerchuk is super bullish on right now, which is this whole live shopping. Kind of goes into TikTok shop, but there's this huge wave for whatnot and this social live commerce. Is that conversations your world's having talks about? How does that fit into the overall e-commerce strategy? What's your take? Speaker 3: Yeah, I think live shopping, that's kind of what what tick tock shop is, does really good. And that is the discoverer discoverability area of e commerce, whether that's ever going to be as big as Amazon, it's hard to say, but it's growing a lot. And a lot more people are doing that. And and what's, I think what brands really like about it What I've learned is that they don't have to, I don't have to trust the brand. I just have to trust the influencer on TikTok that is giving me that information. And that's a kind of a double-edged sword because I think a lot of these influencers and more and more people are realizing this, that a lot of these influencers are just promoting these products because they're getting paid to. Or they're getting affiliate referrals and stuff like that. So there could become a big fallout in that, you know, honest affiliates versus those just kind of trying to make money. But that's kind of the benefit of TikTok shop is that, okay, if you trust me and I promote your product on Amazon or on TikTok shop, You're just assuming that I did my research and that that company is decent and so you're using my trust to buy that product. So that's where that live shopping is really beneficial to brands as long as that influencer can maintain that trust. And let's see, there we got Chris back in there on his phone. Sorry about that. No, that's all right. I don't know, technology, there's always something. Speaker 2: Well, next time we do this, I'll just do my phone. My laptop seems to be the issue. Speaker 1: You look good on your phone, Chris. Speaker 2: Thank you. Speaker 3: Yeah, it looks fine. The video and audio sounds decent. Speaker 2: Yeah, I heard everything you were saying that whole time. You were talking about agentic trust for the most part. Speaker 3: Yeah. Speaker 2: I think that's like a 2027-2028 thing. So I'm curious what the rest of this year looks like for I know how to use it. Can I trust the results? Or do you end up wasting time fact-checking, double-checking things until you trust it more? Speaker 3: That is something that I've caught myself doing. I'll be working on something, trying to automate a task with AI, and it's just not working, so I'm going over and over, or trying to figure out something with AI, and then I'll stop after a while and be like, I'm just going to go do it. I could have had this done by now. So you definitely run into that sometimes. You got to be careful that you're not trying to AI things just for the sake of doing them in AI. But some things it's really good at, like summarizing these news articles, throwing that into ChatGPT with a good prompt. And getting a summary is a lot better use of my time than me reading everything and then typing a summary myself for every single article that I'm putting in the newsletter. Some of these big ones, like these ones we're covering in the show, I try to read over and make sure I understand everything. But I might have 16, 20 different news articles in the newsletter. So I'm not doing that for every single one. So that, in my opinion, is a really good use of ChatGPT and saving me that time. Speaker 2: Summarizing articles. I'm still having tons of problem with people summarizing their emails, where there's so much back and forth with me not knowing what they're talking about. It goes back to a phone call or back to somebody writing an email. So maybe you don't have that. But that's becoming an issue where I ask a few questions which I need in order to start working on a suspension case or a reinstatement. The answer I get back isn't relevant to what I asked. Speaker 3: I actually had that issue this morning. Not necessarily an issue, but I noticed it this morning because there's a hockey game that I was looking at going with the local rotary group that I'm a part of here in Greer, South Carolina. And because of the snow event, it got moved to a new date. And so they're like, okay, this is the new date. Let us know if you can come. And Google like pre-filled my reply with, Yeah, put me down for two tickets, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, no, I can't make it. That date's like deleted all of that. I said, no, that date doesn't work for me. So unfortunately, I can't make it. But yeah, AI is trying to, you know, decide what you're going to or predict what you're going to reply. So that's probably what you're running into, Chris. They're just clicking on whatever Gemini is saying and sending it back to you without fully reading it. Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. Speaker 3: You got to be careful of that stuff for sure. Speaker 2: But with appeals, the details mean everything. People used to think the format meant everything. Like I had the right information, but I didn't write a plan of action using the right format. Now it's the opposite. The format of a plan of action is irrelevant at this point. It's the facts and the details that they use to reinstate you that matters. And if it's murky, this is the biggest problem with ChatGPT appeals. If it's obvious rewrite AI did for you and meaning is lost, then the person reading it stops reading. Yeah, because they're like, well, this person can't answer a question. So they're letting AI answer for them, which means they don't know the answer, which means they're borrowing an answer, which means it's not an authentic answer. Speaker 3: So, yeah, and it's, you know, the AIs try to accomplish what you're asking in one way or another. And so they'll, they'll fill it with all kinds of fluff and junk and stuff. For example, in our newsletter, what I have to tell ChatGPT to not get crazy stuff is, I'm like, give me a one-sentence summary, skimmable, explain what happened, no EM dashes, no fluff, no industry jargon. I put all those little triggers in there to try to get it to just Give me what I'm asking for, not a bunch of filler stuff to pack in a bunch of information that isn't necessary. Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. Speaker 3: Yeah. So AI is awesome in some ways, not in other ways, and it's a tool like anything else. You got to use it properly and make sure you're actually reading what you're getting back. For example, I've seen People just copy and paste stuff that they get back from ChatGPT and at the beginning of their reply to you will be like, this is a really good reply to Todd. Okay, you obviously copied that from ChatGPT or whatever and same thing for doing a reply to an Amazon case or something. If you've got that prompt at the beginning, like you just copied it from ChatGPT, that's not going to go over too well with the agent that's reading it on the other side. Speaker 2: No, because they're looking for reasons to skip it and to mark it as done because they get credit for that investigation without having to invest the time into it. So if they're measured on hourly metrics, which we all know they are, that's a freebie. So do you want to be their freebie? Probably not, if it's important. Speaker 3: That makes me think of an article, I don't know how long ago now it was, six months or more ago, how there was all of a sudden just a ton of Amazon listings popping up on Amazon. And like the bullets in the description and stuff would have like ChatGPT prompt information in it and stuff. So people were just using the API to like load new listings into Amazon directly from ChatGPT without ever filtering the results or looking at it or anything. So, you know, garbage in, kind of garbage out stuff. That you got to be careful of with AI. People are trying to use it just to bypass doing the work. And it's good for saving you time, but you got to double check your results. Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure. Speaker 3: All right, guys, we're at the top of the hour. So I think we'll go ahead and wrap it up there. Appreciate everybody out there watching, and we'll see you guys next Thursday, 12 p.m. Eastern. And Chris, Blair, thanks so much for coming on the show. Speaker 1: Todd, thanks for hosting. You guys are a wealth of knowledge. It was fun listening to you guys, hearing from the experts themselves, but thanks for having me on. You guys have checked out some of my stuff in the past, so it's a full-circle moment to be a part of it too, so I appreciate you guys. Speaker 3: Yeah, appreciate it as well. Speaker 2: Thank you. Speaker 3: You guys have an awesome one. Speaker 1: Take care. Speaker 2: Bye. 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.