Amazon News: Amazon’s New Portal, AI SEO Hacks & Rising Scam Alerts

Amazon News: Amazon’s New Portal, AI SEO Hacks & Rising Scam Alerts 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 2: Hello, hello, hello, everybody. Welcome to another Friday for Amazon Seller News. Got Neil from PPC Ninja and Danon from Ecom Triage today. Appreciate you guys joining. Speaker 3: Always a pleasure, buddy. Speaker 1: Thanks for having me. Speaker 2: It should be a good one today. We've got some fun news to talk about with a new service provider portal that may cause some issues for service providers out there, some artificial intelligence CEO that we're going to talk about, some scams we're going to talk about, and of course, tariffs, tariffs, tariffs going on all over the place. So stay tuned for all of that. If you're out there watching, leave your comments and we will definitely try to bring them into the show as much as we can, answer any questions you have, stuff like that. So feel free to interact as much as you would like. But with that, let's go ahead and just dive into the first part of the news here. There we go. So we've got an Amazon's new solution provider portal. Starting April 10th, Amazon service providers and account managers must register on the new solution provider portal to retain access to client seller central accounts. Failure to register means losing access, creating significant disruptions, especially for smaller providers managing multiple accounts. Adding to the challenge, names containing Amazon, AMZ, or Prime potentially could be blocked from registration because they're trademarked terms from Amazon. Sellers and service providers need to act fast, complete the necessary migration steps, and prepare for potential hurdles. In this new system, so definitely big changes for service providers and probably for sellers as well, because almost all of us use some kind of service provider that is going to be affected by this. So you're going to have to rework how they're getting access to your account. Now, Damon, before we went live, you mentioned you already went through the registration. So if you want to tell us a little bit about how that went. Speaker 3: Yeah, so it's just a whole bunch of steps and you have to provide them information. You have to sign three documents if I remember correctly. My wife actually did probably 70% of it and then I did the last bit, but it took her, I'd say combined, it's probably An hour's worth of work maybe it's hard for me to gauge that because I wasn't doing the bulk of it but I probably spent 20 minutes getting the rest of the data and signing the documents and stuff like that it. Overall it was fairly painless. A lot a lot more painless. Excuse me, a lot more painless than I would expect coming from Amazon dropping something like this, you know. So it seems like they actually thought this out. And so here's what I'm not sure of. Some companies like myself use a unique email for each client so that there's no There's there's no overlap of information or anything like that. Yeah, so I I did this through econ triage But does that then cascade down to every email that I've done for my clients? I would wager not. And so I think I will probably have a problem despite having gone through the process. And I have not been approved yet, but I'd guess that I'm gonna have a problem, a serious problem coming up soon here. Speaker 2: Yeah, you would hope that they would approve your domain name, you know, so anything at ecomtriage.com Would be approved if they approve your account yeah, maybe so and But I don't I don't actually know I've got the s SPP page up right now. Speaker 3: Oh, interesting. So you, yeah, Todd, yeah, you're on it there. So you were saying that it sent you to the seller partner API, which is, yeah, this, this is clearly a part of that. But in order to become an approved seller partner, I believe it's a completely different process than this. I think this is like, Probably a much lighter version would be my guess because to my knowledge, this does not give me access to SPAPI. Speaker 2: Yeah. No, for some reason that's just developed inside of the selling partner API, which is a little, little strange, but I guess they're probably trying to merge the service providers and the solution providers into one portal, I guess would be what they're trying to do. Speaker 1: Yeah, that's exactly what I think. It's probably like a giant database consolidation and saying, okay, all service providers, whether you are SaaS or I'm part of the Amazon external economy that is not actually selling products, but selling services. We're all going to register in this place and we're just going to track everyone over here versus having multiple databases. So that's kind of, that makes sense for pushing everyone that way. What I find kind of interesting is that now's the time that they're going to go ahead and do this. I mean, service providers on Amazon have been around forever. And I look at this similar to registering an Amazon account, right? A selling account where it's like sellers have to go through these hoops, jump through these hoops. And you know, it does take an hour and you have to provide all that. You have to, you know, provide your first born as collateral to get on the platform and jump through all the hoops. And now they're looking at it going, okay, well, in the email, they're specifically citing Safety concerns for Amazon sellers, right? So that means when I look at this or like when I read that email, it's like, okay, some Amazon sellers are probably getting scammed by service providers and they're saying, okay, it's the Wild West. We're going to, you know, there's regulatory concerns here. We're going to make everyone register and be able to hold someone accountable, right? Because it's probably all about accountability. Someone got scammed from some unique scam that we have no idea about because we're on the up and up service provider side of things. But that's what I see when I read this email. Speaker 3: Yeah and you know the other thing is I actually support that because I would. Think of it as like maybe fiver right where everyone is registered on fiver and if you get scammed by someone you can go to fiver or alibaba for instance you say hey look. These guys didn't do what we agreed upon. Here's my evidence. Cool, you got trade assurance. Here's your refund, right? Or whatever it is. I think this is a good thing, right? Will it disrupt us? Yes, it will. But guess what? Amazon's been disrupting sellers and service providers for ages. This is just the next one. I can't remember who I was talking to. I think I was on a podcast. I was on a podcast and he asked me, what do you think is going to be the thing for 2025 to 2026? I basically told them, look, you evolve with the future or you die in the past. And it's always been that way. And I am a shining example of that with my private label. I didn't evolve with the future. I knew it was coming. I was there when it happened, and I was there when it passed me by. And my private label is dead because I didn't evolve. This is just going to be that for service providers. I think it will cause problems, but ultimately, I think it's a good thing. Speaker 1: When you brought up talking about those scams and the deliverables, I think that's a major one. I know so many sellers that have had I have negative experiences with service providers where it's like, I just paid you, you know, we'll say $2,500 for a full image stack and I got hot garbage. Like what's my recourse here? And I actually know, I have very close friends where that happened to and they just received like a whole bunch of AI images that they could have made themselves. And they were out 2,500 bucks and they followed up with the agency and then they just ghosted them, right? And it's like, well, So as soon as you said that, that's like the light bulb clicked on for me right there. This could definitely be a source reason as to why this happened. Now, it'll be interesting to see how Amazon delegates or how Amazon will enforce this, right? Because like from the PPC side of things, for my industry, it's like, I hired you to maintain my ads and do a good job. And it's like, well, I'm only as good as your conversion rate. So yes, I was working in the account, I was doing exactly what you told me to do, but the results didn't happen. Not because of me, but because of, we'll say external market factors, you know, your offer, those kinds of things. I was working on the account, but we didn't get the results we wanted. How does that get enforced? Right? Because then it's like, I'm still doing the work, but I'm not getting the results that we wanted. Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, it's, to me too, it kind of, you would think it opens up Amazon a little bit to lawsuits and stuff if one of the providers in their network then scams someone. You know, it brings some legal issues on Amazon, I would think. Speaker 3: Yeah, well, that's a good point, Todd. That makes me wonder, Is there gonna be a database, a public database of everyone here? Like, are we all going to be part, are we gonna go from, you know, 300 solution providers on the, what's the page? You said it earlier, Neil. It's the page that you can go to basically shop approved providers. Speaker 2: Yeah, the service provider network. Speaker 3: Is that what it's actually? Okay, fine. Yeah, I thought it had another name. But are we going to now go from 300 people listed there to like 30,000 because there's so many of us that just, even me as an individual, I have access to people's accounts because I've just helped them. Does that mean that me as Danan Coleman needs to get approved on SPP? I don't know. I don't know what to expect, to be honest. Speaker 2: I think so, yes. I mean, if you're doing any kind of service work for someone, like if you're managing someone's account or something like that, even if you're only doing it for one person, technically, you would have to register and be approved to continue doing that. Otherwise, you're going to risk getting that access shut down. Speaker 1: And so one more thing, like an interesting topic is, so like within on the Amazon seller side, accounts get suspended, accounts get banned, like that kind of thing happens. And like, once that happens, That's exactly what happened, right? It happens all the time. And so then, like, once you get banned, you're on a blacklist. And if you try to create another Amazon account, Amazon says, no, no, no, no, you can't do that, right? Like, you're shut down. And so now, for the service providers, that can also be something that happens where, like, during the process, I'm sure they wanted everything about you, right? Like, I haven't gone through the process. I'm not going to have to go through the process because I'm in I'm just at the executive level, but not the owner. So I'm not responsible for filling in all that paperwork. But I'm sure they want, you know, all of copy of your passport, driver's license, you know, banking information, all that kind of stuff to be like, OK, we're going to we're going to be able to trace you. I'm here to talk to you about how to get flagged. We have a blacklist that we can now enforce. And like I remember probably back in like 2015 or 2016, Helium 10 came out with the selling course and Kevin King had a blacklist going and it was just like providers not to, or suppliers not to do it. And there was no kind of like widely accepted list going. And so it was like, okay, well here's an actual list of, you know, I think all in all, that's also positive for the sellers, but at the same time, how do they get appealed if you do somehow end up on that list as well? Speaker 3: Right. So then if we take this a step further, are they going to make Amazon sellers pay providers through a whole new monetary platform and then hold. Speaker 1: With a 15% referral fee. Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly. And then raise fees every year. Speaker 2: Yeah, I wouldn't put it past them. Let's hope not. I wouldn't put it past them, that's for sure. But, you know, you raise a yearly fee to maintain your list. Speaker 1: The yearly fee to maintain a status on the list, right? Saying, okay, you're a registered service provider. Here's your yearly fee, just like an Amazon account. Speaker 2: Yeah. For example, let's take, I think his name is Ed Rosenberg. Is that how you say his last name? Speaker 3: Yeah. Speaker 2: He would probably be on the black list, right? For sure. Speaker 3: You would think so. Speaker 2: How's that going to affect his business? Because if he can't get registered in there, even though he is providing legitimate services for a lot of people, to Amazon, he crossed the line. To a lot of people, he didn't cross the line. He was doing what needed to get done to fix Amazon's mistakes. But that's going to majorly affect his business potentially. Speaker 1: Yeah, but blacklist in the future service provider fees going to Amazon in the future. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: All in all, I think it's a good thing, right? I do think it's a good thing. It's kind of bringing some regulatory into the space where it kind of has been the Wild West, where if you get ripped off, you're kind of left with your hands out and what do you do? Speaker 2: Yeah. Unknown Speaker: I would agree. Speaker 3: I just hope that they don't decide to, well, you know what, we're profiting on the seller side, let's profit on the agency side as well. And I wouldn't put it past them to do that. Speaker 1: That seems like an easy one. Speaker 3: For them. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Speaker 2: Yep. For sure. All right. Well, let's go ahead and move on to our next article here and talk a little bit about AI. I have not dug into this tool a lot. I'm not necessarily endorsing this tool, although Neil, you said that you have talked with the developer and everything like that already. I don't know how great this tool is, but what I really want to dive into is just being able to use AI for things like this. This is a AI-powered Amazon listing backend optimization guide. So this guide explains how to optimize the backend of Amazon listings to improve indexing and search visibility using AI-powered tools. It emphasizes the importance of downloading category files, conducting keyword research, and scraping data for additional insights to refine product listings. By following a structured approach, including gathering product URLs, leveraging chat GPT for optimization, and uploading enhanced backend data, sellers can maximize SEO performance. The guide also encourages sellers to test and provide feedback to help develop an automation tool for bulk optimization. From reading this essentially this is a chat GPT Bot that you can upload all of your information into it and the goal is for it to generate you a Upload file to update your listings with all of the information entered in By the AI system, which to me could be extremely helpful, assuming that it gets it correct, especially with filling in all those extra backend fields. Everybody can fill in the title and the bullets and description, but there's a million other fields in there as well that most people don't fill out. That filling those out potentially could help your product rank and get more visibility. Speaker 3: I think that that's awesome because there's so many fields that you have no idea what they are, what they mean or anything like that. I would use it. I've heard of AMZ Optimize. I've never heard whether it's good or bad, but I'd certainly try it. What's the cost? Speaker 2: Right now it's free because it's in beta essentially. Yeah. Speaker 1: Free is always the best price, especially when we're talking about being able to test things. So few things about this, like the bulk, um, like the bulk uploads for products, um, you know, the, the backend ones that you upload there, they are incredibly tricky. Right. And like, I've gone through those and I'd say that Amazon's training on how to use these, It's like anything else. It's subpar, right? I remember when I was learning how to use bulk sheets, I was writing nasty messages to the Amazon YouTube channel because I was like, you guys are skipping over the most important parts of the training. And so a lot of sellers aren't familiar with all of this information that needs to get filled in. And so I think anytime we can actually fill in If you want to get more information, feed more information into the AI to help it better understand what our products is down to the most micro level possible, that's a good thing. And if someone has developed a tool to make that easier and has actually gone through and mastered, you know, bulk uploads and making it easier for everyone, I mean, that seems like a pretty good service to offer. Speaker 3: Yeah. Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. The question with AI is always, will it get it correct? And what incorrect information is it going to put in there? The example I like to give is when I asked ChatGPT one time to give me the highest elevation in every state. And it came back with elevations, but sometimes we had only 48 states. Another time we had 54 states. So it's kind of all over the map. It doesn't always get the information correct. Speaker 1: So back when I was a seller, I remember I uploaded one of these bulk sheets. I was trying to fill in additional information. So I personally struggled with this in the past. And when I uploaded mine, the bulk upload went through without any errors. And I had unknowingly changed my product type. Which meant that my product was no longer searchable on Amazon, even though it was there. So the only way you could find my product is if you had the ASIN and you were directly typing in it. It disappeared from all search results because it was classified in the wrong category. And it took me about two weeks to figure this out. And so building off of what you said, Todd, is, you know, these AIs, they get it wrong. You know, we catch GPT lying to us all the time, like just making stuff up, even when it's in reasoning mode. And so I think there is a level of review that needs to be required before you use a tool like this, because the AI does just want to give an answer, even if it's not the correct answer. And, you know, the implications on this, like if you don't know, like for me personally, I didn't know what I was doing. I was just being like, okay, I'm optimizing my listing as much as I possibly can. I'm filling in all this backend information. And I had inadvertently changed my product type, which actually hurt my listing more than what I, if I had actually done nothing. So I think that like making sure that there is a review processor or just having a backup Like hitting the reset button if something does go a little squarely or sideways and you have unintended results and you don't know what you actually did is probably a good thing. But like having a tool like this is a great step. Speaker 3: Yeah, I think necessary for probably most people. Speaker 1: I was on Pasha's podcast, I think last week, and we had great conversations about AI and he's definitely one of those guys that is embracing it and understands that, like you said, Dan, and it's important to embrace it or get left behind. Speaker 2: Yeah, I use it every single day for, you know, optimization of listings and writing app scripts to manipulate data in Google Sheets, things like that. So it's Extremely helpful, but you do have to double check the data that it's giving me. So that's, you know, one worry of a tool like this is that people are just going to use it and upload the data. And then like happened to you, Neil, they changed their category accidentally and they no longer exist because, you know, the AI doesn't necessarily know that it shouldn't do that. It's just trying to optimize you the best way it knows how. Speaker 3: Yeah, well, I think with any AI tool today, you still, no matter what, you need that human intervention. You've got to cross-check the work of it, right? It's not just, it's not the answer. You know what I mean? You have to go and look. I think it's a great base to getting started and helping you put together Pretty much most of what you need, but these days, I don't know if you guys feel this way, but I've had quite a few people create content for me or a list or something like that. And like you used AI for this, didn't you? There's just, I don't even, I can't even put my finger on it yet, but there are subtle hints to me that it's just purely AI. And I know that they spent 34 seconds creating this rather than actually looking at it. By all means, I tell my executive assistant, leverage AI. Leverage it, make your job easier, but don't trust it. It's like trust but verify, right? And the verification step, it's quality control. Every company needs that and you need that with AI. You have to quality control it. Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure. Do you guys have any favorite AI tools that you use frequently? Speaker 3: I mean, I use ChatGPT almost exclusively. Um, I like perplexity. I, I think that it does a better job of content creation. Um, and I've been using Gemini a little bit more, but not for, um, not for language based requests and stuff like that. Mostly inside of my Google Atmosphere you know what and then actually as a this is a kind of a weird plug but anyone that needs a note taker I use fathom video. I've used Fireflies, I've used Zooms, I've used a couple of other ones. Fathom takes the cake by a long way for me in its simplicity and just giving you the data. So if anyone's interested in that, I actually have a 30-day premium thing and I pay for premium. I think it's totally worth it. I probably go to Fathom to reference my meetings with clients as much as or more than I go to ChatGPT in a day. Yeah, fathom.video. Speaker 2: 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 3: Yeah. It's incredible. Incredible note taker. Speaker 1: I was using Firefly AI and I believe Google just forced everyone in the Google business suite to adopt to Gemini in that aspect. So I started using the Gemini note taker for a lot of my meetings and I'm actually finding pretty good results. And so it was good enough that I canceled my Firefly AI subscription. And I'm just using Gemini now. I find it gives a good enough overview that I can get exactly what I need out of it. I take notes. I do. I have the AI and I take notes at the same time when I'm in my client meetings. And then in terms of like the AIs that we're using within the agency. So Monday is what we're using to help do a lot of our We have AI streamlined automation processes. And then GPT, like we've built out, we have a repository of GPTs that we've built, right? And it's just, you can do all kinds of things. So we have TOS, listing compliant titles. Because Amazon just changed the way that they were enforcing titles. We have for finding negatives within product listings. So we download all the search terms, we upload them, we punch in the listing, and it'll spit out phrase negations. So we can just cut off anything that's irrelevant at a product level and make sure that we're just cleaning, keeping all that clean. But it would be Gemini and GPT and Modair, probably the big ones that we're using within the Within the agency for us. Unknown Speaker: Yeah. Speaker 2: Okay. Nice. Speaker 3: What about you, Todd? I see you are paying for Gemini Advance. Speaker 2: Yeah. I have started using grok a lot more than anything. Um, I don't know. It, it does great work when it comes to writing app scripts and coding and stuff like that. And now with the new, uh, deep think and deep search that they have seemed to be pretty impressive for finding data and stuff like that. But I still jump over to chat GPT sometimes. For some writing things, it seems to be a little bit better for that. But yeah, I've played with Gemini as well. And you can see I got a bookmark right here for Claude over in the corner. So I use that as well. They all have kind of different strengths and downsides. It all depends, but they're all advancing quite fast. Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, just When I first used Claude, it was pretty bad. And I say that in relation to other AIs. When Claude first came out, AI was, at least for us general consumers, it was revolutionary. So it's still good, but the results that I got were far worse than what I got in GPT. But i think that you look at anything everybody almost all tools are implementing a i even my crm. Which which is a high level through parsimony. When I'm creating workflows, and I'm no genius at this, I'm literally bumbling my way through this, it gives me suggestions. Do you want to do this or that? And I go, well, what is it? And they go, well, how about a one-day pause right here before you send this next thing? I was like, oh my God, I was looking for that. And I think that technology in general It's just going to get to the point where we go, I need to do this. This is what I want it to do. And you just tell the tool, the tool goes, cool, this is what you need. Click yes. If that's what, if I understood you correctly. And so all of these help pages and help files and stuff like that, it's all going to go into a simple system where you ask an LLM what to do. And not only does it give you the answer and then ensure that it's got the right answer, but then you're going to be able to click a button to implement. And so you'll save yourself time. Like I just, I don't, I can't even tell you how much time I spend trying to figure stuff out. You know, like Stripe, for instance. Unknown Speaker: God, I hate Stripe. Speaker 1: So I just want to build off something that you just said there. So you kind of started about how with these AI tools, they need oversight. Right. Human oversight. And I think that's kind of what a lot of people are starting to really recognize is that AI is coming and it's going to be the people that can wield it and use it will be the ones that are actually controlling it. When I do lots of sales calls and people ask me about the software for a service and they say, hey, how do you stack up against all of these other PPC softwares? The number one question we get asked is, hey, do you have AI built into your software? We say no. We don't have AI because we found that like AIs can be just a black box. And we talked about how sometimes it gets it wrong. And we found that Sometimes you spend more time on doing what it did than actually going forward as well, right? Because it does make those mistakes. And so that human level of human oversight is extremely important. And then just kind of having transparency around how it got there, right? So like those deep think models, and be like, this is the steps I went through, you can verify all of this and make sure that it all adds up. is super important as well. Right now, when we're starting to get into Apps Scripts, like what Todd has up on the screen here, color me lost. I'll plug it in and I'll just cross my fingers and hope it works. Speaker 2: Yes. And that's the key with writing code. Is to phrase the the statement correctly and explain what you want correctly so that I have a computer programming. Background so I understand like if then logic and so when you're writing a statement for what you want done with code, you want to think in like if this then that if this then that and kind of explain it in that way to the AI so it gets it right. Speaker 3: Show me your prompt on this, because that's actually a fairly large bit of JavaScript, right? Speaker 2: Let's see what I wrote here. So I pasted in the whole function, but. So I need to update this app script to also include on the new restock any SKU that do not have any units in the AWD sheet columns. And then I listed all the columns and also do not have any units in the seller board sheet in these columns. And then I pasted the function. So kind of like an if then and specifically telling it which columns I want to look at, because if you don't Give it enough information. It will just make assumptions. You know, like if I didn't tell it the columns I wanted to look at, it would just pick random columns. Speaker 3: Yeah. Speaker 2: Not ask you. It's not, they're not smart enough a lot of times to ask you questions. Even if you say, do you have any questions before you do it? Anything? It's like, nope, I'm good. And it just spits out code and makes assumptions. So you gotta, Be specific when you ask it to write code. Speaker 3: Yeah, this I would not be able to produce this. Even with what you just said, I wouldn't be able to produce this. Speaker 2: Yeah, it's you know, it's. It's not as hard as it looks, and maybe I'm biased, I guess, because I do have the coding background, so it's easier to me. Speaker 3: You are biased. Speaker 2: If I had to, I could read through the code and understand what it's doing, right? Speaker 3: Yeah. Speaker 2: So more advanced stuff, yes, it'd probably be hard for you, but if you had some basic data that you needed to have manipulated, you could write A couple paragraphs of exactly what you wanted, hit enter, and it would give you code on what you needed. You know, you'd probably want to attach a copy of the file that you're processing so that it knows what the headers are and everything else. Speaker 3: Yeah. See, that's, that's, I don't think you can do that today. So I do everything in Google, right? And so I want to be able to just, paste the link to it and say, Hey, call him this, call him that. Yeah. I mean, I don't see why we don't have that right now. Speaker 1: I'm sure it's in the works. I'm sure it's in the works. Speaker 3: I'm sure that Google is saying, nah, they can use Gemini Pro for that and pay for it. Speaker 1: One of the very cool Apps Scripts. Speaker 2: Sorry, go ahead, Neil. Speaker 1: Oh, no, I was just going to say one of the very cool Apps Scripts that we built within PPC Ninja, Ritu built it. So, you know, I'm just like you, Dan. Apps Script, no go. But Ritu loves it. And so she built like a tiny app script that lives in Chrome. And, you know, it's part of the AI thing on Rufus. And what it does is on the Amazon listings now, you can ask Rufus questions, right? What does this product do? Speaker 2: Blah, blah, blah. Speaker 1: And she just wrote an app script that says, I want you to ask Rufus 20 questions. And then we're going to download and scrape all of that data, put it into a Google Sheet, and then we can analyze it and figure out what the AI is thinking your PDP actually is, right? Speaker 3: I tell you, man, Ritu is a genius. She is so smart with that stuff. And like, you'd never know. She's so soft spoken. She's super sweet. But up here, she's calculating everything. She is awesome. Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, she really does move mountains when it comes to like, I like to think that I like that I can operate at eye level and think things through. And then she comes up with these things that I'm like, Ritu, like, when did you come up with that? She'll be like, oh, I couldn't fall asleep. So I did this at like three in the morning. Speaker 2: Right. Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, that's awesome. So I have to ask then, is that script going to become available publicly for those of us? Speaker 1: She's been doing a lot of AI webinars and masterclasses and I know that, I believe that one's come up quite a bit inside those masterclasses. So, I mean, if you want to see it, you got to go check it out. Find some of the videos or I bet you, you know, if you send her an email, she might just send it right to you. Speaker 3: Yeah, cool. You know, speaking of that, I was just talking to my buddy, I don't know if you know him, Toma Rabinovich, yesterday, because I've got the spreadsheet of all of the e-com events going on around the world. And I've got the group and he's like, dude, you need to also do just like these one-off webinars and stuff like that. I'm like, you know what? You're right. I need to do that. So Ritu, if you're listening, although Neil, you can tell her, any events you're doing, let me know. I'm going to start building a spreadsheet of events, like outside of big events. I know she's been doing that for probably two years now almost, but I lose track of what's going on and who's doing what and where it's going to be and when and all that stuff. You could spend your whole life on webinars and trainings, but I just lose track of what's going on and what I'm interested in. I miss it. Speaker 2: That's a never-ending battle for being someone who likes to take in knowledge because you can never learn it all. It can be a never-ending race to try to learn things and all the new stuff that's coming out. Sometimes you just got to resound yourself to knowing that you're never going to know. Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly. Initially, I was trying to keep track of every AI tool that came out. And when it got to like, you know, there's a hundred new tools to say like, screw this. And then I fully stopped. Everything. I'm like, okay, I'm just going to use ChatGPT. It works for what I do. I use AI at a very low level, higher level than people that don't use it and much lower level to people that are building businesses around it. But it has been, I feel like I'm missing out. I'm sure that there are You know what would be cool, Todd and Neil, and actually we should get Ritu on this, is to do like a business optimization AI tools thing. Like this is what you use for this, this is what you use for that. That would be kind of cool. Speaker 1: Yeah, it would be fun. We built another cool one. Actually, I probably won't talk about this one in the public. We can talk about it offline. Speaker 3: Dang it. Now, of course, mystery sandwich, buddy. Now we have to know. Speaker 1: Yeah, we can talk about it offline. It's a cool one, though, for on the backside of business things. Speaker 3: Sweet. Speaker 2: Sounds good. Well, yeah, an AI episode would definitely be fun, so we might have to set that up in the near future. Speaker 3: For sure. Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure. All right, let's go ahead and jump on to our next story here. This one I thought was pretty interesting. This is from Amazon themselves. Amazon warns of rising fake customer service scams on social media. Amazon has reported a 33% increase in customer service impersonation scams on social media since December. Scammers monitor customer complaints in comments and respond using fake accounts, attempting to direct customers to external links or collect personal information. Amazon reminds sellers and customers that official Amazon representatives will never ask for private messages, external links, or sensitive details on social media. To stay protected, always use Amazon's official website, app, or verified social accounts for support. Now, I have not seen any of these scams myself regarding Amazon, but I have seen a ton of these scams lately regarding my Facebook pages, like people pretending to be Facebook support and trying to get me to click on links and stuff. Speaker 3: Oh, really? I've not seen any of that. I've got a few Facebook pages. Speaker 2: I've been getting a ton of messages like every day like a new message from and they'll have a name. The name of the person that's messaging me will be like Meta Support is like their name that it comes up and they've got a Facebook badge as their logo and everything or their picture and stuff. So it looks relatively official if you don't know better. Speaker 1: And I can see it being up by 33% because, you know, we were, we were literally just talking about it. So, I mean, there's AI for good and then there's AI for bad, right? And now they're able to deploy these AI bots at scale to try and, to try and do this, right? They can write the app script to say, okay, we're going to create a thousand Facebook accounts an hour. We're going to have all these email addresses and then we're just going to do this at scale through, um, And I think that's why we're seeing such a rise of this kind of scamming, because before it was a lot harder to deploy at scale. But now that we have these AI bots, I think I saw something where it's like, please correct me if I'm wrong, it's like 70% of internet traffic is now bots. Speaker 2: I wouldn't doubt it, I guess, but that seems high. Speaker 1: I heard it somewhere. I can't verify it. I think I saw it on Reddit or something like that. Take it with a grain of salt, but I would imagine that at least 50% of the internet traffic is probably all bots now. You know, when you have that many bots kicking around, whether they're AI or whatever, internet scrapers, it could definitely be not out of the realm of possible that this is just AI tools getting deployed at scale by people with not so great intentions versus, you know, we're seeing the side of the AI world where it's all great intentions, right? We're helping people and these people are just saying, OK, I'm going to use this to extract as much money as possible. Speaker 3: I don't enjoy that we have those types of people. I mean, you could apply yourself in such a better way to help. It just doesn't make sense to me, but I applied myself to help people, so. Speaker 2: Look at that. Here they're talking about, look closely at messages claiming to be from an Amazon driver. Speaker 3: Oh, wow. Speaker 2: Or pretending to be Amazon delivery drivers in emails, fake order scams. Wow, there's a lot going on. Membership renewal scams. I'm sure there's seller support scams in here as well. I mean, trying to get access to seller accounts and stuff like that. Speaker 3: That's got to be targeted new sellers because any seasoned seller knows there's no way they'd be that helpful. Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a good point. Very good point. Whoops. Speaker 1: So I just Googled it and it says that 50% of Internet traffic comes from non-human sources. And then it says bad bots in particular now comprise of nearly one third of all traffic. Speaker 3: Whoa. Speaker 2: Okay. Speaker 1: And I mean, even as an Amazon customer, like I buy on Amazon, you know, several times a week, I'll say, and I'm still getting those phishing emails where it's like, dear valued Amazon customer, here's a, redeem a gift card, right? Enter your email, click this link, redeem a gift card. And it's like, that's all getting deployed at scale too. And I'm wondering, you know, that's definitely going to be baked in there as well. Speaker 2: The spam filters are not very good at catching this stuff. I was mentioning the Facebook messages. How could Facebook not pick up that that is an obvious scam? It's obvious to me as soon as I look at it that it's some scammer trying to mess with me, but they don't send it to spam. They send it to the inbox. Gmail does the same a lot of times. The craziest messages sometimes we'll get through. How did you not pick up that that is obviously a scam? One thing you want to look at when you get an email from someone is just look at the domain name that it's coming from. Make sure it's coming from at amazon.com. But you still have to be careful because that can be spoofed, as it's called, and they can fake what that says in different ways. You have to be careful with that as well. Myself, if I ever get an email that I'm not sure about, I'm never clicking on the links. I'm always opening up the website directly and then navigating to wherever I need to to reply to it or whatever, just because it's so easy to fake that kind of stuff. Speaker 3: One of the things I'll do is I'll just hover my mouse over the link and at the bottom left of your browser, if you're looking inside your browser, it basically always gives you a preview of what the link is. And you can tell a lot of times right then and there. And what I'll do is if I don't see that, if that looks suspicious to me, I'll do a search on the web for what is this domain. And then if I get back a whole bunch of like fraud websites, then I know, okay, don't go to that domain. Speaker 2: Yep. Yeah. Yeah. You got to check the link and the where it's going because like this URL right at the top here, right? Trustworthyshopping.aboutamazon.com. Somebody could register, you know, askamazon.com. And now you think you're on an Amazon page when you're actually on some third-party site that looks like Amazon and that you're about to log into. Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, honestly, even this link, I'd be suspicious of it. Speaker 2: Yes. Speaker 3: Because it doesn't say trustworthyshopping.amazon.com. Speaker 2: Yep, yep. And what they'll do a lot of times is they'll register a domain. So let's say they register the domain, you know, Helpful.com or something, right? And then they'll set up Amazon.help.com or something. And you'll click on it and you'll see, oh, Amazon.com, but it's actually Amazon.help.com or something like that. And so you really have to be careful. Speaker 1: I think in Gmail, I get emails from Amazon when I'm talking with their reps and stuff like that. I'm pretty sure their emails come through with a blue checkmark as well. They have the verified emails as well in the Gmail. Speaker 2: Verified emails. In Gmail, when you get an email from Amazon, they have a blue checkmark? Speaker 1: Yeah, I've seen that before. I've definitely seen that before. We've seen some pretty interesting ones come through the agency too. Speaker 2: And yeah, I don't see any blue checkmark in my Google account. So maybe that's some plugin or something you guys have installed on your server. Speaker 1: I can't search Amazon.com inside my inbox. It's absolutely a nightmare. Speaker 2: Well, the main thing is just to watch out for scams, whether you're a buyer or a seller. They're coming for you. You're going to get tons of stuff all the time. You just got to be aware of that stuff out there and never trust anything you receive in a Facebook message or an email or anything like that. You never know. Yeah, and once they have access you're they're probably gonna lock you out real quickly. Oh, yeah All right, so let's bring up the last one here this one I don't have a summary on because we just added it here last minute But Trump has added an additional 10% tariff on top of the 10% that was already on there and And that went into effect March 3rd, I believe it was, a few days ago. And he did just delay the 25% tariffs on Mexico and Canada again. So those are not going to an effect yet. But if you've got products that are coming from China, you're gonna be hurting a little bit with the 20% tariff going on there. Speaker 1: It's an interesting time, right? With these, the 10% tariffs, like they're saying, they're like just focusing on the economic news. They're saying inflation is starting to take up again. I was speaking with some of my US-based clients and they were just saying, you know, that they're in the supplement space and they're saying, hey, our cost of production is going up. Our cost of the raw materials is going up and they're producing inside the US. And so, You know, part of this 10% tariff is to level the playing field for American sellers versus Chinese sellers. And when you're seeing inflationary on both sides, it's almost like a net zero, right? Where it's like a lose, lose, lose. And the only person that's really going to benefit from this would be the actual government because they're getting an extra 10%, right? Speaker 3: It's like hiring lawyers. Speaker 1: Exactly, right? You're mitigating or litigating absolutely nothing here. Yeah. It'll be interesting to see because I have quite a few American based clients and they manufacture in the United States and they are really hopeful that this will help them dramatically just by leveling the playing field. So everyone else's prices are going up and they're hoping that they'll be able to stay the same. And then it's a level playing field. Really interesting to see how this will play out over a long enough period of time. In the interim, in the short term, it's going to be terrible, right? And I don't think that there's any way around that. But over a long enough period of time, if this sticks, who knows, right? Speaker 2: Yeah. And, you know, it really comes down to the long run, like you said, and what happens over the long run. Like, for example, if let's say these 20% tariffs on China stay on, But in the long run, he is able to decrease income taxes and corporate taxes by 20, 30, 40 percent. And you have a net decrease in taxes. It could be extremely beneficial in the long run, but it's going to take time for that kind of stuff to happen. Speaker 3: For us to determine if it is worth it. Speaker 2: Yes, for sure. The key is going to be what happens next, right? You can't just slap tariffs on and then I expect prices to come down because that's typically not how it's going to work. The retaliatory tariffs that he keeps talking about I think are a good thing. If the United States just implements the policy that whatever your tariff is on our stuff, we're going to put the same tariff on your stuff, that could have over time an overall lowering effect on the total tariffs that the world sees, you know, and so that could have a lowering of price effect over time. But all of it, unfortunately, is just going to take time. And in the interim, you're probably going to see higher prices on things. Speaker 3: Yep. Speaker 1: And one one thing that's super interesting to kind of talk about is just kind of like the economics on the Chinese side, like we're looking at it being a US is throwing a 10% tariff on all products coming from China. And that's fine. But how China responds, they could do, and Trump specifically called this out, he said, hey, don't devalue the yuan 10% and offset this tariff, right? Because then China can fully do that where they're saying, okay, we're just going to drop our currency by 10%. We're going to manipulate our currency, lower it, make it the same price so it's still attractive for these American importers to continue buying from us. Everything's the exact same price. And the party just goes on and this does nothing. And then the U.S. government actually gets that 10 percent, which is, you know, ideally what Trump wants. But at the same time, it's not making it more competitive for American businesses trying to sell to American consumers. Right. Speaker 2: Yeah, there's only so much of that you can do before you really start hurting your economy. You know, if you're artificially lowering the value of your currency, well, that hurts your citizens as well because their purchasing power of anything that comes from overseas is going to be decreased as well. Speaker 3: Yep. Speaker 2: But yeah, that is definitely a game that China likes to play. In the U.S., we do similar things as well. I don't think, too, the drastic effect that China does with their manipulation of their currency, but we do similar stuff as well. Speaker 1: And the government subsidizes the Chinese factories as well, right, with their exports. They give an export subsidy to all these factories that are exporting to the United States, right? They want those goods going overseas. And the government's willing to, you know, chip in, we'll say. And who knows, maybe the government will start chipping in again here too. That could be a larger portion and they don't devalue it. You know, the party keeps going as is. So it'll be interesting to see. You know, immediate, there is going to be pain, right? And it'll, prices will start to rise depending upon sellers reordering frequency, right? Depending upon your inventory management skills, you know, do you have Six months worth of inventory sitting stateside and at 3PL sitting here versus are you shipping from China every single month, right? Speaker 3: Right. Speaker 1: That'll decide how quickly the prices on Amazon start to rise because One of the other things a client was saying, you know, like if these Chinese products start to rise in price and I'm an American producer, well, that also gives me the ability to just raise my price because, right? Not necessarily because I have to, but because it's a free market and, you know, I want to be 15% higher price than these Chinese products is a differentiating and a quality kind of thing, brand positioning. And so they might just continue to raise their prices as well. So who knows where this will go or how this will end. Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. It's going to be interesting to watch. It's been a heck of a ride for what, 40 some odd days so far. I think about the fastest any administration has ever moved before. So we're only 40 days in and it feels like we're four years in already. So definitely going to be interesting to see where it goes and how this all shakes out. You're going to have tons of people. You know, freaking out and talking about the world ending, but the world's not going to end. It's going to keep going on. We just got to wait to see what the end results are. I'm hoping and praying that things turn out the way he's looking at because if he can decrease income taxes and eliminate a lot of the federal government and decrease costs and things like that, the net result It could be extremely beneficial bringing manufacturing back to the U.S. and stuff, but there's a lot of it in there. We got to wait and see, and hopefully it works out the way he's trying to make it. Speaker 3: I hope so too. And if the world does end, none of us will remember. Speaker 2: That is true. That is true. Definitely. But all right, guys, we are up to the hour here. So this has been a lot of fun. I appreciate you guys coming on. Everybody out there watching. Hope you enjoyed. And every Friday we'll be here. So we'll see you next Friday. Speaker 3: Bye, everyone. Speaker 1: See you, guys. 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 2: 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.