Amazon News: Buyer Breakdown, Fee Backlash & AI Search Shake-Up

Amazon News: Buyer Breakdown, Fee Backlash & AI Search Shake-Up 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 episode of Amazon Seller News Live. Appreciate everybody out there joining us today. I've got my friend Neil Robson from PPC Ninja on today again. So Neil, appreciate you joining me. Speaker 1: Thanks for having me on again. I feel like I'm becoming a regular on this show. Speaker 2: Yes, absolutely. That's a good thing. We were talking before the show here. We've got some extremes going on. I'm down here in Florida and it is getting hot down here and you're up in Canada, right? Speaker 1: Yeah, up in Canada and snowfall warning. It's been snowing for almost 48 hours. We got about two inches, which is crazy considering it's April in four days. Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure. It's like Wisconsin where I grew up. You pretty much can get snow into May sometimes when you're that far north, so you just never know this time of year, March especially. Speaker 1: Well, Wisconsin gets down into those frigid cold temperatures. I only know that because I watch the Green Bay Packers play every once in a while. And I know that Lambeau Field gets pretty cold in the wintertime. So it's very similar, but I mean, pretty close to the border too, right? Speaker 2: Yep. Yep, for sure. Yeah, I definitely do not miss winters up there for sure, but not sure about the Florida summers. It gets a little hot down here. Speaker 1: It's not for everyone, that's for sure. Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure. But it looks like we've got some people streaming in, which is awesome. So if you are watching live, feel free to throw your comments or questions in the comments there and we'll bring them into show, talk about them, answer them, whatever the case may be. Without further ado, let's go ahead and dive into the first news article here. So Amazon's 99% repeat rate and female shopper dominance raise growth questions. So numerator data reveals that 75% of Amazon shoppers are women, which I would not have guessed that it would be that high. And the platform boasts an extraordinary 99% repeat purchase rate, which basically means they bought more than once. Far above the e-commerce average of 28 to 30%. Baby boomers make up the largest shopper group, but show below average purchase likelihood, while male shoppers and several minority demographics remain under engaged. Amazon's growth potential now hinges on reaching these under-representative groups, particularly as it faces rising competition from platforms like Temu and TikTok Shop. With new initiatives like Amazon Haul and Alexa Plus underway, the retailer is working to stay ahead while continuing to trim costs and refine its strategy. And I will add to that, push their costs on to the sellers as well, as we all know. Speaker 1: We'll get into that in a minute. You know, when I read the stat that women comprise of 75% of Amazon shoppers, I chuckled on the inside. So my wife and I, we share an Amazon account and it's registered to her name. And so technically all of my purchases And I'm wondering how many other households are actually set up like that. Like, if you were to look at my personal Amazon account, like the demograph would just be all over the place, you know, like it's looking at women's clothing, it's looking at barbecue stuff. And so it's getting a very hard read on us because we share that Amazon account. So I kind of chuckled when I saw that 75%. And I wonder, I would imagine that there's a lot of And this leads into the second point of that return purchase rate, right? We share an Amazon account because we only want to pay for one Prime membership a year. And it's like, we're just reducing our costs. And when you already pay, I can't even remember what it is. I think it's like 120, 150 bucks a year for Prime. When you pay that money, it's like, okay, well, I just get the free two day shipping. I don't have to think about it. And it's very, very easy, right? So sharing accounts makes a lot of sense. And then with that two day shipping and the free shipping, like, of course, you're going to have that insanely high repeat purchase rate. That's why Amazon charge it like, they get the best of both worlds, right? They get a charge, the prime membership to the customers. And I mean, you do get a lot with that. But then they also charge the seller the fulfillment fee. And so they're and the referral fee, right? So it's like they're double ending on or maybe even triple ending, I don't know. But they're really taking advantage of this situation from both sides. Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, that's a really good point. I didn't think about that. But yeah, you're definitely right. I think a lot of people probably share their Amazon account in the family for sure. My wife and I, we have separate accounts, but my account is a business account and she's added as a user. So we share our Prime membership in that way. So we have a separate account that we order on. But most people I don't think are going to be doing that. They're just going to be sharing one login and Ordering under the same account for sure. So that's a really good point. Speaker 1: Yep. Like we have communal Kindle, we have communal audio books, right? And it's like we get our own shared library and then having one prime account, multiple or like prime video account, multiple user logins, all that kind of thing. Now, the interesting thing is the underrepresented demographs, right? Like how are they, like, I'd be interested to know how they can try and penetrate that market. As a marketer, it's like, well, how do you go about doing that, right? Trying to get after the black African consumers and the Latino, the Asians, like how do you incentivize them to get on the platform if they're not already there? Speaker 2: Yeah, it says black or African American consumers represent 13% of Amazon shoppers. So I don't know off the top of my head what the current demographic is in the United States. Do you know what percentage? Speaker 1: As a Canadian, I do not know. Speaker 2: Let me look it up real quick here. Let's check out Grok. Current demographics makeup of the USA I Didn't spell it right so hopefully I can figure out my misspelling. I Think it's somewhere around 20% or so, but I could be wrong But yeah, how exactly you you target them? That's I mean, I don't know that's I You've got obviously certain channels and things like that, that you could target like BET or something like that. But that differentiator I think is decreased quite a bit because people don't necessarily watch network television anymore that much. Most people are on Netflix and stuff like that. And so that's going to make it a little harder to target that way. Speaker 1: Yeah, and you know, like Prime Video is trying to get into live TV as well, right? And so like, maybe if they can crack into live TV, they could really start bringing people over and make it a much more attractive offer for that Prime membership. And then it's like, once you have Prime, That repeat purchase rate it's just so easy. Speaker 2: So I've got the stats here. So, white non Hispanic makes up about 59% Hispanic makes up about 20%, and Hispanics. So they must be in this 13%. So they're about 13%. So Hispanics are underrepresented, but Black and African American make up about 14%. So that's actually right in line on Amazon. And then Asian makes up about 7%. So that's right in line as well. So those are actually right on target. I would say the only one that's underrepresented would be Hispanics. And that's probably could be due to the language difference. Speaker 1: I was just about to say that, you know, as someone who comes through search terms for a living, the amount of Spanish that I see, like, There's some high search volume Spanish keywords, but overall, it's all coming in in English, right? And so I think that's a very clear representation of my Spanish isn't that great because I haven't had to learn it to go through the search terms. And so I think they have some room to grow there. Because you said it was 20%? Speaker 2: Yeah, about 20%, 19 to 20% it says. And so if I'm reading this right, they represent 13% of Amazon shoppers. So that would be a little bit under represented, not huge. But yeah, I think the language difference is probably what's going there. So this bullet here, I would say there's nothing wrong with They're current makeup. It's almost right in line with the country except for Hispanics a little bit, but not huge difference. Speaker 1: And then looking at the baby boomers, I think that's probably pretty accurate. Like, you know, it's getting easier and easier just to find what you need specifically on Amazon and save yourself the trip trying to, you know, track down, is it at this store? Is it at that store or whatever? And it's, you know, convenience factor. The, where was it? The, where they were talking about not purchasing. I saw they were, the generation as a whole isn't necessarily, Purchase. Speaker 2: Yeah, so right. However, baby boomers also index that a below average likelihood to purchase from Amazon. So baby boomers make up 33 percent of buyers on Amazon, but on average, they're less likely to buy on Amazon as a whole, which makes sense. Baby boomers are by far the largest generation alive right now. And they're also going to be the most hesitant to want to shop online versus shop in store. I think more than anything, because, you know, most of their life was before the Internet. Where myself, I'm, I'm like, quasi Gen X millennial, like in between. And, you know, I got our first computer when I was 14 years old, and started shopping online on basic stuff, like eBay and such, maybe when I was around 1516, something like that. So Gen Xers are, and millennials are kind of the first What are some of the generations that are a little more used to shopping online from when they were younger? Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, it could be a technical skill kind of thing where it's like, I don't want to have to try and deal with the review or if there's a return that's got to happen. The other thing that kind of comes to my mind is they're also the richest generation. And so, you know, they want high quality vetted stuff as well. And it's, you know, you can start your discovery phase on Amazon and then all of a sudden you end up in Home Depot or wherever, you know, doing the final purchase. Speaker 2: Yeah. You know, you mentioned Home Depot. Home Depot is like one of the only stores that I actually go to anymore. Home Depot, Ace Hardware, All those kind of things where, you know, it's a Saturday and I'm working on something and I'm like, Oh, I need this. I run over to Home Depot and grab stuff. And then inevitably you buy a bunch of other junk that you didn't go for as well. But yeah, that's like the only store that I really care to go to rather than buy on Amazon for the most part. Speaker 1: Yeah, 100% like you want it. Well, number one, it's a quick drive away. So you can have it in, you know, two hours or an hour or whatever, versus the two days. And then you also get to see that tangible item, right? Where it's like, this is the quality that I'm looking for, you can kind of eyeball it and be like, this is exactly what I need. Whereas, you know, you're relying on the PDP and images to be like, is that what I need? Is that not what I need? And you know, if it's a miss, Then you got to go through that return and you're delayed. Speaker 2: Yep. So, yep, for sure. So yeah, I mean, reading into this, the other interesting stats, um, I don't think this is too surprising that 99% of people buy more than once on Amazon where normal is 28 to 30%. I think that's almost all because Amazon has just built up its reputation of trust. People trust it, where most other websites do not. I'd be curious to see like where walmart.com is with that, with the rebuy rate, because Walmart's going to have pretty good trust as well for most people. But I don't think they call out specific stores. Just the general 28 to 30% is the normal. There was a comment down here that I thought was interesting. One thing they're talking about in this article is that it's going to be hard for Amazon to continue to grow. But this person was commenting that Amazon doesn't really need to have to necessarily grow. I'm not going to say Hispanics and stuff like that. I'm sure they would like to and they'll try. But e-commerce is just going to continue to grow in general over the next 10 to 20 years before you might see it kind of plateau a little bit. Once we move past the baby boomer generation, And now we're, you know, the Gen Xers and the Millennials are the elderly people. I think at that point, then you're going to see a much more plateau in the e-commerce transition. It's going to slow down before then, obviously, but once you reach that, that timeframe and everyone is just kind of used to shopping online, it's just 100% normal for everyone. That's when you're going to kind of start seeing that plateau and growth. Speaker 1: Well, there's a very interesting thing that just happened and so I just want to build off that. Amazon doesn't have to do anything. Amazon is here and the longer they're here, The more of a challenge it is for retail business to stay alive. And a great example of this is I'm sure you're not up to date on Canadian news, but Canada has a store called Hudson's Bay Company. And it's very similar to like Macy's or along those lines, big box department store. And they've been in Canada for over 100 years. And this week they announced that they've gone bankrupt and they're closing and You know, what store do you really point the finger at for having an impact like that? It would be Amazon. Over a long enough period of time, Amazon is going to squeeze out these box stores, big box stores. They can't afford, you know, traffic down. They can't afford the rents. And they ended up going out of business. And then Amazon just eats up all that customer base that, you know, can't go to that store anymore. Speaker 2: Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah, 100%. And it's just going to keep happening. There was there's recently was a clothing store here in the US that declared bankruptcy as well. I forget what it was. I keep wanting to say row 21 or row 21. But I don't think that's it. But yeah, you're just going to keep seeing that, you know, with retail stores going out of business if they can't Adapt to the e-commerce. Forever 21 is what it was. It just popped up. Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. Speaker 2: They've gone down and you're just going to keep seeing that and then Amazon is going to keep absorbing those or whoever the competitors are, TikTok Shop and Temu and such and Walmart are going to keep growing as well. I think the poll question here that they have on the page, has Amazon hit a high watermark in terms of its market penetration in the US? In terms of e-commerce retail as their percentage of e-commerce sales, I do believe that they have or are close to their high watermark there because competition is going to keep coming in and eating away at that. It's just too big of a market not to have that happen. And we're fully past the point where people aren't taking it serious. Up until maybe the pandemic, I think Amazon was still considered like this specialty thing, right? That all big brands didn't have to be a part of. And that's completely shifted after the pandemic. Speaker 1: A hundred percent. And I think that's just because these brands realize that, you know, they kind of had all their eggs in one basket, which was brick and mortar retail. And then all of a sudden the taps turned off for, you know, one month, two months, six months, whatever it was. And Amazon exploded, right? Like, I wonder where Amazon would be had COVID not happened because it really mainstreamed it, normalized it, and it was an essential service almost, right? Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. We've got a couple questions coming in here. Let's bring them up. One's a political question, kind of. Do you see sellers seeing a drop in sales and reduced margins due to Trump's tariffs? You want to answer that one first or you want me to jump on it? Speaker 1: So I actually just did a little bit of research on this. And so I was looking broadly at the toys category, seeing what was going on. So I had one of my clients emailed me and said, hey, my sales are down, what's going on? And so I started to look at it and they're in the toys and games category. And so I just went into Product Opportunity Explorer and I started looking at the search volume trend. So what it does, for those of you that don't know, you can go into a tool inside of Amazon. It's called Product Opportunity Explorer. You can type in the search term and then there's a selector and you can switch it over to trends and it shows you some pretty cool information. It will show you the weekly search volume trend for that niche. And so the niche part is very, very important. Like you have, you know, high search volume keywords, but what this niche tool does is it aggregates all of the search volume together. So, you know, toys for kids, five to nine toys for girls, toys for boys, it all gets aggregated under the And I was looking at it and from February to March when the first round of tariffs were supposed to come into effect, I saw a 7% drop from the last week in February to the first week in March. I saw a 7% drop. And then the search volume never recovered. And then I started looking at it on, it went, so it went from 1 million searches a week to 940,000 searches a week. So, you know, 60,000 searches a week, you know, that's 240,000 searches a month. It's significant, but you know, it's 7%. I started, I zoomed out and I looked at it year over year. So I was looking at, you know, what was the average search volume of this in 2024? And the lowest number it hit was 1.1 million searches a week. And the average was 1.5 million searches a week. So if you take that 1.5 million searches a week and put it over that 940,000 searches a week, that was like a 36% decrease year over year in the niche toys, which I thought was extremely significant, right? Like that's something that you wouldn't really expect. And, you know, I shared it with Ritu and I was like, look at this, like this is what's going on right now. And I saw I went and looked at one more category. I didn't do as deep of a dive, but I looked at pets because, you know, people love their pets. They love, you know, it's a place where people are willing to spend. Toys can be, you know, maybe a little bit of a luxury, but people always be spending on their pets. So I was looking just to kind of I think it was pet treats. And it looked like at a high level, it looked like it was the exact same kind of pattern. So do I see a drop in sales? I see a drop in search volume, which is reflected on the top line of sellers. Speaker 2: And you think that's due to tariffs causing that? Speaker 1: So seeing that February to March 1st was a very interesting one, right? Seeing that it was a very clear drop, right? When we look at it from 1.5 million all the way down to 940,000, that's a gradual drop that happened over time, right? And it'll be interesting to see what happens on April 2nd. And we'll be able to see that data very clearly on Product Opportunity Explorer if there is another decrease like that. And so it's also specific niche by niche. So like, you know, I'm finding the health category It's largely unimpacted, but the discretionary spending, we're seeing a little bit more of an impact there. And then I've been talking to a lot of my clients about the reduced margins due to the tariffing system. And all of them are all my sellers are saying, you know, we're just going to eat that, you know, a couple cents a unit. We're just going to eat it and we'll see what happens and we'll see how long they can maintain that for. Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's that's really interesting. Yeah, you never know the cause and effect of what exactly is causing it. And I don't have necessarily data to back it up. But if we think about it, a tariff in and of itself shouldn't cause necessarily sales to drop. Unless prices have to significantly rise, which I haven't seen any indication of that yet. February's inflation rate was down slightly from January. We'll see where March comes in. Maybe it ticks back up. Maybe it doesn't. I think the sales increasing or decreasing has more to do with people's confidence in the economy. If they're confident that the economy is gonna keep doing good, they're gonna spend. If they're not, they're gonna save in case something happens, so they're gonna spend less. So with all the news of the tariffs and a lot of people trying to spend them as bad, a lot of people trying to spend them as good, You may see an uptick or a decrease in sales if people start thinking that the economy is going to go down and with the stock market having tanked, which I think it's recovered some, you know, that's going to play into people's fears. So it all depends where that goes. And we've already seen Trump scaling back on the size and scope of the tariffs that he's going to implement on the second. He changed it from, you know, all countries who have tariffs on us are going to get tariffs to now specific countries are going to get tariffs. So, you know, Trump likes to change depending on how well he thinks a policy is going to do, because Trump likes to win. He wants to win. The last thing he wants to do is see the economy tank. So he's going to shift things on that. It's going to depend on the product, you know, how well you can shift those tariffs off of the consumer and either push them back on the manufacturer, move your manufacturing to someplace else that has lower or no tariffs. So it's really going to depend. It's going to be really hard to say. We're just going to have to wait and see. Now, if he can pair the tariffs along with a slash in the income taxes like he's talking about, eliminating income taxes for anyone making under $150,000 in income, then everything that the tariffs could do is gonna pretty much go away because the amount of savings that people are gonna get from that income tax drop compared to an increase from the tariffs is gonna be The savings is going to be a lot more than any increase that the tariffs could have. Speaker 1: Yeah. And the other interesting thing is like when we think about, you know, the people under 150k, those are, you know, the people where the majority of the discretionary spending on Amazon is coming from, right? Like these are the people who stopped searching. So when we're seeing that decrease in the search volume, you know, it's, Like I point to fear and I point a little I don't know what I don't know what it's like in the United States. But, you know, costs, general day to day costs here in Canada are up across the board. Right. And I think that's been a steady rising trend. And so, you know, if the majority of your customer base is in the lower income bracket, They're going to stop searching on Amazon because they got to prioritize, you know, getting grow. 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 1: She's paying rent, those kinds of things. So the significant drop from February to March, I would attribute to pure fear. Whereas the slow decline on that search volume that I talked about, I would say that's kind of like the cost of living crisis in conjunction with the fear of uncertainty and all those other good things, not good things, all those ungood things going on in the world right now. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: Interestingly, on the latest polling, some of the highest numbers for quite a long time of people who believe that the country is headed on the right direction. And Trump right now has some of the highest polling numbers he's ever had for his approval rating as well. I think he's at like 48% approval or something, which is back in his first term, his high was like 44% and his general was like around 40%. So, um, I think a lot of people don't know what to think or what to do. You've got the news media, you know, they're very hyperbolic and sensationalizing and most of them hate Trump. So they're doing whatever they can to try to make everything he does look bad. We're just going to have to kind of hurry up and wait to see what happens here in the future. It's really going to come down to people's perception and how they view the economy. I don't think anything that he's doing is necessarily going to hurt the economy outright. Karas could if he doesn't pair that with Regulatory breaks and tax decreases. If they can't pass that bill to get that done, then an increase of tariffs are going to hurt the economy. But if you compare it by decreasing the regulations and decreasing taxes, then they are going to at least offset each other, if not better. So we'll just have to see, you know, what exactly happens. His other question was, will America Canada relations affect global fulfillment, making goods in US warehouses available in Canada? I don't know if it'll affect global fulfillment, but it definitely might affect the trade back and forth between America and Canada. With that said, I think they're going to work it out one way or another right now. There's a lot of posturing going on. Canada's got an election coming. Yes, we do. They're going to be super hyperbolic until after the election and then everything is going to calm down. But yeah, that's just my hot take on it. Speaker 1: So I mean, I think it's going to come down to like what the NAFTA trade agreement is. I'm not sure the specifics on, you know, importing General's goods from the US into Canada, whether or not that's going to come with an additional, you know, cross-border importing fee. And I honestly don't know. You know, that's a great question. And I am honestly unfamiliar with it. I know a lot of sellers, like Canadians, as a Canadian, I can speak very, very passionately about not wanting to pay that import tax fee because you do pay the import tax fee anyways, right? If I'm buying something in the United States, a lot of the times, I do have to pay an extra three to $5 to get that to me. And so as a Canadian, I'm always very conscious about making sure that I'm purchasing products that are in the Canadian fulfillment system. So I don't have to pay that extra fee. And the only time I'll do that is if it's a product that I can't like, because they're all so close, right? It's a product that I can't find in Canada. And I really, really want it. I'll pay the import fee. But I, you know, I have a lot of sellers that have that global fulfillment turned on. And the amount of sales that they get is, you know, it's, it's, it's very minuscule. It's a very small drop in the bucket compared to what is going on in the, in the overall American ecosystem. Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. It's not huge. It's, it's a couple percent, two, 3%, if you're doing good. So Deepak, I would say if you have products in the USA that are selling If you're selling decently in Canada through the remote fulfillment, then you should look into getting that inventory up to Canada if it makes sense, because you're going to exponentially increase your sales. I don't know how many x exactly, but I would say at least double, if not probably quadruple or more just by getting that inventory up there in FBA. If you live in the United States and you're shopping on Amazon, for me, one of the first things I do is check, you know, only show me prime fulfillment. And then sometimes I'll even check the ones, you know, only show me ones that I can get tomorrow morning or today. You know, and people in Canada are going to do the same kind of thing, I'm sure. And so those listings that are fulfilling from the U.S. are just not going to show up in their searches anyways. Speaker 1: And Canada is a fantastic marketplace to sell in. I gotta say, there's a lot of room to grow in Canada. Like we were talking about market penetration in the United States. When I was a seller, I would launch all of my products in Canada first. I would get them up to over 100 reviews and then I would migrate them into the United States marketplace and I would launch them with those global reviews. And it just made the barrier to entry So much easier because the cost per click is half, if not more. You get the same conversion rates. Canadians, they understand that there's the difference between CAD and USD and you can charge a little bit more because you charge what it costs in USD and CAD and it's the same. And I highly encourage sellers to start in Canada if you're just starting out. It's a fantastic marketplace to learn. It gives you the opportunity to make the mistakes and be able to keep going versus going into the big pond and kind of going against some of the bigger players in the space. Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, I would agree. I like Canada. Canada is a good place to sell in. And yes, starting in Canada, you know, you're not the first person who's mentioned that. I've had a couple people tell me that now starting in Canada is really a lot easier than diving into the US. So it's definitely something to think about. The market obviously is 10% of the size of the United States. So you got to keep that in mind. But, you know, it's a relatively similar market that you can tap into and sell in. Let's see. Let's jump on to the next story here. Sure. And we've got... So this one here, I thought was kind of interesting. And have you used ChatGPT's operator at all, Nielsen? I have not. Speaker 1: I have not used operator, but we build out custom GPTs. And it looks very similar to this. Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. So let me read the headline real quick. So how ChatGPT helped automate USA product sourcing for Amazon FBA. So Max shared how he streamlined the tedious process of sourcing US-based products by using ChatGPT's operator to automate supplier searches on ThomasNet. By setting prompts to find and contact domestic suppliers of fluorescent light covers, he was able to collect lead information and submit inquiries, saving hours of manual effort. For Amazon FBA sellers, this method offers a smarter, faster way to source US-made products, which can help avoid tariff issues, reduce lead times, and strengthen supplier relationships. It's especially useful for those wanting custom products or aiming to move away from overseas sourcing. So he actually made a video here, which I'll play for everybody. It doesn't have any sound or anything. But if you're not familiar with ChatGPT operators, essentially you can give it a series of instructions, like he punched in a series of instructions here on what he wants it to do. And then the operator actually browsed to ThomasNet It searched for fluorescent light covers. and sorted it or filtered it to only show US based suppliers, collected all the suppliers information. If they had a contact form on their website, it submitted the contact form with the request that he was looking for for these custom light covers. If it didn't have a contact form, then it got their email and everything like that. And I'm assuming you could set up another operator to email those people automatically. And then you just sit back and wait for the replies to come in. It's pretty awesome the way this is working. I mean, normally this this is something that I would hire a virtual assistant to do this for me. And I have done that a million times in the past. And now the ChatGPT operator program can do it all for you. Speaker 1: So there's two things that really come to mind with that. Number one, that is so cool, right? Like being able to automate a task like this is so cool. Number two is RIP inboxes just from spam. Like I think about how this could be deployed on a network site like LinkedIn. Whereas if you are a business and people want to work with you, you are definitely coming up in a database and you are getting hit hard. And so I think it's awesome. You know, we've used lots of VAs for data sourcing and doing exactly what this is. And, you know, seeing this go down in real time, you know, we're living in the future now. Speaker 2: Yeah. It's really cool. Some people will say, well, what about the lost jobs and stuff like that? And that's going to always hurt in the beginning when this kind of stuff happens. Whenever somebody talks about losing jobs due to technology, I always bring up the tractor. You know, it's like, should we have stopped the production of the tractor to prevent all of those field workers from losing their jobs? And I don't think anybody would. Well, most people are going to say, well, no, of course, tractors are beneficial to society. But when tractors first came out and eliminated all those field jobs, no more people, you know, picking the rice or the cotton or whatever by hand. A lot of people lost their jobs and that was a major transition and that's a similar kind of thing that's going to happen with AI just in general over the next decade on an even larger scale, I think. Speaker 1: Well, and it opens up a whole new economy as well, right? Like with all of these jobs, like someone else has to be the one still operating this system, right? Like there's still got to be a driver there for now. And, you know, there's often there's riches in the niches. And so, you know, you figure out how to deploy this and you start selling it. Well, you could have a pretty nice business doing this as well, setting this up for other companies. And I mean, I imagine it's probably only a matter of time before On the other end, where it is the company that is responding, this is all automated too. So it could just be two AI bots trying to hash it out and figure it out from there. Speaker 2: Yeah, it's pretty awesome. And if you're not taking advantage of this kind of stuff already, you're going to get left behind if you're not learning AI, no matter what your job is out there. Unless you're the guy who came and replaced some shingles on my roof, Your time is probably short of being able to complete your job without using AI in some way. Eventually those roofers will probably be replaced as well by AI robots, but that's a ways in the future yet before that kind of thing. More than 10 years, I would say for that, maybe more like 30 or 40 years down the line, but could be sooner. We'll see. They might surprise us, but I got a feeling at least 20 years out before something like that happens. But in the next 10 years, I just seen an article from Bill Gates basically saying that all employees will be replaced by AI in the next 10 years, which I think is a little hyperbolic to say all. But I think all employees will have to be using AI in some way in the next 10 years or they're going to be replaced would definitely be something I'd be willing to back up. Yep. Speaker 1: A hundred percent. I mean, Tesla was making claims, their Tesla bots, 2026, I think they said. So, I mean, who knows if all of a sudden we all start getting butlers around the houses, but as far as like being able to do roofing or any type of trades work, like that's, you know, a decade at least. Speaker 2: Yep. Yeah, the having Rosie in the, you know, in the kitchen cooking your food and stuff, Rosie from the Jetsons. I don't think that is necessarily that far off. That that could happen sooner than say the roofers and stuff like that. And that's something that would sell. Really well, if you could get a robot that you know, did the dishes, cooked basic food, you know, vacuumed the stairs, and things like that. I mean, that would be amazing. That I could see happening in the next five to 10 years for sure. Speaker 1: Yeah, easy. Speaker 2: But yeah, ChatGPT operators, if you haven't played with it yet, check out this article and he's got all the details here, exactly what he typed in the prompt and everything like that. I'm probably going to steal this prompt for some of the products that I've been thinking about creating that I want to find a US manufacturer for because I've looked for US factories before US manufacturers and it is annoyingly difficult dealing with US manufacturers because they're not used to. the process like the Chinese suppliers are. They're not used to people coming to them and asking for, hey, can you make 500 or 1,000 of these? They're used to dealing with big companies that are like, can you manufacture 10,000 or 100,000 of this widget? And it's a huge project for them. They go into a lot of depth in it and that's what they're used to dealing with. So when someone like me reaches out and says, hey, are you able to make 1,000 of these for me? First, they probably think that I'm joking or wasting their time or they see it as a waste of time very possibly. So finding a good factory to be able to do private label for you can be difficult. So using a bot like this to reach out to a bunch of them at once could be very helpful. All right, well, let's go ahead and jump on to, well, Deepak had one question I wanted to throw up here real quick. Asking you, Neil, he says, I'm based off in India. As a seller, do I need to deal with sales taxes in Canada? Speaker 1: Yes, you would. You would need a GST number. You would have to register with the government and get a GST number. I'm not sure what you call it in the United States, but you need a similar number. Speaker 2: Doesn't Amazon handle the sales taxes in Canada like they do in the U.S.? They submit them for you? Because in the U.S., we used to do that, but now pretty much every state is automated by Amazon. They handle all of that. Speaker 1: So it's been a long time since I sold. When I was selling, I had to manually input it all myself. And there was, I think, a few provinces that didn't comply with that. And so you would have to have the GST number just for those specific provinces that weren't complying. Four years ago. And so things have changed. So I would say, look into it more. But if it's similar to what you're seeing on the United States, I know it was coming into effect. So it's a possibility. Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it's all Amazon is remitting it all, but check with a tax accountant on that for sure. But I'm pretty sure they are now just like almost all of these states in the US are. Now, if you're not talking about sales taxes, if you're talking about import taxes, that's a whole different matter. You are responsible for import taxes. And you have to get a registration number, a business registration number I think it's called in Canada and file those taxes and such for the income that you make in Canada. And then the import duties and fees, those are gonna be paid by your import broker and then you're gonna pay your import broker for paying those for you. So that happens at the time of your importing the products. All right, cool. So let's jump on to this next one here. And let me pull up. All right, so Amazon's new deal and coupon fees spark outrage among sellers. And this was a big one this last week. John Elder calls out Amazon for breaking its promise not to raise seller fees in 2025, following the rollout of new higher costs for lightning deals, best deals, coupons and prime discounts. These fee changes now include daily charges plus a percentage of sales, hitting US based and higher priced product sellers the hardest. Elder argues that the changes favor large brands and overseas sellers, squeezing out small businesses and reducing seller profitability just ahead of Prime Day. He sees the move as a tone-deaf money grab by Amazon leadership disconnected from the reality. Of everyday sellers and I definitely echo his sentiment on this one. It's a you know, it's going to be huge the specific details here. So lightning deals used to be $150 now, they're going to be $70 per day plus 1% of sales cap that $2,000 is going to be the cap. Best deals used to cost $300 for seven days. Now it's $70 per day plus 1% of sales. Coupons used to be 60 cents per unit or per redemption, I should say. Now it's $5 per coupon plus 2.5% of sales and then prime discounts doubled from $50 to $100, which is a huge increase. And what's crazy is Amazon tried to say that, you know, this'll be cheaper for most sellers. It's like, I don't know how they're trying to calculate that one, but the only one that could be cheaper is the coupons if you have like a super cheap product. But other than that, this is just going to hurt a lot. Speaker 1: So I just did the math on that. So lightning deal. So I think they all need a cap. I think that's probably an important thing that might be missing on the best deals. So $150 fix, now it's $70, 1% of sales capped at $2,000. So that 1% of sales, if you cap it at $2,000, all of my clients, we're hitting that $2,000 a day when we run lightning deals easy. So they'll be paying that. So that's $160. And then you're paying the $70 fee on top of that. So it works out to being $230 for a fee. So you're paying an extra, was that 80 bucks? Looks like extra 80 bucks to run a lightning deal. And then the best deal costs $70. But then the 1% of sales uncapped means that, you know, if you do $6,000 in sales, That's even more money, right? Like you're paying out a lot of money there. Speaker 2: Looking at the image here, it does show best deals and lightning deals both in that bullet with the $2,000 cap per deal. So that's an important clarification there. The 1% I believe if I'm reading this right, it says 1% of deal sales with a cap for variable fee at $2,000 per deal. I'm hoping that that means that the 1% is going to be a maximum of $2,000 or is it $2,000 total cost of the deal? You know, so if you sell, um, what, if we do a calculator, let's say over the course of the deal, you sell, you know, five, let's say $5, 000, which is relatively low 0.01. That's going to be $50. Um, Plus the $70 per day. That's the way I was originally reading it. Are you reading it, Neil, that you think that it's capping the $2,000 in sales and 1% of that? Speaker 1: Yeah, so I'm thinking that's exactly, I think I did the math wrong when I first pulled up my calculator there. And so 2000, I'm going to say it's 2000, they're going to take $2,000, 1% of that, they're going to take that plus the $70. That's the way I'm incorporating the lightning deal. And then for the best deal, it's going to be 70 I'm 70. So that's going to be the cost, the daily cost of just running the deal, right? $70 a day. And then it's going to be that. And then it's going to be 1% of your sales on top of that. Speaker 2: Yeah. Okay. Yeah. That's a, that's a little bit more reasonable, but still you're looking at, I would say a 50 to a hundred percent increase in the cost of running each one of these deals. Speaker 1: That best deal became insane. Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure. And now on the coupons, I don't see a cap on the coupons. Speaker 1: So the way I was interpreting this is it's $5 to set up the coupon. That's what I read, right? So it's $5 to set up the coupon. So if you set up the coupon for 30 days, you're paying $5 to set that coupon up. And then it was a percentage, right? Is that what it was? Speaker 2: 2.5% on the coupon. Speaker 1: Yeah. And so, you know, if you're a low average order value product, that's a real good deal, right? If I have some clients, you know, we've built a deal strategy around our lightning deals, around our PEDs, around our coupons, we have, you know, very in depth coupon strategies. And once you get into over $400, you know, that really adds up on every single unit sold, right? We, we recommend an always on coupon. So every single sale is getting that it just added 2.5% to not your bottom line. Speaker 2: Yep. Yeah, that's gonna hurt a lot. The 2.5% with no cap. You know, that could add up quite a bit compared to the the 60 cents per unit. Again, It's going to at least double your promotions most likely. At least a 50% I should say and probably more like double the cost of your promotions that you're going to run. Speaker 1: I think it's also going to devalue the best deal a little bit as well. Getting the best deal before was an extreme advantage. Not everyone gets access to it. You know, lots of people can get access to lightning deals, but best deals are harder to come by. And they typically are reserved for, you know, high sales velocity sellers and not everyone gets access to them. And I have a lot of clients that have built their deal strategy around the best deal because it has just over a long enough period of time, it does great things for your BSR. And now I was talking with a few of my clients and I'm always telling, Hey, look for best deal, look for best deal. And I got an email, I got two emails this week saying, Hey, I got, I got access to the best deal in April. And I'm going, Oh, two of them got it at once. Like what's going on? I didn't know about this before I jumped on this call with you. And that's why I love coming on the show is because I find out Crazy changes that are happening on Amazon. So I mean, if you guys want the number one spot for getting updated information every Friday, check out Todd. But even for me, as someone who's, you know, very involved in the space, just learning about it here and seeing, you know, to me, they opened it up to more sellers. So it's going to devalue the devalue the effect of the best deal. And if they open it up to everyone that could have In overarching downward pricing pressure on everyone because someone will always be running a best deal now. Speaker 2: Yep. Yeah. Yeah. It'll be interesting to see what kind of effect that has, you know, the, the overwhelming amount of, of deals and deal days and different things where they're slashing prices for whatever reason. It just has a continually diminishing effect, I think, on people's psychology when there's always a deal going on and it's no longer special. You're going to get a lower and lower amount of people who turn out for each one of these special time periods where there's supposed to be big deals and stuff like that. When in reality, in studies that I've seen in the past, People have looked at like the specials and the deals that happen on Black Friday and they find in a lot of cases that the prices on Black Friday average higher than prices throughout the rest of the year. People are wise up to those kind of things and they start figuring them out. People used to, if you go back to the days of When radio first started coming out or TV started coming out and you heard it on TV, it must be true kind of thing was a major mentality until the salespeople took over the airwaves and then nobody believed anything they heard on TV anymore. Same thing with the internet and Amazon and e-commerce and coupons and stuff and people are starting to realize that all this stuff is It's not true, a bunch of bull kind of stuff, you know, and so they're just going to tune it out just like everything else. Speaker 1: Yeah, a lot of higher informed shoppers. When you were talking about the TV ads going out, it made me chuckle. I see a big trend on TikTok right now with brands pretending that they were on Shark Tank. So they're using a green screen. And they're pretending to do the Shark Tank walkout. And then it like cuts over to Kevin O'Leary. And he's asking them a question, but it's like, cut footage, and they're not actually there. And the whole thing is just staged. And it's like that with the like, with everything that's going on is becoming easier and easier to even fake credibility. Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah, it's a People are going to get war out on it, but at the same time, people do like deals. You got to play with it and see if it makes sense. Look at your margins, look at your numbers. Are you more profitable by doing more volume when you run a deal and a coupon and stuff like that versus not? You got to measure these things. Speaker 1: Just one more thing I want to say before we potentially move on to the next topic. I deal with People from all over the world. And one of my clients is a Chinese aggregator. And I was talking to him about Tencent. And I can't remember the other one over there. There's a couple other like Chinese platforms that are very similar to Amazon, except for, you know, they're run by the Alibaba group. And he was saying that every single month in China, they pretty much have a prime day. Speaker 2: Yeah, I imagine. Speaker 1: And he's just like, over a long enough period of time, that just becomes the price and no one cares about the holiday anymore. And you were talking about those diminishing returns, like with July Prime Day being 91 days after or with the October Prime Day being 91 days before the July Prime Day, the October Prime Day is significantly Lesser sales compared to the July one, because, you know, you go from Q4 until July. So you go, what is that? Seven months without a big sale going on on Amazon. Then everyone's got that built up buyer intent and you have the big sale. It goes on. And then 91 days later, you do it again. Right. And it's like you get that diminishing return because everyone spent all their money in the first one. And you're like, Oh, I know it's not that big of a deal. And you're like, Oh, I know Black Friday's coming up and Cyber Monday and all that kind of stuff. So again, it's just that diminishing returns where Amazon wants to keep it going because, you know, they move more volume, so more referral fees, more inventory, all that stuff, right? Higher cost of business, higher cost of operation for businesses. Lower returns. Speaker 2: Yep. Yep. Absolutely. Deal fatigue is a real thing. But mainly just know everybody out there, your prices on deals are going to go up. So you need to make sure you're checking to make sure it's worthwhile to run them. All right. Let's touch on this last one real quick and then we'll wrap up. So Amazon's new Interest AI could transform product discovery. Kevin King highlights how Amazon's new Interest AI allows shoppers to use natural language to describe what they're looking for, which then generates curated product feeds based on mood, context, and intent. This tool mimics discovery behavior seen on platforms like TikTok and Pinterest, offering a new way for customers to browse beyond keyword searches. For Amazon sellers, aligning listings with lifestyle-driven use cases and intent-based language is now more important than ever. King warns that early optimization could give brands a significant visibility advantage before this feature becomes mainstream. For me, I think this is really cool. I think this is going to take off very quickly to be able to just type a question on what you're looking for rather than having to try to guess what keywords you should punch in. It's just going to be much more natural for people. Unknown Speaker: Absolutely. Speaker 1: I saw this and I was like, wow, this is so cool. There are so many use cases. For me and my specific hobbies where, you know, I was talking to you about backstage, I do competitive barbecue and I don't know everything out there in the market. And so I can just come in here and go into browse mode and be like, oh, you know, what is going on out there? What does Amazon think these tools are that are available that I might not know about? Right. And just be able to kind of find and discover new products based on my hobbies. I think that's so cool. So, so cool. I think it's going to do great. I think it'll do really, really well. And, you know, of course, optimizing towards that is the ultimate goal for sellers, right? Making sure that These keywords are found in your listing or even just asking Rufus, you know, making sure it understands what your listing is and, you know, would people be searching for this if they were to use the search engine? Would your listing answer that question? Speaker 2: Yeah, to play off of, you know, what you just mentioned there about the competitive barbecuing, you know, you could totally jump in here and say, hey, I have a barbecue competition that's coming up in a few days. I'm looking for ways to try to improve my barbecuing, make my, you know, make my ribs taste better and be more juicier. What do you got for me? And then hit enter and it shows you products that relate to that. You know, you need stuff that's going to come fast. You've got to come in here in a few days. It's only going to show you stuff that can arrive today or tomorrow. And then stuff that could potentially help you improve your cooking skills, you know, maybe some seasoning for your ribs and stuff like that, and different tools that could allow you to cook things better, you know, barbecue thermometers and all that kind of stuff. Speaker 1: Or even just like, you know, as you were talking, it kind of popped into my head, day to day dinner prep, right? I want to make an Italian dinner for, I want to make an Italian meal for dinner on Wednesday. Show me stuff that'll be here in time. Give me all the ingredients, add it to my cart. Send me a recipe to my Alexa. Let's go. Right? And done. Speaker 2: Yeah, that's actually really awesome. I was, I used grok the other day because we have this, we have this sliced turkey breast, roasted turkey breast that is just going past, you know, best used by date. So I just said, give me some recipes that are easy I could use to make this. And it gave me one. I'm like, Oh, this sourdough turkey sandwich sounds awesome. I'm going to run over to Publix and grab the sourdough and a couple other things I needed to use it up. And it was one of the best sandwiches I've had. It was fantastic. But I could jump in here and say, hey, I want to make these turkey breast sandwiches. Give me some really good recipes to choose from. Boom. Okay. I like recipe number three. What do I need to make it? And then it shows you the products to make that, add everything to cart and you check it out, you got it the next day or whatever. Speaker 1: And it goes to your robot butler and then the meal just shows up. Speaker 2: Yes, for sure. The robot butler gets the package at the door, prepares your sandwich for dinner or lunch and you're good to go and you come down from your office. Speaker 1: I don't even have to leave my desk. Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. That is the future, ladies and gentlemen. That is the future. Sellers on Amazon, like you said, you need to think about that and tailor your bullets and description and stuff to play towards the interests and the moods and things like that. Yeah, humans don't read that stuff for the most part, except for maybe certain products that necessitate you looking at the details more finely. But the AI is going to be reading that stuff. So you're going to want to tailor towards the AI that's looking for certain things, not just packing keywords in there, because the AI can understand regular human sentences and stuff like that. Speaker 1: So before we close, you said something really interesting, I just want to share with the audience. So right now, I have definitive proof that Amazon's AI is going in and they are reading your bullet points. And they are simplifying your bullet points. So you can have all of this descriptive copy going on in your bullet points. The AI is coming in, it's simplifying it because customers, my theory is customers don't like reading all of that. They don't want to deal with keyword stuffed listings. And so Amazon is coming in and they're trying to fix that problem. And they're changing bullet points on listings without seller's consent right now. And they're optimizing towards making it easier for the customer to understand what that is. So I imagine that there's going to be a point where Amazon makes a change and it says, okay, In the back end, ask questions or like put in some questions that you think your product can answer, right? A Q&A thing. Speaker 2: Yeah, I could totally see the AI generated content taking over most places, taking over the title, taking over the bullets, maybe even generating images, which AI is not great at that yet, but it's getting there. You know, because one of the best places on a listing now for me is the AI generated review paragraphs that it adds. That's one of the first things I look at most products. Now I hit the reviews, look, read that AI generated description of what's what's good, what's bad about the product. And then I make my decision on what to buy, maybe flip through the images, watch a video or two from time to time. But looking at that AI review generator or description, I should say, is one of the main things that I look at now. Speaker 1: How often do you actually read the copy? Speaker 2: I would say maybe 25% of the time, and it really depends if there's something specific that I'm looking for, like I need a certain size of something or I need to make sure it fits something or something like that. But other than that, it's mostly just looking through the images, reading that review text, and then maybe watching a video or two. Speaker 1: 100%. I'm the exact same way. I barely read those unless there's some type of technical spec that I'm looking for. Other than that, I'm using the images, right? So I can understand Amazon being like, okay, we're going to simplify these bullet points and just make it bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, very easy. And you can still have that text that the AI is just going to go over. Speaker 2: Yeah, totally. And that's that's where the AI generating of your listing is going to come in, right? If somebody searches for the barbecue thing, like you mentioned, You're going to want to tailor your listing for that. If there's a specific thing, I need something that fits on this specific barbecue grill that I have, the AI can put that right there in the headline that fits this barbecue grill. Even if you didn't have it in the title, you had that down in your description somewhere, you're going to want that in your title if that's what the person is looking for. They don't have to hunt for that data. All right, cool. Well, Neil, that about wraps it up here. Appreciate you coming on the show. Speaker 1: Always happy to be here. Thanks for having me, Todd. Speaker 2: Absolutely. And everybody out there listening, I appreciate you watching and listening. We do this live every Friday at 1 p.m. Eastern. So jump on live with us, get your questions answered, shoot your comments, whatever the case may be. But yeah, appreciate you joining us and everybody have an awesome one out there. 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.