Amazon News: Deals Surge, AI Traffic Grows & Virtual Multipacks

Amazon News: Deals Surge, AI Traffic Grows & Virtual Multipacks Unknown Speaker: Welcome fellow entrepreneurs to the Amazon Sellers School podcast, where we talk about Amazon and how you can use it to build an e-commerce empire, a side hustle, and anything in between. And now, your host, Todd Welch. Speaker 3: All right. Hello, everybody. Another week, Amazon Seller News Live. I just want to apologize first off for missing last week. I lost track of time and realized too late that I got on here too late. So I apologize for that. But we are back this week and we've got Danan and Leslie with us this week. So going to be a fun one going over the news. I appreciate you both joining me today. Absolutely. Speaker 1: Always good to be here, my friend. Speaker 2: Excited to be here. Speaker 3: Yes, absolutely. We've got a lot of good news today. Been a difficult last couple of days, I guess for me, with the passing of Charlie Kirk, unfortunately. I know that's not necessarily related to Amazon, but I can't say that any public figure passing has ever affected me like this one has. I'm happy to see that they caught the suspect it sounds like this morning. Speaker 2: Yes, that's great news. I have a son who's kind of in the Charlie Kirk demographic. You know, a lot of young men of high school age and college age were very interested and invested in him because that's who he was really speaking to, right? That was his audience. So yeah, it's been a tough couple of days at my house. Also, you know, we teach our young people that the way to solve problems is by talking to other people. And so then when someone, you know, love him or hate him, I don't care what you think about his views. He was just talking to people and something terrible happens. That's really hard to reconcile that with your kids. Unknown Speaker: So yeah, it's been a, yeah. Speaker 2: It's been a challenging week around here, but I'm glad at least something positive happened today. Yay. Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was tough. I think just because he was such a wholesome and seemingly good person, you know, I don't think he, at least I never see him like, He never hated anyone or really got angry at anyone. He always tried to talk with people respectfully and have a good dialogue. I disagree with what he says, but I think he was as close to a good person as he could get. Speaker 1: Yeah. Somebody told me a quote that they saw recently, which is nobody ever got killed for lying. Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, for sure. That is true. He will definitely go down in history. I think he'll be someone in the history books, a line of, you know, like Martin Luther King and people like that who have been assassinated. So yeah. But yeah, I mean, 9-11 yesterday, so that, you know, hits home as well. And just a couple days of, you know, feeling sick to your stomach, basically. Speaker 1: Yeah, that was obviously timed. Speaker 3: Yeah, it could have been. It could have been. It's hard to say. I mean, we don't know much about the person they caught yet. So there's lots to learn. But we'll see. Speaker 1: Yeah, I just don't see it being a coincidence. But We digress. Speaker 3: Yeah, perhaps not. Speaker 1: Perhaps don't open that door between you and I. Speaker 3: Yeah, we'll leave it there and maybe talk about it in the future. But let's go ahead and dive into some news here, which is Amazon news, I should say. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 3: And look at that, right over on the right, they've got the Charlie Kirk suspect arrested. All right, so it's official Amazon shoppers like deals better than coupons. Momentum Commerce analysts of Prime Day 2025 showed that deals outperformed coupons by a huge margin. Sales with coupons rose 44% while sales with deals jumped 132%. Even after the event, products with deals held sales momentum at 23% while coupon backed products dropped 14%. For Amazon sellers, the shift is tied to Amazon's new coupon fee structure, making them more expensive and less attractive to brands. The key takeaway, prioritize deals over coupons, especially during major sales events to capture shoppers' attentions and drive revenue. So, thoughts on this one. Leslie, we'll go to you first. Speaker 2: Okay, so I probably think about this a little differently than a lot of folks, but I would expect this because the entire point of Amazon is that we're lazy. So if you have Amazon Prime and you pay for Prime, the reason is you want stuff to come quickly so you don't have to leave your house to go get it or you don't have to go find it if it's something hard to find. Think like replacement filters for a certain product, right? So Amazon exists out of convenience and for coupons, as lame as it is, you have to click the button, you have to remember to click, you have to even notice there's a box to check. To get the coupon, I've actually accidentally not clicked it before and thought I did and then I'm mad about it. Whereas with the deals, Amazon serves those deals up based on your past shopping history right there on the homepage. It's like saying, hey, hey, Leslie, you want this thing or hey, you bought this supplement before, buy it now. And so it's so easy. It's laziness and being spoon fed and we're all such suckers. Speaker 1: Yeah I I I'm gonna take a slightly different approach and go it's convenience is just another way of saying it I totally agree with Leslie on this it's the fact. Everything Amazon does for the consumer is reduce friction and time to point of sale, right? And by doing that, you increase the amount of revenue you're able to generate because, look, nobody else had a buy now button. Click, done. It's on its way. Amazon, as far as I know, was the first one to do that. You have eBay where you have to log in 57 times an hour and upbid, upbid, upbid, upbid, and then you have Amazon that goes, buy now. It's a convenience thing. As a consumer, even if I see coupons, I don't even bother with pressing it. I may have done it one or two times. However, if I see that strikethrough and there's a deal on it, cool, and it's automatically applied, all I have to do is click that Buy Now button. So it's a point of convenience and it's time to sale, drastically reduced. If all you have to do is click one button, if you have to For a coupon, you have to click two buttons. That's literally twice the amount of time to make a sale. Speaker 3: Yeah, I think you have a point. For me, the one benefit that I've seen to coupons was just the psychological aspect of You're saying yes by clicking the coupon and whether that increases your conversion rate or not. But the convenience factor probably outweighs that and plus the way that a deal is displayed, right? Because if I'm getting a coupon and let's say the product is $20, And the coupon is for $3. It's like, okay, now I got to do math and figure out $17. Or is that 16? I don't know. I'm not good at math. You know, you got to do math to figure out what the actual price is versus with a sale. It's right there. It's like, hey, It's not $20 anymore, it's $17 and you're getting this percentage off on there. I think it's easier to see how much you're actually getting the discount with the sale versus the coupon. Speaker 1: I agree. I do believe that outside of the convenience of not having to click anything, there is the visual aspect of the original price struck through. The amount of savings, if I'm not mistaken, it also gives you the percentage. So it gives you the dollar amount and the percentage. So not only do you get to see both, so if you're a percentage person or a numbers person, it caters to both people and you don't have to do any thinking at all because immediately you know, oh, it's cheaper. So like it's that age old, Hey, honey, I saved $400 today. Cool. On what? A $2,000 purse. It's like that you're immediately saving money as opposed to, and I think also that coupons is a holdover from the days of newspapers when you would actually clip coupons and then go in to get that deal. That's how these stores drove traffic in the doors. But today, you only need to show that it's better. You don't need to take action. I do believe that coupons as a way of savings is a dead technology when it comes to e-comm or I should say dying. Speaker 3: Perhaps. One thing that they did not measure that I would like to see measured is, let's say I've got a $20 product and I do a $5 Discount, right? So it shows, you know, strike through the 20, $15. And then I also had a $2 coupon as opposed to just a straight $7 discount. I wonder which one of those two would win in that kind of circumstance. Speaker 1: I can only answer that from my own personal consumer behavior and that is I literally don't even see the coupons. Speaker 3: Yeah, I agree. They show them in the cart now, so sometimes I click them there. I've started to remember to look for those before I check out. But yeah, you're absolutely right. I forget to look at the coupons all the time. Speaker 2: I actually really appreciated when they started adding those to the cart. As a seller, I wouldn't appreciate it. But that does as a consumer, because in the cart, I'm usually looking to confirm when it's actually going to get to my house. So then I will see it. And that's the one thing that keeps me from always using the swipe where you're just doing the buy now, because I want to see when it's going to get there. And I want to, you know, double check if there's a coupon or something I missed. Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, 100%. Especially for me, because I have turned on in our business account so that it will, it will highlight, like local sellers, you know, anywhere, In the area, I think you can select like six or seven states or something that it will count as local sellers. And so I have that turned on. And unfortunately, what that does sometimes is it will throw like an FBM seller into the buy box that's 20 or 30% more expensive just because they're a local seller. So I got to pay attention to that sometimes. But usually I like it because then it floats all of like the US sellers to the top for me, which is nice, which I like to look for. But yeah, I'm the same. I rarely ever use the buy it now button. I always add to cart and then look and make sure I'm using the right card and sending to the right address and It's getting to me in an appropriate amount of time. Speaker 1: Yeah. Hey, I just checked our my cart. I actually happen to have both a coupon and a deal right on top of each other. So the top one's a deal. You just get that discount. And the bottom one, there's a little button here that says redeem. So I have to take an action, you know, and it's not that big of a deal. Sorry, it's not that. Complicated, but all I have to do to get this 15% off of these spray bottles is buy it, whereas what I have to do is I have to click redeem for these electrolyte drops. So it's just friction. Speaker 3: I also think the deal is in red, the coupon is in green. I think we're trained to pay attention to red more because, oh, there's a problem. I better pay attention to that. Speaker 1: Red or black, but usually red is always associated with the sale tag. Speaker 3: Correct. Yep. Speaker 1: Almost always. Speaker 3: Green is go. Speaker 2: With the green, I think they're trying to make it be like money. This is money toward your purchase. The coupon is dollars toward your. Speaker 1: It's a different point of view. Speaker 3: I think this all makes sense. And it's probably just better to switch most of your stuff to deals instead of coupons. Anyways, just because of the added expense that Amazon has created with coupons, it's made it In a lot of cases, not in all cases, but in a lot of cases it's made it significantly more expensive, especially if you have a higher priced product, because they're taking that percentage now. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 3: So, yeah. There you go. Switch to deals, not coupons, but I would like to test it doing a combination of both. I'll have to think about how I can do a test For that with some of my products and do just a straight deal and a deal with a coupon at the same total and see what it comes out as. Speaker 1: 5% deal and a 5% coupon or something like that. Speaker 3: Yeah. The problem is that the lift, if you did see a lift from a deal and a coupon combination, it probably would not outweigh the percentage that Amazon's going to take for a coupon anyways. Speaker 1: Yeah. You know, it's, These sorts of numbers sometimes keep me up at night. It's like, okay, my increased revenue or my increased sales numbers was this, but what was my increased profit, right? I've had a couple of clients that I've done these audits for where they've got millions of dollars of revenue, right? But their profit margin is crap. And so me and my partner, we went through somebody's ads campaigns. They were doing like 50-ish a month, 50,000 a month on ad spends. And we cut out like 17K. And did the revenue go down? Yeah, it did. But you know what their profit did? It went screaming because they weren't dumping an extra 17K a month on literally losing money. Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, that's an important thing to always remember so you don't get tricked by people who are posting, oh, I sold a million dollars, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. It doesn't really mean anything. I could sell a million dollars tomorrow if I was willing to sell Nike shoes for a dollar each. Right. And I had the inventory. I could sell a million dollars real fast. Speaker 1: Absolutely. Speaker 3: It doesn't mean I'm making any money off of it. So you always gotta be careful with that for sure. Speaker 1: I used to be embarrassed to tell people that I was not a yearly seven-figure seller until I found out that I made more money in profit than the seven-figure sellers that I knew because they had like a 10% margin and I had a 60% margin. And so I can sell less than half of what they were selling and still make more. And that's when I realized it really isn't about the quantity of sales. It's about how much profit you're able to acquire out of what you're selling and then on top of that, how much do you need to make? How much do you want to make? For some sellers, an extra $1,000 a month is like, hey, that pays the mortgage, that pays the car, that pays off the credit card, whatever, and that's an incredible accomplishment for them. Speaker 3: Yeah, it also depends what kind of seller you want to be, right? How much margin you want. If you want to just be a smaller business, then you better have a super high profit margin so you can keep operating. If you're patterned and you're gonna go public with an IPO, then a 5% margin or even a 0% margin is fine. I mean, Amazon lost millions of dollars every year for like 10 years straight. So it all depends on what your end goal is. Speaker 1: Yeah. I met a guy that his whole business operating basis was, don't make profit so I don't have to pay taxes and live off the cash rewards of the credit cards because they're non-taxable. That works. Speaker 2: Interesting. Speaker 1: I thought so too. Speaker 2: You know, it all goes back to the temptation of the Amazon app. You know, people for years have posted those screenshots of the gold bars and it is not a mistake that they're gold. The gold bars on the, when you open your Amazon app and it's got the bar showing your revenue over whatever time period you've chosen. And that became like the measuring contest. Y'all know what I'm talking about among sellers for a long time. And they would like, you know, show those and they'd show them online and they'd show it, you know, you could see them at conferences, show them to their friends. And none of those ever show your profit margin. And if you're like dying and don't even get me started on people who never close their books until actually April of the next year or something, I don't even know. I'm one of those very small, I mean, someone might even call me a hobby seller because it's been my side gig for so long because I've been consulting for a long time. And so Amazon is still my side gig. And I'm perfectly thrilled if I have five to 10 sales a day because my margins are stupid. And I don't need, if I'm making a couple hundred bucks a day on Amazon, I'm actually like netting a couple hundred bucks a day. I'm actually super happy because it's my side gig and that pays the kids tuition or whatever. And I've met with sellers who are really big, who literally made less money than I did last year. Unknown Speaker: It's nuts. Speaker 2: And they have so much risk. They have all these employees and all this stuff. The difference between the coupon and the deal cannot be overstated. Just like the difference between switching between three PLs because of the 50 cents an item or switching your packaging size because of storage costs or whatever it is. All those little bitty bits, man, they all matter. Speaker 1: Indeed. Speaker 3: Yeah, so definitely play with it out there. Use the deals. Speaker 1: And know your numbers. Speaker 3: Know your numbers is super important. I didn't in the beginning and it hit me. I had to go back to a full-time job for a little while. Speaker 1: Initially, for the first couple of years before we were actually tracking our numbers, I spent money like a millionaire. But it turns out profit and revenue are not the same thing. Unknown Speaker: Yes. Speaker 3: And it's much harder to grow when suddenly you're living off of the profit. Speaker 1: Definitely, yes. Speaker 3: Because now everything you spend, there's a little more scrutiny to it. Speaker 1: Yes, absolutely. Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely. All right, let's go ahead and jump on to the next. News article here, Gen AI. Gen AI drives a 4,700% surge in traffic to shopping sites in the US, according to Adobe. Adobe reports a massive 4,700% year-over-year surge in traffic from generative AI platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity. Shoppers driven by AI links are more research focused, spending 32% more time on sites, viewing 10% more pages and bouncing 27% less. For Amazon sellers, this signals a growing sales channel as consumers increasingly trust AI-generated recommendations and click-throughs to purchase. So yeah, the 4,700% I didn't notice what that was compared to exactly, if they have the number of clicks that relates to here or not. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 3: Yeah. Speaker 1: I mean, I'm a little curious on how, where they got this number, but I can tell you from my own behavior that I definitely have used ChatGPT to locate products and I appreciate that ChatGPT goes out and searches Outside of Amazon, right? It will give you Amazon listings, but it'll give you other sites as well. Now, OpenAI and Shopify doing a deal together, this makes a hell of a lot of sense. And I do firmly believe that with the new generation of search going over to AI, and then people using AI to locate top competing products for whatever type of search they're doing, I'm an AI driving people to Shopify sites that this is going to cause a revolution on where money is spent. I believe it's going to be pulling heavily away from Amazon, which I support because you are supporting small businesses directly. I see this as a good thing. On the flip side of that coin, I have not had the best experience with obviously trustworthy websites with ChatGPT showing me the results. There have been links that go to trash websites that are just ad websites. So I've got a buddy in the space. I'm trying to remember the name of his company off the top of my head, but What he wants to build is some sort of certification system for websites that talk to AI and say, this is a legitimate website. It's been certified by this company and they have an SSL in there and they're using secure card transfers and all that kind of stuff. And this is going to become much more necessary when it comes to AI because otherwise we'll have the early days of just e-commerce, dropship e-com websites attracting credit cards, which was a big scam in the early 2000s. Speaker 3: Hey, Amazon sellers, tired of losing money on storage and shipping fees? Well, Amazon Storage Pros is here to take the headache out of logistics. We manage everything from inventory and creating efficient shipping plans to working with 3PLs and Amazon's AWD so that you can focus on growing your business. Start with a free storage cost audit and discover exactly where you're overspending and how to fix it. Don't let logistics eat into your profits. Visit AmazonStoragePros.com. That's AmazonStoragePros.com to get your free storage cost audit and start saving today. And now back to the show. Yeah. Yeah. That's definitely something to be careful with. You never know if the sites that it's recommending are super quality sites that you can actually trust. So you gotta be careful with that. You would hope that it's recommending legitimate websites, but I'm sure it can be tricked. Speaker 1: Definitely. Yeah. Speaker 2: Well, and this is also the new SEO to be solved for brand owners because I've already been seeing out there in the wild people offering up various scripts and things to try and do to seed your information into a ChatGPT or Grok or wherever. So figuring out how to get those LLMs to pick you up and say, yeah, this is a product that should be in our recommended model for this and not just scraping them off of some random review site. For a long time, there have been those paid review sites out there that I'm sure that they are a source for ChatGPT and Grok and people are not aware that those are all paid. A lot of times when you go out on Google and you search for What are the best, like I was looking for a robot vacuum, right? So what's the best robot vacuum that also mops and you go out and all those reviews. I know one of the guys who owned one of those sites, I mean they're all paid, they're all paid reviews or it'll have half paid or the top three will be paid and then the rest are filler. And so now ChatGPT is pulling from those sites and it's all essentially like advertorial. So it's, it's, It's going to be interesting to watch it shake out, but it's one of those things where fast early movers on this could really get some advantage. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 3: The AI really needs to be able to determine between what is likely promotional and what is real user opinion of different things so it's not getting tricked by those sites. I used to do some of that back in the day, creating those sites and doing reviews and stuff. I made some money at it. I probably could have made a lot more but I was trying to be honest and actually reviewing products that I knew about and have actually used and so that limited my ability versus just throwing up pages and putting lots of links on them. Speaker 1: Yeah, I did a paid content video for an electric bike company and contractually, of course, they don't want you to say anything bad about it. So the features that I didn't like on this bike I just didn't talk about, you know, and so we're talking about websites so far, but YouTube is also crawlable by these search engines because there is the transcripts there. So yes. You don't, I mean, YouTube does require you to disclose if you've been paid to do a video for a vendor, but not everybody does because they don't even know about it. You know, these smaller creators, they just don't know about it. And so, for instance, like my YouTube video, it's not disclosed that that's a paid thing. Is it on YouTube? Yeah, I think it is. This is just another form of advertising. And so you're not going to, you know, these AIs, they are trained on what's on the internet. And the children of our generation, we all joke like, well, it must be true. It was on the internet, you know, and it's so far, like so far from the truth that what you find on the internet to be true at all times. It's just like, Hey 80% of all statistics are made up on the spot and like I just these chats these eyes they're not trustworthy when it comes to this data because it's trained on the data that's there. It'll get better though. It'll get better but here's what I see happening. With every new generation of search, there's a way to trick the engine and stuff it with the things that you want it to search. So the people that are Far more tech savvy than us on building websites and coding and stuff like that. We'll figure out a way to stuff these websites with whatever the AI is looking for and then we will be served up results that are crap and then open AI is going to figure out how to fix that and it'll go down the whole thing that it's always done in Google. You know, scammers figured out how to make a couple million bucks. Google makes a change and ruins everything and puts them all out of business, except for the people that know that it's coming because they're the ones that invented it. And then they figure out something else and so on. And so it goes. And it's going to be the same thing with open AI. Speaker 3: Yep. Yeah, for sure. It'll definitely happen. I think the loop will probably be faster and faster as time goes on because AI will You know, just learn how to self adjust itself rather than waiting for Google to put out a massive update or something. It'll just be micro updates daily or hourly or whatever. But yeah, you definitely, I mean, number one, you just shouldn't trust AI Whatever it says, regardless, I mean, I if you ask it stuff about a topic that you know a lot, you're going to catch it telling you lies or incorrect stuff. So just assume that Anything else it's doing is probably giving you some incorrect stuff as well. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: Here's something both sobering and an opportunity for those who want to jump into it. Reddit is the source for most of the AI engines. Fortunately, several of them have stopped using Reddit, but I believe that the new The latest ChatGPT, I think ChatGPT made a deal with Reddit. Speaker 1: I saw something about that. Speaker 2: And Reddit's a cesspool, y'all, full of crazy people who just ran, they think they know things and they don't, and it's frightening. And you talk about a place that if you really know something in detail and you go look there, you'd be like, Oh, all these people are nuts. It's an echo chamber. So I'm sure there's some threads that are nice, but y'all know what I mean. Speaker 3: Yes. Speaker 2: So the opportunity though is if you know that ChatGPT has a deal with Reddit and you're selling thingamajigs, then you need to get the over into the thingamajig forum and start seeding information about I'm your thingamajig compared to the competition because it could very well, because of that deal with ChatGPT, that could help you get more or a semi-organic sales on Amazon. Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, I'm sure you guys are familiar with like the influencer platforms that are out there. I had a meeting with one of them yesterday just to find out, you know, pricing and stuff like that. It was like they were recommending me do 100 influencers a month, or I could do the 300. But for 100 influencers a month, I think the platform fee was like 200 bucks or something like that for the platform fee and then it's $20 per social post that the influencers make. So I can go on there with any product and put the details on what I want these influencers to say basically. And for a couple thousand dollars plus product giveaways, I can have hundreds of videos made every single month for my product. And of course, AI is going to pick up on that and potentially use it as, hey, yeah, this product is one of the best out there. There's tons of influencers that are talking about it. It's pretty easy to manipulate it and you can do the same thing on Reddit like you were saying, Leslie. If you know ChatGPT is using it, pay a thousand people to go on there and talk about your product and now you're showing up. Speaker 1: Yeah. Two thoughts on this. So number one, In the early days of internet, all you had to do was stuff a website with keywords. And one of the tactics that we used in those days was you made a really big, really tall bottom of the page and you literally stuffed the keyword. This is where keyword stuffing comes from. You stuff the keywords into the bottom of a page and you made the text the same color as the background. And that's how you ranked on Google. Speaker 3: Yep. I remember doing that. Speaker 1: Yep. Me too. But now, keyword stuffing is going to be content stuffing, is what it's going to be. So you're going to need to go all over the internet and stuff those areas with content that you know AI is going to. And I mean, this is already being done in many ways. I'll give you an example of a high-end product I didn't buy. Because I wasn't able to answer the single question that was most important to me, there's this desk. This chair that I have is called Secret Lab. They have a metal desk. It looks incredible. It's all built-in power. It's a raised lower desk. I was about to spend $2,000 on this desk, but before I hit that button, I went and I searched for every video I could find on it and I could not find a single video that was not clearly influencer-driven by the brand. I immediately stopped the sale because I already like we've got on these chairs, we've got these replaceable armrests, right? I bought them all to see which one I liked and went to return and I said, oh, no, no, we don't do returns. I'm like, I ain't paying two grand on a company that doesn't like you can't try the product, you know, on an Internet only company. Forget that. And so I'm not buying this company. Yeah, because I cannot find legitimate Non-biased data, I'm not buying from this company. Speaker 3: Yeah, and that's what you got to look for and hopefully AI will get smart enough to figure that out because you were able to figure that out. Hopefully AI will be smart enough to figure that out and kind of weed those out or at least like, okay, I'm going to take these 100 videos and just lump them together as one because basically a paid promotion and then try to find real reviews of the product. It's a never-ending battle. You're just going to have AIs battling each other because the people trying to hack it are going to create their own AI to hack the system and you'll have the AI systems battling back and forth to one up each other. Speaker 1: I do believe, though, that no matter what, content is still king and doing building something correctly and in an organized fashion that delivers the answers that that People are seeking the answer, delivers the answers that people are seeking the answers to. That doesn't sound right. Answering the questions people are asking. That's the best way to get well known or to get found and build the most amount of trust. It's really, the strategy is the same as it always has been. It's just being modified by technology. Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, definitely not saying you shouldn't do those kind of things like influencer posts and stuff like that. Speaker 1: Not at all. Speaker 3: Hopefully you're doing it in an honest way that you're actually have a good product and you're not just trying to scam people with a piece of junk and get a bunch of sales. So it's definitely good to do that stuff. That's why I looked into it to see what it would cost us to drive However many sales to Amazon and get all these posts and stuff. But you just got to be careful when you're looking for products yourself. Many people are not as honest as the people on this live stream. So you got to be careful. Speaker 1: Yes, correct. Speaker 3: All right, let's go ahead and jump on to the next one here. So Amazon rolls out virtual multipacks. Amazon has launched a pilot for virtual multipacks, letting sellers offer multi-unit variations of brand-owned FBA ASINs without physical bundling. Each multipack gets its own ASIN and SKU, shows as a variation on the product page, which I think is key, and is fulfilled directly from single-unit inventory. So this is cool. You couldn't do this before. You can make virtual bundles, but not virtual multipacks that were a part of the variation of the original product. So for me, this is really nice for testing. You're probably still gonna get charged the full Amazon fees for individual sales. Speaker 1: Correct, yeah. Speaker 3: But very good for testing to see if the multipacks will work for you. Speaker 1: Yep. Leslie, I saw you shaking your head. I want to know what your thoughts are. Speaker 2: Rolling my eyes. So as most of y'all probably know, but maybe not, I get weird visibility into lots of people's catalogs just by virtue of what I do. You know, Amazon made an announcement a long time ago about not allowing multipacks that are not manufacturer multipacks, right? And then they didn't really do anything for a long time about it. And so all of a sudden this week, a lot of sellers are seeing their multipacks go down. So those ASINs are going down. Now they're not enforcing these as a suspension, like a black mark on your account necessarily. What they're doing is they're saying, send us your invoices. So we can reinstate, but it's not, it's not a bad enforcement. It's not a, we're going to take your account down and kill you for it. Speaker 1: It is a BS one though. Speaker 2: What they're doing is they're going to tell everyone, hey, this was not purchased in a multipack, so you can't sell it as a multipack. Some of the listings that I have seen that they're taking down are literally seven, eight, nine-year-old listings, standard products that have been out there forever and ever. To me, what it looks like is that there was some program manager at Amazon who was like, we should do virtual multipacks just like we're doing virtual bundles. And then they went backward from there. And so this is the so well, if we're going to do this and make this an Amazon service, then we have to take out all of these listings that have these poor sellers have had forever and ever. And there may not even be a listing for a single and and all of a sudden all your listings are going away. I think I get where they're coming from. I'm sure there are reasons, you know, capital reasons, trademark But sometimes it's like working with a control freak from hell that they just have to meddle. They just have to mess with it. And someone putting up a two-pack that is literally live on the site selling and making money for Amazon and the seller for more than half a decade, which I saw several of those this week, and all of a sudden they're verboten. And you know that Amazon has accepted invoices for those in the past. Absolutely they have. It's nuts. It's part of the Andy Jassy regime that I just don't get with this uniformity and It's all gotta be a certain way. This is like the eBayification. If you have something that's different, it's like eBay. We're not eBay. Unknown Speaker: I don't know, man. Speaker 2: I know that there are sellers that are freaked out right now. I just want you to know, if you got a multipack that they took down, they asked for invoice, they're probably not gonna reinstate the listing, but this isn't like an inauthentic or something where they're gonna take out your account. They're just making you prove that it was sold in a multipack, and if not, they're just gonna say no. Speaker 1: Yeah, this is a profit play. Speaker 2: For them, isn't everything. Speaker 1: Yes, it is. Like I've said it for many years, like rarely does Amazon do anything in the, in, in the favor of the seller, in favor of the seller. You know, Amazon is interested in Amazon making more money and you are a pawn that moves across the board, shoveling money into the big old pie and anything that they do like this, like many sellers without knowing that they're going to pay individual prices on every single one of those multipacks are going to applaud that this exists and Amazon should have done this roughly 10 years ago, right? Easily, they easily could have done it, right? But they didn't and so I actually, my wife and I, Man, it must have been 12, 13 years ago. We recaptured an entire product market by creating multipacks in our home. We put two bottles together, shrink-wrapped them. Three bottles together, shrink-wrapped them. One with a sample, shrink-wrapped. Two with a sample, shrink-wrapped. Three with a sample, shrink-wrapped. And then we had the whole first page of Amazon. This was even before virtual bundles. So virtual bundles came out a year or two later. The fact that Amazon's doing this, it's going to be, you know, let's take Apple. Everything that they do is the most revolutionary thing on planet Earth. Amazon's doing the same thing. Look at what we've done for you. We love you and we're going to go up on stage and say, and you know what? We help you more than we've ever helped you before. They're gonna spout that crap while they go and we're gonna charge the shit out of you for it in the background. Speaker 3: Yeah. Fulfillment fee per unit. Speaker 1: Yes. Speaker 3: In the pack. Yes. That's what drives you crazy on those. You know, there should be some kind of discount for a multipack like that. That's the whole point of making a multipack. Speaker 1: Yes. Speaker 3: Is to help the customer save some money. Instead of selling two at $14 each, you can sell two at $10 each because you're saving on the fees and everything else for those products. Speaker 2: Absolutely. I've done that for years. I've been on listings on Amazon where there's a one-pack, a two-pack and a three-pack. Some of these things, some of them I have at FBA and then some I merch at Fulfill. When I merchant fulfill them, I can absolutely have a lower price because I'm sending one box. The shipping sometimes is the same or like 50 cents more. And so I make more money and the buyer pays less. And so it's literally good for everybody except Amazon. Speaker 3: Yep. Speaker 1: Yep. Yep. Speaker 3: Yeah. So, I mean, yeah, totally on, on that. You're probably going to see an average price increase, I would say, of products out there, especially bundles, if people are forced to do this. And those people who are having their bundles taken down or multipacks, I should say, odds are they're not the brand owners. And so they're not going to be able to create these virtual multipacks anyways. They're going to have to get the brand to do it. And I doubt the brand won't really have any incentive. Because you're not going to be able to sell it for cheaper anyways, so why sell the multipack? Speaker 1: Yeah, I think this has in part to do with sellers creating unauthorized multipacks and packaging them with other products in order to gain sales of their own private label stuff and stuff like that. I think in part it has to do with that. But this is one of those things where it's like, hey, one person did something perhaps they shouldn't have done, so let's punish all individuals associated With everything and anything. And I think sometimes it's a bad thing. I'm not actually saying the truth right now. Sometimes it's bad that Leslie and I are both on here at the same time because both of us have many experiences that are similar and she has an even broader experience than I do. But when she starts saying something like, hell yeah, damn right, they're out to get us. But and I'll probably always hold that viewpoint when it comes to Amazon. They just don't do anything to assist the seller and make things better for us. For the most part, probably 99.9% of the time. But no matter what, this is merely the cost of doing business and you need to pivot appropriately. Speaker 3: Yeah. I mean, having this tool available for sellers is good. But what's not good, as Leslie pointed out, is their reaction to other multipacks that people have made by taking them down and banning those listings. That's obviously not good because that was harming no one and it's just a benefit to the consumer who's getting a better price. And the seller is making some extra money. Speaker 1: One could argue that by leaving that in, that Amazon is being more of a sustainable company for shipping out six foot by six foot by 1200 foot boxes for a freaking sock that somebody ordered. Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, for sure. They've gotten a little bit better at that, but you still get them sometimes where it's like, why? This is such a big box. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 3: And then I always laugh because they get you the big box and you got the little item in there and they'll put like one little piece of paper as if that's supposed to protect it. It's like, why put the paper in there, right? Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 3: Recently, the purpose of that. Speaker 1: Yeah. Recently we've been receiving, my wife's been ordering shoes for the kids to try, right? And there have been a couple of times where I'm not even joking. It's like a two foot long box for a pair of children's shoes. And there's like two or three pair of shoes in there. I mean, yeah, I'll stop. I'll get off my soapbox. Speaker 3: It's a lot. Speaker 2: There's reasons. I'm using the air quotes reasons. Trademark for that at Amazon, when they reach the end of a shift and the boxes haven't been restocked, they are not supposed to stop working. So they use whatever boxes are available at end of shift before the pick and pack is replenished and everyone's moving around. So whatever, it's just like the very worst, y'all know this, the very worst boxes you ever get from Amazon are the ones when you place a removal order. Um, they are either stuffed full and weigh 900 pounds or they've got one item, but they're an enormous box. So when they do removal orders, it's literally, Last priority. So after all the orders have been filled, then they'll do removal orders. And that also is end of shift and it's whatever the heck box is open and open and available. And that's why it's so random because I've gotten them stuffed where it's like bursting out, bursting out. And then I've had some where it's like the pen, the writing pen in a three by three box. What the heck is that? Speaker 3: Every one of those removal order boxes look like they've just been dropped in the UPF truck. Speaker 1: I know. Speaker 3: Every one of them looks like it's just been thrown through the mud, tumbled down the conveyor belt a million times. Speaker 1: Ace Ventura. I always think of Ace Ventura when he was delivering that package and he was just doing handstands on the box and kicking it down the The hallway and stuff like that. Speaker 3: That's how they do removal orders. Yeah, it has to be. It's like, Hey, ups, this is a removal order. It's like, okay, dropkick. Speaker 1: Boom. Yep. Speaker 2: Well, in the, in the warehouse, This is a little bit of an exaggeration, but they're kind of trained to believe that they're trash. They believe that whatever's being removed is not viable, important product anymore. So they treat it accordingly. They're told they don't have to have the same standards for an item they pick and pack for a buyer. So they legit are treating it like garbage, which is why it's really upsetting when someone has a removal order for a legitimate purpose, like I have someone I worked with recently who they needed to rebrand some items and so they placed a removal order and I just shudder to think what the product will look like when it gets back to them. Speaker 3: Or Amazon taking down your multipack. Speaker 2: Yes, and so you gotta pull all those out, yeah. Speaker 3: Yep, yep, for sure. All right, well let's, we've got a few minutes left here. We'll jump on to our last story and see what you guys have to say about that. Speaker 1: I've got one thing to say about this. Speaker 3: You've got what? Speaker 1: One thing to say about this one. Speaker 3: Okay. So introducing Amazon Lens Live, instant scanning, real-time product matches and insights from Amazon's AI Shopping Assistant. Lens is an AI-powered visual search tool that instantly scans products and displays real-time matches in a swipable carousel. Integrated with Amazon's AI assistant Rufus, it also provides a quick product insights, summaries, and answers to customer questions directly within the shopping app. Speaker 1: Welcome to 2017 on Google, Amazon. Welcome. Speaker 3: Right, yeah. I know, right? When I first seen this, I'm like, lens, that's, why does that sound so familiar? And then I'm like, oh yes, Google lens. They basically copied the name and everything they've been doing with it for years. Speaker 1: Coming out next year, Amazon goggles. Speaker 3: I did just see something about Amazon is releasing AR glasses. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 3: So basically copying Google's AR glasses that they had. We'll see if they're any better or not, but supposedly they're rolling them out to all their Amazon drivers. I think this is kind of important. I've used this some myself when I'm looking for something on Amazon and it works pretty good for the most part. I'm pulling up products that are at least similar to what you're looking for, not necessarily the same brand and stuff. A lot of times you'll get a lot of knockoffs of the product, but it works pretty good for finding products. Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm not knocking it. It's a good thing that Amazon did this. It's just freaking eight years late. It's like this could have been done a long, long time ago, but I'm glad it's finally here. I do wonder by giving Amazon access to your camera lens, what other data they're going to be gleaning from what's in the image. But I think this is going to be good for people In general, we'll see if it gets adopted, though. Speaker 3: Yeah, well, that'll be the question. And plus, it's it's integrated with Rufus, which is good. So I'm assuming Yeah, you've got automatic questions that show up down here at the bottom. So that's kind of a thing for sellers is is where these questions being generated from, right? It's AI probably generating those questions based off of The Q&A sections of your listing, the reviews of your listing, and the content of listings that it's showing. So that kind of plays into what we've talked about on a previous listing, which is writing your listings in a way that are kind of question and answer style based. Yes. And answering these questions for the customer writing your copy and Rufus will likely pick up on that. Speaker 1: Yeah, I do. I do think that sellers and brand owners need to, I mean, it's always been this way, but more than ever now, brand owners should know the questions that their customers are asking and tailor just what you said, but they need to know the questions first before they build the listing, because nobody cares about your own opinion if it's not relevant to what your customers want. I don't sell bikinis. And but if I went and I wrote a bikini article and built a bikini brand, like, well, I don't know how comfortable they are. Well, at least not admittedly. I'm not admitting that on this live stream. I don't know. But, you know, what matters is my customer that's going to buy the bikini. Right. So you need to be building your listings. In such a way that as the customer eye trail and journey goes down your listing or across your images, you're answering the questions that are top of mind with the most important question first and then answering all the other little detailed questions that lead to a buying decision. Speaker 3: Yeah, it's gonna result in having to write your listings differently because it's gonna, the AI search is gonna replace the regular search for the most part at some point. The last I seen it was something like 15 to 20% of searches are going through Rufus now, and that's just gonna increase. And so the way people search are gonna change. I'm no longer gonna go to Amazon and say, You know, one person tent and hit enter and see what shows up and scroll through it. I'm going to go and say, what's the best one person tent for my hike into the mountains in North Carolina? And I'm going to hit enter. I'm going to see what Rufus comes back. And Rufus is probably going to come back with listings that have some of that information in it. Either content provided by the brand owner or content from reviews and Q&A. Speaker 1: Yep. I am agree. Speaker 3: Yep. So it's going to be super important to, you know, adjust your listings for this. The, uh, the age of AI is definitely upon us and it's, it's going to come very quick, uh, in the next year or two, I think it will be taking over almost completely on a lot of these e-commerce platforms. Speaker 1: Yep. AECOM, not e-com. Speaker 3: AECOM. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Any thoughts, Leslie, before we wrap it up? Speaker 2: Well, for sellers out there who are still doing old school flipping items, this is actually very exciting because I don't know how long it's been since y'all have in the... Speaker 3: Good point. Speaker 2: In the app, in the Amazon app, you know, they used to have a barcode icon where you could click on a barcode and you could scan a barcode and it would pull up product. And then they took that away and they changed it to like a visual recognition kind of thing. And so you'd hold it in front of the product and it would put all these little dots all over it. And then it would pull up like a cow in a field. I mean, it was, you'd be scanning a book and it would pull up a car It was terrible. I played with it just to see if I could get it to match things. And I mean, 10% of the time or less, it actually matched something. Speaker 3: Less for me. Speaker 2: I know this is a very small portion of sellers and audience of this show at this point in time, but there are still people out there who are flipping stuff, especially at the holidays. And there are still people who, uh, you know, their wholesaler catalogs aren't the best for searching on Amazon. And so this, this actually might give some, uh, faster results for people who are trying to find a product and match it or like go through a bunch of stuff quickly and see if anything's worth them doing more research on. Speaker 1: Yep. Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, you'll just have to be careful, especially if you're newly getting into the flipping game, or else you might run afoul like I did with my very first product where I just I've seen a listing and I'm like, that looks like what I'm selling. I'm sending it in. And so I became a hijacker for a little bit. That was my first experience sending my own product into Amazon. So you got to be careful with that. Obviously, in this case, what is showing on the screen, this white Plant Pot doesn't have a brand name on it or anything, so it's just going to show stuff that looks like it. Just because it looks like it doesn't mean you can actually sell on that listing that it's the same brand or anything else. Speaker 1: True. Speaker 3: You got to be careful with it. All right, we'll go ahead and finish it up there. Dayna and Leslie, I appreciate you coming on the show again. Speaker 1: Yep. Speaker 3: Everybody out there watching, I appreciate you watching. We do this every Friday, so hopefully you join us next week. Until then, have an awesome weekend. Speaker 1: Bye, everyone. Speaker 2: Thank you. Speaker 3: See you later. Unknown Speaker: This has been another episode of the Amazon Seller School podcast. Thanks for listening, fellow Amazon seller. And always remember, success is yours if you take it. Speaker 3: Hey, if you made it this far in the show, I really hope you enjoyed it and I'd like to ask you a favor. Could you head on over to Apple or Spotify or wherever you're listening to this and leave us a review? It would be greatly appreciated and would help us continue to grow the show and offer more episodes for you. Thank you. God bless and have an awesome day.