Amazon News: Google Exit, Feedback Shift & FBA Prep Ending Soon

Amazon News: Google Exit, Feedback Shift & FBA Prep Ending Soon Unknown Speaker: Welcome, fellow entrepreneurs, to the Amazon Seller School podcast, where we talk about Amazon and how you can use it to build an e-commerce empire, a side hustle, and anything in between. And now, your host, Todd Welch. Speaker 2: All right. Welcome, Amazon sellers. We are here live again, and I am back in the studio after missing a couple weeks. A way for training and then visiting some family. So it's awesome to be back. We've got Danan in his matrix glasses going on over there. He said he just got back from the ophthalmologist. So his eyes are a little sensitive, but I appreciate you joining us, Danan. Speaker 1: Yeah, you got it, buddy. Always good to be here. Thanks for having me again. Speaker 2: Yes, absolutely. It's pretty cool. We can see your entire setup in your glasses as well. Speaker 1: That's right. Monitor one, monitor two, camera that I'm not using, light. Speaker 2: Be careful what you bring up on your screen for sure. All right. Speaker 1: This is how I do my subliminal messaging is I just put it up on the screen and there you go. Speaker 2: Yes. Go to ecomtriage.com. All right. But yeah, it's good to be back for sure. And we've got a pretty eventful news week for sure. Lots of things happening on the Amazon landscape. Everybody that is streaming in right now, if you have any questions or comments related to the news, throw them in there and we'll be happy to bring them into the show. Even questions in general, if we have time, we'll bring them into the show as well. So we're always happy to help people out there with their Amazon sales and selling on Amazon. So without further ado, let's go ahead and dive into the first one here. Speaker 1: Let's do it. Speaker 2: So Amazon pulls back from Google Shopping ads, creating rare opportunity for sellers. Amazon has suddenly stopped bidding on Google Shopping ads as of July 23rd, marking its first full retreat from the platform since 2020. This has opened the door for other advertisers like Walmart, Target, and smaller Amazon sellers to capture more impressions and enjoy lower cost per click. Experts report cost per click have already dropped 1 to 4% on average, with some product categories seeing reductions as high as 40%. For Amazon sellers running off Amazon campaigns, now may be the perfect time to test Google Shopping ads at a much lower cost. Interesting. I've seen news that Amazon has been scaling back its Google shopping ads as of late, but very interesting that they cut it off completely. So any thoughts on this, Dana? Speaker 1: Yeah. So speaking of cue the speculation, I've got a couple of thoughts on this. Number one is that I believe Amazon has been making some pretty significant strides in trying to recover profit or show more profit. So this would obviously, I mean, I'd be curious to know what Amazon was spending yearly on Google ads. Speaker 2: I'm sure it was a lot because they always showed up at the top when you search for anything product related. Speaker 1: Yes, exactly. And so I believe that's part of it. The other part is that If they've got this brand referral bonus in full swing within 10%, they're also technically losing money there. If they're advertising the product and the product owner is outbidding Amazon on their own ads for that category of that product and they're having to then pay for that, That's driving up costs, right? And then they still have to give that brand referral bonus. So that's technically not a loss of dollars, but a loss of income for them. And honestly, I see this as a good thing, if I'm being honest, because each brand can now go after their categories. At a lower cost, because let's be honest, what was Amazon truly doing by putting Google ads on there? They were just arbitraging ads. They pay for the ads, but you pay for the ads after they drive the traffic there. If you can just drive the traffic straight to your own listing, I see that as as a benefit personally. And I think that any brand that isn't currently doing Google ads needs to test it. And by the way, a one or two month test doesn't cut it. Three months minimum, six months ideal to know if it's working. But at the same time, um, Google, Google ads is complicated, more complicated than I mean, actually Amazon and Google ads are complicated now, but every brand owner besides me knows how to do Google ads. I mean, Amazon ads, Google ads is just another beast. There's so much more attribution capabilities and tracking and all that kind of stuff that Amazon just doesn't have. And, um, So even me who used to run Google ads back, you know, more than a decade now, I'm now lost in what is capable on Google ads if I'm being honest, which seems that I'm being an on saying that a lot this morning about if I'm being honest. Speaker 2: Yes, it's good to be honest. Um, yeah, it's, Speculation, of course, as to what's going on. The big question will be how long this lasts. Is this going to be a permanent thing? Is it going to be a few days, a week, a month? You mentioned running Google ads for six months, but it depends on if Amazon kicks their ads back in and your cost per click goes up. Speaker 1: Sure. Speaker 2: But in reality, if you're building a brand, you should probably be running Google ads anyways, even if you're getting less clicks because you're not Having your bid high enough, you're probably getting something. And either driving that to your Amazon store front, because you can actually do some tracking on there with Google ads and stuff, or driving them to your Shopify store or something like that. And I think that might be where an even bigger opportunity is for brands, is to drive some traffic to their Amazon storefront, I'm here to talk to you about how to sell on Amazon, but drive just as much or more traffic to their Shopify storefront and take advantage of the lower cost per click and see if they can make that profitable and get those customers direct and kind of cut Amazon out of the equation a little bit. Speaker 1: Yeah. You know, I, I would love to get an, a Google ads expert on here to, If you've got a campaign structure where you're driving traffic to both your website and to Amazon, I wonder if you're not bidding against yourself to drive traffic in two different places or you use day parting where you drive traffic part of a day to Amazon and part of a day to your own e-com site. But honestly, I, I guess it depends on the brand on which is better because if it were my choice, I'd never send traffic to Amazon. I'd send it to my own store because then I'm acquiring that name, email, phone number, address, everything, and that becomes my list, right? And if you can get 1,000, 100, 500, 1,000, 10,000, Email list that then also becomes, Hey, we've launched this. Hey, we've launched that this week. We've got this deal this month. We've got that deal. And you don't have to pay Amazon all those fees unless you're using them for FBA. But you've got to pay fulfillment fees no matter what. Speaker 2: Yeah, the email list is a big, big point. And especially if for the younger people out there who may think that email is dead. You can do a lot with an email newsletter, email promotions, and make a lot of money with that. Yeah, because pretty much everyone still has an email address that they at least occasionally check. Yeah, I mean, you almost have to write to be able to sign up for anything, you got to have an email address, you got to go get that code. That they send over there. So at a minimum, they're looking at it then. And it's a, it's still an extremely effective way to market. So being able to direct people to your Shopify store, get a sale there and get their email address or even if you just get them on your your newsletter, by offering them a discount code or something like that. And If you don't have their attention that way, you can use that to not only market them to their email, but you can then take that email, load it up into Facebook and do target them there or find similar people to them on Facebook. Speaker 1: Yeah, create a lookalike audience with, yeah, I did that a long time ago where I had, I 700 emails and I created a lookalike audience in meta and it, you know, it's great because that's your ICP, right? Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, I know the guys over at Ampth.io and they do specifically Google ads directing to Amazon, Walmart, Target, other places like that. So it'd be interesting to have them on the show and talk about this a little bit more and get what their take is since they're in the Google ads campaigns all day, every day. Speaker 1: Yeah. So Amped, a funny story when they came into the Amazon sector, which was now about seven years ago, maybe eight years ago, I helped them launch into the Amazon community through Managed by Stats. So I haven't looked into it for a long time, but there was 50 plus different people that I sent over there and they come from Google ads. That's what they were before. And then they've been figuring out this, you know, Google to Amazon system for quite some time. And then the only other one that I am aware that does that is a carbon six. Speaker 2: And so they've got, they do Google ads, huh? Speaker 1: Yeah. So let me see. I, I, I was actually just speaking to Clayton the other day. It's a mom, mom, mom, mom. Gosh, I can't, I can never remember the name of the tool, but yeah, if you look at, if you look at carbon six, it's a, They've got a tool that does it. Speaker 2: Okay. Yeah. Those would be good options. Amp.io, Carbon 6, both are good platforms that have some good people behind them. So if you're not familiar with Google ads and you want to try it, that would definitely work with someone like that, that actually knows the platform rather than just trying to figure it out yourself because It definitely is a little more complicated than Amazon ads and just like Amazon ads, you can waste a lot of money really fast if you do it wrong. Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's PixelMe. Carbon 6's tool is PixelMe. Speaker 2: Okay. Yep. Yep. Speaker 1: So, Amped.io and PixelMe by Carbon 6. Okay. Speaker 2: Very good. So, definitely check those out. If I had a brand, Which I mostly am helping other brands, so I will talk to them about this. But if I had a personal one, I would definitely be trying it. I'd probably get on one of those tools. I've done it before myself, but I'm definitely not an expert at Google Ads. I would probably hook up with one of the companies that are able to do it for me and just test it out. Try it out for a few months and see how it goes and go back and forth pushing people to your Amazon storefront versus Shopify or whatever platform you're using and see where you get the best ROI on there. Yeah. Speaker 1: I think any brand will fairly rapidly learn that what's going to be most important is Accurate attribution. And if you don't currently know Google ads, you will, I don't think you'll be able to just pick that up and do it because if you're running ads to a Shopify site, you need to add a TXT file so that Google can track, okay, this is, this ad is connected with this website. Oh, there's the TXT file that's embedded into the website. Now we've got everything good. Now you've got your events and your, conversions and all that kind of stuff being trapped, tracked appropriately. And even though I know that stuff, I actually don't know how to properly set it up. I just, because I don't run Google ads and I haven't for ages, but, I know that that's something that you're going to want to do because otherwise all you're going to see is, yeah, I'm paying Google for clicks or impressions. Speaker 2: Yeah, I remember a brand that I was working with, which we don't work with anymore because they decided to take it all in-house. We were reselling their product for them and running some basic ads on Google. They contacted us upset that we were running ads on Google, which was driving up their cost per click for their own Google ads going to their site. I'm like, I'm not running it on Google on purpose. Amazon's just pushing the ads out there. Speaker 1: Oh, it wasn't you actually? Speaker 2: Yeah, no, no, because we had all that turned off and we're just doing the sponsored product ads. And Amazon was still running ads for their product on Google Shopping anyways. And so we ended up having to just turn off ads and then they ended up taking it in house and doing it themselves. But This would have been good news back then. They would have been happy to hear that, the brands anyways, because then Amazon's not competing with their ads that they're driving to their Shopify store. Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. I think ultimately this is a good thing, but at the same time, we also know that If Amazon can take an inch of control, they'll take a mile. Speaker 2: You know, and on the other side of this, you know, you can put on the conspiracy theory hat. Is this an attempt of Amazon to start trying to make us pay more to put our ads on Google and such? Are they gonna open up something more in Amazon ads saying, hey, pay us more if you want to have your ads showing on Google or something like that? Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I would absolutely see Amazon doing something nefarious like that, where basically, here's what I think Amazon does, is that they make something really attractive. They do something and everyone goes, what's going on? Then they do something else and they make it really attractive to bring you back in. Then they box you in. Then they force you to stay there. Speaker 2: Yeah, I could totally see something like that. Yeah, but we'll have to wait and see, you know, what happens from this, I would expect it To be announced relatively soon if they were going to be doing something. Speaker 1: Probably at Accelerate. Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. There you go. And that's coming up. When is it? Speaker 1: September 15th, so a month and a half. Speaker 2: 15th. Yeah. So a month and a half. So just enough time for you to see some kind of drop in your sales and Amazon be like, Hey, we'll help you get those. Speaker 1: We've just partnered with Google and now you can turn on, also advertise on Google and right inside of your ads platform. Speaker 2: Yeah. And you have complete control, so it's much better than us doing it for you. Speaker 1: We're here to help you because seller support means support and we support our sellers. Speaker 2: Yeah, I could totally see something like that happening. Would not put it past us. We'll have to hurry up and wait. But in the meantime, great opportunity, I think, if you want to try out Google Ads for a lower cost per click. Yeah, I think a lot of people are going to be overall happy about this right now. Speaker 1: I don't know that I would carve away from my existing budget on Amazon ads, but produce a new budget to test. I was recently speaking with a Google Ads rep. $30 a day is like the bare minimum. I think it's the same on Amazon too, but $30 a day is the bare minimum that you want to do. That's like the bare minimum. Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. You want to do enough to make sure you get a valid test. If you're not getting enough impressions, you're not really going to know if it's effective or not. Speaker 1: Yeah. So basically you want to budget like at least a grand a month. Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. Throw a grand at it. See what happens. Make sure you either know what you're doing or you're working with somebody who does know what they're doing and see how it goes. I mean, if you're building a brand anyways, you should probably be doing this regardless of what Amazon is doing because you're going to build a brand. You're going to want to have your own site, have your own checkout and be building outside of Amazon, not just on Amazon. Speaker 1: Yeah. So if you want to take a strategic point of view from this, If you're not currently doing this and you plan on building a website or you have a website built and you've done a lot, not got a lot going on, start running traffic to it. Get those conversions, which gets you those emails. Then you can go into a lookalike list on meta and start advertising to your ICP. And so this is, You could call this a really long-term marketing play, but if you're just going to test ads for one or two months to see how many sales you get, one, that's not long enough, and two, you're not thinking big enough, in my opinion. Speaker 2: Yep. Yep. Build your brand. All right, let's go ahead and move on to the next story here. Sellers protest a major change to Amazon feedback coming August 4th. So starting August 4th, so just a few days as of this recording, or this live I should say, Amazon will allow buyers to leave star only seller feedback with optional text. A move it says will increase submissions, not a good thing. But sellers are pushing back hard, warning this change strips away vital context that helps them address issues and appeal unfair ratings. Many fear it will lead to more confusion between product reviews and seller feedback, especially for FBA-related complaints the seller didn't cause. Without written comments, Sellers lose their ability to defend against misleading ratings, which could impact metrics like order defect rate and buy box eligibility. So I agree a hundred percent with those complaints. When I first seen this, I was like, eh, not that big of a deal. But then I thought about it a little bit more. I'm like, well, I'm not going to be able to remove all those reviews or feedback, I should say, that people leave thinking it's a product review or complaining about Amazon FBA, which none of that should be on your feedback if you're using Amazon's fulfillment services. Speaker 1: I'm in the review service. I help Amazon sellers remove negative product reviews that don't belong there. It's a pain in the butt. All they're making this is the same as product reviews, which has been like this for ages. The problem is exactly what it says. I think the biggest problem is that number one, you have no idea who left you a star rating. It may or may not be attached to an order. You have no idea. It still highly impacts your overall rating and there's nothing you can do about it. They could have, yeah, so. 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: About five to 10% of the written reviews on Amazon. It's a, sorry, the rating to written review, written reviews make up only about five to 10%. Now, of course they hold the most weight, but you could hire your competitor to go out and go give 51 star ratings. And that's going to majorly impact you. And there's no tracking for you whatsoever. You can't see when you got them. You can't see who they were. And one of the things that I look for when I'm looking for fraud are spikes in the number of negative reviews over a very short period of time as compared to the product as in its entirety. And that's one of the ways that I detect fraud. So if Amazon's doing this, which obviously they are, I would wager that At least 90% of the people that leave a star rating are only going to leave the star rating by requiring writing a review. It gives you such valuable data, such valuable data to the brand to ensure that they're able to deliver the best possible service and experience to the Amazon customer. So. I mean, Amazon, by doing this, in a way, like I don't see this being used for fraud really all that often, but Amazon's just opening the door for it. It's like, hey, We don't care. We don't track it. You don't have to say who you are. There's no time date stamp to the client. There's no retribution possible. Have at it, right? Now, if you look at any seller of any size, there will be a significant number of the negative reviews crossed out because it was an FBA issue, had nothing to do with the seller. Speaker 2: Yes. Speaker 1: So those people are likely going to just leave star ratings. The seller will have absolutely no recourse on this. They're just screwed. And like, Getting on my high horse here about Amazon screwing the seller. I've been in this game a long time, as you have as well, Todd. Over the years, we see these little things that impact us negatively as sellers way, way more than the things that they release to assist us to do a better job on Amazon. Speaker 2: For sure. Yeah, it's, it's gonna be really bad because I'm just looking at my, my 10 latest feedback. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: And four of them are product reviews. Speaker 1: Yep. Speaker 2: 40% of them are product reviews that should not be there. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: Now three of the my most 10 recent I have gotten struck out because they had to do with product reviews or FBA Delivering late or something like that. And so if they're able to not leave any kind of comment, I wouldn't be able to get those taken out. So that 40% of product reviews, they're just gonna be in my seller feedback as they didn't like the product or something like that. Now, to be fair, some of them are five stars about the product. Others are one star. Most of the one stars, the really bad ones are usually about Amazon fulfillment services. Occasionally the product review ones will be negative, but not as much as the Amazon fulfillment problems. And so now you're just not going to get those removed because most likely most people are not going to leave optional comments unless they're really angry about something. It depends. Speaker 1: Yeah. And those people write books usually. Speaker 2: Yes. Speaker 1: Yeah. I just don't see this being a good thing. I think Amazon needs to require a reason why they're giving a review. I think they should do this for product reviews as well. They should require a description. Google does this, they don't require it, but Google does this where as you're writing, it says, hey, could you be a little bit more descriptive? It's a little bit short. Hey, this is a good length. Hey, this is a great length, right? Now, Amazon likely uses that same format to assign a weight to each review, but they should require it because How can a bad product get better if they don't? How can a manufacturing issue be detected if nobody's writing reviews, right? Speaker 2: Yeah. At a minimum, you know, this is more painful on seller feedback because people frequently think it's a product review. Or they're giving feedback on Amazon services, not seller services. Speaker 1: Right. Speaker 2: With reviews, product reviews, you rarely see that mistake going the other way. Speaker 1: Yeah, definitely. Speaker 2: But at a minimum with product reviews, it should show the star rating and who left the rating and when they left the rating. But instead with product reviews, you just don't even see that. You don't know who left it, when they left it, what happened. You don't know anything. So it's extremely unhelpful the way it's implemented with product reviews. I can understand this with product reviews a little bit more because they want more product reviews. But with seller reviews, it doesn't make a lot of sense since it's so frequently they're putting incorrect feedback about something that has nothing to do with the seller. Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. This is, I think Amazon doesn't want to be responsible for That sort of stuff or not have to be as responsible. Speaker 2: Yeah, it could be there. They're like, okay, we don't want to anymore have to determine if we should strike a review or something because we don't want something coming back on us that we didn't strike a review when we should have or something like that. Speaker 1: Yeah. And let's be honest, they shouldn't even strike it. It should just be gone. Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure. Speaker 1: Why keep a review that has nothing to do with the star rating and what was said? Why keep that? It has nothing to do whatsoever with the seller. Why keep it? It should just be gone. Speaker 2: Yeah, I agree with that for sure. It's I've got two of them on my account that like one that struck out, but it still shows visually a one star, but at least it struck out. But still, it says do not buy reader sunglasses. They are junk. Speaker 1: There's still words there and it still impacts whoever's looking at it. Speaker 2: Yeah. As a buyer who doesn't understand how this works, I'm just seeing that two out of the most recent five are one stars, even though they're struck out. There must be something wrong with this seller. So, yeah, we'll see. Amazon does not have a good track record as of late as doing things in seller's favor though. So, I doubt that it will be reversed. What's that? Speaker 1: Are you referring to last decade? Speaker 2: Yeah, last decade, but it seems like it's coming fast and furious in the last year for sure. Speaker 1: Yeah. The last year or two, I actually totally agree with you. Rapidly raising rates, significant amounts, making claims, Hey, no, no rate increase this time. So they add new rates, right? And, and then now they're taking away stuff. Another little thing that most people probably never saw, but I do because I'm in the review business is that When you filter on reviews, Amazon used to tell you 800 global ratings, 250 reviews. Now they don't tell you that. Now it's just a number. The only way to see the global ratings is by aggregate, by looking at all star ratings. So you can't even tell if you go into one stars and there's 301 stars, written one stars, there's also likely 700 star rating only. There's no way to tell that anymore. That's minor, but it's just another piece of data that they've stripped away. So what they've done is now you can only see the latest 100 reviews and then, yeah, basically they're just stripping away data. They're hiding data and stripping it away. Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I was disappointed when they took away the commentability on reviews as well. I think that was a good tool for sellers to at least have some kind of outlet against bad reviews that, you know, weren't accurate or something. Especially the reviews that are always funny or, well, not so funny when you're the actual product owner, but the ones that are like, One star greatest product ever. Yeah, yeah, those are very annoying. But then you got people who, you know, just go off on a product or something like that. And it's fabricated or maybe it's about a whole different product or something. And you just have no way to really reach out to them anymore and try to resolve it. Speaker 1: Yep. Yeah. Look, I have dedicated my life to figuring this out for my fellow sellers. You know? Speaker 2: Yeah, we got to keep fighting Amazon as they say and keep moving forward. It'll be At some point enough will be enough and Amazon will start losing its dominance and maybe then we will see some changes. But right now, I mean, They're the big dog in the park and they're just doing whatever they want, so. Speaker 1: Yeah, they're the big dog and they'll shit anywhere they want to. Speaker 2: Exactly, and that's not gonna change until they start losing that, so we'll see. It might not even change then, to be honest, because the retail side of Amazon is becoming less and less of their profit in the company, so they may not even care as much then. Speaker 1: Ads is a significant percentage. I think ads is most of it, and then their server side. Speaker 2: AWS. Speaker 1: Yeah, AWS. Speaker 2: I believe AWS is their top revenue generator now, if I'm not mistaken. Speaker 1: Yeah. You know what? I'm going to look it up. It was, and I think it got surpassed by ads recently. Speaker 2: Okay, yeah, it could be. So yeah, ads, they're going to be sensitive about that for sure. So if their retail side starts declining, that's going to hurt the ad. So I guess that's where we got to hit them, hit them where it hurts. Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. Speaker 2: Not a whole lot you can do right now. But you know, Walmart and other places are making strides, but they've got a long ways to go. So we'll see. Speaker 1: Yeah. You know, we should do what we used to do. Some kids won't know about this, but the gas strikes where, hey, everybody, band together. Don't get gas on Wednesday. They'll lower their prices. Literally nothing ever happened with that because the next day everyone needed gas, you know? Speaker 2: Yeah. You got to get at, got to get gas and you got to get ads too. So that ain't going to work so much unless you can shift those ad dollars somewhere else and make equal to or more, uh, and on another platform. Speaker 1: Yeah. By the way, according to ChatGPT, Amazon's top five income sources is actually online stores, first-party retail, so that's vendor central, equates to 38 to 39 percent. And then 3P sellers is 24 percent. And then AWS, 16 percent. Wow. Advertising, 8 percent. And then subscription services, 7 percent. Speaker 2: Is that revenue or profit? Speaker 1: That's got to be revenue. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: Yeah, it's got to be. Speaker 2: And retail is a lot less profitable than AWS. Speaker 1: Yeah. I did ask it for the sources of income and not the percentages of profit. Speaker 2: Okay. Speaker 1: But yeah, I mean, AWS cloud computing, could be a significant percentage of the profit because once they've got their infrastructure in, it's, you know, there's a small maintenance and then, and then, but otherwise it's very profitable. Speaker 2: Yeah. Ads even more so. I mean, you just, once you got that set up, you're just, it's just a slot machine making money for the, hardly even a slot machine. Speaker 1: It's a money printer. Speaker 2: Money printer. Yeah, for sure. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: And we're out here hoping we get something in return every once in a while. Speaker 1: Exactly, we're just feeding that printer. Speaker 2: Yep, absolutely. Speaker 1: Let me add my ink in there. Speaker 2: All right, next article here. Let's take a look. So Shopify and Amazon block agentic AI bots and begin the war. So agentic AI bots are basically the AI that goes out and tries to shop for you and make purchases for you. So Shopify and Amazon are drawing a line against agentic AI bots that automate the checkout process without human review, signaling a growing resistance to third-party automation in e-commerce. Shopify updated its robots.txt with a message to developers warning against scraping and automated buying flows and directing them to use official tools. Amazon recently blocked Google shopping agent, reflecting a broader battle over who gets to control the AI driven shopping experience. For Amazon sellers, this signals that while AI will continue shaping e-commerce, platforms are tightening control to keep automation and data within their walls. So this is kind of interesting to go along with the pulling all their Google shopping ads that they're also blocking Google's shopping agent. As well, Amazon is and then Shopify is, you know, basically trying to block all of them from doing checkouts for people. Speaker 1: It's certainly for now that makes sense, but that's going to change. Like pretty soon you're going to be able to hook up your spreadsheet of this is the inventory that we need in order to operate as a business. Hit one button, order me the stuff that I need, right. That I'm low on, but I think it makes sense, especially right now in such an early stage of, of AI. Well, public AI, I should say, in that I wouldn't want something to go and do the full checkout process for me. Anyhow, I'd want to review the order. That's like hiring a new employee and then just saying, cool, go ahead and go talk to the customers and Go get them tiger. Speaker 2: Yep. Speaker 1: Um, here's, here's your SOP and go, go get it. So, um, you know, it's, I don't see this as a bad thing. Also, by the way, Shopify has done a partnership or some sort of joint venture with, uh, open AI. So, you know, they're going, they're not blocking the AIs from seeing stuff. Amazon, maybe. And that wouldn't surprise me all that much. Um, probably because they're going to try to continue to develop their own personal shopper. Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, this this kind of reminds me of really all the internet battles back in the day between the browsers and between different search engines. You know, they all try to create their wall the garden and keep everything for themselves. And in the end, you know, someone is going to kind of become the big I'm a big behemoth on the block and everybody's just going to pivot towards whoever wins. And that's just where we're at right now is these things are developing. And so Shopify is trying to make its own way. Amazon's trying to make its own way and they're not going to work together until they have to at some point in the future. Speaker 1: Yeah. I think that this is, This war happens over and over and over again. It's just out marketing. It's not even survival of the best, you know. You had eight track and cassette tape, laser disc and DVD, you know, um, CD-ROM and, and, uh, well, I mean, solid state. Technically that wasn't, that was a, that was a generational thing. I mean an evolutionary thing, but you know, you've got Claude and Gemini and GPT and, uh, perplexity and you have all these big, people, but some of them are going to go by the wayside and then it's going to come down to two and then there's going to be the Google of them. Right. And, and I'll tell you, like, I see lots of people loving on Gemini. I think it's shit. Speaker 2: I haven't seen anything good out of it. I haven't used it for a while. I bounced back and forth between ChatGPT and Grok. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: I was using Gemini. It was pretty bad. Speaker 1: Yeah. And you know, they, they just, Google recently did their announcement and they said, Hey, you know, all these new things, all these new features, amazing, amazing, amazing. It now integrates with Drive. There's now Gemini inside of YouTube as well. But like, Just last night, I was like, hey, I want to copy this sheet over to this other sheet. I said, oh, well, there's an error there. I'm like, cool, what's the error? It's like, oh, there's an error there. If I, I constantly go back to ChatGPT. Anyhow, this is about, this isn't about that, that what AI is better than the other, but you know, GPT definitely has the widest adoption. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: They're integrated deeply with Microsoft, but Gemini is integrated with everything Google and Google has more data. Thank you for joining us today. I'm Todd Welch. Speaker 2: The leader almost never makes the jump to be the leader in the next thing. If you look back, IBM was the behemoth and they couldn't make the jump to compete with Microsoft, so Microsoft took over. Microsoft couldn't make the jump to compete with Google, so Google kind of took over with Google Drive and Sheets and Search and everything. And so the question is, who's gonna replace Google? Google's not gonna go anywhere, but they'll fade into the background most likely just like all the other big tech behemoths of the past. Because when you're that big, it's hard to pivot like a smaller company like ChatGPT and Grok and companies like that can just shift to whatever they need to. Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't know. It's definitely gonna be an interesting thing to watch this go. I can see Google doing a good job of it. Like, especially on the shopping side of things, because let's be honest, when you build your own Shopify or your own e-commerce site, you want people to find you on Google. That's where the search is happening. If they're on Bing, they're probably searching from work. You know, but Google is where you want to be. That's where you want to show up. And so if Google's already got the data, they've already crawled the sites, they know everything about your products, and they implement some form of Gemini into product search. It could be really good. On the other side of this coin here, if you're going to use ChatGPT or these other agentic, these other AI tools to look for products, they are going to Google, right? Speaker 2: For sure. Speaker 1: Unless, of course, they're going direct to the sites, but in order to find the sites, they still have to do some form of a search. Because the search engines, they're just servers that house all the data. So, um, yeah, anyhow, it, it doesn't surprise me to bring it back to the beginning here. It doesn't surprise me that, that these companies are not allowing AIs to check out, but you know, finding the data, I think they would be foolish to not allow their data to be seen by AIs. It just needs to be known it's an AI. And I think they've probably already figured that out. Speaker 2: Yeah, right now it's just Amazon is blocking Google completely from accessing their site at all. Shopify is open to be accessed. They just don't want people to check out, which, like you said, in the early days, I think that's fine. Eventually, you're going to want AI to check out for you, especially, you know, hey, ChatGPT, we're almost out of printer paper and we need some markers. Go find me. Based on our purchase history, whatever's the cheapest right now and order it. Speaker 1: See, that's how I'd like to use it. You can use it. I use it right now to locate products. I say, hey, what are some of the top rated products in this category? Good. Now I've got a brand to go look at, right? Because I want to see brands, people that, companies that create a product. They back it with their warranty or their whatever. Um, but once that's all perfected, I'm also going to want to use it for, Hey, this is the product that I want. What's the best deal. And of course only show me reputable places that are not going to swipe my credit card data. Speaker 2: Yeah. This is one area where Amazon could potentially start losing out because they are the behemoth. Because they're the behemoth, they're not going to want to create a shopping agent that looks on Amazon and looks on Shopify and looks on all these other platforms. They're going to want to be The walled garden, just Amazon and that could hurt them in the long run as the shopping agents get a lot better because why would you want to use the Amazon shopping agent when you could use the ChatGPT one that can look at Amazon, Shopify, WooCommerce, eBay and every other place out there and find you the actual best deal or at least the best product they can get you the fastest at the most reasonable price? Speaker 1: Yeah, the best deal for sure. They don't want that transaction happening anywhere else. However, did you see that Amazon now allows you to buy from vendors off of Amazon but through Amazon? So, you know, they're obviously taking note in that, yeah, we don't have every product, but if you want to buy a Prada bag or Louis Vuitton bag, that's how you pronounce it, right? Yeah, I think so. Speaker 2: Not sure. Speaker 1: It's Louis Vuitton. But if you want to buy that and they're not on Amazon, you can buy it using Rufus to locate it and stuff like that. But speaking of, Agentic shoppers. Have you tried using the Rufus tool to find new products? Speaker 2: I have not. Speaker 1: Have you? Speaker 2: It's atrocious. Yeah. Speaker 1: It's atrocious, yeah. Speaker 2: Yeah, I figure it would be. It shouldn't be. It should be really good, but... Speaker 1: It needs to just be integrated straight into the regular search. The regular search is much more convenient, but yeah, it's really bad. If you're trying to use Rufus as a search engine for a product, no, don't bother. Speaker 2: Yeah, it's definitely going to have to get integrated because the more people use AI, the more they're going to move away from using search terms. They're not going to search for tennis racket. They're gonna search for show me the best tennis racket for left-handed people that works great in the heat of Florida or something like that. They're gonna search and the AI is gonna need to be able to comprehend that and try to find the best product that matches that query. Speaker 1: Yeah, so this is an area where my opinion differs from a lot of people. I don't think that keyword search is going away, um, because someone is still going to be searching for a solution to a problem. Right. Um, so I think it'll start off with, I need to figure out a way to, to get X done, or I want Y results or something like that. And then the AI will say, okay, well, these are the things that you can use to, to accomplish this goal. Okay. Now it's just going to be, okay, good. Now find me that left-handed tennis racket. Right. So there's, there's two sides to this. The first side is what we've all known has been a Google search first. How do I handle this problem? Right. That gets done on Google. Now they have a product that they know is going to handle the problem. Then they go search for the product. Now they're comparing the product. Now they're looking for the deal for the product because they've made their decision on a brand to buy. And so technically what you have is you've got Google through forums and YouTube and all that kind of stuff to find, hey, this is the problem. These are the things you can use as a solution. Then you've got the product research. Then you've got the buying intent and looking for the deal, right? That can all happen in one spot now. But I firmly disbelieve that keyword research is going away. Speaker 2: Yeah, definitely not going to go away, at least not for a long time. But I think more often you're going to see long tail searches like that. I was looking at some of my ads this morning and let me just see because I was doing some keyword harvesting and such this morning actually before we jumped on. There was one that stood out to me. Let me see if I can find it really quick because it was super long. It was like 12 words long. I couldn't negate it obviously because it was too long, but it was 12 words. Here it is right here. I'll just change it up a little bit so that it doesn't give away the product, but it's basically something like, Tennis racket to help with sweating on the back of my hand or something like or my palm. Speaker 1: Okay. Speaker 2: That was the search phrase that I'm like, Oh, wow, I don't that's a long search. Yeah. Speaker 1: That's just the top of funnel search. It's like I have the problem. It's basically saying my palm gets really sweaty. What do I use to help prevent that or To handle it, right? Speaker 2: Yes. Speaker 1: And so it's just the beginning. We've always been this way. We've always searched this way. It's just on multiple platforms. Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure. Normally that would be in Google, but with AI, it will be able to help with that and be like, well, here's some products that may help because this is what's probably causing that. And these help with this and that and that. And here's your link to that Google step. Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. And so, yeah, again, keyword search is not going away, but the search, the customer journey is consolidating. That's what I think. Speaker 2: For sure. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: All right. Well, let's jump onto this last story and touch on it here. And then we will wrap up because I think this is important, but I don't know if there's going to be a ton to talk about, but it's good for people to know this. Amazon FBA to end prep services starting in January 2026. Amazon will officially discontinue all FBA prep and labeling services beginning January 1st, 2026, impacting sellers who rely on Amazon to prepare inventory before it reaches fulfillment centers. This change applies to all inbound inventory, including shipments from AWD, AGL, and third party logistics services. This will definitely affect me a little bit. I do have some products, specifically their food products that require labeling. That I send direct to Amazon and from the supplier and let them slap the label on there for me rather than bringing it to our warehouse. Next year, I'm going to have to start bringing those products to our warehouse regardless or a 3PL or something like that to put those labels on. Speaker 1: Once again, we are seeing Amazon doing another thing that is beneficial to sellers that they've determined is not a profit center for them, and they're just cutting the cord. Speaker 2: Removing it. Yep. For sure. Speaker 1: Now, it's so funny because in one way, Amazon says, hey, AWD will store all your extra inventory and give you this discount. And then after they did that, like, all right, fees are going up. And everyone's like, well, now you're more expensive than the other guys. Like, yeah, but you're already locked in. Speaker 2: You already got your product here. Just leave it. Speaker 1: Exactly. And so there is a convenience. I am willing to pay for convenience, right? Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure. Speaker 1: But Amazon just, I don't know. I think that this all boils down to profit for them. That's what I think. And if You can have a profitable area, but if it's so much trouble because the employees are transient or something like that, it might not be worth the time spent in the executive structure necessary to run something like that. And you can just go, forget about it. We'll reuse this space for something else. Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, I definitely. I can understand this because, you know, prep services are a pain to do because every product is different and you got to figure out, you know, what size bag should this go in and things like that and put the label on and not screw it up. As well as a big thing. I think 3PLs should be very happy about this, though, because when AWD came around, it's like, oh, wow, is this gonna, you know, destroy 3PLs because now you can send your product into AWD for long term storage. Ship it over to FBA where they slap the sticker on for you. You don't have to do any of that. And now they're removing the prep services. So I think it also decreases the shine of AWD a little bit. As your long term storage because AWD doesn't do any kind of prep services either. So now you're either going to have to send it to a 3PL or your own warehouse to do it, or get your manufacturer to do it for you if you're able to. Speaker 1: Yeah, ideally, the manufacturer does it, that's for sure, because then you don't have to touch it, it doesn't have to go anywhere else. You know, I realized that there's a lot of, um, uh, a lot of Amazon only sellers. I'm one of them. You know, I've only ever sold on Amazon with the exception. Well, of the products that I sell today, I've only ever sold them on Amazon. Um, with that said, um, You want you want I think you should be looking to expand off of Amazon. I've said this for years. They're putting the squeeze on everybody, you know. So if you're looking to be outside of Amazon, you should have a 3PL. But you should have a 3PL that really knows what they're doing. And by the way, if anyone needs a recommendation, I know We've got several really, really good 3PLs and hey, maybe Todd will start offering 3PL services. I mean, not 3PL, but we'll see. Speaker 2: Yeah, we'll see. It's definitely not the funnest part of running an Amazon business. I'll tell you that. Running a warehouse is not super enjoyable. Speaker 1: No. Dude, that's why I don't even touch my inventory. Everything's done in the manufacturer. We send them a label, they ship to Amazon. That's like, we don't touch it, we don't see it, we don't do anything with it. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: Yeah. And I feel like Amazon is more and more moving to where you will create your products to line up with all of our specifications before they ever get to us. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: Or we're not going to sell, let you sell your products on our platform. And again, that kind of goes back to they're the big dog in the room. And you can't really do anything about it right now. You just do what they want you to do and hope it works out. Speaker 1: Yeah. So, you know, build your own form of, of sales channels as well. Speaker 2: Yes. Goes back to what we were talking about in the beginning with the Google ads, have your Shopify site or wherever you want to host it. Run some traffic there, get some sales through there and start building off of Amazon. I think that's been the big message this year as well as, you know, move off of Amazon. Don't be selling on Amazon, but move outside of Amazon as well. Speaker 1: I personally feel that that message has been being pounded for the last five years. Speaker 2: For sure, for sure. But the urgency hasn't really been there because Amazon was still a pretty good deal. And it's still a good deal, but it's less of a good deal than it's ever been. Speaker 1: Yes, but how do you boil a frog? Speaker 2: Yes, move it up slowly. Yes. Increase the temp. Speaker 1: Yep. Speaker 2: Yep, for sure. Yeah, look outside of Amazon and prepare for this if you've been using Amazon's prep services. I'm not sure, you know, what kind of percentage of sellers actually utilize those services. Resellers use it a lot. And that may be why they're discontinuing it because they've been disfavoring resellers a lot lately. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: But yeah, prepare for it. At least they're giving us a good runway January 1. So we've got A good, what is that, four months? Something like that. Yeah, four months before they discontinue it. So at least they're giving us enough time. But yeah, get ready for it. Have your manufacturer do this. Find a 3PL or figure it out yourself. Speaker 1: You can reach out to Todd and I. We're quite well connected in the community. Speaker 2: For sure. Yeah. As you mentioned, you've got some ideas for good 3PLs and stuff. Anybody out there looking for one, shoot us a message in the comments, shoot us an email, whatever the case may be, and we'll let you know some good 3PLs to utilize if you need one. All right, awesome. Well, this has been fun, Dana, and I appreciate you joining us. Speaker 1: Always. Speaker 2: And I thank you, everybody out there listening. We do this every Friday, 1 p.m. Eastern, so until next time, have an awesome weekend, and we'll talk to you later. Speaker 1: Bye, everyone. 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.