Amazon News: Lawsuit, TikTok Sale, AI Shopping, and UPS Cuts!

Amazon News: Lawsuit, TikTok Sale, AI Shopping, and UPS Cuts! Unknown Speaker: Welcome, fellow entrepreneurs, to the Amazon Sellers School podcast, where we talk about Amazon and how you can use it to build an e-commerce empire, a side hustle and anything in between. And now your host, Todd Welch. Speaker 2: All right. Hello, hello, hello. Another Friday already. So another day of Amazon Seller News here. We've got some exciting news coming up here, but first I want to thank Leslie for coming on the show and Dayna once again. I appreciate you guys joining me. Speaker 3: Good to be here. Speaker 1: Happy to join you. Speaker 2: Yeah, so we've got some exciting news. I think today it's going to be fun to talk about. So we've got one coming up here where Amazon supposedly has been tracking everyone through their phones. Microsoft possibly looking at buying TikTok. OpenAI has created an AI Shopping Assistant and UPS and Amazon may be cutting ties here, or at least decreasing quite substantially. So let's go ahead and dive into it. But if you're out there listening, Go ahead and throw any comments you have in the comments, any questions I should say, and we'll try to bring them up during the show and dive into them as well and get your questions answered. So let's go ahead and share this first story. So Amazon faces lawsuit over alleged seeker tracking of consumers. A new lawsuit accuses Amazon of secretly tracking consumers through their cell phones by embedding tracking codes in third-party apps. The lawsuit claims Amazon collected sensitive geolocation data without consent, revealing personal details like religious affiliations, health concerns, and shopping habits. If true, this raises serious concerns for Amazon sellers about how the company handles consumer data and potential regulatory scrutiny that could impact advertising and sales strategies. The outcome of this case could lead to new data privacy rules that affect how sellers engage with customers on the platform. First off, I'll just point out that this is just the beginning of a lawsuit. So, you know, innocent until proven guilty and all that. Speaker 3: I wish they did the same for us, but please continue. Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, for sure. But yeah, I would not be surprised at this at all, because it sounds like what Amazon has been doing They're using their Amazon ads SDK, which other companies use in their applications to show Amazon ads and make money. They're using those to secretly steal the data from those apps and learn all about the users and customers. So what do you think about that one, Leslie? You're the account help person and deal with these kind of things all the time. Speaker 1: So first I just want to say this is all just crazy talk because it never ever happens that I'm in my house saying to my husband, you know, I really need to buy a new pair of shoes. And then later a bunch of ads for shoes pop up on my phone. So, you know, this never happens. And anyone who would think that is just insane. Unknown Speaker: I'm sorry. Speaker 3: It doesn't happen on Facebook either. Speaker 1: No. Or the follow me ads, the remarketing ads, that never happens on that either. In fact, I know that if we talk about any name brands on this podcast right now, that later when I open my browser, nothing weird is going to happen. Speaker 3: Nike. Unknown Speaker: Fishing equipment. Speaker 2: Fishing equipment. Speaker 3: Lamborghini. Speaker 1: If Amazon is actually doing this, which wouldn't surprise me at all, because hey, it's another stream of revenue that isn't dependent on dot com sales. And really they like making all their money off of data because making your money off of data is awesome and lower risk. But that being said, I would see this as being a huge unforced error and one of those things where they think no one will ever catch them if it is in fact true. Because when you are one of the biggest companies in the world and people have a love hate relationship with you, you just don't add fuel to the fire. I get really frustrated with Amazon with stuff like this because they are already in the crosshairs of the federal government. We still don't know. How that is going to change or not change under the Trump administration. They've got several big lawsuits pending, one of which is going to end up before the Supreme Court on product liability, most likely. It hasn't yet, but I bet you it will. And they're just asking for more trouble. I just don't get it. As someone who is also a shareholder, not a fan. Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, the way I imagine this probably went, you know, giving the benefit of the doubt to Amazon, which may not be a good thing. I'm going to guess that the Amazon Advertising SDK, which is the programming component that other apps use to show Amazon ads, somewhere in their terms of service, it probably said, hey, we're going to collect this data, just so you know. But what they failed to do is then they also have to inform the users of those apps. The people who make those apps need to inform their users. So I got a feeling that's maybe the defense that Amazon is gonna take here. Like we told these apps that we were doing this. It's not our fault that they didn't tell their customers they were supposed to. So they may cover themselves with something like that, but we'll see. Speaker 1: Well, and don't you always wonder, I always click the ask app not to track. You don't know what I'm talking about when you install a new app and it says, we want to collect information when you're on other sites and things. And I always do that. No, thank you. Don't you always wonder if that actually means anything or if it just goes into the ether? Speaker 3: So, I think that it probably means something but not as much as we think because we still have to accept, if we want to use their website, we still have to accept their terms and conditions, right? And in their terms and conditions, which are 87,000 pages long using specialized legal Latin and stuff and verbiage. We sign our life away every single time we agree to these terms and conditions. And I don't know if I've ever met anyone that actually reads them all. I know I don't. Speaker 2: No, no, you'd never really do. That'd be your life. Speaker 1: Yeah, that's all you would do and you would still never finish. Speaker 2: Exactly. Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly. And and not only that, but the way these contracts are written are such that it's very nebulous as to what you're giving them access to, like to Facebook, you say, hey, they go, hey, would you like us to be able to access your all of your photos real quickly? And nobody realizes, or not many, I would imagine, realize that when they say, yes, absolutely, they're saying, go ahead and have access to put all of my photos onto your service, all the metadata, the location data, the voices, the faces, everything, and the locations, which is part of the metadata, so that you know where I've been, you know what Products I'm taking photos of. And by the way, go ahead and run it through your AI and see what I'm interested in. And then advertise to me. Speaker 1: Okay, y'all, I have to tell you, I have to tell you this. One of my fantastic team members at Riverbend is watching our stream right now. And he just messaged me on Slack and said, I read them, nerds read them. Unknown Speaker: All right. Speaker 3: Okay. Who is this again? Speaker 1: This is one of our consultants, James. He is a brilliant, wonderful consultant. And you know what? This is why he's really good at his job. He's one of these people who will dive into the details. Speaker 3: Yeah. James, why don't you come onto the live stream and break it down for us Barney style and like tell us what we're agreeing to. Like the world needs people like you, buddy. People that are not a lawyer that can, that can read this stuff, understand it, and then translate it into layman's terms. Because I, I, I can read contracts okay, but most of them are written in such a way as like, well, I understood it this way. And the reason you get into legal battles with each other or even against laws and stuff like that is because, well, this is how I interpreted it. Oh, well, we interpreted it differently. So you sue me, I'll sue you. Let's see who has the better argument and which one can pay off the judge first or last, maybe. Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. Who has the deeper pockets? Speaker 3: Exactly. Speaker 2: Pretty much is what it comes down to. It's yeah, I mean, our data is everywhere. Europe is definitely a little better on data privacy, but we don't do a whole lot here in the United States. I wish we did more in in banning this data collection and stuff or making it a lot more stringent, you know, and this is one area where I think our government really messes up. We spend How many trillions of dollars every year on a lot of stupid stuff? I feel like this is one thing where the federal government could come in and if you have a grievance and you're suing a big company, The government could be in your corner, you know, essentially providing counsel and stuff like that and to sue these big companies because it's impossible for an individual to do it. I mean, you'll just get destroyed. Lawyers will wrap you up for a decade in lawsuits. Meanwhile, you lose your job, you lose your house and everything else because you're focused on a lawsuit. Speaker 3: Yeah, well, let's be honest. If you had the government on your side, it'd probably be the same scenario. Speaker 2: Probably. Speaker 3: That cogwheel turns pretty slowly as well. Speaker 1: Well, and honestly, the real problem with this to me is not necessarily companies getting your data and using it to market to you. It's annoying. It's not cool for anyone to have your data, but they are not the problem. The problem is that then it gets hacked. I mean, how many notifications do you get every year in your email or a thing that you get in snail mail that says, we're giving you a free year of whatever because all of your data has been hacked? I mean, our health insurance company was hacked for heaven's sake, or like one of their providers was hacked, I think, and they're huge. And so every single time that there's someone else collecting your data, it's another opportunity for bad guys to get a hold of it and use it against you. And that upsets me a lot more about this than anything that Amazon or another retailer would ever do with the data. It's that it's just Just out there more, more stuff about Leslie that no one needs to know, like what I want to buy. I mean, who cares? Speaker 3: Many years ago, I went to open up a bank account and they declined me because I had terrible credit. And they said, yeah, Justin Dwan-Colbin. I was like, who? Like, this isn't you? Like, no. This person used my social security number and was able to Get money and all kinds of stuff and so like. Social security number is like, okay, that's probably fairly easy to get. Maybe. I don't know. I'm not into fraud, so I'm no pro at it, but it's so easy these days. And there's so many places that are so insecure with their data. And I don't know for sure, but I have to estimate because a lot of businesses do business with tons of other businesses. So there's got to be cascading levels of insecurities. That hackers could kind of worm the way up the waterfall, so to speak. And then get whatever they need from you. And so I have heard that hackers get these credit card numbers and your personal data, then they sell it to other people who then go, well, yeah, I'll give you 50 bucks for this credit card number. And then they try and buy whatever they buy. I've had my fraudulent charges on my credit cards, gosh, must be at least four or five times. Speaker 1: Yeah, we've had those too. And like you, Dana, I have had social security number fun. Someone stole my social security number, who also stole a bunch of others, apparently, and was prosecuted in federal court in Louisiana. I had no idea any of this was going on until I got a victim letter from the feds. And now I get a pin in the mail every year that I have to use to file my tax return, so that they know for sure it's me filing the tax return, which is just Crazy. But what's nuts about it is I had no idea. I saw no impact to anything. But I was one of the hundreds of victims that this person now in a federal penitentiary had. And so it's the hacking. It's really the hacking that worries me. Thanks, Amazon, for helping the hackers. You're awesome. Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, for sure. It's one of those things, hacking is going to happen no matter how up you are on security practices at your business. It's always possible that software you use has a bug or something that they take advantage of, but I really think we need to hold CEOs of these companies criminally liable if it's obviously happened because of neglect of security. You know, I know there's nothing that can ever be foolproof, but if you start attaching, you know, criminal, criminal, uh, uh, what would that be called? Criminal laws or whatever to these kinds of things, they're going to take it a lot more seriously. Speaker 3: Yeah, so there's a guy that I saw on the Joe Rogan show called Ryan Montgomery, and I had to look his name up, but he is an ethical hacker. His job is to go into your system and show you how insecure you are, and he has the most fascinating technology to just, oh, you walked by me and In his satchel is something that swipes your data right there because you've got NFC on your cards, right? This stuff is so real. When we were children, what was Mission Impossible is now Mission Entirely Probable with not even a large degree of sophistication compared to the technology that is available to us today. It's something that if we wanted to, we could go and join Anonymous and start learning this stuff. So, you know, I think that there is a very, especially today, a very strong place in the world for ethical hackers and hackers for hire that you bring on board specifically to breach your systems. Speaker 2: Yeah, it's I mean, Russia, we know for sure they hire computer engineers right out of college to come onto their hacking teams to do things like this. So it's, it's huge. South North Korea, I mean, does it we know as well. I'm sure China does. Speaker 3: I'm sure we do too. Speaker 2: We do it too, as well. Supposedly, we're supposed to be the good guys. But you never know. It all depends on What we're doing, right? Speaker 3: So in a sea of gray, is anything black or white though? Speaker 2: Yeah, no, there's always grays, different shades of grays for sure. And it all depends on the circumstance also and what our goal is. Speaker 3: Yeah. Speaker 2: But yeah, just got to be careful out there. There's a, hopefully we'll see what comes with this lawsuit, but it's definitely won't be the last one. That's for sure. Yeah. Speaker 3: Hopefully, something comes of it. I don't care who wins or loses but hopefully, something better from Amazon comes of it. Speaker 2: Assuming it's true, what will happen is down the road, we'll see a little news clip that Amazon settles for $50 million or $100 million or whatever and the lawyers will take their $90 million and then you'll get 5 cents. Yeah. Well, you'll have to send in a big card and fill everything out to get your five cents. Yeah. Speaker 1: And then someone can steal the data from the card and fill it out. Speaker 3: Yeah. Right. Speaker 2: For sure. Unknown Speaker: Awesome. Speaker 2: Yeah. I didn't get any data stolen, but I had some crypto in the Celsius network that went bankrupt. And that was like two years ago or something. They finally just sent me back like a fraction of the money I had in there. It was only a few thousand dollars, but I ended up getting back like 500 or 600 of it. But I had to go and set up an account in PayPal, enable their crypto, do the self-identification, give them all my information just to get this crypto into PayPal so then I could transfer it to Coinbase. Speaker 1: Okay, so y'all I have to I have to tell you what my our invisible guest James messaged me. Yeah, he says well, he says what about adding sidewalk with it? How does that pan out? Do y'all remember sidewalk from Amazon? Oh, it was this crazy thing where they were going to use everyone's individual internet connection in their house to create Like, better coverage for and yeah, look into Sidewalk. They dropped it because it was really intrusive and horrifying. Intrusive and horrifying and it was called Sidewalk. Speaker 2: Yeah, that's why they wanted to buy Roomba. So that they could get the map of your house and see, you know, the layout of your house and kind of basically what's in it based off of the maps that Roomba draws. Speaker 1: Well, and then they've got the delivery thing where they want you to let them go in your garage or open the trunk of your car or come in your house, right? So, I mean, Amazon should be the CIA. Amazon should be the CIA. They'd have it down. Speaker 2: They've probably got just about as much data, that's for sure. Speaker 3: Yeah, maybe even more because people agree to give it to them. They don't have to, you know. You know what's funny? I was watching this TED Talk at some point and there's a guy that hacked a router To use and use this the 5G signal to map the inside of a house and it was pretty interesting and sophisticated, but he said it's possible. He did it live like this is here and you can see this is bouncing back and based on the signal return and stuff like that and the latency and all that you you have a rough estimate of the size of the house or at least several rooms. I mean, there's. Speaker 2: Didn't you mention the other day or maybe it was someone else that they did a test with AI robots? And they gave them a video camera and the signal from a Wi-Fi router and they had people walking around in a room. And then after they learned, you know, the people moving around and what that looked like, they took away the video camera and the AI was still able to tell where the people were in the room based on the Wi-Fi signal. Speaker 3: Yes, yes, yes, yes. I think that may have been the same talk, actually. Maybe so, yeah. But I know it's time. Speaker 1: I'm going to have to move out in the country and live on some compound. Speaker 2: I know, right? Speaker 1: And use Starlink, and that's it. Speaker 2: And man, the world's so freaky. It's a scary time to be alive, that's for sure. Speaker 3: Yep. Leslie, I know you won't let the package go through, but I'll attempt to send you a tinfoil hat. Speaker 2: Let's just hope our AI robots outpace everybody else's AI robots, you know, because they'll be AI drones flying everywhere, you know, fighting in the sky all the time to make sure North Korea and China or whoever doesn't bomb a city or whatever happens, you know, execute someone for remotely. Speaker 3: Good old Skynet. Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it's coming for sure. Speaker 1: That's why we're getting Star Wars. Did y'all see there's a new executive order this week for Star Wars a la Ronald Reagan. So it's like a, it's like a missile shield. It's like, it's like Iron Dome for Israel, but it's Iron Dome for America. That is the next big project. So, um, you know, when you, I'm sure y'all probably saw since we're talking about like AI and drones, it's totally off of our topics, but still, When they, during the inauguration, the new Suburbans or whatever SUVs that Trump was in, like the top of them had this really thick shield on them that I had not noticed before. And someone told me those are like drone proof. It's because of they're afraid of drone attacks on them. Yes. And so this is like a huge new focus is drone attacks. Some, some of them using AI to choose targets. And so that's why this whole Star Wars thing that sounds outlandish, but then when you learn more about this stuff, you're like, Oh, I guess it makes sense. I don't want it to make sense, but it does. Speaker 3: Yeah. I've seen quite a few reels of, of drone attacks on soldiers and trenches. Like trenches are no, are, They provide you cover from, you know, acute lead poisoning. Right. But they don't provide any protection from drones. And, you know, now, you know, you can get a commercial. About seven grand to get a drone with infrared and now you can see everything at night or day, right? And they're super, if you think about it, what does a country invest into a soldier in terms of food, electricity, equipment, training, all that stuff, years and years. And I think every soldier has costs like, call it a quarter million dollars or something like that. Well, you can replace the effectiveness of an individual with a drone for a few hundred bucks. And by the way, back to the Iron Dome, I'd just like to cast my vote that if we do do something like that quickly, I'd like America to call it the Chrome Dome. Speaker 1: Oh, y'all. I okay. Echo and Alexa the all of those have ultrasound motion detection. Speaker 3: Yeah. Speaker 2: Oh, yeah. Speaker 1: So you know, that's all. That's all part of what we're talking about with knowing if you're in the room and could that be developed further? Yeah, James just told me about that too. I didn't even realize that. So it's enabled at the first and he said it doesn't work really well, but they all have that. There's even a help page on Amazon explaining it. Speaker 2: Wow. Yeah, I've seen, definitely off topic, but I've seen an interesting video of a guy doing a demonstration of these little drones. They're about this big and each one of them carries, I believe it was a 22 charge in it. Speaker 3: Rifle, 22 long rifle? Speaker 2: Like 22 bullet. Speaker 3: Okay. Yeah. Speaker 2: 22 bullet in it. And they were, they're designed to, you know, seek out a target. So he had this one in his hand and there was a dummy across the stage and he threw it up in the air and the drone went and slammed into the dummy's head and shot through the head of the dummy. And he was talking about, you know, you could release thousands of these into an area program to seek a certain target or, you know, go after everybody, whatever you want to do. And it's just like, wow, that's crazy. Yep. Speaker 3: And those are probably 20 bucks to manufacture, 30 bucks, maybe. Speaker 2: Yeah. Once they're mass produced. But they're also creating those drones that have targeted EMP weapons to battle against these kind of drones. They go up and shoot EMP and knock the drones out of the sky. Wars are going to be crazy in the future. Speaker 3: I know. For us civilians, it's going to be on the news. Use your metal umbrellas today. There's going to be chrome, little, little pieces of drones. We're going to be falling through the chrome dome today. And, you know, so just use your metal umbrella, your titanium umbrella. Speaker 1: See, and you were just making fun of my tinfoil hat and, you know, it could help me out. Speaker 2: It'll happen. It'll happen at some point. Speaker 3: I wasn't making fun of it. I was telling you I was going to send one to you. I figured you needed it. Speaker 2: All right, next story here. So Microsoft among U.S. companies eyeing TikTok acquisition. President Donald Trump confirmed that Microsoft is one of several U.S. companies considering a bid to acquire TikTok aiming to keep the platform operational amid government scrutiny. The potential sale is driven by national security concerns over TikTok's Chinese ownership with the U.S. seeking a controlling stake in the company. For Amazon sellers, this development could impact TikTok's advertising landscape and TikTok shop as well and influence their marketing opportunities. Depending on future ownership and regulation, a U.S.-based acquisition may also lead to changes in data policies and advertising competition that sellers should monitor closely. So interesting. I can't say Microsoft was on the top of my radar for acquiring TikTok, but they've been kind of searching for some relevance here, I guess, for a while. And this might be a grasp at that. Hey Amazon sellers, tired of losing money on storage and shipping fees? 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But the date of 9-11, something like that in Wingdings, which is a font in Microsoft, it would bring up two towers, fire and airplanes. I actually tested this shortly after. Yeah. So I actually did this on my own computer, which hadn't been updated, but I think Microsoft updated it since then to change what icons come up. But I tested this myself when I was a kid. Sure enough, you put in the date. It was like the exact date of September 11th. What was it? I can't even remember the year it was. 2001. 2001. Thank you. Yeah. And it came up with two towers, an airplane, and a burning or fire symbol, something like that. I was like, okay. Some programmer was trying to make a bad joke i think most likely but i did this with my computer that hadn't been updated in in ages. Yeah this is the time of like streaming updates with microsoft and stuff like that. Speaker 1: Yeah this is like the most unsexy. I mean, the only way to make this less sexy is if it was IBM or HP. It could be any stodgier. I was actually really surprised when I saw this because it just, it's like you said, Todd, not on my bingo card. Like I had a list of maybes in my head and this ain't one of them. But I think what Dana said is really smart. Which one of you wasn't who said, you're both smart when you say they're searching for relevance. Speaker 2: Oh yeah, that's right. Speaker 1: Yeah, that's Todd. Yeah. So, you know, dead on there, Todd, because they are searching for relevance. They've got their, their stupid edge browser that everyone immediately deletes from their machine. Speaker 2: They're not, this is Chrome by the way now. Speaker 1: They're not collecting any of our data or information through that. They don't know our browsing history because you're right. Everyone uses Chrome or something else. No one is using Edge. It's horrifying. Speaker 2: The big money maker for Microsoft right now is Azure, which is like their platform for hosting apps and virtual computers and things like that. Similar to Amazon's AWS, same kind of thing. That's where they make most of their money right now. Speaker 3: Let's take a step back and think about this overall. There are very few companies out there that have the computing power and the servers necessary to run something like TikTok, right? So we got Amazon. We probably do have IBM. We've got Microsoft. We've got Google. Google, thank you. Yahoo, maybe not. Speaker 2: Probably not Yahoo. They got bought by somebody, I think. Speaker 3: Did they? Yeah. That's a whole other sad story. Yahoo not buying Google, but anyhow. Who else? Speaker 2: Well, I mean, anybody could technically buy them and then use those platforms to host the data. Speaker 3: Yes. Speaker 2: But it's going to be more expensive than those platforms themselves buying the software. Meta, I mean, Facebook, for sure, has the capacity to do it. Maybe X slash Twitter, but probably not Elon Musk unplugged most of their servers so. Speaker 1: Yeah, I really thought the buyers, my top three were Meta and X and Amazon. Because Amazon already has a relationship with TikTok to facilitate sales. And so I thought it was going to be one of those three. All three of those are also much more integrated into the social space and understand converting content into sales, which isn't really a Microsoft thing. Microsoft's never been a content or a creator company, so that's why they weren't really on my list for that. But I would like to make a request that if this happens, that Microsoft stay away from it, because if you've had to use Teams. Speaker 3: You hear that, Bill? Stay away. Speaker 1: If you've had to use Teams, you know what I'm talking about. If you've had to use their messenger equivalent, it's also clunky. It's so clunky and, and, and Microsoft is very IBM, you know, they're very, they're stodgy and slow and, and the ship turns very slowly. So it's, it would be an interesting culture clash of the new hip fast, running as fast as they can. TikTok really does run like a startup. And then you've got the, the Titanic. Microsoft is moving real slowly. Speaker 2: I wouldn't, I would prefer none of them buy it. I think they would, in the end, just ruin it and use it as, you know, like a data harvesting thing. And it would have a, either a quick death or slow death, probably slow death, because it's got so many people following it. But Eventually, I think it would just take a downturn. Amazon, I just don't want to have it because I like that TikTok is stealing some market share. So, I'd prefer a separate company to have that. My pick actually is Shark Tank. Shark Tank. Now, he's working through another firm that's raising all the money and stuff. So, it wouldn't be him himself. I'm not the spokesman for the organization that's doing it, but I would prefer a company like that, that like you say, Leslie, could hopefully replicate the startup mentality of TikTok and keep it going. Speaker 1: If it's a lot of private equity money, they're going to continue with the theme. Private equity money wants you to keep doing what you're doing and make money and they're only going to mess with you if you stop making money. Whereas Microsoft and Amazon and Meta, they all think they're really smart and they do everything the right best way and they're going to try and shoehorn it into their current organizations and see how they can leverage it Although, Todd, I will take issue with something you said a moment ago. You said they would turn it into data harvesting operation. Oh, come on. The Chinese are already doing that. We know that. We just don't see what they're doing with our data. Speaker 3: They did it right. Speaker 1: Yeah, we don't see it. They're not using it for consumer choices. It would just be more obvious to us because it would once again be that I said Nike shoes, Dana, and then I'm going to go to Facebook in a while and then Nike Ad will pop up. So, yeah. Speaker 2: Yeah, that's for sure. And no matter who buys it is going to do that data mining. That's how these companies make a lot of their money. Speaker 3: Or it'll go the way of MySpace. Speaker 2: Possibly, yeah. I don't see it, though, because it's assuming that acquisition happens. I don't think it's going to tank very quickly. It's going to be around a while, but you could see some other platform rise up. Sooner than it would have without a purpose. Speaker 3: Like Truth, is that a platform that Trump did? Speaker 1: True Social? Speaker 2: Yeah, True Social. Yeah, definitely won't be that one. I don't think, just based on the name. Speaker 3: Rumble, yeah. Speaker 2: Rumble, yeah. I like Rumble. Rumble's kind of interesting, but they don't have a As large of a catalog, nearly as large as YouTube and stuff if you're actually looking for stuff. And I've tried using them just to get out of the YouTube atmosphere a little bit. And I post all my videos over there, but their curation is really horrible compared to YouTube. If you're just looking for something that would interest you, it's not great. That would be an interesting platform to buy TikTok, though, and incorporate TikTok into Rumble. Because TikTok has that algorithm figured out for showing you videos that you know And if they bought it and incorporated it into their YouTube platform, also Rumble, then that could be something. But I doubt they have the money to do it. Speaker 3: Rumble's worth, they're valued at about over $3 billion. Speaker 2: Oh yeah? Yeah. I know they've grown quite a bit. Speaker 3: I'd never, I wouldn't have expected that, but that's pretty awesome. Speaker 1: They do a lot of rewarding creators for having exclusive content for Rumble. So even if you have, you know, if you do 10 videos that you put on Rumble and on YouTube, then you do two more that are just Rumble. They reward that a lot and it shows up more in the algorithm. But I totally agree with Todd. Part of the issue over there is the search just isn't that great. And it doesn't serve stuff up. The way YouTube does, you know, or even, or even Facebook, even though theirs isn't as good, the way they serve you up things that you would actually like to see, or X is really great at that too. Like if you watch a video on X, it's going to serve up one that is something you're interested in next, like 90% of the time. Speaker 2: Yep. Yep. Yeah, Rumble right now though is very skewed towards political content as well. My Amazon videos get very low views over there. Speaker 3: I was going to say, I mostly see, like I'm just looking at it right now, political gaming. Political content and gaming content. That's what I'm seeing. I'm not logged in. I haven't been to Rumble.com in ages. I'm talking years, but it looks like a lot of Yeah, I'm actually seeing the same, same list of stuff for pics. There's Yeah, I'm not. There's a bunch of gaming. Yeah, gaming, crypto, crypto. Speaker 1: The last stats I heard it even skews more heavily male than X does. Speaker 3: Oh, really? Speaker 1: Probably, which is hard to accomplish. Speaker 2: Politics, gaming, and crypto. That probably skews mail, for sure. Speaker 1: Super heavy mail, but the stats on it were something nuts. It was over 75% mail was the last one I saw. Speaker 2: Very good. All right, cool, cool. Well, let's go ahead and jump on to the next article here. So this one I thought was pretty cool. So OpenAI Shopping Assistant Operator could change how customers buy online. OpenAI has introduced an AI agent called Operator that helps shoppers find products and complete tasks like making reservations. eBay is integrating this technology to direct buyers to unique inventory, aiming to make shopping more efficient and personalized. For Amazon sellers, this signals a shift towards AI-driven product discovery, which could impact search algorithms and how customers interact with listings. While AI could boost sales by improving product visibility, sellers may also face challenges with inaccurate purchases and increased return rates. Speaker 3: But it's more than just shopping and if I'm not mistaken, it's also $200 a month if you want to put this together. It's supposed to be like you're almost like hiring a I don't want to say hiring a VA, but personal assistant almost sort of. Yeah, it's like, hey, I want you to plan a trip for me from here to there. Yes, it does order groceries for sure. I have to assume that I believe that shop not Shopify. What's the big grocery shopping? Speaker 2: Instacart. Speaker 3: Thank you. Instacart. And there's one or two others that are testing this with Operator right now. And I didn't have the time, unfortunately, to deep dive into this, but I'm pretty interested in Operator because I actually hired an executive assistant last week. Who didn't work out, but I was thinking, well, $1,000 or $1,200 or $1,500 a month, whatever that person costs compared to $200 a month. If this operator can do many of the functions like, hey, I give it a Google Sheet and I say, I need you to clean this up, clean the data up and do this, that would be pretty awesome. Oh, did you? Oh, sweet. So you've got the actual thing, but what I'm seeing is filling out forms, groceries, travel arrangements, creating memes, which is an interesting one. Speaker 2: Yeah, this one here says that they said operator to search price line for your travel. So it's kind of like a customizable bot, it sounds like, with shopping abilities. But the goal is kind of to make An AI robot that can be your assistant in just about anything that you set it up to do. Speaker 3: Which to me is extraordinarily intriguing because I can't tell you how many times I go throughout my day where I go, oh, you know, well, I dare say I go on tangents. But so if I've got, hey, oh, I need to go ahead and I research this thing, like I just jot it down in my notes, right? But then I end up with this huge list of things I need to do that I'll never get to. If I could task that to a bot to just give me preliminary data, let's just say, for instance, I go, okay, I need to find out about this data. Here's the questions I want to know the answers to. And I just feed that, say, a Google Sheet or something like that, say, here's the questions. Go out and find me the data and it can fill those fields. That would be pretty awesome. It would save me an enormous amount of research time. Speaker 1: Yeah, I think before you'd invested in that we need to have James read the Terms of Service. Oh, yeah, how much of their data you're gonna oh, yeah, you're gonna give away here because man I tell you the things like ChatGPT and I get really leery of putting, okay, you're going to say I need a tinfoil hat again, but we've all seen it. I hate that when you, every query, every question, every task, it's like, it's somewhere, it's out there, it's tagged to you. Speaker 3: Yep. I've come to terms with it. Look, I need a tinfoil hat just as well as you do, Leslie. I know that this stuff is happening. I've just come to accept it. In my opinion, the best case scenario is either you go, whoever you are, go and never shave again and go out and live in the woods in a wooden hut or You or you just don't do anything dumb that can get you into trouble. And if you're going to do dumb stuff, don't publicize it. Right. But I firmly believe that no matter what, no matter what precautions I take, whether I'm using a VPN, a VPS, I'm logging into a separate, like it's all tracked. It all goes somewhere. Somebody who we don't want to have it has it. And there is a social profile built for you on every government so that if you ever get caught, something could be used against you and you could Go bye bye to Guantanamo Bay and be waterboarded for the information about what you posted on MySpace in 1922. Yes, you are 100 percent correct. Speaker 2: I'm sure, Danan. And that's definitely the battle. I mean, we all got to use all these tools anyways. It's like, okay, you got to agree to this terms of service. Like, well, I got to use the tool. I need to do business. I need to do whatever. And so you just agree to them and move on, unfortunately. Speaker 3: Yeah. The thing that actually concerns me the most are platforms having access to my photos, right? My wife, she probably won't kill me for saying this, but she won't even, like, and we don't do this. Like, you know, when we were kids, there were naked pictures of us as children, like in cowboy boots or cowgirl boots or just a naked butt with a cowboy hat on or whatever. Right. We don't do that anymore. Like, because our phones, there are things that have access to our phones. We don't take those pictures, you know, and not only that, society has gotten to the point where like, oh, you have a naked child. It's like, well, yes, it's not. Anyhow, if it fell in the wrong hands, it would be horrendous, right? Absolutely horrendous. Speaker 2: Used against you potentially even. Speaker 3: Absolutely. Yes. And so we don't do that stuff for fear of that, right? We're just parents and it's totally normal to have a child run away from you after you're changing a diaper and they get up and take off. It's also super cute, but you could take that so far out of context that we actually don't Don't do anything. We try to keep it as very clean, you know. Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, we're the same, you know, even as far as not posting our baby on any public social network, you know. We post them on Facebook, but I've got, you know, all the security preferences locked down so only friends can see it. You hear these stories about someone took this photo of a child and then used AI to create child pornography. You can even take a photo and turn it into a porn video if you wanted to at this point. Just crazy. You got to be careful with that for sure. Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah. The only place is we don't do a whole lot of photos of our children, but like my kids end up in my YouTube videos, right? Because we're out camping together. But yeah, anyhow, it's a terribly unfortunate thing that this is where we are. How did we get on this subject anyhow? Speaker 2: Yeah yeah yeah that's right yeah there's people like that in the world and so many of them. Speaker 3: Yes and I mean I'd rather know that that exists than be oblivious to it and be subject to the shit end of the stick on it. But, you know, it's still, it still sucks. Like, I have to change my habits. Anyhow, yeah, go ahead. Speaker 1: On a much lighter note of people taking pictures of our children. So we were invited to a party this weekend. And for some reason that I don't understand, the people having the party were requiring, requiring that any male attendee wear a kilt I have a 17-year-old son. I have a 17-year-old son who is a man's man kind of 17-year-old son. He's like, don't make me go. And I said, I'm not going to make you go, dude. I wouldn't wear a kilt either if I were a 17-year-old boy. I'm cool with that. And he said, mom, if someone takes pictures of that, And it gets around. I don't need that in my life. I mean, can you imagine how this could be twisted in 25 different ways? And he's thinking of, you know, people saying he's become a transsexual or he's cross-dressing. It would be really easy to make it look like he's just like a dude in a skirt. No matter what you think of that or don't think of that, think of yourself as a 17 year old boy who is a straight male trying to make his way in the world and he's like, I'm not going because someone could take my picture in a skirt and it's all over the place. People are going to put it on social media, not doing it. So even stuff like that that isn't like, scary from the perspective you're talking about Dana and about evil things that evil people do. Speaker 3: It's just reputation. Speaker 1: And if you're, if you're a 17 year old male, you're not going to be able to laugh that off. Like, you know, like one of y'all would be able to, it's just not something you can deal with. Speaker 3: Well, you know, I haven't met your son, but you've told me he's beastly in his size. The only thing he'd need to do to combat that really is just pick up a tree and throw it like the Scottish do. And then everyone would be like, you can wear a kilt, you're good. Speaker 1: Yeah, we're not going to mess with this guy. We're not going to. But he's a gentle giant and he just doesn't want to go there. So I feel for him. Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I get it. Speaker 2: Yeah, no, I definitely understand that. I mean, it depends on your age too. Like for me, if I got invited to a Scottish thing like that, I'd be like, heck yeah, give me the kilt, give me the bagpipes. This is gonna be awesome. Speaker 3: But I don't want to hear that stuff. What's that? I don't want to hear you play bagpipes. Speaker 2: It would be horrible, but I'd have fun. Speaker 3: For sure. Speaker 2: Yeah, I'd be like Ross in Friends when he's playing the bagpipes, if you remember that. Speaker 3: I didn't watch Friends. Speaker 2: My wife loves it, we watch it all the time. Speaker 3: Cool. Speaker 2: All right, last story here. UPS to cut Amazon shipments by over 50% impacting e-commerce logistics. UPS announced plans to reduce its Amazon package volume by more than 50% by late 2026. So that's two years from now yet. Citing lower probability from the e-commerce giant. The move aligns with UPS strategy to shift focus towards higher margin customers such as healthcare shippers and small businesses. For Amazon sellers, this change could lead to increased reliance on Amazon's own logistics network or alternative carriers, potentially affecting shipping rates and delivery speeds. Sellers should monitor how Amazon adapts its fulfillment strategy as changes in carrier partnerships could impact costs and order fulfillment efficiency. And the other thing I did hear recently as well is that UPS is no longer handing off small packages to USPS. They're gonna be fulfilling those themselves. So they're picking up that volume and are gonna start decreasing the Amazon volume. Speaker 3: I see, well, one thing we know for sure is that Amazon, once they've gotten to a certain point, they want to just do it themselves and make the money themselves, right? So we see this and we've already seen it in the shipping area, right? Because they had a little snafu with FedEx many years ago and then They were primarily using UPS. I think that UPS is basically nipping this in the bud because my guess is Amazon's been nickel and diming them for a long time to where they're like, okay, where's our profit? Forget about this. Let's just, they've had enough time to, my guess would be they've had enough time to figure out how to improve the logistics on this to make it more profitable. And they're going, okay, Here's the model that we've done based on everything that we learned, everything we were doing with Amazon. Let's boot them out now because they're going to kick us off eventually anyhow and we don't have to have that revenue any longer. That would be my guess. Speaker 1: So y'all, I'm old enough to remember when UPS was about to go down the toilet and they were having to negotiate a contract with their very large labor force and they were saying they couldn't afford to give them the raises and they were afraid they were going to go bankrupt and Amazon bailed them out with a giant shipping deal. I'm sure y'all remember that and I'm sure as I'm sure as part of that deal, they probably gave ridiculously low guaranteed rates just to get the volume so that they would stay in business. And then they've had a whole lot of shakeout on that and their workforce is right sized after COVID ended and all that jazz. So now UPS is doing a little better. Fuel prices are down a tad. Things are more stable. And so now they are running low margins because that's what they agreed to with Amazon. And they're probably like everyone else, like us, who can't Hit Amazon to raise your margin for anything. So like if you're a vendor to Amazon, you know, they won't raise your margin. They won't raise your price on your product or what they sell, what they buy it from you for. I'm sure this is the exact same thing. So UPS is like, okay, cool. Well, then we're just not going to do that volume anymore. And then on the flip side, Amazon made that investment in Rivian. Do y'all remember the ill-fated investment in Rivian? And so there's all these hideous, you know, the really ugly big boxy electric trucks that are delivering all of your stuff now to your house. And so the investment in Rivian, it's kind of like a Ponzi scheme where they made an investment in Rivian and then they bought a whole bunch of trucks from Rivian to boost their investment in Rivian because it looked really bad and the numbers were bad. So then they bought more trucks from Rivian to help their investment in Rivian. Speaker 3: I wasn't following that. I remember the investment in Rivian and Rivian basically putting a hold on releasing their initial truck, the R R1, I think it is. And then producing those trucks for Amazon. So that truck comes to my house. Actually, they're very cool. And I saw a short from one of the drivers. The technology on this is pretty awesome in that when they go out and do the deliveries, when they come back, they go through a photo booth, so to speak. That looks for any damage or anything like that. Then they just plug them back in and off they go. And so they got this rotating fleet that goes in and out. I think it's a good idea. I don't know the ramifications on the power grid that it takes to do something like that. Like if you've got a warehouse of these electric trucks, oh my God, the amount of power, the gigawatts of power that has to go in there must be impressive. But I think it's pretty good. If Rivian can pull through, I think they're having some trouble today. A pull start just went by. Speaker 1: Yeah, so Amazon is really good at controlling its costs and it's really good at controlling its human costs. And so if they've got a workforce that is doing delivery for them, I would bet that they're keeping their costs down quite a bit on delivery of those packages. And then y'all know about those little, the, the other partnered carriers, if we want to call them that, of that are doing deliveries that are these small businesses that will go pick up, you know, 10,000 packages or whatever, and they deliver those every day. And some of those guys get almost slave wages. It's really bad. It's really, really bad the amount Amazon pays them. So I would bet you money that Amazon is keeping its costs super low via all the drivers they've hired for the Rivian thing on the one hand, and then these other companies that they seriously abuse, and we all know that on the other hand, so they're probably not really sad about UPS, if UPS is going to raise the price, what do they care? They love owning that delivery network and I think they plan to use it for many more things than just themselves. That's one of their goals. The distributed delivery to them is just like the distributed data. They see this as a great way to make money. So I bet this is like everyone's cool with it. I would be shocked if everyone wasn't cool with it. UPS needs to make more. I thought it was interesting, Todd, that you said medical. I have two different deliveries every month that are prescriptions. And they're both overnight deliveries. They're both FedEx. UPS has never touched those. And you know those are high value, right? That's gotta be a high value delivery compared to, you know, getting your box from Amazon or whatever. I think that's really interesting that they've picked out healthcare as we need to go after some of these overnight things that we're not getting that people, I mean, who do you trust with overnight? I trust FedEx. I think most people do. Speaker 2: Yeah. So one of my thoughts is, you know, when people fulfill from Amazon, say on their Shopify site or eBay or whatever, For myself, I think most people usually check, you know, block Amazon Logistics because if it's coming from your website, you don't want it to come in an Amazon box and, you know, an Amazon vehicle and people are like, oh, I might as well just buy it on Amazon. So that would lead me to wonder, you know, if UPS is going to be cutting Amazon volume, are those prices going to go up if you're blocking Amazon Logistics even further? Speaker 3: I don't know. I think we're going to see APD come out, Amazon Parcel Delivery. Speaker 2: It could be. Yeah. I mean, people just get used to thinking of Amazon as a UPS or FedEx and it won't really matter. Because I guess you can separately set Block Amazon Logistics and Blank Box. So maybe it'll be enough just to do Blank Box. No one will care that it gets delivered in an Amazon van, but I don't know. I think a lot of people who are fulfilling through Amazon on their own site don't want it showing up in anything Amazon. Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, I would agree with that. And I don't know. This is, you know, I think a lot of people have said that the Amazon wave is, you know, dying down. I really don't think so, though. I think it's just getting more and more and more sophisticated. But that means that us as three piece sellers need to be looking into the future as best we can into what changes coming and how do we need to be pivoting to accommodate that because it sure as hell isn't getting less expensive for us to. sell on Amazon, right? So does that mean that we need to pivot into doing our own stores but then utilizing Amazon as our 3PL for our logistics? I don't know. We could go a bunch of different ways on where should somebody go but In my opinion, I've been saying this for the last couple of years now, I think one thing's for sure to me, you got to be diversifying. It doesn't get any less expensive to deal with Amazon. At best, we all clap when they say, we're not raising our rates this time. And everyone goes, oh my God, that's the greatest news since Betty Crocker. Not, not that, you know, we're making it more efficient, therefore we're passing the savings on to you. Unknown Speaker: No, no, no, no, no, no. Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. We're not screwing you for FBA rates. Speaker 3: Yeah. Speaker 2: They didn't say that they wouldn't raise AWD rates or that they would eliminate savings that you could get. Speaker 1: And if we're going to go full circle on today's podcast, if we're talking about Amazon delivery, where's their promise made about the drones? When are they going to start delivering by drone effectively? Because that was a huge thing and now it's kind of gone all. Speaker 2: Yeah, there's little pockets of it in different places with testing. But yeah, I think that's proving to be a lot more challenging than they thought. Speaker 1: I think so, too, because they made it sound like by now it would like all be just coming by drone. And I haven't even seen it. I'm in a testing area for Walmart. For that from our local store. Yeah, our local store in the giant Walmart parking lot. You'll know how big those are. They put a chain link fence out in the parking lot and have this area that they have that set has the branding for Walmart drone delivery all over it. And then it's got these landing pads like like they've marked off with paint one, two and three for the drones. I've never seen anything leave it or come back. But they've got it all set up. It's been set up for months. Unknown Speaker: Interesting. Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, I mean, we all thought we'd have self-driving cars from Tesla by now, too. So all this technology takes a lot longer than you initially think. They blow out the marketing to get the venture dollars. Speaker 3: Yeah. Speaker 2: And then it takes a lot longer. Speaker 3: I actually think on the self-driving cars from Tesla, I actually think that Starlink is a part of that plan. Because the lower the latency you have, the faster the data and the corrections and all that stuff happen. And so when you have a network of satellites around, you know where every Tesla car is, you know where every car is, and every Tesla is feeding the network and the other cars exactly what's going on. You can compare data and then you truly will have self-driving cars. Speaker 2: But it's common for sure. It just takes longer than you think. Speaker 3: Yeah, but I read somewhere, and I'm looking for it now, I think in Arizona, Amazon actually grounded the drone delivery because of crashes or something like that. Speaker 2: Yeah, they had an accident where they crashed in the sky or something like that. I don't remember what happened, if it hit a bird or something. Speaker 3: Yeah, birds are bad for airplanes in the same proximity. Speaker 2: For sure. It doesn't work so well. Yeah. All right. Well, we're over the top of the hour here, so we should go ahead and wrap it up. But that was a lot of fun. I appreciate you guys coming on the show and everybody out there watching as well. Appreciate you and we'll see you next Friday. 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.