Amazon News Live: Share-of-Voice, EU Fee Cuts & The End of Commingling

Amazon News Live: Share-of-Voice, EU Fee Cuts & The End of Commingling 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: What is going on, everybody? Amazon Seller News Live. Another week has come and gone. Got a full house again this week, which is awesome. Chris McCabe from eCommerce Chris, Eric Castellano from eCom Profit Path, and of course, Danon from eCom Triage. Gentlemen, appreciate you joining me today. We're going to be diving into some good news today. Some big changes coming from Amazon here, the end of 2025, beginning of 2026. Definitely going to want to pay attention to this one as we dive into All these changes, and without further ado, let's go ahead and dive into this first one, which I think is really big. So I'm curious to hear your guys' thoughts on this. Chris, you probably run some of the most ads or help people with ads, perhaps, a little more than myself and Dayna and Eric, but we'll see what everybody thinks on this. Amazon's Amazon introduces reserve share of voice for branded search. Amazon is rolling out a fixed priced reserve share of voice system that lets brand registered sellers lock in sponsored brands top of search placement for their own branded keywords. This eliminates auction volatility for brand terms but requires API setup, upfront payment, and validation that the keywords match your registered top brand or registered brand. Because this guarantees visibility, most of the time rather than 100% Competitors can still appear through sponsored products or other placements. For Amazon sellers, this shift mainly benefits larger brands with predictable budgets, while smaller brands must weigh whether fixed pricing is worth the cost versus traditional CPC bidding. A mouthful there, but essentially brands can lock in the advertising for their branded keywords. At least that's the way it's supposed to work. What are your thoughts on this, Chris? Speaker 3: Yeah, so we don't create ads for people. We tend to deal with problems with ads like Amazon won't let us do this ad. We don't know why. So we deal with ads managers if there are account problems, ad creation problems because of a restriction or a block, kind of like account suspension, ASIN suspension type stuff. This is interesting because for years, keywords have been abused by people who weren't the brand. So I think this is one of the big drivers, forcing you, if you're going to mess with someone's backing keywords to, you know, or add keywords to pay, , and put some money behind what you're doing. But also I think it's supposed to favor brand owners, but I don't know if it'll have some loopholes. I don't know if it'll be exploited by people who have a bigger budget for certain keywords, , than the brand owners. But like you said, , it looks like there's priority given for, oh, you actually own the brand. Versus someone who's pretending that they're the brand owner or trying to mooch off the brand owner. So that'll be interesting to see how this plays out. But there's been so much nonsense for the last two, three years about, you know, different keywords and who's using them, why and how, and are they the brand? Are they not the brand? So maybe this will play into that. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: Yeah, it's interesting that it's only through API integration, it says here, which is rather archaic. I'm sure eventually it will move into the graphical user interface like everything Amazon as it advances. Well, I don't know. Speaker 4: I mean, with Amazon announcing that you're going to have to pay them, what was it, $1,400 a year in order for the pleasure to be able to access the API? They're going to have thousands upon thousands of brands go, Oh, well, we also have to pay $1,400 a year for API access. So Amazon just picked up a few more kajillions of dollars per year in revenue. Speaker 3: Yeah. Speaker 2: Yeah. So here it says $4,914 US dollars, which, which is a lot, but it could be less than what you might be spending in a year for your branded search terms. Speaker 1: Yeah. And I think the downside is for smaller brands, right? Because it's like you're committed to that. You're locked in. So once you click approve and that ad starts running, I mean, there's no, there's no, if it's not performing as expected, there's no backing out. So I think smaller brands will be more hesitant to participate in this, but for a bigger brand, absolutely. It could make logical sense. Speaker 4: Yeah. I, this is, I see two sides of this coin. Good. Now you can lock your own brand branded terms. Bad because somebody is going to figure out a way around that. You know, if you're your main, your top competitors, they're, they're going to figure a way around that. Um, and, and you will be locked into paying dollars that Maybe don't matter after a year, you know, because now there's going up on on other search terms. I don't know what it would look like exactly, but there's pros and cons. One being that the second being that you now have to pay for your own terms. And what's that expense going to be? Amazon doesn't talk about what the expense is going to be, you know, because typically if you go on to Google, In order for you to win the ad space on your own brand, when you've confirmed with Google it's your own brand, it's a very low cost per click. I don't know what Amazon's going to charge, but I'll bet you it's going to end up being more, especially since you're going to have to pay that extra 1500 bucks a year for API access. And you're going to have all these big brands that maybe they don't know how to work with ESP API. So they're going to have to hire someone to handle this stuff. So it could end up being a fairly decent cost center over time. Speaker 2: It's also an interesting trademark issue, right? Because with Amazon, you're not supposed to anyway, as a lot of people do it, but you're not supposed to put other people's trademarks in your copy, even if it's in the backend keywords that nobody sees. So if you're targeting my brand name in the PPC, you're using my brand name in the back end of the PPC advertising console, right? So is that a trademark violation by simply targeting Those searches in the advertising console, could that be some kind of legal case that comes up? You know, obviously this is, that's been, this kind of thing's been happening a long time. So maybe there's nothing there. You would think someone would have brought that up in court at this point or by now if that was actually a legal issue. But it's an interesting thought on with trademarks. Speaker 4: Yeah. Speaker 1: I was going to say, I know if I was going to test it, I would be selecting the shortest term possible because it says they give an example three months, but they might have like three, six, 12. I'm not committing to something like this as a business owner for 12 months. I would pick the lowest term possible, which would probably be the lowest cost and then see how it works. And if it's phenomenal, then I'd double down. And if not, I'd keep it moving. Speaker 2: If I was a bigger brand, and you have to see if people are actually searching for your brand, number one. You're going to be going into your brand analytics and see what your top search terms are. If you have a query in there that has your brand name in it and it's getting a large enough volume of search, Then it makes sense to lock that down so that you can fully protect that search. But a majority of Amazon products or products that are sold on Amazon, I should say, are probably not getting a very significant search volume for their brand name. Speaker 4: Yeah, you know, it's interesting. Our brand does get brand search, but I don't do advertising at all. So I don't even know if, and also this brand is not brand registered. So we don't have a way to tell if people are indeed. Yeah, we have no way to tell. Speaker 2: The product that you're selling is a brand that sells a lot outside of Amazon as well, right? I'm sure they run probably TV commercials. All that kind of stuff. So they've got brand recognition where a majority of products that are sold on Amazon do not have brand recognition. Speaker 4: That's a very good point. I do know from the days where Amazon did give you lots of data that the majority of our conversions come from branded search. Speaker 2: Yeah. Very good. So yeah, for you, Chris, I can see this as a potential new avenue of, hey, I filed for this and Amazon rejected locking down my trademark or something like that. And you have to dig in and help them figure out through the API how to get Amazon to allow it. I think Chris may be locked up actually. He has not moved in a while. All right. Hopefully, he will come back. But like you said, Dan, that's going to be a whole new world where people are going to need help figuring this out through the API. We're fixing rejections from Amazon. I think it's a good thing overall, but I don't think it should be a very high price to do it. I think it should be a relatively low price. Unknown Speaker: It should be very low price. Speaker 2: It should be almost pretty much no price, really. Speaker 4: Yeah, it should be. I mean, this is, yet again, just another way for Amazon to swipe money, in my opinion. I'm glad it's being done. It's great that you're going to be able to lock this stuff in, but you own your brand name, right? If people are searching for your brand, Then it should organically be showing up first, no matter what, because that's what the user is searching for. You shouldn't have to pay to show up when someone's looking for you, right? Now, if you've got good branding and in terms of your listing and stuff like that, you're going to show up organically anyhow. So what this is doing is basically Amazon saying, oh, by the way, Don't worry. People are looking for you. You're going to show up organically. But all your competitors, because 98% of the SERPs page is paid ads now, if you want to show up in the paid ads, the PPC slots, Then you can do that. But if you ask the average purchaser, Amazon buyer, they have no idea that they're clicking on an ad. Speaker 2: Yeah, probably not for the most part. Speaker 4: Yeah. So as far as the eyeballs of your consumers are concerned, you're not in position one if you're not in position one for advertising. It doesn't matter that you're in Organically position one. Yeah, that's actually position five. Speaker 2: Now, Eric, you, as a part of your training that you do, you're teaching private label in addition to resale, right? Speaker 1: Yeah, it's definitely not our go-to, but we have some private label brands ourselves, and obviously a lot of resellers start launching private label brands, so we definitely have the knowledge to help grow the private label business as well, but it's not our primary focus. Primary focus, wholesale brand partnerships. Speaker 2: Got it. Okay. Yeah, I guess I asked because I'm curious how much importance you put on brand building, you know, outside of Amazon with a Shopify website, email newsletter, Facebook, Instagram, all that, TikTok shop, that kind of stuff. Speaker 1: Yeah. So years ago, it was little to no importance, right? You can build a multi, million dollar brand just on Amazon and be cool with that, right? But now with the changes in the fee structures, placement fees, low inventory level fees, I think it's become more complex and I, in the past two and a half to three years, we definitely encourage, if you're doing private label, you can't just be Amazon centric. You have to have your own marketplace and Shopify website and be running TikTok and you gotta be more diverse. Speaker 4: I fully agree. Speaker 2: Yeah, I agree 100%. Especially building, you know, your social media and your newsletter. You know, we're helping a brand launch that has a very large email list and a base of consumers that are used to buying from that email list and off their website. And so they were able to just send out an email and generate several thousands of dollars worth of sales right from the launch of the product on Amazon. So it's pretty amazing when you have that outside traffic and are able to drive it into Amazon to build your brand. Speaker 4: Yeah. And, and you would have no use for that if you're, if you plan on being a one product business. The only thing you can do is end another deal, end another deal. Speaker 2: In this day and age, I would stay away from making random products and trying to grow them on Amazon, especially if you're based in the USA or Europe. You need to build a brand identity that people connect with if you're gonna compete with just all the cheap knockoffs that are inevitably gonna come. Speaker 4: I agree. Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure. All right, cool. Let's go ahead and jump on to the next article here. Speaking of Europe, Amazon cuts seller fees in Europe amid Shine and Temu price war. So Amazon is making one of its biggest fee reductions ever in Europe, slashing referral fees for low-priced fashion, home goods, pet clothing, groceries. And vitamins to stay competitive with ultra-cheap marketplaces like Shine and Temu. These cuts drop some referral fees from 15% down to as low as 5% to 8% along with reduced fulfillment fees across major EU markets. So I wanted to talk about this because in the past we've talked a lot about the importance of competition to Amazon, which is still relatively minimal in the US, but it looks like it's starting to cut into their market share enough in Europe that they're actually having to cut prices and fees for sellers, which is great for us. Speaker 4: That was exactly how I read it too. And that article also says, that February 1st, that they're going to cut home products from 15% to 8%, which is like, if you have, I can't do the math publicly here, but if you're cutting your, your costs to your fees to Amazon and half there, I mean, for some people, that's, that's a, a, a not insignificant increase to their profit. Speaker 1: Yeah, I figure a 1999 product, that's $1.40 back in your pocket with that 7% referral fee change. But I can't help but read this. I can't help but read this and laugh because look at what happened in 2025, right? Big announcement, no changes in fulfillment fees, boom, hit us with low inventory level fees, placement fees. So Amazon's gonna make up for this somewhere else and imagine in three to six months, we'll hear what that new change in EU is going to be. Speaker 4: Yeah, absolutely. Speaker 2: They'll be fulfilling all of the Shine and Temu orders for that. Speaker 4: Right. That's right, yeah. And now we've partnered with Shine and Temu and we fulfill for them. You can fulfill your FBA inventory. Speaker 2: Yes, and we're increasing our multi-channel fulfillment fee. Speaker 4: Yeah, by 50%. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 4: Yeah. I think it's funny that Amazon, they've always got to save face for this stuff and they know it because they said, as we continue to lower our costs to serve through operational improvements and innovation, we are passing on the greater savings to our selling partners. If ever I heard a load of horse crap, that's it. They care about profit. They're a public company now. Speaker 2: Well, every company does that. Every big company, especially, you know, they have their entire marketing and promotional team making sure everything sounds nice and fluffy and rainbows and kitty cats and all that stuff. Speaker 4: Exactly. Exactly. And that's all that is, is, you know, it's a public public statement to appease the masses. Speaker 1: Yeah. There was a big Amazon event back in October in New Jersey, Sellers United, and Amazon was supposed to go to that event. And that's right when they were making the announcement of the, there was the 2026 announcement for fee changes. And so they canceled because they didn't want to have any representatives at that event being drilled with questions because they didn't have all the information needed. So, I mean, Amazon, they're going to do what Amazon does and we're going to get, We're going to feel the hammer at the end of the day. Speaker 4: That's for sure. And you know what? The fact that they pulled out for that reason just goes to show how much they actually know about how we sellers feel about what they're doing. And they're going to do it anyhow. And they just need to make sure that kind of the pot doesn't boil over, so to speak, and their reps don't get pummeled. Speaker 1: Yeah, I really think that Amazon, I've been saying this for two or three years now, like Amazon should employ one of us, right? I don't think they have any long-term sellers on their team who really understand how sellers operate and what they need. And I think it would be super beneficial for them. Speaker 4: I totally agree. I, you know, I've even considered Not necessarily from a PR standpoint, but for more of an understanding standpoint to help us sellers going to Amazon and getting a job in, I don't know what area, but some area just so that I could basically figure out, okay, guys, this is what's actually going on. Because Amazon, as we know, is so siloed. And they have such high turnover in so many positions that the people that work there don't know what's going on. And they don't have the experience that we do in terms of what we see on the ads platform, what we see in the product display, the product details page, what we see in terms of buyer behavior and conversions and all that kind of stuff, changes that they make that negatively impact or positively impact us. They don't know that stuff, right? And if they did employ, and I'm not talking about employing influencers in this space. I'm talking about people that are in the trenches of Amazon. Operators, yes. And they need to, even on a fractional basis, where they can go, hey, what's happening? And this person can go, This is what's actually happening. But Amazon needs to care enough to be able to do that. Don't get me wrong. There are lots of awesome people that work at Amazon. I have friends that work at Amazon and they do care. They do care. But most of them, their hands are tied because they don't know how to make an impact to resolve the thing. Speaker 2: Yeah, well, that, you know, really is where the competition comes in. If we want Amazon to support sellers more, They're not going to do it unless they have to do it. They're going to focus on providing the best experience for the customer, not necessarily good experience for the sellers. Now, I did just recently have a relatively good experience with Amazon Support because this new company that we were launching that I was talking about earlier, Somebody had created their listings previously before they got brand registered and everything. So we didn't have full control of the listing. So I couldn't change a lot of things. And we were going back and forth with support and we're getting nowhere. But then all of a sudden the brand got an email that, hey, we are giving you this high level specialist support access. We had to email this special email and fill out this spreadsheet with any things that we wanted updated. I submitted that with all the issues that we're having, that we didn't have control of these listings and everything. Within a couple of days, they had it all fixed for us, even when support was telling us, no, you can't change that. Because, for example, their brand name is multiple words long, but a few of the listings only had the first word as the brand name. And they would not change it. But this advanced support, they had it changed in a matter of about 12 hours. Well, that's cool. That was quite pleasant that they gave us access to that. And it's ongoing. It doesn't really have a deadline that I can see. So we're still able to use it. Speaker 4: Not just for 12 months. Speaker 2: No, no, I didn't see any kind of deadline or anything. We'll see how long they actually give it to us. And you have to open up a case with regular support first, so you go to regular support. They give you the generic response that it can't be done no matter what, and then you send it to the advanced support and they take care of it right away for you. Speaker 4: Kind of sounds like Saskore. Chris, do you know what he's talking about? Speaker 3: They call it escalated support. You can hear me now, right? Speaker 4: Yeah. Speaker 3: Yeah. I'm in a better location. My hotel put me in like room Siberia when they changed our reservation. So anyway. I'm in the main area now. I haven't heard a lot of positive feedback about it. I've had more people saying this was kind of the same thing we were already dealing with on cases we had already opened with regular support. But I could see how it could function the way a lot of escalation emails function, where once you target certain people, instead of certain cues, you get, you know, somebody manager level Who can look it over? In your case, it sounds like it was kind of a straightforward thing, right? All you had to do was read it and understand it. I mean, support reps always say you can't do stuff that you can do. They always do that. Yeah. Speaker 2: Yeah, the regular support kept telling me that, oh, you just got to create a listing because you can't change a brand name ever once it's set. Okay, that's false. Seller Success is the name of the team. Speaker 3: Yeah. I mean, there's, were you at Accelerate in 2024? They mentioned escalated support, and then it went away for a while. And then it came back around this year's Accelerate. So it was kind of dormant for a year, and then it came back. And then of course, The seller AI assistant was the big thing they're pushing now. So this kind of fell to the side. This wasn't really their big initiative anymore. Speaker 4: I actually do think that Amazon is kind of figuring out how to appropriately create their support system now that they're as big as they are. It'll start out with AI. It'll then be escalated to somebody that doesn't know anything and reads a script. But then I think after that, that it should, I'm hoping that we'll have an escalation path that makes sense where if, yeah, and also I think that maybe with the AI, because it's going to be referencing their own policies, that you'll be able to give your first, or I guess technically your first human degree of support, better information Because the AI will have referenced their own policies hopefully, but I think all of us here know that Amazon It has policies that contradict with each other. 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. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I'm somewhat looking forward to AI replacing the bottom level of support. It'll be faster to get the rejection probably. Speaker 4: Yeah, it'll be faster bad support to a resolution of no, we can't do that for you. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 3: You'll know the need to escalate faster. Speaker 4: Exactly. Speaker 3: Yeah. I did a whole, I think I did an article, maybe just a LinkedIn post on why are people waiting We hear from tons of sellers all the time, we need help with ABC. Okay, what have you done so far? Well, we did this, this and this and nothing really happened. Well, what do you mean nothing happened? Well, they just keep telling us to wait that they're reviewing it and days and days and days are going by. You have no idea if anything's actually happening. And we have some people waiting like five, seven, nine days for a reply and then they get a copy and paste. Boilerplate denial or just a message that says nothing. The concept of waiting is like for the birds. Speaker 4: Yeah. You know what's funny, Chris, since you mentioned that? I have an open case with Amazon right now from Accelerate, from my meeting with Accelerate. It's still open and the case number is like 088. It's not a standard Solar support case. Speaker 3: Yeah. And they forgot about it. Speaker 4: I mean, that's not I keep getting constant updates. Hey, we're looking into this. It's being escalated and automated. Yeah, it's totally automated. And I gave them clear and overwhelming evidence of of buyers Threatening my account, I said, if you don't refund this money, this is like way outside of the refund policy on a supplement, by the way. And I said, if you don't refund us, me and my friends are going to buy all your inventory and then return it. And then we saw a doubling of our return rate. Speaker 3: You need to report that to abuse teams. You don't want to wait for Seller Cafe. Seller Cafe is a huge, I could do a whole thing just on that because I met with a bunch of people there and they made promises. I mean, it would take forever to tell you all the details because I talked to them about a dozen different accounts. They made all these promises. They didn't come across on most of it. And when I tried to follow up, they were just sort of like, oh, we'll just message a bunch of sellers that you told us about. Some of these people weren't even clients. They were just sellers. You couldn't get into Accelerate because they were suspended. Speaker 1: I got a quick short 20-second seller cafe story. I landed in Accelerate. My account gets suspended as soon as I check into the hotel. $7 million a month Amazon business. So we're like, oh, this is great. We'll go to the cafe, meet with someone in person. So, we schedule it. Three hours later, we get there. We're like, we're going to meet with someone live and be able to discuss this, get this resolved. This is amazing. They put us on a virtual call with someone from like Tennessee. This is ridiculous. Speaker 3: Seller Cafe needs to be done a totally different way next year. Speaker 4: Well, they need to be able to actually resolve problems. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 3: Well, sometimes they do. Sometimes they do. Speaker 4: Okay. They've never solved a problem for me in the last three years. Speaker 3: Yeah. And I don't know if Todd wants to go down this sideline conversation, but just in quick, I mean, some of them, we did get answers. I mean, their SLA for responses for a seller cafe normally is like 21 days. We're 14 to 21 days. So we got some answers within a week, but some other people just got a message that said like, we met with you at Accelerate and this is what you need to do next. And it was like, well, this is what I talked to you about. This is the same exact message they got four times in a row. So if you're not even going to modify the message, other than to say, we talked to you at Accelerate, then there's no point to do. And Eric, I mean, that's what happened. A bunch of people got suspended after they bought their tickets and they didn't know And they were on their way or they already had hotels and flights and whatnot. And they got their registration canceled at the last minute. So they had Seller Cafe appointments and tickets to accelerate, both which vanished. And then they started contacting me like, you're gonna be, you keep posting on LinkedIn, you're gonna be at Seller Cafe all day. And I said, yeah, I'm there right now. They were like, can you ask about this? This is our merchant ID. It was crazy. If you're not actively selling, And they don't want you to go to Accelerate. They should have a banner on the page like you cannot buy a ticket. You were not alone with that. Speaker 1: Fortunately for us, we landed, checked in immediately and then we got suspended after we got to the hotel. So we were still able to get in. Speaker 4: Really? Speaker 3: Yeah. Speaker 4: Two years ago, I showed up with a suspended account and I was really lucky in that somebody from Seller Performance was sitting right there when the person at the check-in said, oh, your account's suspended. I'm like, for what? And it was that Freedom from Information Act stuff. Speaker 3: Inform. Speaker 4: Yep. Inform. We had given them absolutely everything, I'm not even kidding, five times. They kept asking for the same thing. We're like, we need you to look at the documentation. It's there in the file that we uploaded that you asked us for. By the time I showed up at Accelerate, my account was suspended and I lucked out. The guy was right there. He was like, yeah, cool. I'll have this handled by tomorrow. Speaker 3: Last year was totally different. I showed up with suspended salaries. We sat with people, we talked through it. And by the end of Accelerate, they were reinstated. Totally different. Speaker 2: So yes, the porch is ever evolving. Yeah. We'll see if it's ever really any good. Speaker 4: But let's hope I mean support has been ever devolving. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 4: Let's hope it gets better. I think it will. Speaker 3: But if they're planning on getting rid of all the support reps or replacing them with AI, Everyone seems to be for that anyway, right? So like now would be the time. Speaker 4: As a first tier of support, I actually do think it would be better. Speaker 2: Yeah. I don't think it could get worse on the first tier because AI is just going to have access to all the data immediately. They're going to know all the policies and procedures a lot better than some guy sitting in a place in the Philippines. Reading a script on the screen, you know. Speaker 4: Yeah. Where his whole statistical analysis is based on how quickly he can close cases. Speaker 2: Yes. Yes. That's for sure as well. All right. Well, let's go ahead and jump on to the next article here. Chinese sellers are abandoning mainland registration. A surge of Chinese Amazon sellers, 780 in November alone, shifted their legal entry from mainland China to Hong Kong after Beijing's new rule requiring platforms to report quarterly sales revenue data took effect. For Amazon sellers in the U.S., this shift matters because it reduces the tax advantages Chinese competitors have long used to undercut prices, potentially leveling the playing field. However, experts note that Hong Kong registrations may not shield these sellers from Chinese tax enforcement. Before we jump on the live, Chris, we were talking a little bit about something similar to this, not exactly the same, but you're dealing with or seeing a lot of Chinese sellers who are trying to open up Delaware, USA-based companies. Speaker 3: A lot of, I mean, this is a huge topic that we've had all through 2025. So numerous people saw this coming. I didn't know this was going to be the move or announcement by the Chinese government, but they obviously did. Because they've been approaching us all year with like, can I have a virtual office, you know, in Wyoming or Delaware, like you said. And then I said, you know what you need. I mean, I'm not somebody that tells people it's OK to have a virtual office. I always say you're going to get flagged for that. You want to be safe. Have a real office. Open an office in the United States. And try to create a new LLC and then go to Amazon and say, I need a new account for this new LLC. Then you get into like, are you going to be selling the same stuff or not? And that's a complicated question, but. Just to answer your question, the first part of it, we are now getting tons and tons of people who are like, I either want to change my China address to a US address on an existing account, or I need help opening up an account under a new LLC in the United States, and then getting a new account for that. Depending on the complexity, Sometimes I'm just introducing them to people who open accounts at Amazon. Like I'm not offering that as a service. I'm just like, you got a few moving parts here. And, you know, some of it's like you keep saying you don't need to have US based personnel. I'm kind of saying now you do. And you got to figure out what kind of expense you want to allocate for that. But some questions are so tangled that it's even tough for me to answer. And I try to direct them in the direction of Amazon teams who are dedicated for that sort of thing. Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, it was definitely interesting news when China decided that they wanted to get the data from Amazon so that they could tax Amazon sellers on the revenue that they're making in the United States. So now, obviously, you can see from this graph, just in the last three months, it went from pretty much zero Chinese sellers changing their legal entity on Amazon to over 800 in November alone, escalating extremely quickly. So they're just trying to escape Chinese or China's taxes by going to Hong Kong, which The effects of that, it's hard to say. Technically, China took over Hong Kong what a couple years ago, a few years ago, they marched in and kind of took it over. Technically, it's still a separate Entity over China, but under direct Chinese control. Speaker 4: Yeah. Technically Britain had a 99 year lease on it or something like that. And that ended in the late nineties or something. I don't know what happened, but yeah, mainland China definitely literally marched in there and said, that's it. The shit's ours. Speaker 2: Yep. Yeah, I think there was a movement in Hong Kong to basically become their own country and the Chinese government said, no, that ain't happening and flooded the streets with the army. Speaker 1: Yep. Speaker 4: And I believe that some people disappeared as well. Speaker 2: Oh, I'm sure. But yeah, the, you know, just like here, people try to evade taxes. Same kind of thing happening over there. I think the more interesting story that we covered last week With lawmakers pressuring Amazon to have more transparency into where products are being manufactured and where their parts are coming from, where the sellers are from, could play in a lot to what you're seeing, Chris, with the Chinese sellers opening up offices in the United States. I think you're gonna see a lot more of that And as you said, Dana, maybe not trust those Delaware and Wyoming corporations so much anymore. Speaker 4: You know, I was actually, while we're talking about this, asking I asked ChatGPT for a graph of businesses opened over the last five years in Delaware. Actually, the trend seems to be going down, but it's still in the hundreds of thousands per year. At that level, it going down by, let's see, over the last five years, I mean, it went 30,000 to down to 290,000. Hmm. I have still a lot of businesses. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: Yeah, definitely. Even if you want to track that, you're going to have to not only track where the product is made, where its components are made, and where the seller is registered, but also where the owners of the LLC are from, if you really want to have an idea. There's a lot of layers there, whether The government can pull that off to actually effectively track that and then actually force Amazon to display that data. It's hard to say. Speaker 4: Yeah, I just, I don't see that being feasible. Certainly not if you're going to a listing and you're going, hey, where's this seller from? Oh, Delaware. You know, that's all you're going to see right now. And that data used to not even be available. Like Amazon didn't display any data, what, five, maybe five, six, seven years ago. There was no information about your company on Amazon. And so now that there is, I mean, I can't imagine Amazon I don't know. I can't imagine them adding so much data that you can basically extrapolate, oh, this is a Chinese seller or this is a seller in Uganda. And it would be great if they did, but that's only because I'm biased on who I want to buy from. But Amazon doesn't care about that. And a matter of fact, many years ago, it may have been 10 or more. They actually, no, it was less than 10. But They actually had the option to buy from American businesses. There was a little flag that you checked in the top right that said, only display American businesses. And they removed that a long time ago. So, you know, they literally don't want to support anybody other than the buyer in themselves Making it as anonymous as possible so that you just spend the money. That's what I think. Speaker 2: I can see that switch coming back as a minimum, just from the pressures from lawmakers. They're like, okay, we'll turn this back on and then you can filter by seller basically. Speaker 4: I hope, yeah. Speaker 2: We'll see. It's going to be interesting to watch. It's a never-ending battle that will be going on forever through all time, I'm sure. Speaker 4: My wife, being a very well-educated buyer since she's been selling on Amazon for 15 years as well, she investigates who the sellers are before she makes a purchasing decision. Speaker 2: That's why I like the Helium 10 plug-in. I have the Helium 10 plug-in on and then it shows the flag of the country that the seller is from. So it's always nice to be able to scroll through and do that really easy. Speaker 4: Yeah. Speaker 2: All right. Let's jump on to our last story here. And I think this is a super important one for all the sellers out there, especially if you're a reseller. So Amazon to end FBA co-mingling. Amazon is eliminating FBA co-mingling on March 31st, 2026, meaning sellers' inventory will no longer mix in pooled bins and every unit shipped to customers must be traceable to the specific seller who supplied it, which is a good thing. For Amazon sellers, this dramatically increases accountability and reduces counterfeit risk, but it also forces operational changes, including new barcode requirements in the end of Amazon's labeling prep services. Brand registry sellers with brand representative status can still ship sticker lists using manufacturer barcodes, while all resellers must apply Amazon barcodes to every unit going forward. So I'm curious on all your guys' perspectives, because we're going to have a couple unique ones here for sure, at least. Because I know myself, Dana and Eric, we do a lot of reselling. And Chris, you're going to probably be working with a lot of brands. That are really happy about this. For us resellers, it may involve having to create some new SKUs and start labeling a lot more products than we used to. Speaker 4: So we actually don't do a lot of reselling anymore. We're actually just down to the one product that we're selling or the one brand I mean. But before we go down that road, now, Eric, definitely, and you, you guys do a ton. Eric, I've seen pictures of his warehouse, videos of his warehouse. I would never, ever, ever, ever want to do that, so my hat's off to you. Speaker 3: You're a brave soul, Eric. Speaker 4: Yeah. I actually have a question. Does this also mean that when we're checking in, because I don't have a lot of experience with this, does this also mean that when we're checking in new inventory, our older inventory is going to be sold first? I hope it does. Speaker 1: Hmm. Speaker 2: I don't know. I think Amazon kind of tries to do that now. I believe Eric. What are your thoughts? Speaker 1: I mean, I know they don't have any first in, first out methodology in their current setup, so I don't know if this would adjust that at all. I mean, that would be great if they did, but I've had products that expire, you know, that I sent in six months ago when I have a shipment I sent in 12 months ago. It's just ridiculous. They're first in, first out. They don't use it at all. Speaker 4: Okay. Yeah. Okay, cool. All right. I didn't mean to hijack the topic here, but I was just curious about that. Speaker 2: Yeah, well, Eric, you've got a lot of products. I'm sure some are probably commingled, some are not. How are you guys going to approach this in having to basically sticker everything? Speaker 1: Yeah, interestingly enough, I've always been an advocate of not commingling your inventory. I advise all of our students to do it and we out of the As of recently, we had up to 4,000 active SKUs. Not one of them was commingled. Wow. Nice. Speaker 2: Okay. So you're already all set then. I'm about half and half. I've got about, I try to lean not to commingling unless it's a product that I think there's no way you can really screw this up kind of thing. And then I'll use the UPC barcode. So I'm going to have some changes that I have to do. Speaker 3: I mean, the barcode thing was years in the making, right? You mean like people buying resold barcodes, Todd? Is that what you're... Speaker 2: No, no. Just, you know, like we resell a lot of products and let's say it's a deck of cards, right? You can't really mess up the prepping of that for something like that. They'll say, just send it in by UPC. We don't have to sticker it. But if it's something, you know, anything, of course, with an expiration date, you have to, but if it's something fragile or something that you could mess up prepping and doing improperly, then I'd sticker all of those with Amazon barcodes. Speaker 4: What's that going to do to cost? Speaker 1: It's going to increase it for anybody who's been doing a lot of commingling. It's definitely going to increase. Speaker 4: But is there, is there, so like if Amazon's not doing prep, they're not stickering it for you. They're not charging you five or 10 or 15 cents a sticker or whatever it is these days. So you're going to have to do it internally. Speaker 1: Yeah, which is, it's a low cost for the supplies. I mean, you can get stickers for a fraction of a penny, but what it adds is labor costs. Speaker 4: Yep. Speaker 1: Yep. Speaker 2: Yeah, the labor is the big thing. You're going to add, I don't know, 10 to 25 cents per product. For stickering them perhaps it depends on your volume, you know, maybe down to like five to 10 cents when you add in labor and everything else that goes into it. Speaker 4: Yeah, but not free. Speaker 1: Yeah, not not free. We're using primarily we've shifted a lot of our business to prep centers. So mainly primarily prep centers now but in full operation at our at our 50,000 square foot warehouse, our average cost to produce one ASIN We call our PCPA, Production Cost Per Ace, which is taking all of our monthly expenses and dividing it by the monthly orders prepped. And in our warehouse was about a dollar and a quarter. It would fluctuate from a dollar to a dollar and a quarter. So you figure that would be greatly reduced if you had a lot of commingling, right? Because now you're eliminating a lot of that labor involved. But if you were, if you have skews, 50% of your inventory was commingled and now you have to label all of those. I mean, this can greatly increase that PCPA number. Speaker 4: Yeah. And not only that, you're going to have a period of time, months for sure, figuring out the best methodology to optimize it to be able to do it as efficiently as possible. Speaker 2: Did you say, Eric, your prep cost per product is about a dollar? Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: Okay. Yeah, that's about the same as mine. I figure about $1.25 per minute for prepping. Speaker 1: It fluctuates between $1, $1.25. When we added web development, it was up to like $160, $170, but we like to have the two numbers with web development without it because there's a cost of operating and then there's a cost of operating considering the growth of the future business with development. Speaker 2: Gotcha. Okay. So what are you hearing, Chris, from brands with this? And are any of them struggling? For example, the brand that I've been talking about that we launched recently, they got the email that they have to sticker all their products, even though they are the brand. So we're gonna have to work with support. To get that fixed, probably because of the same issues that we've had with control of the listings, we're running into that. So are you seeing any issues on your end with that? Speaker 3: I mean, I've been telling everyone that comes anywhere near us if it's an option that you can take for your category to get out of co-mingling for years because all the nightmarish false accusations of counterfeit, If they're going to have an open marketplace where brands can't gate all their listings, that means somebody else can jump on, say that they're selling the same thing but not be. Speaker 4: Absolutely. Speaker 3: They're going to post a lower quality. This was evident years ago. I don't know how much content, articles, podcasts, whatever over the years we've done. Kind of instructional webinars and things, and we would mention this every time, like run screaming from commingling. Whoever set up that whole concept, it was convenient and cost-effective for Amazon, but they never considered the back flow or backlash to it. And it's like, I mean, hallelujah, if this is going to play out the way it's supposed to, but I mean, there'll be the usual bumps and stuff. But I mean, it's just been such a year's long nightmare of some buyer getting the wrong, I mean, Amazon is supposed to be 100% about buyer experience, you know, and this wasn't it. So I mean, it's good. And There are gonna be brands, I mean, we still have brands who a lot of their listings or some of their listings will be flagged for review and they'll say, buyers had concern about the authenticity of your products, or they're just outright accused of counterfeit. I mean, do you know how many counterfeit disputes we do a year? Because brands are accused of counterfeiting their own products, which makes absolutely no sense, or violating their own intellectual property, like the IP disputes. Which is kind of like how we started this whole conversation today. You were talking about trademarks, trademark keywords, right? That created a whole other level or circle of hell with sellers. Sellers just historically don't understand that for intellectual property issues, you need intellectual property expertise. And they kept hiring this grab bag of Amazon lawyers that are floating around out there. Most if not all of them aren't IP lawyers. And that that played into this whole commingling thing. They would be like, well, just send a letter to legal saying we're not counterfeiting our own products. And then it would take forever to get a response or they would just get a generic response back. So it's like, The cartwheel of other problems in other areas that spiral because something like this gets fumbled at the outset. So hopefully this mops up most of that. I think with Amazon stuff, if you attack the problem at the source, I mean, if they attack the problem at the source, 75% of it improves quicker, yet quickly. Speaker 2: Yeah, and this is another step, you know, towards the favorability of brand direct over resellers, I think, and Amazon has been pushing that way because Now the brand themselves are going to not have to sticker the product and they're not going to be commingled. So they're going to save that extra expense, extra labor costs. So it makes things a little bit easier for the brand, a little bit harder for the reseller. Speaker 4: Yeah. Speaker 2: But that's where brand partnerships, right, Eric? You and I did a full episode on brand partnerships. And so that's where brand partnerships really come into play. So you have that direct relationship. You're with the brand and you're helping them resell their products rather than just being a random reseller. Speaker 1: Yeah. And they can give you that brand representative role in brand registry. So you can have the co-mingling opportunity. Speaker 4: I mean, that's what we've done with our supplement brand for the last decade. We are their Amazon sales team. I like it that way. Speaker 2: All right, guys. Well, we are just going over the top of the hour, so we'll let you all get back to work, and I appreciate you coming on the show. Everybody out there watching, every Thursday at 12 p.m. Eastern, we do it. So until next time, have an awesome one and happy selling, everybody. Speaker 4: Bye, everyone. Speaker 3: Bye-bye. Speaker 1: 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.