Amazon News: Prime Day Flop?, TikTok Buyers? & Vine and Box Sizes

Amazon News: Prime Day Flop?, TikTok Buyers? & Vine and Box Sizes 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. Hello, hello, hello. Speaker 2: What's going on everybody? Welcome to another day of Amazon Seller News Live. Another week has gone by and it was a relatively big news week. Some weeks I'm looking for news articles and I struggle to get the 10 total that I'm looking for for the newsletter. But this week I had to cut like six or seven. To get down to the 10 that I'm usually looking for. So it was a busy week and we're going to be diving into it here. Got my friend Noah from My Amazon Guy. Appreciate you joining us, Noah. Speaker 1: Happy to be here, Todd. I hate to be this guy, but sorry, a spider just came down in front of my monitor as we're starting. I just crushed it though, so we're fine. Speaker 2: All right. Well, I'm glad you got it. That's funny. Yeah, that's what happens when you're live. I remember a few weeks back we were talking and I had a fly just land on my forehead, so that's always fun to have happen. At least we don't have to worry about, like, if you're a super big political figure or something, you know, all the memes and stuff that come out of that stuff. We don't have to worry about that. This is fair. Speaker 1: This is fair. However, you know, there can always be memes, I suppose, but yeah. Yeah, no, I'm doing well, Todd. Thanks for having me. Always happy to be here. Speaker 2: Yes, I'm looking forward to today. We always have good conversations on the topics and you're always up to date, so that's always good. But it looks like we've got a bunch of people who are streaming in, which is awesome. So if you're watching, feel free to throw your comments in the comments area and we'll bring them in the show if that makes sense. Happy to answer your questions related to the news or outside of the news if we have time as well. So definitely throw them in the comments. That's why we do this live. So hopefully we can bring you guys into the show. Without further ado, looks like we've got a few people saying hi. What's happening, Jack, Doug, Nikki, Deal Hunter, appreciate you guys joining the show. But let's go ahead and jump into the first news article here. So, and it's a big one. It's a big, bold claim that Amazon is actually refuting here already. But Amazon Prime Day sales plummet on first day. So Amazon's extended four-day Prime Day event may have backfired with sales on day one down 41% compared to 2024, according to Momentum Commerce. Consumers are browsing and filling carts but holding off on purchases, likely waiting for deeper discounts. Lower average spending and item prices suggest buyers are more cautious this year. For Amazon sellers, this means urgency driven tactics like light limited time deals and scarcity messaging may be more critical than ever. So we were talking a little bit before we jumped on, Noah, and you had some thoughts on this that you're not exactly agreeing with what this article is saying. Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I think it's not that I'm not disagreeing, right? So I think sales are down, but it's also a four-day sales event compared to a two-day sales event. Now, that being said, Amazon themselves has claimed that they are projecting or forecasting $23 billion for this Prime Day compared to $13 billion last Prime Day. I don't think that we're going to hit anywhere close to 23 billion. I am currently in the ballpark of thinking we're probably going to hit closer to maybe 15, 16 billion over the course of the four days. I mean, I'm seeing both sides of it, right? I'm seeing our clients who are doing great numbers this Prime Day and doing great, but I'm also seeing a giant rise in sales without You know, the need for people to actually do all that much in discounting. I made a post yesterday where I saw that like many different products had the same regular discount they do every like 60 and 90 days for Prime Day. And it's like, that's, that's not really what it's about. And everyone knows the first, you know, week or two before Prime Day and the week or two after Prime Day are also going to just be, they're going to be low, right? In sales volume as a whole anyways. Speaker 2: Yeah, I definitely agree with everything you said there. My sales personally, the week, week and a half leading up to Prime Day definitely tanked as they do every single year. And my first day of Prime Day, well, we don't do any major deals for Prime Day. It was slightly above like a normal day for us. So that's without a lot of discounting. I've got some products that we're discounting and stuff. And I seen maybe a 15 to 20% increase on those products, but nothing major as of yet. But like you said, it's four days instead of one day, two day, three day, whatever the case may be for past Prime Days that we've done. And so if we're going to take apples to apples, really what we got to do is look at the end of the four days and then add additional days on the last year and compare those numbers. You can't really take a four day and compare it to, you know, one day or two day and say, oh, see, Prime Day was bigger. It's a little disingenuous to say that, but it's yet to be seen what happens, because it says right in the article that a lot of people are adding products to cart, but not checking out. So they may be waiting to see if bigger deals are coming. Speaker 1: And that's, I think, almost like a purposeful confusion by Amazon because buyers don't understand the fact that it's like, no, when you do a Prime Day deal, that's for all four days. That's your deal, right? And I know that Amazon, for some brands and everything, allowed the ability for them to split up their Prime Day deals into day one and two and then day three and four. I don't know many brands that actually chose to do that, right? And so that's one of the things where There's not going to be new deals, right? If anything, you know, it's like the deals are only for as long as people have stock and inventory. And I don't know, I typically tend to see, yes, like Abandoned Cart just skyrockets right the week after Prime, always. I think that's going to be pretty bad this year because, you know, even the stuff I normally am one who spends a lot on Prime Day. I found maybe one or two things that were on sale. I was like, well, I need this anyways, I guess so. Speaker 2: Yeah, I've pretty much been the same. I guess I've never really, I've never been like a Black Friday shopper or Prime Day deal shopper or anything like that. I could care less about, you know, those holidays that we make up to try to sell more products. If I see a good product to buy or something, I will. Like yesterday, I bought a I bought a wireless thermometer for the grill and it was a decent price. I think it was like 30% off or something, 40% off, somewhere around there. Something, anyways, regardless of if it was on discount, I just happened to be cooking steaks yesterday. I'm like, oh yeah, I really need those thermometers that I forgot to buy before. So I jumped on it. Speaker 1: Great that you were looking during Prime Day, apparently. Speaker 2: Yes, for sure. And as we were mentioning too, I found this graph here from MarketPulse about the other major retailers that are doing their version of Prime Day. At the same time, of course, as Amazon, Target, TikTok, Best Buy, Kohl's, Walmart, all overlapping Amazon Prime Day, most of them doing it even longer. I think the only one that's doing it the same amount of days is looks like Kohl's. The rest of them are all doing it more days. TikTok is like doing Prime Year, it looks like. They've got at least a whole week or so on here, more week and a half, it looks like. If Prime Day ends up being down, how much do you think something like this plays into that, the competitors to Amazon? Speaker 1: I think it plays a decent amount. I don't necessarily think it's so much of I wouldn't even say it's because they're doing it at the same time, right? Because at the end of the day, Amazon shoppers, in my opinion, are typically going to stay Amazon shoppers, right? The people who come in and purchase more on Prime Days, in my opinion, are not like regular Amazon shoppers. They are people who would shop in these other areas and whatnot, but come to Prime Day because of the fact that There are deals there and there are products there and things like that. They're on sale, right? So it's kind of like the equivalent of, you know, if you're somebody who wouldn't typically go to Target, right, to go pick up something, but then you see that on Black Friday, Target has a, you know, 35% off, you know, flat screen TV, right? It seems wild that I just said flat screen TV in 2025, but you know, anyways, point being is that that's who I think primarily a lot of these Prime Day shoppers have been. But when everywhere is doing the same thing, you now have Target and you now have Walmart and you have Best Buy who could potentially have that 35% off TV too, or maybe that's 40% off, right? Or maybe it's 45. There's not much you can do there, right? So those are things where I think it's those outlier buyers that aren't normally on Amazon every day and you can't even see that all these different marketplaces are doing it pretty much starting at earlier, right? Earlier than Amazon is because they're trying to get people to stick with their deal days or whatever it is before they go over to Prime Day. Speaker 2: Yeah, they don't want people to jump over to Amazon to even look. They're trying to get them to make their purchases with them before they look at Amazon. I agree with Amazon shoppers probably are going to typically stay on Amazon. I rarely even think to look outside of Amazon unless it's a big purchase. Then I'm looking all over, if it's like 500 or 1,000 or something like that, I'm checking prices around. But otherwise, yeah, I just jump over to Amazon because it's so easy. But yeah, starting ahead of time makes sense to try to get people to buy whatever they were looking for before they go and look on Amazon for the start of their Prime Day. Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I would say I'm the same way, especially with like, you know, really technical products like a TV, actually, you know, typically I'm starting with like a Google or an AI search and getting all the information about the different models and take it from there. But now I'm probably still going to go to Amazon at the end of the day and be like, oh, do they have this model that I'm looking for? So I'm the same way. Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure. And we've got a question here from Deal Hunter that I'll pull in. Who decides the prime deal price? Is it the seller who wants to join or Amazon? So with that deal hunter, it's the seller, at least if you're selling on Seller Central, you get to choose or you submit your Prime Day deals. And then if they're approved, they'll show up for Prime Day on Amazon. Now, if you're a vendor, then I think it's more up to Amazon for those decisions, correct? You might know a little bit more about that, Noah. Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, if it's Vendor Central, technically vendors on Amazon OnePiece or Vendor Central who sell to Amazon, they can still dictate some amount of deals. Amazon gets final say on it, right? And it's actually a hotly debated thing within Vendor Central, funny enough, because a lot of people get annoyed with how Amazon wants to sell their products so cheaply, or vice versa, wants to raise the price up so much that nobody buys it. So it's a pretty hotly debated thing. Speaker 2: One thing with vendor central products, their listings are always so horrible. You would think Amazon would at least do some basic optimization for these guys that they're selling their product for, but usually when Amazon sells on a listing, unless it's one of their own products, the listing is pretty horrible. Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, even with like Vendor Central nowadays, like they still have the thing where you have to pay to have access to premium A plus content on Vendor Central, which is insane to me. You have to, you have to pay them to allow that when it's like on Seller Central, it's just like an available thing you can have. Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. It's crazy. The, uh, you know, if you're listening out there and you're selling on Vendor Central, look at Seller Central. If you're willing to do the work yourself or get someone like myself or my Amazon guide to do the work for you, you'll probably end up a lot better off in selling a lot more if your product is in a price point that it can make sense anyways. If you're selling like a $5 product, maybe not worth going to Seller Central. Vendor Central might be your better play, but if you're selling 20, 30, 50, $100 products, you're probably better off on Seller Central for sure. Got a couple other questions here. Let's pull them in. Doug and Nikki say, hey everyone, Amazon Influencer here, not enjoying Prime Day at all, checking out to see how sellers are doing. So appreciate you joining us, Doug and Nikki. I'm curious if you wanna let us know why you're not enjoying Prime Day at all. That'd be cool to know. And then it looks like Deal Hunter had another question. Just making sure when you send your products to Amazon Warehouse to FBA, even if the box has a logo, is it fine? I don't for sure understand what you're meaning there, deal hunters. If you want to clarify that, let me know. It shouldn't matter if your logo is on the box. Amazon's not going to care what's on the box as long as it has their labels on it that they need, the product labels and or the box labels if you're talking about the shipping box. Speaker 1: Accurate. Yep. Speaker 2: Let's see. Another question here that you could probably take. Bizon says, how to convert organic sales into PPC sales. I know it's awkward question because everyone wants to convert PPC to organic, but I want to know. So I'm curious why he wants to convert organic sales to PPC sales. But what do you think, Noah? Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, this is an odd request. I mean, not that difficult. Look at what you are currently, actually, look at your search query performance report. Look at where you're currently getting your organic sales from. Take those keywords, add them into exact and broad campaigns so that you can just target directly at them. It will help you control if you do probably top a search. I mean, depending on what your organic ranking is, is kind of where you're going to want to take it from. Yeah, I mean, I don't know why you would want to do this. You're right. It is a very awkward question, but that's how you would go about it. Speaker 2: Yes. Yeah. I mean, you just got to bid more on that keyword than to get in a higher ranking with your PPC ad than your organic. But yeah, I don't know. The only reason I can think that you might want to do that is if you are getting paid by how much PPC You run for someone, so you want to increase the cost of their ads maybe? Speaker 1: I don't know. Speaker 2: I'm hoping that's not the reason. Speaker 1: I hope it's not as well, but once you said it, that makes a little bit of sense. Speaker 2: Go ahead and clarify that. I don't think that's why you're doing it, but let us know if you want to Let's see, Keith has a question. Is there any updates with how to bypass Amazon's filter for the main image hack? I'm not sure about that one, what he means by filter. Do you? Speaker 1: Oh, yeah, yeah. So Amazon's released a new AI crawler called Bulldog. And so with that, essentially, they have the ability now to look at people's main images. They aren't looking at them historically. They're only looking when people are going to update the images. Is there a way to bypass it? Technically, yeah. So we update our main image hack documentation stuff to show the different ways. You can still have product packaging in the background. You can still have change like how the product looks in some ways. You just can't have stickers on it. You can't do hang tags anymore, things like that. So you can still technically bypass it. Main image hack is just getting harder to do because Amazon and AI don't want you to do it. Unless you are Amazon, in which case, do a main image hack all day. Speaker 2: Yes, then you can have a gray background and everything if you're Amazon. I've seen that on an echo listing, I believe it was, like one of the white echoes or something like that, and they had like an off-gray background with nice gradients and stuff like that. It looked pretty nice. Yeah, it's just got to look super real, you know, like you're not digitally adding it. So if you're just adding, you know, like a sticker looking like it's stuck on the side of the bottle or the side of the box or it's printed on the box, you're probably going to get away with it. But if it looks in any way like it was added on, then you're probably going to get it pulled down. And that AI is just going to get better and better until it probably starts getting a lot of false takedowns because it thinks real stuff is not real. And that's the other thing you could do, right? If you really want to do it properly, just update your actual packaging. Get a box printed the exact way you want it to look, take the photos, upload it. If Amazon takes it down, you submit the real life photo that you got and you're good to go. Obviously, digital is a lot easier and faster. You don't have to worry about creating the box and everything like that. Once you find something that works, if Amazon takes it down, then get the real life thing created and take real photos of it. Speaker 1: There you go. We've done that for a couple of clients. It's actually always really funny whenever the image gets taken down and it's like, ah, now we have a picture of it. Go do a bin check of the product and you'll see. Speaker 2: Yes, there you go. Yeah, sometimes you got to do that. I mean, do it digitally and then make it real if it's something that's really helping your sales and it makes sense cost-wise to actually do it. All right, looks like we got a reply from Doug and Nikki who were saying they do not like Prime Day right now and they're saying, We are probably only 2X our normal sales, which when you balance that with the lull before the sale while shoppers wait for the sale, I think we're going to be hard pressed to be positive for the sale. So yeah, basically what I was saying, this is kind of my story every year on Prime Day because I don't run huge discounts on most of my products. I resell a lot of products. The ones that I do run sales for, you do see a boost. But yeah, normally you don't see a huge increase unless you're running some major sales and you know, you get lucky and get some good exposure for the sale. Speaker 1: This is, I think, just a perfect key employee example of why I kind of hate Prime Day. Because at the end of the day, your sales the few weeks beforehand and the few weeks after are going to be lower than your average normal sales. Prime Day, it's going to be okay-ish, right? But at the detriment to profit, your bottom line profit margin, right? If you do a giant discount, you're hardly making any profit at all. And then on top of that, like any potential sales ranking or category ranking, keyword ranking that you gain from Prime Day is likely to be lost because the lull that comes after Prime Day, right? So it's one of those where I'm just, I have such a hard time defending Prime Day. I think it can be really great if you are positioned in a really, really good way. But I think for majority of sellers, it's why we're seeing so many sellers who are like, I'm just not even participating this year. I can't remember who it was. I think it was Maybe Elizabeth Green or someone had put out a poll and was like, are you participating in Prime Day this year? It was like an overwhelming, like 200 people responded. It was like 84% said no. Speaker 2: Yeah. You know, it's, We're in an always on deal world. No matter what time of year it is, you're always going to find deals. I've seen reports in the past like Black Friday that if you look at Black Friday deals versus the deals that happen through the rest of the year, a lot of times they're not always the lowest throughout the whole year. I don't know. It's one of those things that maybe people are just catching on. People learn these things. Back in the day, the used car salesman used to be really effective because it was brand new tactic. Not as many people were using it, but then everybody started using it, so people started tuning it out and it didn't work anymore. Maybe we're moving into that area now with the always-on deals that are happening in the e-commerce and people are catching on. And it's probably not really a deal, it's just the normal price. Speaker 1: I mean, that's the thing. I made a post, I think it was yesterday or the day before, and it was exactly that. It looked at like five different products and I pulled up their Keepa graphs and all five had ran what their Prime Day pricing was as like a discount within the last 60 to 90 days. And it's like, that's not, you know, that's not like a deal. That's just a, this is your regular, every 60 days dynamic pricing at this point. Speaker 2: Yeah, and maybe that's because of the tariff impact and such that's going on right now. People are just not willing to discount, so they're just running their normal discounts. It's hard to say for sure. I mean, it's impossible to pin that down for sure, but it's definitely playing a role, I'm sure, for some people in how much they're actually discounting. Speaker 1: No, absolutely. I mean, people's profitability at the end of the day is just taking a hit this year. And I'm seeing more and more people just be like, it's not worth it. 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. All right, so we've got a reply from Deal Hunter, but before we go into it, I'm gonna jump into the news story because it actually plays into the news story here. So, this one I thought was pretty cool. Amazon increases FBA box length to 36 inches. Effective June 20th, Amazon has expanded the maximum box length for FBA shipments in the US from 25 inches to 36 inches. This update brings Amazon's policies in line with industry standards and provides more flexibility for packaging longer or consolidated products. So I've got the thing open here. Now it's 36 inches only on one side. So that's something to keep in mind. You can't send in a 36 by 36 by 36 box. It can be 36 inches long. They specifically put it on the length, although I don't think it will matter, you know, which side is 36 inches as long as one side is 36 and the others are 25 or under. Speaker 1: I agree. And I mean, this is one of those changes. I think it's cool. Right. But it's also I look at I'm like this affects like point zero one percent of sellers because like it's such a very specific I think the 25 inches by 25 by 25 was really dumb because there isn't any other warehousing or anything that has that as their max. It was just Amazon had that. I know that there are probably entire businesses that sell larger products that probably changed how they manufacture and package their products to meet that 25, 25, 25. I think it's a cool change that Amazon's doing. I also think it's kind of like a, I don't think the people that are in that, you know, let's say 30 by 25 by 25 realm of packaging are probably going to FBA still. Because I think the pricing, the pricing wise of this is probably still just going to be way too expensive for them. Speaker 2: Yeah, so here's the thing for me. This is big for me because one of the products that we sell, it comes to me in case packs of, I believe the box is about 36 inches long or 30 some inches long and like 12 inches wide by 20 inches or something like that. So in the past, we've always shipped them to our warehouse. We cut down the boxes and put, get them down to 25 inches and then send them into Amazon. So now I'm going to be able to just direct ship from the supplier to FBA, cut out the visit to our warehouse and that whole leg of shipping and everything else. Speaker 1: Todd is a part of the 0.01%. Speaker 2: I was really happy. When I seen this, so maybe I'm more happy than most people, but I think it's a good change for sure. Speaker 1: I think it is as well. I mean, it's one of those changes, like I said, that Amazon makes these changes every so often to like their policy and things like that, that I'm wondering, what is the, first off, what was the deciding factor behind this, right? Like there's always something that Amazon does, like they don't just do things to do them, right? So usually in my mind stems from, There's like some internal thing that happens as to why they need to do this. Probably some new premium brand they wanted to work with was like, hey, we can't send our products into FBA or something along those lines. Yeah, I mean, it's a good change to see. It's just one of those that I'm just like, why? Why was it like this in the first place, right? Speaker 2: Yeah, my only thought, the reason I speculated on the 25-inch cube was some kind of limitation with the conveyor belts. Anything larger than that would probably, you know, whatever, not make the corners or go through whatever it needed to go through. And now they've removed that from the system. And so they can accept the larger boxes because it was always, you know, if you had an oversized product, those products would never go to the same center as the standard size. They would always split them out into separate. Speaker 1: So, since you say that actually, I wonder if I can find it. There was recently a news article that came out with Andy Jassy talking about updates they had been making To their warehouses and to their like robot AI system, because, you know, Amazon warehouse have all those robots that move around everything. Now that you say that, I'm wondering if there was some kind of limitation with the robots and how the robots could pick certain types of items and the sizing of items and the 36 inches maybe being too long to fit into their containers that the robots can pick up and move places, because that would make a lot of sense if that is the Uh, if the use case there, uh, and whatnot. Speaker 2: It definitely could be, um, the 25 by 25 by 25 though, goes back far before. Speaker 1: I think they would have had six years now. Speaker 2: Like, so I don't know. I feel like it was some kind of conveyor belt issue. That's. Just stuck in my head, but you could be right with the robots as well. You've seen those videos with the robots bringing around the cartons, right? Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: It could have been something like that. Those are usually for individual products. Speaker 1: Small items. Yeah. Speaker 2: This is just the cases or the boxes that you send the products into the warehouse. You might have 100 units inside there or whatever. So yeah, it's hard to say awesome that it's there, that it's increased anyways for those that it did affect, but let's bring Deal Hunter's question in now. I was talking about the 36 by 25, 25 box we send to the Amazon warehouse to FBA my products. I know for FBM the box has to be plain. So yeah, so he's talking about the box that the products go inside of. I have never had a problem with this. I've reused boxes with other people's logos on it that I get from suppliers. I've used boxes for products that I've bought and used in my house even, and I've never had any boxes rejected because of what was written on the outside. I don't think Amazon would care about that unless maybe you start sending in Walmart boxes or something, although I have done that as well. Speaker 1: Yeah, so I don't think that this is ever really in it. So first off, Amazon, even for like FBA, has the ability to ship in product packaging now, right? So you can save money by shipping in your products packaging if it's a hard package. I also know that I've worked and, you know, completed, you know, warehouse projects where they shipped like oil, right? And it always shipped in the product packaging, the box that came in. And, you know, that's just not a plain box in this place. It has all of the branding on everything. Now, yes, Walmart and things like that, I think are usually where the issues lie in that. And that's more so just because it is, I think, akin to dropshipping, right, which Amazon now has a huge problem with from different marketplaces. But for the most part, I don't think it matters what box you send something in. You can send something in whatever box you really want to. Speaker 2: They're definitely not going to care, I should say. Like I said, I've sent in Walmart boxes, I've sent in Logo boxes, and they've never rejected anything. For the most part, they're just opening those boxes up, taking the products out and probably throwing away the box anyways, so it's never reaching a customer. Now, if you package your actual product in a Walmart logo box and that's delivering to the houses of their customers, yeah, then they may have an issue, but I doubt you would ever do something like that. But definitely shouldn't matter We've got a Sean who wants us to take a look at a listing but we're not gonna be able to do that on here But probably reach out to you know, maybe my Amazon guy have them do a listing audit something like that I believe you guys do that for free, right? Speaker 1: absolutely, if you head on over to my Amazon guy calm and I think right at the very top of our page there's a little button where you can get a There's a little button that says get an audit. So free audit at the very top of our page and we'll get you one. Speaker 2: For sure. Another comment from Doug and Nikki, they're the influencers. So they're saying we also lose money because everything is discounted and so their percentage is on a lower amount, which definitely is true. So I imagine your influencer income goes down a little bit. Andre says, total flop, our sales are next to none the whole week. I would say if they're next to none, you might want to look and see if there's something else going on. I think most people are seeing some kind of increase. It's just not as big as years past and not as big as you would hope it would be. So you might want to dig into that a little bit more, Andre, if they're really way down. There could be some kind of search suppression going on or something else that you're having issues, your deal's not running or something like that. Keith says, I launch unique products every few months and they start off great. However, after a few months, we get a copycat product with a massive discount. Sales then go down. Any tips, Noah? Speaker 1: Copycat product with massive discount. I mean, yeah, that's going to happen, I think, for any category in this stage. You used to be able to launch pretty much any product and, you know, you could control entire categories, entire minor niches, right, for years on end back in the day. But nowadays, I mean, it's so easy, especially the Chinese sellers and the In the market to where anyone, not anyone, but I guess you can have, you know, identical products within a week's time, sometimes within categories. If the sales volume is there, there are people who are constantly looking for new products. You know, you say you launch a unique product. If it's a super unique product, I would ask the question of, Have you started a patent process on it beforehand? You would be surprised how many people I have talked to who they have launched products and then within a month of launching their product, they find out that, you know, the manufacturer that they use to manufacture the product created their own variation of it and is now a seller of that product. And it happens all the time. Because that's just thing. If you don't have a patent on your product, anyone can create that product and sell it. So that's usually my best advice is, you know, create a patent. If you're just, you know, white labeling some product that anybody can do at any point in time and getting a manufacturer to create it, there's not much you can really do against competitors outside of just trying to be as competitive and grow it as quickly as possible to be the category leader, regardless of price. Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I would echo that. If the product is unique enough that you can get a patent, it's not cheap, but it's your best solution to keep copycats out of the market. I've successfully removed products from Amazon using their Apex, the Amazon Patent Evaluation Express process through Brand Registry. And so it works if you have a patent. And that's really the only way, otherwise you're gonna get knockoffs very quickly. If you have a successful product and it's just the world we live in, that's why you need to make sure you're building a brand, building an email list, building probably platforms outside of Amazon as well, social media, things like that. If you also include something in your business plan where you're Doing some kind of good in the world like donating to a charity or something like that. That can be helpful as well because people look for those kind of things and you're going to get people that are willing to pay more. I'm one of them. If the product they're buying has a good mission or a good that they're doing in the world. For our baby, I use a company called Every Life. For our diapers, we get them delivered to us every month. And the reason I do that is because, you know, they, they, they're a pro-life company and they donate to centers that help women who are pregnant and things like that. So, you know, I, they don't really cost that much more, but I buy their products Instead of Huggies or something like that for that reason because their mission aligns with my values. So that is another way you can go at it as well to see if you can separate yourself from those copycats because a Chinese seller isn't going to do those kind of things most likely. I agree. Speaker 1: I mean, at the end of the day, it's differentiation, right? I think that's the biggest thing that anyone, and it doesn't matter whether or not you have like copycats or whether you're in a already known niche with your product, differentiation is like just a core principle of having brands and selling products at the end of the day. Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure. It's a big thing. You gotta be building a brand. You can't just be shotgunning products and expect you're gonna get any amount of sales for a very long time. Speaker 1: Not in this day and age at least. Speaker 2: Yes, for sure. All right, let's go ahead and jump on to our next story here. And then we can take some more questions as well. So Trump claims very wealthy people, very wealthy people are ready to buy TikTok. That was a horrible Trump impersonation. Sorry about that. Speaker 1: That was more of a Borat than a Trump. Speaker 2: Yeah. President Trump announced that a mystery group of wealthy individuals is ready to purchase TikTok U.S. operations to avoid a nationwide ban, though approval from China is still required. The platform faces legal pressure from a U.S. law mandating ByteDance to divest or be banned due to national security concerns. A previous deal involving Oracle, Blackstone, and Michael Dell stalled after Trump imposed new tariffs on China. For Amazon sellers, using TikTok to drive traffic, the app's uncertain future could disrupt marketing plans, making it wise to diversify traffic sources for now. And I jumped over to Grok. And I just asked it, I'll bring it over here so we can see it on the screen. I asked it, who are the most likely buyers? And it's saying Larry Ellison, the Oracle-led consortium. Which makes sense because they were already, you know, top of the list before. And then we got Frank McCourt's People's Bid for TikTok, which is including Kevin O'Leary, which is their kind of spokesperson that people probably know. And then Mr. Beast, which is kind of interesting, making a bid as well, apparently with an investor group. Thoughts, Noah? What do you think? Do you think we'll actually see something happen or are they just going to delay it again? Speaker 1: I think we will. Oh, we have the comments still up by the way. Speaker 2: Oh, yes. Sorry. Speaker 1: I don't think anyone's going to buy it anytime soon. I got to be honest. So I think the reason that there's, you know, a bunch of people quote unquote ready to buy TikTok, right, is because Anybody with two cells in their brain or anything can go ahead and look at TikTok and be like, yeah, this is a money and revenue driving machine, right? Ignore TikTok shop entirely, even though that's kind of us as e-commerce people, but ignore TikTok shop entirely. The advertising alone and the amount of user base that the US TikTok has is surpassing meta in some capacities, right? And it is growing. Daily. And so it's one of those things where we can look at that and we can very quickly just say, TikTok is going to be, yes, a revenue driver. And so, of course, tons of people want to buy it, but TikTok doesn't want to give it up. I think that's the big part that people keep forgetting. It's like, yeah, tons of people can say, oh, yeah, I'm ready to buy this and everything. Like they said there at one point that like Kevin O'Leary's group or whatever had like 20 billion secured, I think, for it. You know, looking at that, I think TikTok would sell for far more than $20 billion right now. Like, if you think about it, because Twitter sold for, what, $43 billion and had maybe a quarter of, I mean, granted, Twitter isn't just U.S., but You know, it had like maybe a quarter of the, you know, annual revenue that TikTok does. And so it's one of those things where it's like, I can see TikTok going for far more than 20 billion. And I, I don't know, I think this is just a giant play of a bunch of kind of tech people, in my opinion, that all want TikTok because they didn't think of it. And when they really should have at some point in time. Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it's, you know, it said $20 million. Speaker 1: $20 billion. Speaker 2: $20 billion. I seen that Oracle was looking upwards of $50 billion. Yeah, $50 billion price. Speaker 1: Yeah, that one I can see being a lot. Closer, I would say that's a lot closer probably what the valuation of TikTok would end up being. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: I mean, just think about it. TikTok shop did 12 billion last year, right? Of course, TikTok themselves isn't making 12 billion. But even still, it's like if we just take, you know, less than, let's say 1% of that, it's like, yep. Speaker 2: If anybody out there watching sells on TikTok, post in the comments and let us know that you sell and how well your sales are doing compared to Amazon. It would be interesting to see and get some real-life knowledge on that. This I just seen and it was kind of interesting. TikTok is currently the second most downloaded app in the United States on Android phones, just behind ChatGPT. So TikTok being second is not surprising to me, but ChatGPT being first is surprising to me. Speaker 1: I wonder if that's during a certain time frame. It would be very interesting to me to know. I just have a feeling there's a lot of people out there who still are not using ChatGPT. So it'd be very interesting to me if that's actually an accurate number, if that's during a certain period of time. I guess it wouldn't be that surprising if you think about how many people have used it at some point in time. But it seems odd that it would be the total, because that would mean 170 million users. I mean, how many of those would be Android? And then that would mean that at least that many have ChatGPT. Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it's a lot. I don't know how many, well, it says 170 million users, but that's probably worldwide. Speaker 1: No, so 170 million, I think, is just in the United States. Speaker 2: Yeah, so at least 170 million people have downloaded the app, most likely, and so ChatGPT is ahead of that. The reason I'm surprised is just, Because ChatGPT, it still feels like a very kind of nerdy app, you know, the interface and everything like that. So it just kind of surprises me that more than 170 million people, more than TikTok have downloaded it. Speaker 1: So I actually just looked and on the Apple App Store at the very least, ChatGPT is the first that they recommend. TikTok's the second. Speaker 2: Well, that's cool. I mean, I'm happy to see that, you know, ChatGPT is getting that many downloads. That's pretty awesome. People are really starting to use it. And dig into AI because it's something that you're going to need to know for the future. Pretty much every day, many times every single day from optimizing listings to getting ideas for graphics. Yesterday I used it to upload all of the products that I have in my inventory management software and I told it to shorten the titles, remove any marketing fluff and everything like that. And it created a CSV for me and everything to upload back into my inventory management software. You can do a lot of things with it very quickly that in the past you would have had to pay a lot of money for a developer to make an app to do it. Speaker 1: I will say, I don't know how much stock we should really put in this though, because I just looked and the top charts for free apps, number one is ChatGPT, but number two is Love Island USA. I don't know how much stock we should put into, you know, top half at the end of the day. Speaker 2: Okay. Well, I mean, that's a big world, I guess. Speaker 1: I should say something about the US people. Yeah. GBT, Love Island USA, TikTok. Speaker 2: Yeah, what does that say about our culture? I don't know. Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. Speaker 2: All right, so very wealthy people are coming for TikTok. We'll see what happens. I couldn't find, I wasn't sure the exact end of the next ban. I think it's like August 1st. When is the TikTok sale forced next? Do you know what it is, Noah, exactly? Speaker 1: I think maybe August 1st, but I'm not positive. Speaker 2: September 17th. Okay. So we've got a little while yet. We'll see what happens. But I seen this news popped up and I thought it was interesting. It's kind of a big story that has been making it around. We'll see what happens. I mean, I'm rooting for Kevin O'Leary, to be honest. I like the way they're talking about data privacy and things like that. And I feel like they might be more trustworthy than Oracle, definitely more trustworthy than like BlackRock and things like that, which are some of the other companies that are supposedly making bids. We'll see. I'm rooting for Mr. Wonderful. Hopefully they pull it off. Speaker 1: I would also root for Mr. Wonderful over Mr. Beast. Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. I don't think there's anything necessarily bad about Mr. Beast, but Mr. Wonderful is just awesome. I like his persona on Shark Tank and all that. He's a lot of fun. And he's a very smart guy, so we'll see what happens. There we go. All right, well, let's jump on to the last story here, then we'll wrap it up. Let me get back to the article. Here we go. So get Vine reviews before your product launches. Amazon now allows sellers to collect up to 30 Vine reviews before their product officially launches. By enrolling eligible FBA products in the Vine program right after listing creation, sellers can kick off launch day with built-in social proof. This gives new products a strong head start in rankings and conversions, especially in competitive categories. It's a major opportunity for sellers aiming to build early momentum without waiting weeks for organic reviews. So I've got some opinions on this, Noah, but I'm curious your opinions on one, this new ability to do this, and then also your opinion on Vine reviews in general. Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I think cool that they are doing it before the product launches. That makes a lot more sense to me, to be honest, with what the program should be doing for people. You know, there's zero reason why you should have to launch a product before you can do Vine outside of Amazon, just saying, hey, you have to. I don't like Vine. You know, in general, I don't typically recommend it just because it, on average, has a lower review than, you know, just standard reviews at about 4.0 stars compared to 4.2 or 3. So I'm not a huge fan of Vine. I think what I really don't like is that they brought this change about directly after changing it to where For parentages, you can only have one product that has Vine reviews. So they remove all of the other reviews for all your other products. And so it's like, well, What's the point, right? I get it, I guess. That probably goes hand in hand with them doing this so you don't essentially just launch or get a pre-launch of 10, 15 different variations and do Vine on them all and parent them and then only launch one product off of it. Yes. Because I'm guessing that's what would end up happening. Speaker 2: That was the hack for sure. Speaker 1: Yeah, that would have been the hack for sure. I don't know. I mean, realistically, I think it's one of those that if you like Vine, I think this is a great change. If you're indifferent, it is what it is. Something they should have done regardless. Speaker 2: Yeah, I have mixed opinions on Vine for sure. I use it sometimes, depending on the product and how complicated the product is and what the odds are that you're just going to get negative reviews because someone doesn't know how to use it right or something like that. If it's something super basic, let's just say a pen or something like that, right? If it's a pen and it writes good and feels good, you're probably not going to get a lot of one-star, two-star reviews unless you have a garbage product versus if you're selling Some kind of a device that goes on your knee to help knee pain or something like that, right? Something like that, you're probably gonna get a lot more lower star reviews because it's not gonna work for everybody. Maybe they use it wrong. They're probably not using it long enough to actually see the results before they have to leave a review. So it really depends on the products that you're selling for sure. But this little change here, this is kind of one of those things like, duh, why wasn't this a long time ago? It's like one little switch that they probably had to flip. I definitely understand why they stopped allowing the variations to have Vine reviews because yes, you create 10 variations, get 300 reviews and then roll them together and all of a sudden it looks like you've got this massive product when you just launched it. And so people were taking advantage of that, I'm sure, very extensively, although Amazon was getting paid. But the FCC has really been cracking down on reviews. Speaker 1: Well, on top of that, I think it's one of those that, you know, if you're somebody who has like an expensive product, And, you know, if it's expensive to manufacture and the actual list price is also expensive, you probably don't want to have to then also spend extra $200 to get 30 reviews for it when it's like, you could just take that money and, you know, do a discount promotion and get better results, better sales. And it's like, that's going to help you so much more than a couple extra reviews. Speaker 2: Well, and Doug and Nikki, I think, are a little biased here, but they say skip Vine, hire a quality Amazon influencer instead like them, I'm sure. Speaker 1: They might be biased, but I got to agree with them, to be honest. Speaker 2: I was going to say the same. I agree, Doug and Nikki. That is kind of the world we're living in right now with influencers and such and getting your product in front of people. My question though is how long that lasts, right? We were talking about deal fatigue earlier. At what point are we going to reach influencer fatigue and just assume that everyone's getting paid and they're doing these reviews just for the money, right? And there's a lot of people that do that, right? I've done some influencer reviews just to play with it and see how the platform works. But I'm doing honest reviews and I'm looking at these products Honestly, in giving my feedback, but I question how many influencers actually do that versus just looking for the products that they can make the most money and leaving positive reviews because then they're going to get more free products and stuff like that from all the other companies that are out there. Speaker 1: Yep. Agree. Speaker 2: But it's the same kind of thing, right, if you look back to the past with blogs, right? Blogs everywhere with the top 10 best knee braces. And it's all influencer, or not influencer, but affiliate links. And most of those blog posts out there, they've never actually tried the products. They don't know anything about the products. They're just coming up with a list. And hoping you'll click on their link and buy the product or some other product so that they get some money from it. Speaker 1: I mean, that's mostly what like creator connection is, right? And honestly, I think that the big thing in the future is not even going to be, it's not going to be Vine, it's not going to be influencers, it's not going to be blogs or creator connections or any of those, not even user generated content. I think five years down the line or so, the big thing is going to be if you can somehow get your product I think that's what it's going to be. If you can get Rufus to promote your product day one or something, or you get ChatGBT and Perplexity to pull it up when someone searches for the best wristwatch or something, those are going to be the areas where People just dominate at the end of the day. I don't think, you know, UGC or Influencer or Vine even are ever going away for that matter. But I think those are the areas that you can start to manipulate and whoever does that first is going to be a very lucky individual. Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure. That's definitely something interesting to think about. And by the way, Doug and Nikki, I'm not accusing you of doing anything that I was just saying, by the way. But there's a lot of influencers that do that. But yeah, that's interesting thing to think of if, you know, the influencers are going to become, you know, the AI bots, the ChatGPT, the Grok, the, you know, whatever, Rufus and things like that. And those are the people that you have to influence to get your products for sale. I don't know. It's going to be interesting because I think people always want that personal connection. The best influencers I think are the ones that have a niche and they build an audience outside of just doing the influence to sell products. And then they add the products in like, hey, this is, These are the baby diapers that I use for our daughter because of this and this and this. Check them out if you want to. Those are the ones that long-term I think are going to do the best and that are building, again, a brand outside of just trying to flip random products to your audience that you have. Yeah, but then of course you can have AI create the influence videos for you in the future, right? I think you were playing with some of that, Noah. I was, I was. Videos and audio and stuff. You sent that to me a while back. Speaker 1: There's a fake AI Noah that can spring up at any point in time and no one would know the difference. I mean, he doesn't move like this, but you never know. Actually, for an influencer video, it would probably work really, really well. The only thing is actually bringing that product up. I don't think AI is just there yet, but it's getting close, especially with like Google VO. Google Veo is going to have influencers all over the place in my opinion. Speaker 2: Google Veo? Speaker 1: Yes, it is Google's video creation AI and you can make like right now like minute long clips. I would bet that there's already someone out there right now as we're talking about who has created a fake AI influencer using it. Speaker 2: Oh, I'm sure. Speaker 1: Promoting products. Speaker 2: Oh, yeah. Yeah, I'm sure they already exist. I just got a sales call yesterday that I answered and To me, it was pretty obvious that it was an AI because it just wasn't like a normal conversation. For some reason, AI tries to be like too casual. It's like, oh, yeah, well, whatever, you know, whatever. We called you about this. And it's like, why are you being like so like casual, flippant, like it doesn't matter. Aloof. That's the word I was looking for. Yes. And so but that's all going to get a lot better. So it's going to be interesting world for sure. So well, we're over the top of the hour. Noah, any last comments or anything before we wrap it up? Speaker 1: No, nothing for me. Nothing for me. You know, thanks for having me. Always, always a pleasure to hop on here and get to get to hang out and talk some, you know, Amazon news. So happy to happy to come on and looking forward to the next time. Speaker 2: Absolutely. Yeah, I appreciate you joining me and everybody out there watching. Awesome to have you. We do this over on Amazon Seller School every Friday, do the news live. We've got a newsletter and everything as well. Noah, for sure, will be joining us again in the future. We try to rotate it up every week, but Noah will definitely be back. So appreciate everybody joining us and we'll see you next Friday. So have an awesome weekend. Speaker 1: See you, everybody. 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.