Amazon News: Variation Breakthroughs, AI Ad Prompts & 2026 Fee Pressure

Amazon News: Variation Breakthroughs, AI Ad Prompts & 2026 Fee Pressure Unknown Speaker: Welcome, fellow entrepreneurs, to the Amazon Sellers School podcast, where we talk about Amazon and how you can use it to build an e-commerce empire, a side hustle and anything in between. And now your host, Todd Welch. Speaker 3: What's going on everybody back for another week of Amazon seller news live and we've got a full house today Damon is back from his international travels with ecom triage and Noah with My Amazon Guy and of course, Mina with Trivium Group. He's the ads expert in the house and we've got a lot of ads stuff today. So looking forward to diving into all that. Some variation changes that are rather interesting and of course, fees going up for 2026, which Surprise, surprise, right? Anybody surprised about fees going up? Speaker 1: I'm really surprised that, yeah, just so surprised. Speaker 3: Yeah, it's always a surprise when Amazon makes things more expensive and harder. But that is the ways of Amazon and that's why all of us pretty much exist on this call. So let's go ahead and dive into the first story here. So, Amazon tests allowing multiple child variations to rank on page one. Bradley Sutton reports that Amazon is running an A-B test allowing multiple child variations from the same parent ASIN to rank organically on page one. A significant shift from past behavior where only one variation typically appeared. He notes that this is happening across multiple categories, including Project X products, suggesting Amazon may be rethinking how variation families surface in search. For Amazon sellers, this could be a major win in low competition niches where a single brand could dominate multiple positions. However, he also warns that in competitive categories, big brands may crowd out smaller sellers even more than before. What do you think, guys? I'm curious. Is this a good thing, bad thing? Is it going to be helpful? What are your thoughts? Speaker 1: I have a quick thought on this. On both of those screenshots, he's logged into his account. So I wonder if, granted, you don't usually see this for sure, but I wonder if that kind of skews his results because he's obviously clicked on those a ton of times. That's just an immediate observation I make is that he's a lot of- Very good. Speaker 2: That's actually, that's very, very interesting. I didn't even think about that, Damon. That's actually, you could be right. Like Amazon could be getting smarter where it's like, they saw that he clicked on it, so they're like, let's show more options because Amazon's optimizing for the conversion. Speaker 1: Yep, exactly. Speaker 4: Well, not only that, this is one thing. I saw people talking about this, right? People are acting like this is new. Amazon's been testing this for like a couple of years now. And so I think it's exact. I never actually thought though, in all those times, there was what Dana had talked about there of like, it's just based off of people clicking, but it's been a category specific thing. For instance, in like the spa category, they've been doing this for like years at this point. We have a client right now that we're working with that where For like over at least a year now, they've dominated pretty much like rank one, three, and six of like specific keyword targets. Speaker 1: And it's all variations. Speaker 4: All variations, same parentage. Speaker 2: I honestly think it's fine. I think, first of all, you're gonna get a lot of cleanup of everyone who's like, oh, I separate my variations to get more real estate, which is like, I think stupid. Speaker 3: Yeah, people do that already. We're thinking the same thing. Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm like, just drive all the traffic to your one listing and let people decide. You showing up multiple times in the search results, Does that necessarily mean like a higher percentage of you getting clicked on? But you also get a third whatever, let's say it's three variations, a third of the reviews. So I think there's a lot more power in a single bigger variation and I think Amazon is going to continue to optimize for like the best experience for customers. So as long as you're optimizing for the best experience for customers and as long as you're focused on the things that matter like A superior main image, superior product overall, you know, a good reasonable pricing. I think this will help you more than it will hurt you. Speaker 1: Yeah, there's another interesting observation on, if you look at the egg trace, you'll notice options, they both say two sizes. Of course, we trust that Bradley knows what he's talking about when he's saying that these are two variations. But look at the reviews, they're split. So it's showing, it seems to be showing the reviews of the, what is it, the 12? Individual. Speaker 3: The specific variation. Speaker 1: Yeah, so and one of them is a 4.7, the other one's a 4.4. So I'm wondering if they Even when you log in and you look, unless there's a split review issue with the listening. Speaker 3: There might be, because the coffins are the same. The coffins are not different. Speaker 4: I'm also curious though, because if you notice, it's essentially the same price for both products with, you know, what, a 73 cent or whatever difference. That seems odd for two different variations of a product to be the exact same price. Speaker 2: Yeah, two sizes. You're right. Yeah. Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, you would think it'd be a bigger difference than that. I don't know. I haven't sourced the bamboo myself or whatever these are made out of. So I don't know what the difference would be on that little less piece of wood, but you'd think a bigger variation difference than that for price. Speaker 1: Yeah, really? Speaker 2: I honestly think it's a non-issue, really. I think people are making this, the variation thing, it's always been around. I think at the end of the day, keep optimizing your product for click-through rates and then Amazon will reward you because what I'm seeing is as your click-through rate improves, also your cost per clicks are going down with nothing else changing. So it's like there is this kind of reward mechanism that Amazon has for if you keep doing the thing that is gonna make the customer experience better, you know, you're gonna get rewarded. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 3: Yeah. Speaker 1: I mean, at the end of the day, that's always what this boils down to, right? Is like, do things right, get rewarded. Do things wrong, Amazon backhands you. Speaker 2: Yeah. And they've been very vocal, right, about their number one core value is like, you know, the customer experience. Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah. And it's never going to end the tweaks. I mean, this is here today, could be gone tomorrow, depending on their data. And then back the day after that, as they continue changing it, especially with AI taking over everything, you know, more and more, you're going to see just changes like this happening as Amazon tests things out. Speaker 2: Ultimately, I think the biggest thing we should ask ourselves is this, does this make our lives as shoppers better? In my opinion, not really. I don't think so. I think what makes it better is seeing different products and seeing the best variation of that product. That's what I would like as a customer. If Amazon was like learning my behavior and could optimize for, let's say, Danan, you're looking for the eggs and you are clicking on 12s and it now realizes that you're looking for 12s, not eights. And then in the search results, it shows you more 12s in the search results. That's what I think is gonna happen more and more. And I think if we look at it just for me as a consumer, Me seeing one brand's multiple variations, how does that help me? Me seeing one brand's different flavors might help me because I'm like, okay, I'm seeing multiple flavors from a brand. But ideally, I want to see the bestseller of each brand versus seeing multiple options from each brand. Speaker 3: Yeah, maybe. But what I like, what you mentioned there actually might be a key, Mina, is that both of these searches are, you know, kind of generic searches, right? Not a lot of detail in the search, except for wooden, I guess, in the egg tray. But it doesn't say one dozen wooden egg tray or 18 egg wooden tray or pink coffin. So Amazon's trying to figure out what you're looking for. So if they use this and they see that, oh, he's really hovering over and looking at the 12 eggs and then they're dynamically generating the remainder of the page to focus more on a dozen or something like that, if they determine that's what you're looking for. Then it could be really good, especially in the case of the coffin with the pink, because I might not even know that a pink coffin exists. And seeing that there might make me look more in detail at different colored coffins that I may be interested in. Speaker 1: Yeah. You know something interesting? I actually just did this search for wooden egg tray. Under my buyer account, I see both the sponsored and the organic listing for that, what is it, 18 eggs? Speaker 3: Yes, I see his name. Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. And in his screenshot, it says options, two sizes. I don't see that. I don't see options, two sizes. And if I click on the organic, They are there. Both options are there, both the 12 and the 18x. It's interesting. We all know that Amazon is always, always testing and your search results are also based on what inventory is available in the warehouse nearest you for two days if you're logged in and you're a Prime member and stuff like that. So it's, uh, you know, just another discrepancy with, with not really a discrepancy, but a difference between what's screenshotted here. And what I just saw is I do not see the 12 egg listed anywhere in the organic results. I do see it in the, in a sponsored I see the 18 egg listed in both sponsored and inorganic. It doesn't have the two, the options there. And so my, my search results are different. using the same exact search term. Speaker 3: Yeah, I think an important thing to remember is don't be, you know, changing your listings and trying to take advantage of every little thing like this that Amazon changes because it can be different for every user out there and it can change and go away every other day. So don't be chasing the latest trends. Just do what Mina mentioned is focus on making the best listing And the best experience for the customer. And hopefully that will organically float you to the top over time as Amazon hones in on what customers are looking for. Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, it's literally always what Amazon wants. Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely. All right, cool. So let's go ahead and jump on to the next thing here. So Amazon introduces AI-powered prompts for sponsored products and sponsored brands. Amazon has launched new AI-powered prompts inside sponsored products and sponsored brands campaigns, which let me bring up the image that will be more interesting to look at here. Automatically surfacing key product information while shoppers browse, these prompts pull exclusively from Amazon's first-party data, your PDP, reviews, brand store, and campaign keywords, and Amazon provides reporting showing which prompt drove clicks and conversions. For Amazon sellers, this feature offers a powerful new way to influence buying decisions, especially while it's still free in open beta before switching to cost-per-click. Noroozi emphasizes that cleaner PDPs and stronger brand content will matter more than ever as AI-driven guidance becomes a bigger part of how shoppers evaluate products. So, Mina, you're heavily in the advertising space. What's your initial thoughts of AI-sponsored prompts taken over? Speaker 2: I think this is huge and I think if you guys have been like doing Google searches, by the way, Amazon's always kind of like following in Google's footsteps a little bit, but if you've been doing Google searches, you see these prompts are always popping up in Google and they're insanely helpful. They're also starting to pop up on all social media. So have you guys ever seen like a post and then under it, it says like, Who's this guy? How did he die? You know, shit like that, you know, if it's like, exactly. So I think prompts are becoming, like, this is why they're introducing them. They're very powerful. People want to very quickly consume content and, like, be able to, like, understand it. And I think this is going to be a huge way to now, like, optimize. I think if we're smart, we start seeing what other, like, all the competitors' prompts are. Collecting that, if there's a way to see like which ones are getting clicked more, that would be great. I doubt it. I doubt that there's going to be anything accurate. But we should kind of like start to look and see what are our customers interested in? What do they need to understand more about the product detail page? Because I always tell people this, when we're optimizing for the product detail page, we look at what the customer wants to know about a product. What makes our product better than everyone else, the unique selling points, all of the negatives that other people have that we don't, all of the positives that they have that we do, and put it all in the images so you can very quickly understand. This is going to be another layer of that. Is this compatible with my iPhone 17? You know, how many servings is this? Whatever it is, you know, like what's the directions, right? Things that naturally, if I'm looking to make a decision on like buying this thing, like the Grip Master, whatever, right? Maybe it's like, you know, how strong is it or if it's durable, whatever it is, the things that I'm looking for, if we create prompts for that, That's going to be fantastic and I love that they made it into like part of the sponsored so that if you see prompts actually helping conversion, perfect. Then you know that you're on the right track. Speaker 3: Yeah, that'll be the key is if we have smooth tracking to show where they use the sponsored prompt and that led to a conversion. Or at least, you know, so that you can see these are the conversions that use the sponsored prompt. These are the ones that did not and have a conversion ratio between the two so you can see the actual difference. Speaker 4: Knowing how Amazon holds data tightly, that'll come in three to five years more than likely. I mean, there's changes though that I think it's cool. It's also one of those that like anybody who has paid any attention in the AI space whatsoever has seen coming, right? At some point in time, all of these AI companies have to start getting an ROI on all of the dollars they have invested into these AI sources. And I think, I mean, to be fair, Amazon's the first one here, right? I expect sometime next 12 months, OpenAI is gonna probably add advertising in as they're also looking at trying to do their IPO. And so they have to show, I mean, that's a fully unprofitable AI company, right? At some point in time, all of these companies have to make the investment and all the time and effort they've put into the AI worthwhile. Amazon's just, I think, the first one to actually make good use of it, and it's because their entire platform is products, right? But I would love to see the attribution data for something like this. Speaker 3: Yeah, I did see news that went along with this that Sam Altman from open AI said that chat GPT will never have Ad results show up or sponsored results show up in their organic What do you call it the responses from the AI because they wouldn't want someone to be able to pay for to put a crappy product above what actually should be the best product that they're showing. Never say never, but that's what he's saying right now. Speaker 2: Honestly, I don't see how that is going to last a long time. I think maybe the response from ChatGPT is not going to be sponsored. But there will be sponsored products, you know, display right there results like. What is the best like plant-based protein powder? Based on, I mean, how is ChatGPT figuring this shit out? It's just going like a Google results, right? Like articles and stuff like that, which are all anyways paid. So it's like, what are you, like an accomplice, right? Maybe you didn't pull the trigger, but you know what's happening. You know people are paying to rank on Google. Yeah, you know people are paying to rank this bullshit on Google. And then you're just regurgitating the results. And then on the side is like, by the way, sponsored products related to the search or sponsored related to the search. And you see this stuff. Speaker 1: Mina, are you are you alluding to the fact that maybe the Internet isn't 100% true? Speaker 2: You should 100% believe everything ChatGPT says. It definitely knows. Unknown Speaker: You almost rocked my world there. Speaker 3: What I think would be kind of interesting or funny to see is, so this prompt says, why choose ancient athletics or accent of athletic shirts? It would be rather interesting to see Rufus. You click on that and then Rufus says, you probably shouldn't choose this shirt because the reviews are not that great. Instead, you should look at these ones. Speaker 1: You know what? I would want that. Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, in a perfect world, if the shirt was really no good, that's how the AI would reply. But it makes you wonder, is it going to be like, oh, this is a sponsor prompt, so I need to respond favorably to this. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: I think the other thing is, I wonder how long until we start having Rufus data, because it's like right now, it's completely black box. We have no idea. The best thing that we could do is go to other listings and see kind of a little bit on Rufus, but we don't know how personalized Rufus is. We don't know if it's from my computer, I'm getting different, you know, Rufus stuff versus a different, you know, user and computer. When can we start getting some of that feedback so that we can incorporate it into our listings? Can they at least release frequently asked questions by Rufus, et cetera? And then it's like, okay, perfect. Let me incorporate that into my listing so that Rufus can read it better. Speaker 3: Yeah, it'd be nice to have that real world data. Go ahead, Danon, were you going to say something? Speaker 1: I was just going to say, I don't see this being any different than SEO when it started back in the days of keyword stuffing your footer with the same color text as the background. It's like, I see this as if you have a really good Product details page. Just like if you have a really good website, you will rank for exactly what you want to rank for and your traffic will be high quality and your conversions will be high because people are finding precisely what they are looking for because that's exactly what you provide. It's, it'll never not be that way in the, in the world of SEO and, and, uh, AIO, you know, uh, AEO. Yeah. Old McDonald had a farm. Um, it'll never be that way. If you produce really good content for exactly your target audience, you will be rewarded with traffic. Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah. And that, this is something that I'm doing in the, the product pages that I'm optimizing now is that, you know, I go to AI, And say, you know, search the entire internet and give me the most frequently asked questions for a men's athletic tank top shirt. And, you know, try that in ChatGPT, Grok, Perplexity, and then take all the most common frequently asked questions and weave those into your listing, put them in the A plus content, We're gonna be talking about a variety of different places because if those are frequently asked on e-commerce websites around the web, then they're probably gonna be frequently asked to Rufus and on Amazon as well. Speaker 2: Yeah, and I like that you guys mentioned that because the one thing that I noticed most brands on Amazon aren't doing is that they're not constantly doing this market research and this consumer studies to see what are, like, okay, I'm buying a protein powder. What is everyone looking for? What are they asking? Are they asking about flavor, digestibility, amount of protein, artificial ingredients, et cetera, et cetera? What are all those things? Because there's a few categories. Category number one is what am I looking for to know? There's number two, what am I looking so that I can disqualify this product? Artificial ingredients, disqualified. It's sourced from this place, disqualified. You know what I mean? And then the third category is unique selling points. And so it's like, what are those things that when I say that I is a feature in my product, people are going to be like, whoa, this is cool. I'm interested. And I don't see brands doing that as much. The big brands that are doing this, they're also not doing it for Amazon specific. They're over indexing on like outside world, which is fine, but there's a lot of hidden information inside of the reviews and other PDPs and other questions and all that kind of stuff in other listings. And when you combine everything and really understand your shopper, that's when I think you optimize for conversion. Speaker 3: Yep, 100%. Speaker 2: Yep. Speaker 3: The same thing that brands have been doing forever, basically. It's kind of nice because we're getting to a world more on Amazon where it's not just all about the latest hack or keyword stuffing and everything like that. It's more natural language prompts and things like that that is more normal. You know, forever the internet has been all about keywords and e-commerce has been about keywords and writing a blog post to make sure you cover this specific keyword to try to get ranked in Google and all that stuff. Those days are kind of going away. They're still going to be around for a long time, but it's going to be more natural flow of what people are actually looking for and hopefully, that will make the e-commerce experience a lot better. Speaker 1: I think that in the early, early days of the internet, the pro one of the problems that initial like, , initial searches had was people would list out the full question rather than the keyword they were searching for. And it took some number of years, but eventually the, The internet, the Googs, the Yahoos, you know, the Yahoo chat rooms, all that stuff, they changed the way that people search into a severely abridged version. of what the original question is, right? And what I'm seeing is that we're going back into a detailed question to get a detailed answer, rather than you know, you're going to be served the same crap. So you just use a one word search. And so I believe that When it comes to optimizing websites and product detail pages and stuff like that, I believe that we're going to need to more accurately define the answers to questions rather than using those keywords to just attract the eyeballs. Speaker 3: Hey, Amazon Sellers. Tired of losing money on storage and shipping fees? Well, Amazon Storage Pros is here to take the headache out of logistics. We manage everything from inventory and creating efficient shipping plans to working with 3PLs and Amazon's AWD so that you can focus on growing your business. Start with a free storage cost audit and discover exactly where you're overspending and how to fix it. Don't let logistics eat into your profits. Visit AmazonStoragePros.com. That's AmazonStoragePros.com to get your free storage cost audit and start saving today. And now back to the show. Yep, definitely. Yeah, and it can still be rather frustrating even with all of the you know, AI advancements and stuff that Amazon has had like just this morning. I was looking for Milwaukee brand power tools, right? I wanted to see if there was any good deals for the start of Black Friday. And so I type in Milwaukee power tools. I click on Black Friday details or deals filter. And there was no Milwaukee stuff that was showing. It was all just like Chinese junk. And so I'm looking at the filter to select the brand name Milwaukee. And it wasn't even in the filter. There wasn't an option for me to select it. And I'm like, okay, well, this is annoying. So now I'm searching the page to try to find the word Milwaukee. And so little things like that can still be quite frustrating that Amazon needs to fix. So, yeah. Speaker 1: You don't have $1,000 cash. Don't even bother buying your first Milwaukee tool. Haven't you seen those clips on YouTube? Speaker 3: They're not cheap, that's for sure, but they're pretty quality stuff. I like them. Speaker 4: I do think that's probably one of the interesting parts about Amazon having such a robust search algorithm and ranking system where Google, for instance, Yahoo, all these, it's a specific skill. It's always interesting to have to like be able to utilize search properly with those. And like a lot of them have different key indicators that you can put in to refine your search really, really well. And like that's an actual skill that people have of like being able to refine Google searches in certain capacities. Right. And Amazon has never had that, I think, for like the general consumer. And so it's always interesting that, you know, especially with the rise of AI as a whole, It defeats that entire purpose of like needing to have a skill set, so to speak. I'm wondering if that's where Amazon's trying to go with the whole Rufus thing of they've never been able to refine that search outside of just basic keywords. And so now they're like, well, let's see if we can do it with AI. Speaker 3: Yeah, definitely. I mean, most people that search and buy on Amazon are probably not as in-depth of researchers as I am when I'm looking for something. Most people are just looking at the first few results and buying one of those or going on to something else. Speaker 1: Even Google, they used to have an advanced search feature that you could turn on. It's gone now. You actually have to go to a Google.com forward slash advanced Yeah, google.com forward slash advanced underscore search in order to be able to do an advanced search. So if that doesn't tell you right there, Google, the largest search platform on the planet, or perhaps second largest or third largest these days. You know, they stripped away everything because people don't, most people don't use it. Speaker 3: Yeah. No, most people don't, don't know that that kind of stuff even exists. Speaker 4: Trying to, yeah. Trying to explain a search operator or anything like that to somebody. And they're just like, I don't know what this does for me. Speaker 3: Yeah. Speaker 1: One of the things I've, I've done extensively, I used to do this a lot with Amazon. It seems to work less and less though. I would put in Amazon.com colon space and then my search and that would shortcut the search function in Amazon rather than going to the homepage and then blah, blah, blah. It would go on Amazon, do the search and in the Google results would show me results for that search string. Speaker 3: Yep, all those little shortcuts and that time is definitely going away with AI. You won't use that kind of stuff at all. Not that normal people ever really use that for the most part, but it'll definitely be going away. All right, let's go ahead and jump on to the next story here. So, Amazon unifies DSP and sponsored ads under one AI-powered platform. Amazon has launched a unified campaign manager that merges DSP and sponsored ads into one AI-driven interface, giving advertisers a single dashboard for planning, reporting, and optimization across display, video, audio, and streaming. Amazon says the new system cuts campaign setup time by 60% and uses automation and AI recommendations to reduce daily workload. For Amazon sellers, this shift means more transparency into how their ads perform across the full funnel and new tools like Ads Agent and Creative Agent that can automatically build campaigns, generate creatives, and run AMC queries without technical expertise. So this is a was just announced at the Amazon unboxed that was just happened here in Nashville over the weekend. So I'm not sure if any of you guys have had time to play with this or if it is even available for everyone yet. I'm not sure. Mina, I know you're heavily into the DSP world because it's basically been kind of a segmented market for people who were able to get access to it. So I'm curious of your thoughts on this unification of the two platforms. Speaker 2: Okay, so first of all, very, very skeptical and I'll explain why. Right now, you have PPC and DSP. PPC, there's a lot of experts doing it. DSP, very few experts. Amazon has always had the stance of DSP is very like advanced and there's so many knobs to it that they kind of want to keep it separated and that's why they're selling the agency seats and if you're an agency that has a seat, then you could run it, right? And then some software companies found a way around that so they could sell their software better. In general, they've kept it separated. Now, an issue with that as well is you don't get like, you know, PPC and DSP data combined, so it's very, very difficult to like start to do attribution. In general, attribution is hard when you have multiple types of advertising. So even when you do sponsor brand and sponsor product, it's muddy and you can't tell the results of sponsor brand and product unless you do it in a way where it's like incremental So, you know, I'm going to launch a sponsored brand campaign and only that, and then see, I spent, you know, $100 on it. How much did my total sales increase by? And I could start to attribute that way. So when Amazon mentions all this stuff, a unified platform and all this kind of stuff, a few things jump to my mind. Number one, they're going to do a light version. They're not going to do a full version. And that's going to be like, it's going to hold people back from actually being able to Fully harness the power of DSP. But let's say that they did put the full power of DSP, you know, under one roof. The attribution is still significantly off. And I could tell you this. Every time we've gone on to Amazon Marketing School or whatever and we look at the path to purchase, the one with the best results has always been the one with the most ads stacked on top of each other. Just so happens the best path to purchase is the one where they click on a sponsor product and a sponsor brand and a sponsor display. I'm like, that sounds really fishy. You know what I mean? This, to me, seems like, number one, they're probably hearing more people want DSP and there's not like an easy access to it. So they're like, hey, why don't we just plug it in to Capital Manager, get more people to start spending money on it. That's going to help them. It's going to help their revenues. And then you're getting people that are unsophisticated. I'm running DSP, and I'm gonna tell you, PPC level of details here, DSP is way higher, because it's very nuanced, audience-based. It's not as easy as PPC, which is just search and ace it, right? So it's way more nuanced. So you're gonna get people blowing more money, and then now, beautifully, they can put the path to purchase all in one place and say, look at it. When you spent more money on DSP, you converted better. I'm like, well, but why did my total revenue stay the same? No one to be found to answer that question. So that's why I'm very, very skeptical. Just seeing the pattern that has happened with them. Now, I have a lot of faith in Amazon ads. The team is amazing. I love them. I think they do great work. But I think bringing this to life in a way that is going to be very beneficial to sellers as much as it is beneficial to Amazon, that's going to take a little bit. Speaker 3: What kind of gets me is the AI part of it, because it mentions they've got the AI ads agent, creative agent that can automatically build campaigns, creative and run queries without technical expertise. So that makes me nervous. Like you mentioned, Mina, there's probably gonna be a lot of people blowing a lot of money without any major results. Speaker 4: I I'm kind of the same boat as mean in this especially in the sense of you know. It takes a certain technical expertise, right? And it's one of the things that, you know, we have clients all the time that we do DSP for, but are super on the fence about just because the aspect of like, they've worked with another DSP provider, they've gone to one of these software companies, like provide it and like, have had an awful experience. And it's like, well, yeah, because you were, you know, throwing $1,000 at, you know, top of funnel marketing, everything and hoping for the best, right? With zero attribution, zero way of like tracking anything. It DSP is one of those that definitely from an advertising perspective is a channel that. You can't just jump into, right? You can't just hope that like, oh, I know how to do, I mean, it's same thing with like Sponsored Display, which is basically, you know, DSP Lite, right? Like the amount of people that I see that just waste like so much money on Sponsored Display and they're like, I hate it. I hate it. Like, and it's like, yeah, because you can be really, really knowledgeable at how to target keywords, do sponsored, you know, products, anything like that. But if you don't know what you're actually doing, it's just a completely different ballpark as far as like an ad structure goes as well. It's going to be a lot of wasted money, a lot of wasted funds from people. From what I know and from what I heard at Accelerate, for instance, this is essentially Amazon's step one as well in basically fully getting rid of that whole idea of agency seats and ad seats for the platform, which I'm hesitant on. I mean, I've always personally kind of hated the whole thing of the agency seats because I'm like, I feel like people should just get access to it if they want it, right? But at the same time, it also created at least A friction point where you don't have people who just completely hate the platform as a whole because they tested themselves and they very quickly realize like it or think, quote unquote, it's a waste of money when they just don't know what they're doing. Right. It's very similar. I mean, If anybody's ever done like, I don't know, influencer marketing. I know so many people have just spent so much money on influencer marketing trying to boost up a product. It's because they choose really crappy influencers or they just don't know how to manage influencers and the marketing around it, right? And it's going to be the exact same thing here. You're going to get a bunch of people who Listen to some guy who's never actually ran a DSP account in his life about, you know, hey, here's how you do this. And then they're going to throw $2,000 at it thinking it's going to change their account when it's like that money will have been way better spent on like a sponsored brand campaign. Speaker 3: Yeah, you're gonna see Upwork exploding with DSP experts all of a sudden that want to spend your money for you. Yeah, yeah. It's ads are not easy. I mean, PPC can be frustrating and hard enough if you don't know what you're doing. And like you said, I mean, a DSP is a whole nother level and you're dealing with a different part of the funnel. That now you're mixing them together in maybe a platform where most people are used to dealing with. We're at the bottom of the funnel almost where people are searching for a specific product. It could waste a lot of money and Amazon may not necessarily mind that. They're collecting the money either way so they're probably happy about it. They're going to have more people throwing their money at it. Yeah, it'll be interesting to see when the platform actually comes out what it looks like if it is a light version, like you said, you know, if you remember the days when a plus used to be behind a wall as well, and then they released the light version of it, essentially, and now everyone has access to the full version, it'll probably be a similar type of robot. Speaker 1: That's right. It was enhanced brand content, then A plus content, wasn't it? Speaker 3: Yep. Yep. Speaker 4: Yeah. Speaker 3: So Amazon has a history of doing that, doing the light versions, doing the agency only, right? And then the light version and then the full version for everyone. So it'll probably be a similar type of rollout with this. So we'll have to see how it goes. Speaker 2: and if you think about it like it's all like it's it's they're giving a telltale of saying it's like you don't need sophistication you don't need whatever there's AI there's this how many AI products has Amazon come out with right now right AI video generation AI image generation AI recommendations. Unknown Speaker: How many were successful? Speaker 2: Yeah, none of them have been successful. So this is literally a trap of like, I don't care because here's the thing. At the end of the day, you're going to end up coming to me as an agency. You're going to go. You're going to burn your money. You're going to be skeptical. And then the smart friends that you have are going to be using an agency, just like with PPC. You're doing PPC on your own. And then you're like, well, when I've used agencies, it hasn't worked. And then eventually, you're going to find a good agency. You're going to go through that entire path anyways with DSV. But like what I want you to be aware of is like Amazon is doing it, marketing it very sexily so that you're like, oh, fuck an agency. I don't need it. I'm going to do it on my own. And you're going to blow some money and you know. They're benefiting like, you know, 10, 20, 30 grand multiplied by 1 million sellers is very, very good money. Speaker 1: Yeah. Anyone that thinks that if Amazon is the one that creates your ads for you, it's going to be a successful ad. Yeah, yeah, like the the worst possible advice I've ever seen to Amazon sellers comes direct from Amazon. Speaker 4: I can't wait to just put a prompt in that's just like, I would like to have 70% conversion rate, 10% click-through rate, and only spend $100. Please make me the ad for it and see what it comes up with. Speaker 1: Oh, absolutely. It'll be like, that's great. Your starting budget should be $30,000 an hour. Speaker 4: That's like a new reserve share of your voice or whatever. And I'm here to talk to you about a feature they have under the sponsor display where you can reserve all keywords for your brand specifically. And I was looking at it for one brand and to pay for it would have been an upfront cost of $280,000 with zero aspect of how long that period of time that cost is going to protect you for. Who's paying for this? Speaker 3: Yeah, I would I would not trust AI to run anything completely independently, especially ads. I mean, Just as an example, so I use AI to help me find some of the Amazon news that we put in the newsletter. Most of it I get manually now still, because when I ask AI to say, you know, give me some good Amazon seller news in the last seven days, Half of it's older than seven days ago. The other half, the links are broken and they're going to the wrong pages. So if AI can't even do that basic function properly, I'm not gonna trust it to completely run my ads 100%. We'll use it to get good ideas, but not run them. Speaker 1: Yeah, a little side note. How is it possible that if you tell it to go and look, that it gives you broken links? Speaker 3: I don't know. It's really weird because the link will be broken. So then I'll search for the article to find from that actual site. And the URL will just be like a little bit different on the actual website versus what it's giving me in the results. I don't know why or how, but it's just crazy. Speaker 1: Yeah. Yep. Speaker 3: So yeah, AI is awesome. Don't trust it 100% for anything, but use it for research. It's really good for that to help get that started, but I would not trust it to run my ads 100%. That's for sure. Speaker 1: I would ever trust AI to truly run my ads 100%. Speaker 3: Yeah, definitely. Not anytime soon. There might be a day, eventually, but not anytime soon. Even then, like you said, Danan, I'm not going to trust Amazon's AI to not spend my money improperly because Amazon's goal is to get more money from ads. Speaker 1: Absolutely. You ever met with a Google rep about ads? Speaker 2: Oh my God, dude. Speaker 4: Don't even get me started. I may have posted about this the other day. Amazon seller supports uglier cousin, Google ad support. Oh my Lord. Yeah. Speaker 1: Their whole quick get started on Google, and it wouldn't surprise me if it's... I don't run ads. So take what I say with a grain of salt. I've just been around long enough to see the evolution and happen to hang out with people like you guys. So I do know a thing or two. You know, their whole thing is, do you want clicks? Like, yeah, I want clicks. Great, give us money. We'll get you clicks. Yeah, here's money. All right, there were your clicks. Like, what about sales? No, no, you just wanted clicks. We got them for you. Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah. No, definitely. I would not trust Amazon with that. If I was a brand and needed some needed ads done, I'd be going to Mina or Noah and they're going to utilize AI. I guarantee you guys do it with your ads and stuff to help with various features, but you have the interest of making me more money. Otherwise I'm going to fire you. Amazon doesn't have that interest. What am I gonna do? I can't fire Amazon. I still need to sell on their platform to make the money. So I'm gonna go to someone who has my best interest at heart rather than letting Amazon run it all for me. Speaker 2: Yeah. There we go. How can we get Amazon to align with our interests? And then you could trust them. Speaker 3: Yes. Yep. You gotta always look at the best interest or the interest of Whoever you're working with, making sure they're lining up with yours. Speaker 4: It was one of those things. I talked to a lot of different people at Amazon Accelerate this year, and I was talking specifically to the VP of FBA. And one thing that he and I were talking about was the aspect of everyone having a really negative light of how Amazon is, how it operates and everything. As far as like the seller perspective, and I was like, why is it so hard for Amazon to align with sellers and like do what they want? And his answer was basically that People bring ideas to them all the time of how they can, you know, make things better, how they can do things. But the problem being is that Amazon is such a large company that it would require multiple different departments, divisions getting together and like aligning on something that just will never happen, right? And like, you can bring something and be like, this would make you, Amazon, an extra $2 billion a year. And they'll look at that and be like, that's, you know, 0.04% of our total revenue. And so it's like, it's really hard for them to even like justify. I'm like, yeah, like people would like you so much more. Speaker 1: I found out recently. So there was, I think it was called the Partner Connect or something like that the day before Accelerate. Speaker 4: We saw each other there. Speaker 1: Yeah, that's right. So you remember when they were saying like the product details page that you would think there's a team at Amazon that's responsible for that, but no, there are teams that are responsible for forms or fields that are contained within that page. And then there are even fields where multiple teams are responsible for just this one field. This was, oh, and the other thing was, is that they, that was where they announced to us that, um, uh, Seller, um, Buy with Prime and what was it? Uh, MCF are merging into the same team, right? Which is good news. Um, we hope, but, uh, that was where I learned that, oh, uh, What is it? Yeah, it's MCF. They have their own budget sheet and their own profit and loss sheet and buy with Prime. They've got their own thing. And sometimes you have within Amazon, these teams that have the same purpose. Unknown Speaker: Or goal. Speaker 1: And so they end up competing against each other in some ways. So this was a big eye-opener for me is that they announced that these two teams are now merging under the same P&L sheet. Right. And that was like, you know, we've determined that this team is profitable and we've determined that this team is profitable. And for years, it just hasn't made sense that they're profitable independently. Let's put them together. And I went, oh my gosh, that's the problem. The problem is, is that Amazon is not a cohesive company. Speaker 4: I've started looking at Amazon less as a company these days and more as like a dictatorship country, if you really think about it, right? Because like, so Amazon, the actual company has like 40 different entities, 43 actually right now. And each one of these different little areas of Amazon is basically its own company and like VPs of that department basically run it like their own company. That's why you have like a VP of FBA who handles all logistics. Then you have like a VP of Amazon ads and like seller support has its own VP and like manages that and they're all these different companies. Account health assurance, for instance, Amazon is a different department and company within Amazon than seller support, which is why they don't talk to each other ever. And when you look at Amazon as this giant scope, it's like Amazon globally has over 3 million employees. They are a $2 trillion plus company. It's like Amazon has a larger market cap than majority of countries' annual GDP, right? They have 3 million global employees. They have 40 different entities. Amazon is a country that is operating globally, basically. Speaker 3: The giant bureaucracy. Speaker 4: Then you have Andy just at the top who gives the same speech 25 different times. Speaker 1: You missed one little thing on the dictatorship, Noah, which I so lovingly say, it's a schizophrenic dictatorship. Speaker 4: Hey, don't worry. They run lean like a startup. They promise. Speaker 1: It's always day one at Amazon. Who knows what they're doing on day one, right? Nobody. Nobody knows what's going on. Speaker 3: We got a question in the comments here I'll bring in real quick from Deepak. With Walmart integrating with ChatGPT and Amazon burying their head in Rufus, making it incompatible with other large language models, do you think Amazon sellers should give Walmart a go with growing sales there? Speaker 4: The thing is, I think it's really funny because I want to say it was the last time I was on here, Todd, with you and Dana as well, when we brought up the news article about the Walmart and like GBT thing and like how GBT is now a huge part of Walmart's like overall referral traffic. But then we dug in and like the referral traffic itself only incorporated something like 1% of all traffic on Walmart's website. So it was like, everyone was like, oh, 40% of its referral traffic comes from GBT. And it's like, But it's all of, you know, 0.4% of total traffic. And so I'll say to Deepak, the same thing I say to everyone, Walmart, realistically, from a sales perspective for 90% of brands will never be more than 20% of Amazon sales, just because of Walmart size, scope, everything like that. It's great if you have like a consumable type product that is really reorderable and you have a large variety of products. If you're a one or two product brand or seller at the end of the day and you're under a million dollars in sales on Amazon, just focus your inventory time and efforts on scaling further on Amazon. Speaker 3: Yeah, I would agree with that for the most part. I mean, you should probably use some kind of multi-channel software just to push it over to Walmart and eBay and wherever. It's not going to hurt anything. But put all your time and effort at least right now until you're big enough on Amazon. And once you maximize that, then start looking at Walmart and these other places because honestly, it's going to be 10% or less of your sales on Amazon regardless, just from the traffic that's there. So you want to focus on the biggest thing first and then move over to these other platforms after you've maximized that. Speaker 2: Yeah, and I wouldn't even do Walmart. I would do Amazon until it's very big and then do TikTok Shop. Speaker 3: Yeah, true. TikTok Shop is kind of where it's at right now for sure. Speaker 2: Yeah, because you're looking at like a return on investment of your time and I don't think Walmart is that. Speaker 3: Yeah. I'm curious, you know, I just thought of going off of that, Mina, since you're heavily in the DSP area, is it ideal for people to maximize their regular PPC spend before looking at DSP? Speaker 2: Absolutely, for sure. Because you're going to get way better results with PPC except for when you do retargeting and loyalty with DSP, which is a very small pool. Basically, anyone who's viewed your product but didn't purchase or anyone who's purchased but hasn't repurchased You're going to get a good ROAS, but again, like if you're spending, let's say 20, 30K a month on PPC, you can maybe spend 5K profitably, 7K profitably with a really good ROAS with the retargeting stuff, and then you're done. And then everything else, which is competitor targeting, complimentary, contextual, those will grow your brand significantly, but it's going to be a lower return on ad spend than if you did PPC. Invest your money into mastering your PPC, maximizing it, mastering your product detail page, maximizing it, making it the best conversion rate and cook-through rate possible. Then you can consider, if PPC is doing well and all that stuff, adding DSP. Speaker 3: Yep, yep, absolutely. Take advantage of the low-hanging fruit first. Speaker 1: I gotta jump, fellas. Speaker 4: Yep, same. Speaker 3: I think we can go ahead and wrap it up. We're over the top of the hour, so appreciate everybody out there joining us. Noah, Dana, Mina, appreciate you guys as well. Until next week, have an awesome weekend, guys. Speaker 1: Bye, everyone. Speaker 4: 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 3: Hey, if you made it this far in the show, I really hope you enjoyed it and I'd like to ask you a favor. Could you head on over to Apple or Spotify or wherever you're listening to this and leave us a review? It would be greatly appreciated and would help us continue to grow the show and offer more episodes for you. Thank you. God bless and have an awesome day.