Amazon News: Walmart Fulfillment, AI Ads, and Pricing Pressure

Amazon News: Walmart Fulfillment, AI Ads, and Pricing 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 2: What's going on, everybody? Welcome to another week of Amazon Seller News Live. I am finally back at it. Missed a few weeks there, so I'm definitely happy and excited to be back on the live again. For those of you that don't know, I moved from the Tampa area to the Greenville, South Carolina area for we got family here, nicer weather, much better driving on the roads, that's for sure. Neil and I were talking about how he's sitting up there in Canada at like 33 degrees and I think it's a nice about 70 something outside here in Greenville, South Carolina area. Speaker 1: Definitely on opposite ends of the spectrum. I'm supposed to be going camping today and it's going to be cold out there. But it's great to have you back, Todd. You know, when you were gone, Danon and I got to run the show and it was like, Parents left the kids unchecked, no rules. We kept the show going for you, but it was a fun time without you too, no offense. Speaker 2: Yes, absolutely. I appreciate it very much. Always good to have you guys on the show and awesome for you to be able to take it over. Well, there was no way I was gonna be able to do it. It's just, I moved an entire warehouse and an entire house. So you can just imagine how much work that was doing all that. We filled, A full FTL trailer moving everything in the warehouse plus a flatbed trailer as well worth of stuff that we shipped over here just for the warehouse. And then I had eight U-boxes from U-Haul filled with the stuff for the house. So yeah, very happy that we're like 75% done with all that. Speaker 1: It sounds like business is good though. If you're moving that much stuff in a warehouse, sounds like business is good. Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, not bad. I would say it was better a couple of years ago. Easier, I should say, a couple of years ago, for sure. But that's kind of par for the course with Amazon, right? If only we would have started 20 years ago or 10 years ago or five years ago or last year. It's always going to get harder going forward. Speaker 1: That's the way it always is, right? It's like, oh, I should have started, I should have started, and it's like, well, I could have had something by now. Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure. I am excited to see, you know, it's not a news article we're talking about today, but I seen that the The inflation didn't really go up at all. The economy is still growing and everything is still looking good there. I don't know how inflation isn't going up at all. I think things are offsetting because like food and gas are way down and other things have gone up. So just the offset and it's staying pretty flat. So if we can keep that up, things may start booming quite a bit here towards the end of the year. Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. That's one of the big things that I pay attention to, specifically on Amazon, right? Like a lot of the products on Amazon are imported from China. And the ones that I pay attention to, not the 3P accounts, but the actual vendor accounts. So Amazon purchasing product from brands and, you know, it's shipped and sold by Amazon. I've been paying attention to those ones because typically they'll be the niche leader and they're kind of setting the prices within those niches. And I've seen those ones, those specific listings from Amazon start to creep up where from the 1P vendor accounts, right? Because Amazon controls that pricing. And so, you know, I'm seeing $3, $5 and it's just like this slow creep up over time. And for my 3P sellers that are holding steady on their pricing, you know, business is becoming better for them because these 1P accounts aren't just dominating the spaces as much. Speaker 2: One of the accounts that I run, it's actually for a cousin of mine. He has these products that he created and they're made completely out of aluminum. We just had to jack his prices way up. One of his products was selling, I believe it was $320 because they're pretty expensive products, but one was selling for $320 and we increased it to $450. Yeah, so it's that's a pretty big jump. What is that like 33% or something increase 30 some percent. So he's having a lot of trouble and aluminum is A little bit different because it's a commodity kind of like gold and silver. So not only do they have the tariffs increasing the cost of the aluminum, they also just have the fluctuations in the aluminum market pushing the prices higher as well as people try to predict where things are going in the future. So yeah, he had to really raise a lot of his prices, unfortunately. Speaker 1: It's interesting. I saw a post on Reddit and someone was importing aluminum car parts from China. And the person ended up like the import tariffs was far beyond what the cost of the actual product was worth. And so he was importing like $1,900 worth of product and his import tariffs was about $2,400. And because it's the double whammy, right? It's car parts, steel and aluminum. And then it was the it was when it was I think it was the 57 or whatever it was from China. I can't remember the exact number, but it was just like, oh, my goodness, that's the trifecta of not what not to import into the United States. Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. And well, the interesting thing with my cousin is that he has his products made in the USA. So that cost increase is just the cost that his supplier is passing on to him to get the rolls of aluminum into their factory, essentially. So, you know, they're talking about boosting production at US Steel. Which is a U.S. steel and aluminum company and they make rolls of aluminum and stuff, but I don't know if it's gonna be enough to be able to offset the large increases for aluminum that's coming from outside the U.S. Speaker 1: One of the ones that I just noticed was that cases of pop and anything in an aluminum cans. I just noticed that the price on these went up at my local grocery store. I bought a case of ginger ale yesterday and it was just under $9 for 12 cans. And I did a take and I was like, what's going on here? And I was like, oh yeah, that's the steel and aluminum coming back. Speaker 2: Yeah, that would make sense. I usually buy Zevia soda, so I'm used to paying like $10 to $12 for a 12-pack, unless they have a buy one, get one free, which happens a lot at Publix, which is a big supermarket down here. But yeah, I'm used to paying pretty high prices. I'm sure they've got big margins, so I haven't seen a big increase in their products, but yeah, that makes sense. Aluminum's gonna be going through the roof. Yep, for sure. All right, let's go ahead and jump on to the first news article here, which is very cool, in my opinion. So a lot of people out there may already know that Amazon just recently, or excuse me, Walmart just recently gave permission to sellers to fulfill through Amazon as long as they use blank box and do not use Amazon delivery services. There are also, Amazon's going a step further. Amazon gives sellers a deal for using MCF to fulfill Walmart orders. Amazon is waiving its 5% surcharge for sellers who use multi-channel fulfillment to fulfill Walmart orders, now officially allowed by Walmart's updated policy. This promotion runs through January 14th, 2026, offering cost savings for Amazon sellers expanding to Walmart. Amazon claims MCF users see a 19% drop in out-of-stock rates and a 12% improvement in inventory turnover. Sellers can connect accounts using supported order management apps or submit manual orders through Seller Central. So, rather interesting, I think. Number one, that Walmart opened up using Amazon fulfillment services to fill their products, which I think points to how large and the strength that Amazon's logistics has become, they've just taken over so much of the delivery space. It kind of points to that, but then Amazon's like, okay, yeah, we'll give you a good deal to fulfill those Walmart orders so we can get a piece of every one of those orders that Walmart fulfills. Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a, it's pretty interesting to see that. So like eight, uh, Amazon Global Logistics, they are, I'm not sure if they are the largest, uh, shipping logistics company in the world right now. I wouldn't be surprised if they are, but I wouldn't be surprised if their goal is to become the largest. And this lines up with all of that, right? Like Amazon has been aggressively increasing their warehousing space through, um, What's the other one? The Amazon warehouse and distribution, right? So they're now in the warehousing business and the fulfillment business. And so now they're just saying, you know, we're building all these massive facilities. Let's fill them up. Right. And they're just saying, you know, we'll work with anyone. And on the other side of things that says that Walmart isn't like, they're trying to grow, but there sounds like there's a little bit of growing pains if they're saying, hey, you know what, we're gonna work with the person that we're going after and say, yeah, you know what, it's okay, you can use their services for now, while we try to catch up because their warehousing probably isn't where it needs to be. I could also see them Looking for some like taking the warehouse space that they have and actually trying to divert it to their retail space. And they were probably just shipping extremely large quantities when the tariffs came down and their warehousing facility might just be absolutely packed. Speaker 2: For Walmart's facilities? Speaker 1: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Walmart would, Walmart would have just been loading up as soon as the, it went from 165 down to 30%. Orders started flying again and they probably overordered because they don't know if this is going to last or not. And so they're saying, Hey, we'll take 30% over 165 or whatever it is. And they looked at their inventory space and they said, we don't have any more. Hey, Amazon, you got space? Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, that's definitely I definitely didn't look at it from that perspective. It could be something there. You know, Amazon did the same thing, right? Because they're introducing or have reintroduced the caps, the storage caps on people and it started shrinking. The space that people have available, so it would make sense if Amazon overordered to deal with the terrorist. Walmart probably did even more so, I would imagine, since they've been in this game a lot longer than Amazon and have dealt with things like this even more than they have. That's definitely a good take my my first thought was That Walmart was potentially seeing a drop-off in the number of available products on their site because for me I was selling on on Walmart. Well, I have been selling on Walmart for maybe three or four years now and And I have it turned on where any inventory that's in my warehouse is available for sale. And then I also had it turned on that anything in FBA was also available on Walmart and I was shipping from Amazon even though you weren't supposed to, technically. I had it turned on so that it wouldn't use Amazon fulfillment. It would use the blank box and everything. But last year, I got my account taken down because I was using Amazon and the way they caught me was that USPS puts a little tag in the tracking that says it came from an Amazon warehouse. And so all of those shipments they were saying were invalid tracking numbers, even though they were all being delivered and everything fine. So I just turned that off and was just fulfilling the products out of my warehouse, which is maybe one third of what I probably have in FBA. So the quantity of products that I was providing on the Walmart marketplace dropped by two thirds because of that. And Walmart never sold enough for me to really put the time and effort it would take to, you know, go into Walmart fulfillment services and everything like that. So that was kind of my first thought was perhaps they were seeing a drop off in the available products on their website. Speaker 1: So there's two interesting things that you said there. Number one was you were talking about sellers having their Amazon warehouse space cut and reduced. And I had several meetings last week with some of my clients where this is a very real thing. So anyone who's listening, please be aware that Amazon is doing this right now. They're actively reducing sellers space for, specifically for products with a slower sell-through rate. If you have a faster sell-through rate, you're going to be fine. But I think what they're doing is they're anticipating the upcoming Prime Day. So Prime Day is coming up. They haven't announced the dates yet. It will either be week 28 or week 29, my best guess. And it's actually going to be four days. And so because they're extending it from two days to four days, they're saying, hey, we're going to need a lot more inventory space here. Anything with a slow sell-through rate, we're cutting your inventory space. You got to get it out of there. We'll get removals. And anyone who has a high sell-through rate, you're fine. So just a heads up, if you do get that email, I do believe that's just Amazon prepping for the upcoming Prime Day. The other thing is I'm talking with quite a few of my clients and Everybody is just interested in Walmart. I mean, you know, everyone's asking me, hey, how can we get you to jump or can you manage your ads on Walmart? What kind of what kind of revenue should we expect if we start selling on Walmart? And like, I'm having these like multiple emails every week being from our clients being like, hey, we want to be on Walmart, we want to expand, we want to grow. And so I do think that with the Walmart catalog would be growing. And it seems like it's still in that early infancy stage, just from how clunky and mechanical it is. So I could see it being, you know, like you said, there could be a product shrinkage offering on the on the Walmart side of things. But I think long term Walmart does continue to want to grow, right? Like they've been heavily investing in this and they might just have hit like a plateau where their warehousing just can't keep up with the overall inventory demands of the entire business. Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. It might be a combination of all of the above or they're just sick of fighting it. They're like, well, Amazon's like the biggest logistics company in the world now. Why do we hang our head against the wall and trying to suspend people for using them? Speaker 1: Why build the infrastructure when you can just rent it for a small fee, right? And your sellers would be the ones paying that fee. Plus, now Amazon's knocking off a search hire, so it's even more attractive. Speaker 2: Yep, for sure. So yeah, if you haven't tried Walmart in the past, now's definitely the time to try it. I use software called Listing Mirror, which is like $150 a month, and you can push all of your listings on Amazon over to Walmart. It puts them up for sale. It keeps the quantities updated between Seller Central and Walmart. So it works pretty slick. If you sell something on Walmart, it will just auto-fulfill it for you over on Amazon. And I haven't really had too many issues with it. Every once in a while, something will fail to fulfill. Usually it'll be like a timing issue if you're low on quantity and you sell it on Amazon before the Walmart order If it fulfills, then you can have some issues there, but for the most part it works quite good. Speaker 1: And you're no longer in danger of having your account suspended for using Amazon. Speaker 2: Yes. Do you guys have any multi-channel fulfillment software that you like to use or recommend to people? Speaker 1: No, we strictly stay on the ad side of things. So on the OpEx side of things, we stay out of that noise. Speaker 2: Okay. There's a lot of them out there that you can choose from and I've jumped between different ones. Joe Lister is another one out there. That's kind of the budget one in the space and it works fine. But it's pretty limited on what you can push quantities to. I believe it only supports like one or two channels the last time I looked where Listing Mirror supports a lot more. Like I use WooCommerce and Shopify and stuff like that as well that I need to fulfill. So it's a little bit more multifaceted but still a good price. 150 bucks a month is definitely well worth it to be able to put all your products on Walmart. Speaker 1: And especially automate all your stuff too, right? Like the automation side of things, like not having to worry about that yourself. That's a business time saving effort. Speaker 2: Yep, exactly right. All right, so let's see, should we jump on to the next one here? Next article, Amazon is about to be flooded with AI generated video ads. Amazon has launched its free AI powered video generator tool in the US, allowing sellers to create realistic motion filled product ads in under five minutes. Sellers can choose from six auto-generated clips featuring wearable products in action, human models, pets, music, and branded logos. New features include multi-scene editing, image to video conversions, and auto-summarization for existing content like tutorials and social posts. For Amazon sellers, this tool makes ad creation faster, more engaging, and completely free, perfect for boosting conversions without hiring a video team. Now, of course, before we got started, we were talking about PPC Ninja has provided AI generated videos for quite a long time. So why don't you go ahead and jump in and talk a little bit about what you guys got going on and what you think about Amazon's AI generated videos. Speaker 1: Absolutely. Yeah. So we've been using AI for video generation for probably about six months now since it kind of was in the infancy stages. And, you know, we're finding that some of the results, depending upon your product, are absolutely amazing. There is a ton of tools out there. I actually haven't tested the one that Amazon is putting forward here, but I like as a pain point from a seller supplying video, This is one of the biggest pain points for sellers. And what a lot of sellers don't understand is there's actually a difference between a product detail page video where it's, you know, you have an explainer video on your listing where it's, you know, you're talking about your unique selling features and all of those things, how to use, how to maintain, how to operate. And then there's ones that we use specifically for advertising. And so here's some interesting facts about Amazon sponsored brands videos. I have an amazing data set. It is astonishingly large that shows that shoppers on Amazon, when they are viewing a video in the search results, they don't watch more than three seconds. So you have three seconds to convert to a click. Other than that, they just kind of keep doom scrolling and that's what ends up happening. And then they also do not unmute videos. It's a 99.99% Unmute rate. So less than 0.1% of customers actually unmute the video. So you have three seconds to get a click and nobody is unmuting. So keeping those metrics in mind, we want to be designing videos with just extremely high click-through rates. We don't need these long, elaborate videos. That's what the video on your listing is for. Some of these videos that we're looking for, we just want that insanely high click-through rate that resonates with the customer. So that's something that we've been focusing on for the last six months. Ritu is becoming very quickly the queen of the AI space. She's got her own AI newsletter that goes out every single Monday where we drop lots and lots of AI tips. So if you are interested in that, you can find our offer on our website as well as a link to sign up for the newsletter. Speaker 2: Hey Amazon sellers, tired of losing money on storage and shipping fees? Well, Amazon Storage Pros is here to take the headache out of logistics. We manage everything from inventory and creating efficient shipping plans to working with 3PLs and Amazon's AWD so that you can focus on growing your business. Start with a free storage cost audit and discover exactly where you're overspending and how to fix it. Don't let logistics eat into your profits. Visit AmazonStoragePros.com. That's AmazonStoragePros.com to get your free storage cost audit and start saving today. And now back to the show. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Ritu is awesome in the AI space, for sure. And, you know, the quick video that they showed there, obviously the ad looked fantastic for this watch. They're putting it on this guy's wrist here, as you can see. And for the most part, it looks pretty good. Now, you mentioned that nobody is unmuting. And how many seconds of the ad are they watching, did you say? Speaker 1: Three seconds, that's all you get. Speaker 2: Three seconds, no audio. So essentially you want that video to like flash in the very first second. Speaker 1: Punch you in the face with exactly what you're looking for in the first three seconds. Otherwise customers will just keep scrolling. Speaker 2: Okay. Yeah, so that's really good to know because as you've seen in that video there, it generates these clips and then you can order the clips and add text and stuff like that. So you want to make sure you're putting the clip in the beginning that really pops and hits the customer in the face with what they're looking for. Speaker 1: The worst kind of videos that I see for ads on Amazon are unboxing because they are just so slow. It's like you slide the packaging out and the customer is gone. They just don't work effectively on Amazon. If you do have an unboxing video, I would highly encourage you to either try out this Amazon one and just get a higher click-through rate or contact us at PPCNinja and we can help you out as well. Speaker 2: Yeah, or I'll get videos from clients that they're like, hey, can you upload this to the listing? And you'll hit play and like the first five or six seconds is just like their logo. Speaker 1: Yeah, those are also terrible. Speaker 2: Those are also terrible. Cut that out. Let's jump right into the content. Yeah, for sure. All right. Speaker 1: So there's, there's some crazy advancements within the AI image, or AI video generation field, like I just saw a video where I think it was Google, they put out an entire video where they were at a car show. And it was interviewing people at a car show and it just looked so realistic that it was like, you almost can't tell the difference. Like before there were kind of those tells where it was AI because they couldn't get the fingers right or they couldn't, like there were just tiny little tells that you could pick out. But with the Google's latest one that they released there, it was unbelievable that, you know, that was 100% AI driven. Speaker 2: Yeah, it's getting quite impressive. It's getting to the point where it's hard to tell. I think I can still tell a lot of times, but I'm sure I've been fooled with AI videos that I thought were real. And the time is very short where anyone is going to be able to tell the difference between a real video and an AI video. I've been getting a decent amount of the AI sales calls. I don't know if you've experienced that yet, Neil. Speaker 1: No, not yet. Please enlighten me. Speaker 2: Okay. It's just like this one has called me several times and it's just a lady will answer and I'll say hello and she'll be like, Yeah, hello, this is Jessica. I'm just making sure you can hear me okay. And I'm like, something doesn't sound right about, I mean, who asks that? I'm just making sure you can hear me okay. Speaker 1: They're probably trying to spoof your voice so that they can call people you know with your voice because the AI voice recording or voice matching is now very real as well, right? So that could be a very real scam that's popping up. Speaker 2: That is a big issue for sure that you got to watch out for. Definitely. But to stay on the AI generated video ads, you guys have a tool as well. So is it similar to Amazon's tool where you're just entering your product information and then hitting generate and it creates a bunch of clips to choose from? Speaker 1: Yeah, so we're using text prompts combined with taking all of the images that our clients supplied so we can kind of build together a more comprehensive workbook for the videos that we're putting together. That's how we do it. We use like three or four different third party tools to kind of mash it all together and then we get one really good result at the end. Speaker 2: Okay. And is that available to anybody who wants to test it out or they have to sign up for you as a service? Speaker 1: Um, they would have to reach out to us directly. So you, you could just, uh, there's a contact button on our website. You can just go ahead and hit that and we can see if we can get you hooked up with some AI videos. One other thing that I do want to talk about is, um, so we also do, And we've been using AI to create Amazon posts as well, because it's still images. It's much easier than doing video. But we got an email from Amazon saying that they are planning on discontinuing Amazon posts, or they are going to be discontinuing Amazon posts. I can't remember the exact appreciation day. I think it's like July 30th. Speaker 2: Okay. Speaker 1: But what was more interesting inside that email, it really jumped out at me as they said, you know, we're not seeing the engagement within Amazon posts, so we're going to discontinue it. And this coincides with our redesign of the product detail page in search. So this was a very interesting email to come across and see because that's what jumped out to me. It was like, oh, I don't care about Amazon Post. Amazon Post doesn't really do anything. And we've known that for a long time. You might be able to pick up a little bit, but it's nothing that really moves the needle. But for Amazon to come out and say, hey, we're redesigning product detail page and redesigning search. Now that punched me in the face because since 2015, we'll say, Amazon has been the exact same, right? And for them to be coming out and saying, hey, we're redesigning product detail page, redesigning search, that's a monumental thing to say in a post talking about getting rid of Amazon posts. Like I didn't know that this, so it's interesting to know that there is a redesign coming and I wouldn't be surprised if Amazon's going all in on AI. Speaker 2: It definitely seems that way. I get the Amazon newsletter every week just to see. Occasionally there'll be something worth sending out to everybody in the newsletter, but usually it's just a bunch of promotional stuff. It is almost always filled with a lot of AI stuff, from AI tools to AI, the capacity that Amazon has on AWS and all this AI, AI, AI, AI in the warehouses and everything. So it's definitely what Amazon is going all in on. And I think most big companies are. Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. Speaker 2: Yeah, so if you're listening out there and you haven't dove into playing with grok, chat GPT, Amazon AI, things like that. Now's the time to do it. There's a lot of people out there that are saying AI is going to take everybody's job and maybe someday, but that's a long ways away. But what will happen is someone who really knows how to use AI will take your job if you don't learn how to do it. That is definitely going to be true in most Jobs that have anything to do with a computer or anything else like that. Even eventually offline stuff is gonna be big in that as well as robots keep advancing and stuff like that. Amazon is releasing warehouses that, or testing out warehouses that are completely run by robots. Like humanoid robots that are walking around building pallets and picking and packing and doing all that stuff. So that's all coming very quickly. And so you gotta learn how to use AI as a tool and really take advantage of it. Speaker 1: Yeah, 100%. That's the best skill you can learn right now is how to interact with those AIs. I've been testing them all. I am partial to Gemini. I like Gemini. And then I would say Grok is definitely up there too. I like Grok because it's, Maybe the filtering isn't as strong and so you can get a little bit more of a open answer, whereas some of these other ones, they are pretty closed off and won't touch on certain topics. Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. Grok is good in a lot of ways. It will answer anything. It doesn't matter how sensitive or crazy it is, the question that you're asking, it will answer it. Where I've definitely run into times where ChatGPT refused to do something. I think one time I asked it to create some kind of a photo with like Jesus on the cross and stuff like that. It wouldn't do it. Because it said it was a sensitive topic. Speaker 1: Religion, yeah. Speaker 2: So I jumped over to Grok and Grok made it for me, no problem. But yeah, it's definitely an interesting world that we live in for sure. But really good to know that what you mentioned there, three seconds and no sound. So keep that in mind. Any other key metrics that you guys have seen that people should be aware of? Speaker 1: Those would be the major two, four videos, right? We just want to have extremely strong hooks on the start of your video because we only have that three seconds, right? The way I like to think of it is like a social media doom scroll, right? We say, what's going to stop the scroll? And that's all we're looking for on a video ad. And if you can stop the scroll, then you have a successful ad. Speaker 2: Yeah, stopping the scroll for sure. It always amazes me like all over once in a while I'll get into like flipping through videos on whatever platform I'm on. And every once in a while, I'll like, I'll flip to a video and then I'll immediately flip like faster to the next one. And when I catch myself doing that, I always flip back and I look at it and try to figure out like, why did I skip that one so fast and try to figure out what was going on in my psychology that would make me like flip faster past that video for some reason. Speaker 1: It's incredible. I think the brain is just becoming inherently trained to kind of skip over content that it might think is an ad, right? Like, I'm a big, I'm a big Reddit guy, and I'm always scrolling Reddit. And I am so immune to the ads on Reddit, because they blend in into, you know, the, they have text ads, and then they have all the video ads, everything. And you know, you just become so dialed in to what that ad looks like. And I just subconsciously, subconsciously skip right past it. Speaker 2: Yep, yep, for sure. And one interesting thing I found is if you put your phone in low power mode, And so it starts, it suppresses video autoplay. And if you're flipping through and the video audio plays, it's always an ad. The ads will still autoplay even in low power mode. So then I know to flip by those right away. Speaker 1: That's a good tip. Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure. All right. So let's go ahead and jump on to the next article here, which I think is pretty cool as well. So this one, Amazon pricing controls may be anti-competitive, German regulators warn. So Germany's antitrust authority has warned that Amazon's pricing algorithms, which can demote or block listings deemed too high, may violate competition laws. The concern is that these price caps limit third-party sellers' ability to set their own prices and impact their visibility and buy box eligibility. The cartel office argues that since Amazon competes directly with sellers on its platform, influencing pricing is a conflict of interest. For Amazon sellers, this raises ongoing concerns about marketplace control and highlights the importance of staying informed on evolving global regulatory scrutiny. Now, this I like a lot. We've talked about this before and I apologize, the headlines cut off here. They talked about this a little bit in the US. It didn't really go anywhere in the US. It looks like it's starting to get traction in Europe, in Germany particularly, and I agree 100%. I think it's price fixing for Amazon to suppress listings that it thinks the price is too high because they look at other websites and they're like, oh, that website over there is selling it for $10 and you got it on Amazon for 15, we're gonna suppress your buy box. Which I think that is highly anti-competitive, price-fixing, and definitely should be illegal. Speaker 1: This has to be one of my biggest headaches on Amazon, honestly. Buy box suppression due to pricing changes is absolutely insane. The fact that a seller doesn't have full control over their price because Amazon's using the reference price, the list price, your last 30 day price. And if you raise your price too quickly, Amazon shuts down your listing. Like what happens when we're seeing, you know, if we go back to 165% tariffs and sellers need to increase their prices to try and maintain some margin, all of a sudden your listing is gone and suppressed. One of the strategies that I use on Amazon is when launching products. I have a discussion with my clients when we're going into the launch phase and I say, okay, let's build out a three month pricing plan for your product. So month one, we're going to have it, you know, and this is a common strategy, right? Like I've heard lots of other people talk about the strategy before where it's like, month one, we're going to give a very attractive offer and we're going to have a lower price because we want to incentivize reviews and generate as much sales and, you know, show Amazon that we came to play. Month two will increase our price depending upon our success. And then month three, you know, we want to be hitting our long term sales price and, you know, hopefully have over 50 reviews and we're into, you know, starting to move into mature phase of the product life cycle. And the amount of times That we experience a buy box suppression during the launch phase because we're crossing over either at the 30 day mark or the 60 day mark where we are increasing our price and Amazon saying, no, no, no, no. Like you cannot raise your price here. We're suspending your buy box. And then it totally screws up our launch, right? Like all this money that we like, we're giving away product for free. We're spending money on ads. And then all of a sudden Amazon saying, no, no, no, no. You moved it more than 15%. See you later, BuyBox. And then they'll put a nice little message there that says, we've identified this product as a higher price than usual. It's like, well, this product hasn't even been on Amazon long enough for you to understand the real pricing. Like, how can you make that decision? And so I 100% agree that this is, you know, price fixing. If you know, Amazon's the most competitive market in the world. And if you want to raise your price, then you should have that ability. And you know, Open market dynamics will say, if I raise my price and it's not competitive anymore, my sales should stop, right? And it's total freedom to be able to do that. But Amazon will look around and say, no, we see it on your website at this price. You have to have a lower price. Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's definitely not, it's definitely anti-competitive, I should say. I, You know, I get it a little bit where if this was the case, let's say you're selling at $20 and all of a sudden your price goes to $30 or $40. I could see Amazon saying, hey, your price seems to be, have gone way up. Did you do that on purpose? You know, yes or no, and then everything is all good, but they will literally fight you To the death, to not allow you to raise the price and not allow you to get your buy box back, which at that point is where they're crossing over into the line of, you know, who are you, Amazon, to set my pricing for my product? You should have no control over that, no say over that. I hope that something happens here. I don't know if it's gonna happen in the U.S., maybe it will. But Europe, I think it's more likely that something could happen here and that will flow over into the U.S. So I'm hoping that we see something more on this. And I do rather like that the German office for looking into this kind of stuff is called the cartel office. Speaker 1: I noticed that as well. Speaker 2: That's exactly what it feels like selling on Amazon sometimes. Amazon is the cartel. You know, you got to pay them for protection. Speaker 1: And it's one of those things where it's like right now everyone's kind of oblivious to it. And then once one country starts to call it out, there is an opportunity. Like if it gets picked up by Germany, I imagine it would spread to all of Europe and then it would go to UK and then it would probably come to Canada and then US would be last to adopt. Right. But I think that the fact that it's starting to be discussed And brought into the mainstream by the government, like the consumer protection laws. I don't know if it's consumer protection laws, but it would be like around the open market and price fixing and all those things. Right. So it's to me that Europe will pass it will most definitely pass it first. And then, you know, U.S. will be a slower adoption. But this is the right this is the right direction we need to go. Speaker 2: Yeah, and a lot of the times the argument from Amazon is like, oh, we're trying to keep the prices lower for people. So we're saving people money. And in reality, not necessarily or not really, because what ends up happening is that, okay, well, I want to sell the product for $30 on Amazon. So I guess I'll raise the price on my website to $30 instead of selling it for 20. Even though the profit margin on Amazon is 50% or 40% and my website is like 60%, now it's gonna be 80% on my website because you're not paying any kind of fees or anything like that over there. And that's what they're not taking into account. And so if you have this where you say, Amazon, you're not allowed to control prices, you can't suppress buy boxes if somebody goes too high, That is another incentive for them to keep their fees lower because they can't artificially try to control the prices as well. So it's another one of those mechanisms to have a little more free market control or a little free market for the fees and such to hopefully keep them a little lower. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: So we'll keep an eye on that and let you guys know if we see anything else on that, but I'm just happy that they're looking into it. The U.S. did last year, haven't really heard anything much more of it. I believe if I remember right, it's coming to court, I believe it might be in July, that the lawsuit over buy box suppression and things like that is coming in the U.S., so we'll see some more information on that perhaps next month. Alright, let's go ahead and jump on to the last story here. So, raising prices without losing sales. Tips for navigating elasticity on Amazon. Kind of flows right in from what we were just talking about. So Amazon sellers facing rising tariff costs must master price elasticity to protect the margins without driving away customers. Start by analyzing total costs and running controlled price tests to find your product's pricing sweet spot. Third-party sellers have more flexibility than one-piece sellers, allowing faster price adjustments and real-time elasticity tests during market shifts. Dynamic pricing tools like FeedVisor's AI can help sellers adapt quickly, maintain profitability, and avoid price points that collapse demand. And you mentioned, Neil, that you've been working with clients as well on increasing their pricing. So I'm curious to hear more about what you guys have been seeing. Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. So that I mean, pricing is one of the biggest things on Amazon, right? Like that's a lot of your offer. Customers that come to Amazon are very price centric. And, you know, that's something that they've just we've just been spoiled with over the last decade from what Bezos has created. What we do at PPC Ninja is we actually have a scraper. So we reach out to our clients and we say, hey, listen, who are the most important competitors to you? And they'll supply us with a list. We'll say, give us 10 ASINs, 20 ASINs, whatever. And we'll put them into our scraper. And what we do is we scrape their pricing every single day. And then on an app, we'll take a week over week average. So we're tracking their price. We'll take the seven day average and we'll track their price every single week. And so then we just automatically do that and we'll send it out to our clients every single week and say, hey, listen, your competitors, these are the price changes that they're doing. So we're very aware Are your competitor prices going up or down? It's a very easy digestible graph to say, hey, you know, we see a price increase here. We don't see a price increase here. We see a price decrease. And it's very easy. Like, it makes our life easier because when there are price fluctuations within your niche, if it's a niche leader, the niche goes up or the niche goes down, depending upon how the niche leader sets his pricing, right? They set the deal, so to speak. And paying attention to this pricing structure is very important. So what your competitors are doing. The other thing that's very, very important is I just had this conversation where one of my clients was talking about decreasing his price by $1. And I said, that can be a little bit of a trap because when we look at the ad data or our unit session percentage, so our organic conversion rate within Amazon, the price change of decreasing by $1 might not be enough to increase your conversion rate where you're going to see a net positive. And a perfect example of this is I had a client and he was running lightning deals all the time, all the time. And we couldn't get his tacos to drop. But, you know, we were looking at the data. And we found that he would drop his price by 20%, but his conversion rate would actually stay the exact same. So there was zero change on his conversion rate. So all he was doing was lowering his price and there was no actual benefit to it. And so what needs to be, how this needs to be set up and looked at is you need to set up very controlled tests where you're monitoring your PPC conversion rate versus your price. And if you do a price increase by say 50 cents a dollar, you might not see any change in your conversion rate. And as long as your conversion rate stays stable and your sales stay stable, It's an acceptable change, right? And, you know, $0.50, $0.30, you're typically not going to see any type of change there. But once you start getting to the, we call them the psychological numbers. So, you know, from $4.99 up to $5 or crossing over the $5 mark or from $39.99 crossing over to $41.99. Those are tough changes because there's the psychological barrier there from consumers. But if you're going from, say, 36 to 37, usually you can get away with that. But that's the way we go about doing it is we'll track PPC conversion rate and your unit session percentage. We'll monitor them both and we'll run a test for two weeks or something like that. We'll say, hey, listen, like your conversion rate went up, no change in your conversion rate or your conversion rate went down. This is not good for you or this is good for you. And then we've established a baseline to be like, yes, This new price can work for you and you just increased your margin by 10%, we'll say, or something like that, right? Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it's it's interesting how the pricing works for sure and the cycle odd psychology that people are looking at because you said the the one guy lowered his price by 20% and Did not see any increase in conversion Nothing, it stayed the exact same Yeah, very interesting. So we were we have a product that we were testing coupons on and And it's a higher priced product, about $90 is usually what it sells for. And so we did a test with a $5, $10, $15, $20, $25, and $30 coupons. And the $30 coupon and $25 and $20 coupons had almost the exact same conversion rate. So going from 20 to 30, Didn't see a very big jump in conversion rate, but then the drop off from 20 down to 15 and 10 was like immense on the conversion of the product when it dropped down. So you definitely want to test it and find out what is actually working and not just assume that lowering your product or lowering your price is going to increase sales and increasing your price is going to decrease sales because that's definitely not always the case. Speaker 1: Yeah, it's got to be like price and conversion rate are inversely proportional, right? So it's like you decrease your price, you need to see your conversion rate rise by the X amount that you offset your price or decrease your price by. Because if you hold your, so if you hold your conversion or your cost per click the same, And you decrease your price, then your ACOS is going to go up, right? And then if your PPC percentage sales say the same, sorry, I'm getting into the weeds here, but it's just going to increase your tacos if you don't see those two moving inversely, right? So price decrease needs to equal out in your conversion rate. Otherwise, you're just going to end up with higher tacos and decreased profitability. Speaker 2: Unless you're just trying to increase sales to get reviews and stuff like that, that's another game. But you want to make sure that actually lowering the price is increasing your sales because it may or may not. Another interesting psychological thing that I've heard in the past is like with multi-packs. Yeah, to if possible, try to put the price a multiple of the quantity. So if you're selling five of something and you want to list it at, you know, $49.98, You might be better off listing it at $50 even, because then people can divide 50 by 5 and get $10 each, rather than trying to do the math on $49.98 and figuring out, is it really cheaper than buying the one? Because people don't like to do math. So I've heard that selling multi-packs like that at a round number that's divisible by the number in the pack, And I think the final thing that I'll talk about with price is also just the perceived value, right? Speaker 1: Like I'll use baby as an example, where if you are priced cheaper in the market, that can be working against you because parents don't want to buy cheap stuff for their newborn baby. Right. They are looking for premium products. And so making sure that you're aware of the pricing structure within your niche is also another one, because like in the home and garden section, I'll say there's lots of different price points where you can get different products. They'll range from fifteen dollars all the way up to one hundred dollars for the exact same product. And people will look at the price and be like, OK, this is a determination of the quality. That's how I look. That's how I look at it when I'm shopping on Amazon. OK, well, what kind of value am I getting for this price point? Right. Because there are always multiple price points. And I'm always looking and honestly, I'm always looking for, you know, middle of the road to upper band. Products because I don't want to just keep buying landfill stuff, essentially. Speaker 2: Yeah. And that's something you learn over time. You know, when you're younger, you don't really think about that. You're like, Oh, I'll buy the $10 one instead of the $20 one. But then as you get older, the times that you had to buy that $10 one three, four, five times, and it keeps breaking, you should have just bought the $20 one and you probably still have it and still be working. So it's definitely something that you think about more as you get older, buying the quality stuff once and hopefully being able to use it a lot longer than the cheap landfill stuff, as you said. Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. I was just looking at buying easy ups, like those pop up tent shelters that you can put anywhere for shade. And you know, they went from $100 all the way up to $500. And then, you know, I was reading the reviews on the $100 ones. And everyone was like, this thing will go straight to the landfill, like don't even waste your time. And it's like, well, that's your pricing reflects that, right? Speaker 2: Yep. Yeah, it's something important to remember. There's always going to be a huge market for the cheap junk out there. But especially as a US based seller or brand, You really want to aim at the customers who are looking to get the better product, the better experience, and are willing to pay a little bit more for that. Because we're never going to out-compete the Chinese on price. But we can out-compete them on customer service and quality very likely. Speaker 1: Yeah, I have a, I'll tell you a funny story. I have one client, he's a Chinese aggregator. So he operates out of China, he's out of Shanghai. And he sells in a specific niche. And he is friends with the factory that he purchases from. And they're both selling the exact same product. And they both agreed to sell to fix their product on Amazon at the exact same price, so that they can both make I could margin and it's low enough where everyone else is kind of getting screwed because they have a lower price, right? So it's like these guys are fixing a price over in China and working together, whereas on Amazon, it's everyone for themselves, right? So there is those kinds of interesting pricing things happening in the background that we just might not be aware of as well. Speaker 2: Yep, for sure. But as far, just to wrap it up, for raising your prices due to tariffs, you're going to want to go at a slow pace. Yes. Every product is different. I increased the product that I spoke about at the beginning of the show from $320 to $450 and we didn't get suppressed. No issues there. None of their products got suppressed. That was the biggest price jump, but they all had some kind of price jump. And we didn't have any problems. And this is in the sports and outdoors category. So there's gonna be certain products, categories that Amazon's gonna be more strict than others. So you'll just have to play with it and kind of increase it up slowly to number one, make sure you don't get suppressed, your buy box suppressed. But also to find out where your sales drop off. Speaker 1: And so if you are looking at doing price increases and you don't want to use the software, if you have a stable PPC conversion rate, your unit session percentage should be stable as well. Just start tracking those over a period of time and give yourself two weeks to a month or something like that. Don't just change your price one day, your sales drop and then change it back right away. Hold steady and make sure that you are using a long enough data set to make a good informed decision. Speaker 2: Yeah, you got to give time for people's mindset to adjust to the new normal. You know, if you think about it in terms of real estate, right, the the price, or the interest rate, I should say went from like 2%. And now we're at 7%, give or take. And for a while, when that interest rate went up, no one was buying houses like the housing market. Just dropped off a cliff and nobody was selling, nobody was buying. And then slowly over time, people started adjusting to the new normal and people are buying again now. I know this summer sales of houses have relatively picked up depending on the market that you're in. Some are still suppressed, but people are buying a lot more than they were when the interest rate first went up because they've adjusted in their mind to the new normal. So if you can bring them along with your pricing and come up, And you also got to look at your competitors and make sure you're not outpricing the market at that time as well. That plays into it. Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a very interesting point. Like I think about April versus May in terms of our sales for our clients on Amazon. And April sales beginning of the month were crazy. They were so much because everyone was trying to buy stuff before the tariffs. And then after April, they really slowed down. And towards the end of April, we noticed a pretty significant slowdown. As soon as May kind of like mid first after the first week of May, buyer behavior turned to normal, right? We saw this happen like and that probably coincides with President Trump putting a pause on the big tariffs and sending tariffs back down to that 30% much more reasonable rate and consumer buyer behavior just snapped right back to normal. Speaker 2: There's a lot of psychology, right? I've been saying psychology a lot today, but it plays so much into it in how people look at the market and what they're going to buy, when they're going to buy, and any little thing can push them one way or another. So just be careful with your pricing and test it. You got to test everything to make sure you're actually moving in the right direction. All right, cool. Well, that wraps up the show. We're over the top of the hour. So Neil, I appreciate you coming on the show. Speaker 1: Always a pleasure. Thanks for having me again, Todd. Speaker 2: Yeah, always great having you. And everybody out there watching, I appreciate you watching the show as well. We do this every Friday. I'm back on it, so we'll be doing it every Friday again at 1 p.m. Eastern time. So until next week, everybody have an awesome weekend, an awesome week, and I hope your sales are going in this direction. Have a good one, 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.