EP #356] [ENG] - New Amazon Changes & How to embrace AI - Oana Padurariu

EP #356] [ENG] - New Amazon Changes & How to embrace AI - Oana Padurariu Unknown Speaker: Welcome to The Ecommerce Lab By Ecomcy. This is the place for everything related to Amazon private label and e-commerce. Learn exactly what you need to start or scale your business. Get insights from the top industry experts who will discuss the latest trends and best practices in the world of Amazon. From choosing products and sourcing from a supplier to setting up your Amazon account and marketing your business, you will hear it here. Let's get started. Here is your host, Vincenzo Toscano. Speaker 1: Hello guys, welcome to another episode of the eCommerce Lab by eCommerce, the place of air related to Amazon FBA, pro level and eCommerce. My name is Vincenzo Toscano, founder and CEO of eCommerce and today we bring you another special guest, actually a very close friend of mine, Oana. Which is, you know, one of the top persons in the space when it comes to, you know, really helping brands scale. In fact, she's one of the official Amazon educators, just like myself. And besides that, she's the founder of Stardust and also RightClick, where they specialize in supporting Amazon scale forward, also using AI and all the latest technologies and strategies that have really been, you know, impactful, especially entering into 2026. And today's conversation actually is going to be around that, like everything in terms of what is working, what is not working, what are some of the trends, like what happened actually two or three weeks ago that we went with Italy, we met with the Amazon team there, like really getting from inside Amazon, you know, what is going to be the future in terms of Amazon. So the goal is just give you as much value as possible. And of course, making sure that, you know, you can get the best kind of tips into, you know, Remaining of Q4 and into 2026. So Oana, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for being here. How are you doing? Speaker 2: Thank you for having me, Vincenzo. Super excited to finally be here. We meet at events, we meet everywhere, we're friends, and finally I get to be on the podcast. So thank you so much for that. I'm super excited to be able to share the knowledge and everything we have with your amazing audience and kind of prep them with what's around the corner because I feel that lately, we were talking in Milan at the event with the Amazon educators, They just dropped a lot of changes on us, right? So selling on Amazon, it's just, I don't know, it feels like it's becoming more and more complicated and sellers will need to know like what's expecting them specifically with the changes in advertising and when that rolls out with the prompts and they will need to pay for it. Speaker 1: Yeah, I agree. I think, Milan, they dropped so many things that I think it would be very interesting for people to be aware of, like things that had to do with, for example, AI around the content. Amazon has been very pushy in terms of how you can leverage the AI to do your images, your video. Multicountry advertising was a big thing that they mentioned. They were also briefly mentioned in terms of what is going to happen with Rufus and all that. So I guess Maybe let's start with the content side of things because that's something even that's a thing that a lot of people has been investing a lot of time because let's be honest, content for a lot of brands is where they invest the most time and resources. And now having access to these tools that Amazon is showing now potentially can help lower the barrier for some brands to finally not have anymore an excuse to say, oh, my images are not good enough because I don't have the money. Like now with these tools, you have no excuse. So what was your take on some of the changes that Amazon is showing now when it comes to that? Speaker 2: I actually had to kind of like congratulate them because when they first rolled out the image generator, they were so bad. Like literally they were, they, you know, they worked for very few couple of things. And finally, Amazon understood how important it is to support sellers in generating images, like you said. Think about brands that have limited resources or they're just starting out. They don't have the budget nor maybe the capacity to create, you know, professional photo shoots because that costs a lot of money. First of all, it requires a lot of time because you would need to plan it, take the photo shoot, then take those media assets, edit them, and it would take, what, maybe a couple of months until they're actually on Amazon, right? So it requires a lot of time. Now, of course, we have AI tools and people would need to subscribe. We need to learn an additional tool. We need to upload images. And believe me, I've been on that a lot in the last year. Like I said, so many tools. It's like what really works. Speaker 1: There's a new one every single day. Speaker 2: It's a new one every single day. It's a new subscription that you need to look at it. And not all of them are very good. That's also the downside of it, right? But when it comes to speed, definitely it does help because you are able, so think about it like that, right? We are now just a couple of days before Christmas. Making sure that you edit and utilize, you know, images that are Christmas-like or you would use AI, right? So up until now, that was available because Amazon was a no-go. Well, that changed Because they finally invested more into that and they did a very good job, I need to say. Especially when it comes to the AI studio that they launched, that separate platform in which as a seller that doesn't have experience, like for example, a seller that doesn't have experience in Utilizing the AI tools and generating, you are guided into that. And I think for me, that was kind of like the biggest aha moment is like, OK, so at this point, yes, we are teaching people how to use these tools and we are giving them the ability to have a very, I would say, you know, very decent tool finally to to to create images and videos. But at the same time, it's also guiding them. Right, which was the biggest thing in terms like how do you educate to utilize with the AI studio that Amazon released? You don't only get, you know, great content, but you have the ability to edit everything and you are also guided at every step in terms of what you would need to do. So with the fact that specifically now they released the sponsor products videos, right? Speaker 1: Which is a big thing because I think just to touch on the video side of things, like a lot of the reason why people do sponsor brands is because they don't have either the time or the budget to go out there and now make a video. But now it's like within a few clicks, you have something that again, of course, it's not going to be 100% the best video, but it's better than nothing. And now you can essentially test a placement within advertising that before you wouldn't test because you wouldn't even have a video. So it removes that barrier, you know. Speaker 2: If you want the best video, like you said, again, it will require resources and time, right? So what do you do in the meantime? You end up with nothing. Well, now we have the ability to generate something that is focused on a specific feature, right? Because that's what they recommend. And you upload that to a campaign and it starts literally rolling. So you are really focused. And at that point you connect, you know, the features that Are, um, I would say represented in, in the campaigns by the keywords with the actual videos. What will that result in? It's so new that we don't have yet like all the data behind, okay. Oh my God, how this is exactly working because they just released it. But remember when they, when they first released the videos, the sponsor bands and the ability to run videos, they were the most engaging ad type, right? So I assume that that's going to happen at the moment. So those of us who, you know, focus on making sure that we do have those videos, we are adding them to our campaigns. And at the same time, we will be able to continue to improve the quality of the videos that we generate, but at least start somewhere because Amazon is giving us the tools to do that. We'll be ahead in terms of how it shows on the SERP when they start, you know, pushing them more. Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I agree. I think something that people have to take out of this is that these tools are there that they are not meant to Be a full replacement of your graphic design, your branding expert is more essentially for you to be able to deploy actions faster. Like as I mentioned now, an advertising that will take you three months because you want to have the perfect video. Like now at least you can get the ball rolling, gather some data, see which keywords are starting to get some traction, which are not. And then once you have the real video, you can double down on what to some extent you have been split testing for a while. And the same with the studio and the images. I think people also is having the misconception, the thing that AI either has to fully replace everything or otherwise I just keep it manual. It has to be hybrid. Like AI is meant to get you 60, 70% done, which is a lot of time already saved on budget. And that extra 30% then is that when you bring the person to do the final touches, the extra element or that extra text on the video or whatever, but at least it's doing the heavy lifting for you, you know? Speaker 2: It's all about the speed and what speed do you want to move at and that will ultimately be a game changer in terms of your strategy because if you test more videos, for example, and you're able to produce more videos and test and see what's working with the new types of video ads, you will have way more data rather than, as I said, waiting three months, having one video and then you roll out one video and what if it doesn't work? Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: By the time people are already engaged on the SERP with This is a simple video in which they get more clicks, so it improves the click-through rate because at the end of the day, so my guess is, why did they add and combine this sponsored products with the videos? Because they, I don't know, like if you look on the SERP, they flooded, literally. I actually plan to calculate today what percentage of placements on desktop, first page on Amazon, is sponsored versus organic. Speaker 1: It's like the last time I checked it's around 70%, like 70% with Tocon. Speaker 2: Right. So out of all these 70%, right, where you are trying to push display, sponsor brands, videos, and you know, you have a lot of sponsor products. Think how, what a big differentiation would be if You know, out of all of your competitors, you start rolling with the video, even if it's a simple one, right? Rolling on page one. And you will be kind of like just in the beginning showing up with that. You'll click through it, we'll skyrocket, right? That's the main driver, like that's the whole main purpose of creating this video so we can attract more traffic and bring them to the page. I like the consideration part. And when they get on the page, of course, it will be a blend of everything else in order to convince them to... To actually buy the product, right, and convert. But yeah, with the videos, I'm actually very excited with this change. Like when they announced it, I was like, okay, that's going to be a big game changer. Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. I actually think it's also part of a bigger agenda. What I mean by that is like, I think the reason why they want to make content so easy for everybody to access is because the way Amazon shifted into being a keyword search platform to being an intent search platform with rubrics and everything, they want to make sure that listings are as accurate as possible when it comes to visuals and the content, because that's the only thing where the engine It's heading, it's essentially trying to understand why you put it on an image, why you put it on a video. To then Amazon be as accurate as possible when it's making this recommendation with the AI assistant kind of ecosystem. So I think it's in their interest as well that you essentially now have a lower barrier of entry to have all the images essentially being displayed, as many videos as possible because the more intel you give to them in what is the right representation visually For your product, the more accurate they can be in terms of connecting with the right consumer. Speaker 2: Exactly, exactly, because it really comes down to how fast it can connect the right products to the right shoppers. And it's interesting that you're saying that, you know, they are pushing more and more towards relevancy and making sure that you update your content. So it is relevant and it's representing 100% correct information. And I think that was also, I like the idea because I think this is also part of how they introduce sponsored products. Which again, it was announced, I think it was Ali, the name of the project manager that explained it to us and we were like, everybody was like mind blown. Those of you listening, you might have seen, you know, there's prompts showing up in none of my accounts. I haven't seen data yet just because they are still collecting, but they're there and soon we will be able to have that. I know also soon we will most likely be able to download the reports from the prompts, which again, I'm extremely curious to see. But what are those prompts? So basically we are having a new It's not the same Rufus, even though on the user side it says Rufus, they explain that it's not the same system. So it's not Rufus that we know on the search and how it interacts with customers, but it's trained on your brand and on the data that it has on the product and all the listings. Correlating with what you just said, Vincenzo, right? Now you have a different system looking at your content And not only replying back to questions, but these will be connected to your advertising. Now, in the beginning, the clicks that you get on those sponsored questions are free, but they will not be forever. So Amazon is allowing us and giving us the opportunity, okay, this is the data, this is what's being understood from your listing, right? These are the questions that are being generated and we're connecting that to ads. So if you don't fix that in time, whatever is a bad answer and you get clicks and you do not convert from that, it will cost you in advertising money. Speaker 1: Yeah, and that's why they're also being so pushy with Amazon Marketing Cloud. I think Amazon Marketing Cloud, it was kind of the tip of the iceberg where it's coming in the sense that they know that the way essentially they're going to keep growing as a platform is they want to be the place where they understand the customer the best. Five, 10 years from now, you're going to go to Amazon because you know, Amazon has so much data about you. They're going to recommend always a product that's going to be the right fit for you. And then you're going to have that trust on the platform, right? And Amazon Marketing Cloud is essentially I'm giving that to advertisers now rather than you randomly advertising on what keywords you think are the right fit. Now you can have this extra layer, which is a filter the other day, that you can say only if the intention is there based on X behavior of engagement bought in the past compared to all the things you can do with Amazon Marketing Cloud, only show my ads. That's essentially telling you that that's where Amazon wants you to essentially double down. It's really understanding your consumer and reverse engineering that into some kind of strategy when it comes to advertising. Speaker 2: And it gives you more data around why ads is important. We always knew that advertising on Amazon is vital. It's important, it has been, it's been a tool. But it kind of like, despite the fact that, okay, they gave us more ad types, more placements, the way that we were creating advertising still felt old. Speaker 1: Right? Speaker 2: If you think about it, right? We still go after keywords. We still go after products. We still go after categories. Yes, we can do retargeting. And that was like a big thing when they released Sponsored Display. And we were able to go after in retargeting. But it kind of like stayed there in terms of the technology and how we can advertise. With the AMC now, it's opening up a whole new world in terms of creating custom audiences. And believe me, I'm spending my whole time on understanding how to write queries, how to get more data, because it has a different approach. Yeah. Changing on how you go after your audience, because just like you said, it's not anymore only about keywords. It's about intent. So therefore, even advertising is shifting. And instead of me, OK, I'm just focusing on ranking on this keyword is OK, I'm ranking on this keyword. But what other audiences can I go after? What other strategies can I create or what other type of data? Actually, it was recently that I was looking at, you know, I'm working with a very big consumers brand in the supplements and we were trying to understand, okay, but how much does my new to brand actually cost me from the advertising that I'm rolling, right? And with two scripts and two queries, I was able to pull that information from AMC, something that up until now was not possible, right? You do have great tools out there that give you like the new to brand, but you never knew exactly what costs you. To get the new to brand and you are able to pull that data from AMC. Again, I feel that this is just the beginning and it is, I will be honest with you, I feel that it's such, it's so complicated because we have access to all this data. You just need to make sure that you kind of like organize on how to pull it, but it does take our work to a different level as advertisers. Speaker 1: I think it's good that you mentioned, I mean, first of all, the ability that Amazon is giving in terms of access to data, but you also double down on the technicality associated with that, because I think we're having these conversations many times, sometimes with people, even myself personally, that say now sellers are going to have access to Amazon Marketing Cloud, DHP to some extent. It's been easier to access, but the reality of the thing is that having access doesn't mean that it's going to be impactful enough to your business if you don't know what you're doing. I think actually having all these tools at your disposal is going to make sales struggle more because that to some extent is going to create that illusion that it's easier than before. Yeah, I'm going to try this, this and that. Speaker 2: No! Speaker 1: So it's actually a, it's a good thing in the sense that for those that actually invest the time and create teams in-house or hire a professional and really figure out what is essentially this technology going to do. Their data and how they can scale it forward. Those are really going to be the ones that are going to be able to keep scaling on Amazon because I think a lot of sellers in the past, and you know this better than me, were succeeding because they were early to market, not because they were necessarily smart, not because they had the best product. But I feel now this to some extent is a reset button. In the sense that now that you have Amazon Marketing Cloud, now that you have a essentially the Rufus, essentially not always recommend now the number one organic ranking, but now the most relevant product. And all these things for new sellers or sellers that have just been there one, two years, now finally going to have a second chance. Essentially, to be able to scale into Amazon again. I feel it's 2014-15 again, but from the perspective that if you put the work and the effort, now you have a chance, whereas before it was a monopoly because people had organic ranking. That's it. They were always the winners. There's nothing you could do. But now, the systems allow you to penetrate this competition. Speaker 2: True. But at the same time, it's also more difficult if you're just starting. Because it's not as, you know, it was 2017, 2015. Click and play. You put a product out there, it's like, oh my god, it just made a million dollars. I have no idea how, you know. Speaker 1: And it was a mistake. Speaker 2: It was a mistake. Speaker 1: One million mistake. Thank you. Speaker 2: You don't get to do that anymore. You need expertise. You need people that help you with that because you cannot, as I said, you cannot do this alone without a team. You cannot do this without help from agencies, from advisors, from people who are in this day to day, right? And you really need, like you said, time, a lot to invest. If you know exactly what you're looking for, so for example, for me, I knew exactly what I was looking for. I spent a good amount of days just making sure that I found the queries in order to do that because I needed an answer. It's easier to respond to specific questions that you have, which you were not able to do until now, right? So it's like if you had specific questions around, okay, there's a gap in my KPIs or even more, how can I plan this even better? Well, with AMC now, you have the ability to pull that data and respond to your questions and help you with that. But it's harder from a planning standpoint. Speaker 1: Yeah, 100%. Which I guess brings me into my next question, which is with everything that's happening, I mean, we already talked about the content, we're talking about advertising, and you know, you're very vocal on everything that happens around AI, but like, what is your take on Some of the comments we're seeing out there that AI essentially is gonna automate a lot of these things because I see a lot of people, and I go to a lot of events here and there, they're already falling into this kind of mindset that they think they can be a perfect AI, that they're gonna click a button, they're gonna go to the beach and MCPs and everything. I mean, I believe in it. We use them. Don't get me wrong. But do you see we're gonna reach a place with MCPs and agents and everything? You're gonna go pretty much to the beach and your business is going to be automated. Do you believe that's going to happen? Speaker 2: No. Let me ask you this. Remember when the PPC tool started to come up on the market, right? Up until then we were just Optimizing manually, advertising, you know, we were doing our own thing and all of a sudden it's like, oh my God, there are those tools coming up and nobody will ever have a job in advertising anymore. It's like we all need to find something else to do because advertising on Amazon will be handled by a tool where, you know, sellers will just push a button and everything will be perfect. That didn't happen. Unknown Speaker: Right? Speaker 2: It might replace some people like the lowest level, right? That they make maybe repetitive things. Speaker 1: The very basic, the very basic. Speaker 2: The very basics, right? And most likely they are already being replaced at that level, right? All across the industry. But it will never fully come to a place where it's like it's just one button and you don't think about it and that's it. I think we are very, very far away from that type of intelligence where it takes all the pieces and puts them together and does and replace a whole team. Speaker 1: I agree because I mean a very quick example is maybe the example you just gave me around YouTube brand metrics and everything like for example most of the PPC automation so agents we're seeing out there, most of the decision making comes from a numerical point of view which is just you have to make decisions based on CPC, conversion, brand analytics, all of that, right? But we all know sometimes a PPC doesn't always have to have an analytical side. It has sometimes a psychological side, which is sometimes you decide to lose money on this keyword. You know, all the KPIs are red, but you know, essentially that's a way for you to gateway people into your brand, halo effect, and then end up buying another product, upset. And that's something that I feel all these tools don't do. They only focus on, oh, A, because that could lower the bid, negate it, and that's it. But what about the advertising as a whole concept, right? And that goes down to what you're saying. You have to have this level of expertise that connect into everything, which I think some options out there are getting to some extent more hybrid when it comes to that, but you always need the expert that needs to feel the machine. Like the machine will never be able to run automatic without your input. Speaker 2: And now the importance of expertise is more important than ever. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: Because just like you said, it's not like just getting somebody who knows the basics and you know in advertising and it's going to the bid optimization based on my cost increase or decrease or add negatives. It's not that anymore. It doesn't work like that. So you need to make sure that your content aligns. You look at what Drupal replies back. You will need to analyze the prompts and the responses that come back to that. Update the content back on that, turn on advertising again. So if it was hard up until now, it will just get harder. Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Awesome. So I think to start coming to a closure, what is your latest take on maybe advice you want to share in terms of everything we discussed so far? Speaker 2: I'm sorry, in terms of? Speaker 1: Latest like tip or advice or prediction, like last piece of wisdom you can share with us. Speaker 2: Make sure that you start looking into the ability of pulling information from AMC and how you can leverage that to plan your 2026 because Big changes around the corner. We know Amazon invested and allocated even more budget into improving all the systems and investing even more in AI. So I don't think that this is kind of like that's it. And now we will roll with this for a couple of years. I think that new changes are about to come like in 2026. And you just need to make sure that you step up to pace with that. And as always, I don't know, it's like make sure that you double check your sources when you try to learn something about Amazon because of course everybody has their opinions out there but try to verify that and make sure that you take everything with a grain of salt and then test it on your own product because What I always say, there's no strategy that one shoe fits them all and it will guarantee you incredible results out there. So who's ever selling those hick hacks and you know, incredible magic tricks is like, Pay attention to that. Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. There's a lot of shiny objects that people have to be careful about. And especially now with AI, everything seems like a wonder, you know, the new wonder that's going to change your business overnight. A lot of it is really not the case. So very important. Speaker 2: Yes, exactly. Speaker 1: So tell me how people can find your work with you. Speaker 2: My go-to place is LinkedIn. That's where I kind of like share whatever I find with the community and that's where you will find me. So if you ever want to ask questions or geek out or even need help with strategies, that's what actually we do at RightClick with consulting. Reach out to me and I will be more than happy to help you out. Speaker 1: Awesome. I love that. So thank you, Oana. It's been a pleasure and hopefully see you soon on another Amazon return. Yeah. Absolutely. Let's make sure it doesn't take another three years to make another podcast. Speaker 2: It should not. It should not. Speaker 1: Take care. Speaker 2: Thank you, everyone. Bye. Unknown Speaker: Thanks for listening to The Ecommerce Lab By Ecomcy. Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss an episode. While you are at it, we would appreciate it if you could leave an honest rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. 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