Episode Title: Why You Get More Customer Reviews

This This is the Billiondollar Sellers podcast, your go-to source for cutting edge strategies and success stories from the world of Amazon and e-commerce. Buckle up and get ready to take your Amazon business to new heights. Don't forget to subscribe to the Billiondoll Sellers Newsletter. Welcome your host. Welcome your host, Kevin King. >> Hey everyone, welcome to the Billiondollar Sellers podcast. I'm Kevin King and today is Monday, March 16th, 2026. We've got a packed one today. We're talking about how Claw AI can basically run your Amazon reporting on autopilot while you sleep. Why reviews just became way more important thanks to AI shopping engines, Amazon opening up shop direct to product feeds, which is a big deal, and Walmart and Amazon taking completely opposite bets on Agent AI. So, let's get into it. But first, here's your Stump Bezos question. And no googling on this one. What percentage of traffic on the US Amazon website is Spanish speakaking? Think about that and I'll give you the answer at the end of the show. All right, so let's kick things off with something that honestly kind of blew my mind when I first saw it. This comes from Mansour Naui. He's a Dream 100 member inside the Billiondoll Sellers Club. And he posted something recently that I think every seller needs to hear. So here's the thing. Most people, and I'm guilty of this too, they use AI like it's a fancy search bar. You type in a question, you an answer, you close the tab, done. Man source says that this is maybe 10% of what's actually possible right now. And I think he's right. So, he's been using Claude's co-work feature. If you haven't messed with this yet, co-work can access your local folders, create files, organize stuff, run scripts. It's basically like having an assistant sitting at your computer doing the boring stuff for you. And that's cool. But that's not even the game changer. The real game changer, scheduling. Co-work just added the ability to schedule tasks with skills attached. So think about what that means. You don't have to go to Claude anymore. Claude is coming to you. Let me give you a couple real examples of what Mansour is doing with this. He connected his Amazon seller API and now every Monday morning, Claude automatically pulls last week's data, builds him a full briefing, sales, inventory, eye performance, and not just a basic dashboard with numbers. It's a dashboard with AI insights layered on top telling him what changed and why. And if you don't have an API set up, no problem. He schedules his Amazon search term report to auto send to Gmail. Then Claude checks Gmail as schedule, grabs a report, runs a custom search term analysis on it. All of that happens while he's asleep. He literally wakes up and the report is sitting there. The insights are already done. That's pretty wild. And think about what this unlocks for your business. The data source can be anything. An API, a file sitting in a folder, an email attachment. And the output can be anything. a weekly brief, a search term report, dashboard, a PPC optimization report, a competitive analysis, whatever you need. And the trigger isn't you sitting down and asking it. It's a schedule. It just runs. This is the shift from using AI as a tool to using AI as an operations layer. And honestly, we're still super early on this stuff. If you want to see this in action, there's a great YouTube video from Michelle showing exactly how it works for sellers. We'll drop a link in the show notes. All right, here's a quick interesting stat for you. Shipping container rates are climbing again on some major routes. So, if you're sourcing internationally, keep a close eye on your freight costs. Those margins can vanish real quick when container rates start spiking. Now, let's talk about reviews because honestly, this one's a wakeup call for a lot of sellers. According to Stackline, Chad GPT users alone are making more than 84 million shopping queries per week. Just let that number sink in for a second. And the brands that keep showing up in those AI power recommendations, they tend to have one thing in common, a deep rich well of customer reviews. So DTC brands across all kinds of categories are getting really aggressive now about collecting reviews. And it's specifically because engines like Chat GPT and Perplexity are using those reviews to decide which products to recommend. I mean, Fire Clay Tile CEO flat out says reviews are quote 1 million% driving their AI visibility. That's a direct quote. And then there's Paco, the dog food brand. They're offering customers 20 bucks off after their third order in exchange for a review. Something they never would have even considered doing two years ago. And the timing matters here, too. Paco doesn't just blast you with a review request right after you buy. They wait 2 weeks for one-time orders and three full reorder cycles for subscriptions. That way, the customer actually has something real to talk about. And here's the other piece of this, where the reviews live matters just as much. AI engines are increasingly pulling from public forums like Reddit, Yelp, and Google, not just what's on your site. So, smart brands are pushing customers to leave reviews in multiple places to increase their odds of getting surfaced by AI. Now, here's where it gets really interesting for Amazon sellers. Amazon has quietly blocked OpenAI's bots from crawling Amazon content, including reviews. That's a huge deal. So, think about what that means. If AI shopping assistants can't even see your Amazon reviews, you need those reviews living somewhere else, somewhere the large language models can actually reach your website, Reddit threads, Google business, niche forums, basically anywhere these models are crawling, the brands that are winning right now and AI powered discovery, they're the ones treating reviews as a multiplatform asset, not just a number on their Amazon listing. All right, let's get into something big. And I mean big. Amazon just made it a whole lot easier for outside merchants to get their products in front of Amazon shoppers through Shop Direct. That's their AI powered feature that surfaces non-Amazon inventory right in search results. The big news here is merchants can now sync their catalogs through third party feed providers like Fedonomic, Salsify, and CED Commerce instead of just hoping Amazon's crawlers find their stuff. And a self-service portal is coming soon, too. And the numbers are getting real. Shop Direct now has over 100 million products from more than 400,000 merchants and tens of millions of those are eligible for something called buy for me. That's where Amazon's AI agent goes to the merchant site and completes the purchase for you using your store payment and address. You never leave Amazon. So why should Amazon sellers care about this? Well, the bigger play here is what one analyst is calling ultra hybrid mode. Amazon's VP of core shopping, Amanda Door, basically confirmed she sees a future where brands split their inventory across 1 P, 3P, and Shop Direct, depending on the product. Let me paint you a picture. Say you sell premium kitchen knives. Your bestselling 8in chef's knife that goes in 1 P cuz Amazon wants to price it aggressively and move volume. Your specialty knives, sharpeners, cutting boards, those go through 3P so you control the listings and the margins. But then you've also got a custom engraving service and a limited edition collaboration knife that's exclusive to your Shopify store. Up until now, those were completely invisible to Amazon's 300 plus million shoppers. Now you send that inventory through a shop direct feed and when someone searches for custom engraved chef knife on Amazon, boom, your product shows up. They can click through to your site or let Amazon's AI buy it for them. So, the result is 100% of your catalog visible to Amazon's massive audience without extra FBA costs or restrictions on those exclusive items. That's pretty powerful. Now, Amazon isn't doing this out of the goodness of their hearts. They're plugging selection gaps before ChatGpt, Gemini, and Perplexity get their agentic shopping acts together. When asked about monetization, Door said they're focused on having quote knowledge of all of the world's selection first, which, you know, actually means lock in the catalog now. I'll figure out the toll booth later. Classic Amazon. For threepiece sellers, keep your eyes on this. More outside inventory and search results means more competition for eyeballs. But flip side, if you got a DTC site with products you're not selling on Amazon, Shop Direct could be a really low friction way to get that inventory discovered. Holiday 2026 is going to be the real test of whether this reshapes how people find and buy stuff. All right. Want to reach page one on Amazon just by sending free products to micro influencers? Stack Influence lets you automate micro influencer product seeing at scale. We're talking thousands of collabs per month to boost your Amazon ranking, generate UGC, and grow your recurring revenue. Big brands like Magic Spoon, Unilever, and Mary Ruth are ganks have used it to hit number one page positioning and increase their monthly revenue as high as 13 times in as little as 2 months. You pay influencers of products only. No negotiating fees. You get full rights to the UGC and the whole thing runs on autopilot. Luan used Stack Influence after Shark Tank and pulled a 13 time boost on ROI, scaling micro influencers on Amazon. Sign up this month and he get 10% off. Links in the show notes. Also, quick reminder, Ecom Mastery AI featuring Billiondollar Seller Summit is coming to Nashville April 8th through 12th. 41 speakers, incredible lineup, and 60% of the room is doing a million plus in sales. And if you join the billiondollar sellers club for just 9 bucks, you get a free gold ticket. Links in the show notes. All right, now let's talk strategy. Amazon versus Walmart. Two completely different bets on how Agentic AI shopping is going to play out. This comes from Scott Wingo. He's a longtime e-commerce analyst. He was also a virtual speaker at Billiondoll Seller Summit 13. So Walmart's play is basically come on in. They've thrown open the doors to AI crawlers, Aentic commerce protocols, all of it. They're welcoming outside AI shopping agents to grab their inventory and bring in new customers. The bet is that shoppers coming through Chat GPT, Perplexity, and other AI engines are incremental customers. People Walmart wouldn't have gotten otherwise. Maybe even Amazon's customers. And Walmart's 3P merchants come along for the ride. Extra exposure, extra sales, zero extra effort on their part. Amazon's play, the total opposite. The doors are shut. Amazon sees its inventory and product data is the crown jewels. They've completely locked down access from outside AI agents and crawlers. Well, as Wingo points out, that creates a real problem. If Chad GPT and these other engines can pull inventory from every brand and every retailer except Amazon, over time, their product selection could actually exceed what Amazon offers. And that's an existential threat for a company that built its whole identity on being the everything store. And that's exactly why Shop Direct exists. Amazon figures if they can combine all our 1P and 3P inventory, plus pull in outside merchant cataloges, then nobody can beat them on selection. They keep the wallet garden intact while still matching or beating the AI shopping engines on product coverage. It's actually pretty clever when you think about it. So, two completely different strategies. Walmart saying come and get it. While Amazon is saying nobody gets our data, but we'll go get everyone else's by holiday 2027. We're going to know which bet actually pays off. I can't wait to see how this plays out. All right, before we wrap up, here are a few more hot picks for you. Amazon is shifting Prime Day to June from July this year. So, plan accordingly. Amazon is now officially Europe's largest retailer. Let that one sink in. Walmart now lets you incentivize reviews with product samples, which ties right back into what we were just talking about. And smaller influencers and creators are often getting better results and better ROI than the big name. So, don't sleep on those micro creators. Links to all that are in the show notes. And here's your parting shot for today. This is a good one. James Clear said, "You are not your grand plans. You are your daily patterns. Oh, and remember that Stump Basos question from the top of the show? What percentage of traffic on the US Amazon website is Spanish speaking? The answer is about 15%. 15%. That's a massive chunk of traffic that most sellers aren't even thinking about, let alone optimizing for. All right, that's all for today, folks. I'll see you again on Thursday. This is Kevin King signing off from the Billiondoll Sellers podcast.