Fake sale tactics are dead on Amazon

This This is the Billiondoll 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 Billiondoll Sellers podcast. I'm your host, Kevin King, and today is May 18th, 2026. We got a packed show today, so let's get right to it. The big one is Alexa for shopping. Amazon flipped the switch. Rufus is officially gone and the eight changes every seller needs to know about right now. We've also got Chad GPT ads, what they mean for Amazon sellers, some wild stats on AI traffic, crushing organic conversions, a cool AI avatar tool, and more. All right, but first, here's your Stump Bezos question for today. The average shopper buys 13 times per year on Amazon. So, how many people shop on Amazon worldwide each year? Think about that and I'll give you the answer at the end of the show. All right, let's get into it. So, last week, Amazon officially flipped the switch. Rufus, the conversational AI assistant that 300 million customers used in 2025, is now Alexa for shopping. And it's rolling out across Amazon.com, the mobile app, and Echo devices right now. It's the same conversational brain underneath, but now they fused the household assistant on top and the assistant's memory follows the shopper across every screen they own. And this is huge for sellers because your product is no longer being evaluated against a keyword. It's being evaluated against a persona that Amazon has built over months and years of that shopper's behavior. So, Max's team from Aoma AI highlighted eight changes that sellers need to know about and uh I'm going to walk you through them. First of all, the main search bar is now a conversation. Shoppers don't need to open a separate Rufus window anymore. They can type a question, something like, "What's a good skin care routine for oily skin in summer, for example, straight into the Amazon search bar." Amazon detects when the input is a question and routes it to Alexa instead of the standard product grid. So, the standard product listing page is no longer the default destination. Number two is AI overviews now sit on top of search results and PDPs. So, the first thing a shopper sees about your category is now an AI written summary pulling from listings, reviews, Q&A, and even external content. Roll it out to all US shoppers right now. Third, sideby-side product comparison is now native. Shoppers select multiple products from search and Alexa lays them out against each other on features, price, and reviews. This used to live inside the chat. Now, it's part of the core search experience, and it's a direct counter to all those people going to chat GPT saying, "Compare these five products for me." Number four is scheduled actions. This is auguic buying. You tap the plus inside the chat and a shopper can set rules like add the sunscreen to my cart when it drops to 10 bucks and I haven't bought it in 2 months. Alexa runs the price check, does the research and either notifies the shopper or adds the item directly. This is the first time Amazon has put true autonomous buying behavior in front of every shopper, not just a subscribe and save segment. Number five, conversational cart rebuilds from purchase history. So you can say add my regular dog treats or add my favorite protein bars and Alexa pulls from the shoers order history and builds the cart one check out from there. And whatever brand they call their favorite, that's the one that wins. Number six, and this one's a big deal. 12 months of price history on every product detail page. A full year of pricing exposed with one tap on hundreds of millions of products. So, the fake sale tactic of listing at 40 bucks, marking down to $24.99, and calling it a deal, that's dead for any shopper who actually looks. Combine this with Alexa price tracking auto buy, and Amazon has effectively built Keepa into the native shopping experience. Number seven, voice shopping is an Amazon app. You tap the mic in the chat window and shop by voice from inside the app on your phone. You don't need an Echo device anymore to shop conversationally with Alexa. And finally, number eight, the personalization layer is inspectable. Shoppers can ask Alexa what it knows about them, their pets, family numbers, dietary needs, and edit it on the fly. That's good news and bad news. Good because the data driving recommendations is no longer a black box. Bad because shoppers can now actively curate their profile in ways that might make some products less visible. So, what does all this mean for your listings? The Cosmo knowledge graph is still doing the heavy lifting underneath. So the retrieval logic is basically the same. So if you've been optimizing for Rufus, you know, clear noun phrases and titles, feature to benefit mapping and bullets, filled out backend attributes, that work isn't wasted. It's still the foundation, but the bar is higher now because three things changed at once. First, your listing is feeding more surfaces. The same content now shapes AI overviews on search and PDPs, drives side-by-side comparisons, and determines whether you get pulled into a custom shopping guide. Weak listings get glossed over in summaries or framed by a competitor's language. Second, you're being matched to personas, not keywords. Alexa for shopping doesn't just retrieve the most semantically relevant products for a query. It retrieves the most relevant product for this specific shopper given their household, their history, and their preferences. And third, generic listings get sorted last. Listings that explicitly state who the product is for, how it's used, what occasion or environments it fits, those get matched to the right shoppers. And if you lose on any one dimension in a comparison, the AI is showing the shopper exactly why your competitor is a better choice. So what should you actually do this week? Audit your titles and bullets for persona clarity. Every listing should make it obvious who the product is for and what specific problem it solves. Yammat is keyword soup. Extra thick yoga mat for beginners with knee sensitivity. Now that's a match for persona. Make your backend attributes machine readable. If sideby-side comparisons native now, your dimensions, materials, weights, capacities, warranty terms, all that better be filled in completely and accurately. Treat reviews in Q&A as AI training data. Alexa pulls from reviews and community Q&A to generate overviews and answer comparison questions. Stale or unressed negative reviews shape how the AI summarizes your product. So, get current on Q&A and respond to recent reviews. Plan promotions like the shopper can see your last 12 months because they can't. The phantom anchor price tactic is over. Build promotion calendars around real differentiated discount events, not perpetual fake markdowns. When to add my favorite moment, repeat purchase behavior is now wired directly into the conversational cart. If you sell consumables or replenishable products, every first sale is now a fight for the my regular brand slots and audit your off Amazon presence. Amazon's FAQ says Alexa pulls from licensed content partners and info from across the web. That means review sites, expert roundups, editorial coverage, all of that feeds the answer Alexa gives. Your listing isn't the only surface that matters anymore. All right, let's talk about some interesting stats. So, some data came out on who are the top 10 e-commerce retailers in North and South America by GMBB for 2025. And uh the numbers really tell the story. Amazon is number one with $488 billion and Walmart is number two at about 197 billion. So Amazon is nearly two and a half times the size of Walmart in e-commerce GMBB. That's wild. And then it drops off fast. Marcato Libre is at about 53 billion. Shine at 35 billion. eBay at about 34 billion. Temo at about 32 billion. And then Apple, AliExpress, Shopee, and Home Depot round out the top 10. All in the 25 to 29 billion range. So the takeaway here is that Amazon is absolutely dominating the Americas in an e-commerce. It's more than nine times the size of Marcato Libre. That's just, you know, it's a monster. All right. Uh, next up, chat GPT ads. Global AI just opened the floodgates on Chat GPT advertising. Early data from Neil Patel shows affiliates already account for about 10% of ChatGpt ads on commercial terms. So, it's working and the smart money is moving fast. Here's how it works. Sponsored links appear directly below Chad GPT's organic answers as visually separated callouts. No keyword matching. Ads are served contextually based on conversation, intent, topic, and flow. So, it's closer to like if Meta and Google had a baby than either platform alone. Now, who sees them? Only free and go plan users. Plus, pro and enterprise are adree, and free users can actually opt out entirely in exchange for fewer daily messages. Also, they don't show on health, mental health, politics, or other sensitive topics. Now, here's the catch that most sellers are going to hit. It's US only at launch. You need a registered US business with an EIN to access the ad manager. Canada, Australia, New Zealand are expected next and UK. After that, there's no workaround. Non- US businesses cannot currently set up an advertiser account. Period. If you're US-based, just go to ads.openai.com and click start now. Add your legal business name, your website, favicon, industry, and uh just a heads up, those can't be edited later, so get them right. Then add your business address, your EIN, and submit for review. There's high volume right now, so expect to wait. Inside the ad manager, your campaign objectives right now are reach, which is CPM, or clicks, which is CPC. Conversions are coming. OpenAI's developer center already shows a pixel and a conversions API in the works. Targeting is interesting. They call it context hints. You write a plain language description of who you want to reach and what query should trigger your ad. You paste keywords, describe your ideal customer profile, and describe the kinds of questions your customer asks. It combines keyword intent with audience targeting. On pricing, the recommended max CPC is 3 to five bucks. Early CPMs were around $60, which is Super Bowl territory. Cost should settle as inventory expands. Reporting is pretty limited right now, so the best play is export CSV and run analysis in Claude or Chad GBT to find what's working. One important thing on the privacy side, ads run on a system separate from the core chat model. Advertisers can't influence or alter chat GPT's actual answers, and they don't receive personal data or conversation transcripts for targeting. So bottom line for sellers, if you're US-based with any get in the queue now early advertisers on every new platform, Google and O2, Facebook and08, Tik Tok in 2020, they captured outsiz ROI before bidding got competitive. If you're outside the US, watch Canada closely as the next domino and start building your context hints and creative library now so you're ready to go day one when your country opens. And the targeting model intent plus ICP description in plain language rewards sellers who deeply understand their customers actual questions. That's a structural advantage for anyone already doing voice of customer work. All right, now software tool of the day. So this one's pretty cool. It's called vids.new new and it lets you add AI avatars into any product scene with no studio, no model fees, no re-shoots. You open it up in Google Chrome, pick the AI avatar option, upload your product shots, whatever you've already got in Seller Central, hero image, packaging, lifestyle mockup, infographic, whatever. Then you pick an avatar and lock the face and voice. So every video in your listing, your PBC creative, your social ads, it all looks like the same person. The key is being super specific with your prompts. Tell it the room, the camera angle, the lighting, the action. Vague prompts give you generic results. Direct it like a real video shoot. Walk into frame, pick up the products, point of the ingredients panel, cinematic tracking shot. The more specific, the better the take. Generate three to five versions and pick the one that doesn't feel like AI. Refine the pacing, the expression, the camera move until it could pass for a creator you hired. There's a link in the show notes. And speaking of tools, uh, this episode is brought to you by Stack Influence. If you want to reach page one on Amazon by sending free products to micro influencers, Stack Influence automates all of that at scale. We're talking thousands of collabs per month. Top brands like Magic Spoon, Unilver, and Meredith Organics have used it to get to number one page positioning and increase their monthly revenue as high as 13x in as little as 2 months. You pay influencers only with products. No negotiating fees. You get full rights to all the image and video content they create, and it's 100% automated, so you don't have to lift a finger. If you sign up this month, you get 10% off. There's a link in the show notes. All right. Now, this next one, this should make every Amazon seller sit up straight. Shopify just dropped data showing that AI search isn't just sending traffic, it's actually sending better traffic than organic search with higher conversion rates and higher order values. And the reason why has everything to do with what they're calling jury compression. Here's the killer stat. 55% of AI referred sessions start on the product detail page versus just 20% for organic search. AI platforms recommend specific products, not categories, so shoppers land already knowing what they want. Think about the old journey. 3 to five searches, 8 to 12 pages across multiple sites, then maybe a return visit days later to actually buy. Discovery, consideration, and purchase were all spread out across sessions. Now compress all of that into one conversation. The shopper tells Chat GPT or Perplexity or Claude or Gemini what they need. The AI narrows the options, surfaces short list, and by the time the click happens, they're ready to buy. And the numbers back it up. AI referred traffic converts 49% higher than organic search, and the average order value is 14% higher. That's per session economics that are already beating organic. And the infrastructure just got real. Shopify launched a Gent storefront so merchants can sell directly inside Copilot and ChatGpt. There's a new universal commerce protocol from Shopify and Google so AI agents can transact with any merchant. The rails are live. Buying inside the chat, no clickthrough required is coming fast. And the historical parallel here is important. In 2012, merchants who built for mobile before it tipped captured share that latecomers never got back. Same story in 2019 with social commerce. We're sitting in that exact window right now for AI commerce. So what should Amazon sellers actually do? Track AI as its own channel. If you're driving any DTC traffic, segment chat GPT, Perplexity, Copilot, Claw, and Gemini referrals separately, and compare them to organic, you'll probably find AI's already outperforming on per session value, even at low volume. Fix your product pages for machines, not just humans. Detailed descriptions, technical specs, use cases. AI agents are reading your listings constantly and deciding whether to recommend you. Build authority off your site. AI recommendations pull from across the web. Reddit threads, review sites, editorial coverage, comparison content. The brands getting mentioned everywhere are the brands getting recommended in chats. And don't abandon SEO because AI systems also retrieve from search indexes. Strong organic ranking fees, AI citation. They're not competing channels. They share the same fundamentals. And here's my take on this. This is the Amazon seller version of the mobile inflection point. Sellers who only think about Amazon search results are about to get blindsided, not by another algorithm tweak, but by the fact that buyers are skipping the Amazon search box entirely and asking an AI which protein powder, which dog harness, which kitchen gadget to buy. That AI is making a recommendation based on signals from across the entire web, not just your Amazon listing. If your brand has no presence outside Amazon, no editorial mentions, no Reddit conversations, no review coverage, no comparison content, you're invisible to the AI making the recommendation. The window to fix that is open right now, but it won't be forever. The new car is an AI agent, so build for it. Okay, now before we wrap up, few more hot picks for you. Amazon dropped SP API fees after developer push back. Good news there. Over $35 billion in validated tariff refunds have been processed. So, if you owe money, look into that. Also, Stripe and Google partnered on Ninja Commerce. And 2025, e-commerce sales topped $1 trillion for the fourth straight year. Links to all those in the show notes. And here's your parting shot for today. This is from James Clear. He said, "Luck flows through people and travels by conversations. The people you talk to determine the opportunities you find. Keep talking to the same people. Keep finding the same opportunities. Start talking to new people. Start finding new ones. If you want different luck, start walking into different rooms. I love that. It's so true. Especially in this business, the rooms you put yourself in, the events you go to, the people you surround yourself with, that determines so much of what happens next. Oh, and about that Stump Bezos question from the beginning, how many people shop on Amazon worldwide each year? The answer is 1.46 billion. 1.46 billion worldwide shoppers. Holy cow, that's a lot of people. All right, that's all for today, folks. I'll see you again on Thursday. This is Kevin King signing off on the Billiondollar Sellers podcast.