He sold $1.9 billion worth of lipstick in 12 hours

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 your host, Kevin Kane, and today is March 23rd, 2026. We got a packed show today. Two really big stories, plus a bunch of cool stuff in between. So, let's get right into it. But first, let me hit you with today's Stumb Bezos question. So, Shopify is neither a marketplace nor a retailer, right? But it now claims about 14% of US e-commerce, which is, I mean, wild when you think about it. So, here's a question. Shopify's global GMV reached what percentage of Amazon's marketplace GMV in 2025? Think about that one. I'll give you the answer at the end of the show. Before we jump in, quick heads up. If you've been thinking about coming to Ecom Mastery AI in Nashville April 8th through 12th, we're doing a live ask me anything and free ticket giveaway tomorrow, March 24th at 2 p.m. Eastern featuring BDSS. So, hop on, ask your questions, and you might walk away with a free ticket. There's a registration link in today's show notes. All right, so here's a number I want you to sit with for a second. A Chinese live streamer, they call him the lipstick brother, sold 1.9 billion worth of lipstick in 12 hours. $1.9 billion in 12 hours of lipstick. Now, the top US live stream sales record so far, $2.2 million. That gap is insane. But that's also exactly where the opportunity is. Live commerce outside of China is projected to hit $2 trillion globally by 2030 and the US is the fastest growing piece. The industry grew 50% year-over-year and is expected to be a 30 to40 billion business in the US in 2026 alone. And every major platform knows that Amazon is pushing Amazon Live hard. eBay, Instagram, Facebook, they're all investing heavily. And here's what I love about this. Sellers overthink it. Talk Shop Live CEO Sammy Hawkins, who launched Tik Tok Shop in the US, nailed it in a recent interview. She said, "People overthink what live shopping is and how programmable it needs to be." And her example was great. She's like, "I love the specific matcha. I tell my friends about it and they go buy it. Live shopping is the exact same thing except you're talking to a community instead of just your circle. Pick up your phone, talk about a product you love, sell it. That's it." And the data backs this up, too. Average order values in live shopping run 20 to 30% higher than standard e-commerce. It captures buyers at every stage of the funnel from first-time discovery to loyal customers spotting a new color or variant and buying on impulse. And here's something most sellers miss. Live streams are basically a free retargeting machine because platforms like Tik Tok and Amazon push your live feed to people who've already showed interest in your product. So you got bottom final customers just served to you on a platter. So why does this matter for Amazon sellers right now? About 42% of Amazon sellers are already on Tik Tok according to a recent survey of more than 750 sellers by Titan Network and BDSN, but most of them have never gone live. They all know how they don't have a studio or they think it requires professional production, a big team. A brand called GU hit $3 million a month on Amazon using AI generated content and live streaming. No massive production budget, no celebrity endorser, just smart execution. The brands that figure out live commerce now while the US market's still early are going to have a massive first mover advantage. The ones that wait, they'll be playing catch-up at a $40 billion and rapidly growing market. And this is exactly why we're bringing a professional live stream studio to the creators lounge at Ecom Mastery AI in Nashville April 8th through 12th at the Grand Hyatt. We've set up a full Tik Tok and Amazon live studio onsite with professional cameras, lighting, soundboards, experienced hosts, the whole thing. brands can bring their hero products and actually experience what a real live stream sales session looks like. And here's what Jason Turki wrote on WhatsApp. Incredible opportunity for those who haven't gone live yet to see it in action. I still see this as a huge untapped channel after seeing it firsthand working at Tik Tok. We've got this career meet sellers event that pairs brands with more than 100 creators, most of them doing million-dollar plus GMV on social commerce. It's a 2-hour session for platinum and diamond ticket holders where sellers set up tables with product samples and creators come shop. And when a creator finds something they love, they can walk straight to the creator lounge and go live with it on the spot or the next day if that's more convenient. Sellers can also use the studio's professional hosts themselves for demos on both Amazon Live and Tik Tok shop. You only need a few product units and the team on site walks you through scripting, execution, and what converts on each platform. This isn't a seminar. It's a hands-on live stream experience you can replicate back home. And whether you go pro or start small with just your phone, live shopping sessions will run during prime windows throughout the event. Mornings before sessions, lunch breaks and evenings, the welcome party alone, April 8th, 710 p.m. will be buzzing with live demos in the creator's lounge. More than 500 attendees are expected. Buswell and the BDSS stage presentations will show attendees how to create their own AI influencers, which reduces the need for expensive human creators entirely. The live commerce wave isn't coming. It's here. Grab your ticket at ecommasteryai.com. All right, here's a fun stat for you. 22% of Americans have shopped online while sitting on the toilet, and Australians aren't far behind at 18% with Brits and Canadians tied at 17%. So, next time you wonder when your customers are buying your products, uh, now you know. Now, let's talk about something really, really big. The AI shopping wars. So Chad GBT's checkout experiment flopped, but the race to own what's called agentic commerce is heating up, and fresh data shows it's actually way bigger than the naysayers think. Every big tech company wants to be the place where you shop using AI. Instead of scrolling through search results, you tell a chatbot what you want, it finds the best options and you buy it right there. No tabs, no comparison shopping, no headaches. But turning that vision to reality, the last few months have been a masterclass and just how messy it can get. You know, headlines have been screaming about the death of Aentic Commerce since early March. But if you look past the headlines, there's a dog that's not barking here. So, let me walk you through what's actually happening with OpenAI, Google Meta, and Amazon, what the latest data says, and what it all means for sellers. So, last fall, OpenAI launched something called instant checkout inside Chad GPT. The idea was you ask Chad GPT for a product recommendation and then buy it right there without leaving the conversation. They partnered with Walmart, Etsy, and Shopify and plan to collect a commission on every sale. It bombed. Mar about 200,000 products available, but according to Daniel Danker, their EVP of design and product conversion rates were three times lower inside the chatbot compared to when people clicked out to Walmart's website. And the reason single item checkout was a dealbreaker. People shop one item at a time. You know, they had peanut butter on Monday, foil on Tuesday, birthday gift on Wednesday, then check out once. Instant checkout forced individual purchases and shoppers were afraid of getting five separate boxes. On top of that, shoppers couldn't connect existing Walmart carts or loyalty accounts, and merchant onboarding was a ghost town. A Forester analyst reported that only about 30 Shopify merchants were actually live on instant checkout. 30 out of millions. Merchants who filled out the form never got a call back. Data feeds were janky. There were pricing errors, incorrect shipping info, etc. By early March, the information reported OpenAI was scaling back. And by March 18th, Nick Turley, head of Chad GPT, dodged a direct question about it and said they're focusing on discovery right now. But here's what the headlines are missing. While the press is dancing on the grave of Agentic Commerce, Chad GPT has been quietly building the exact features needed to fix instant checkouts problems. Multi-item carts. A company called Retail Gentic discovered Chad GPT testing multi-item single merchant cart systems back in late January 2026. A self-service merchant center was found in early February that would replace the broken onboarding process and let merchants sign up on their own. And they've been adding more product info and features on product cards to improve conversion. OpenAI's own spokesperson said they're continuing to build in this area and their chat GPT shopping merchant page keeps getting cleaner and more functional with each update. That's kind of a weird behavior for a company that supposedly gave up on shopping, right? So instead of owning transactions, OpenAI is leaning into what Chad GPT does well, which is helping people find stuff. Nick Turley recently said shopping is very visual and people want to see products and compare, not just read walls of text. For checkout, Walmart is leading by embedding its chatbot, Sparky, directly inside Chad GPT. So it's a chatbot inside a chatbot. Sparky syncs your Walmart car across the app website and Chad GPT supports multi orders connects your Walmart plus benefits and a similar setup is coming to Gemini and Walmart has good reason to invest. Decker says Chad GPT is bringing in twice the rate of new customers compared to search engines higher income techsavvy shoppers who aren't traditional Walmart customers. Now while OpenAI pulls back on checkout, Google is going all in on something called UCP, Universal Commerce Protocol. Think of it like a universal translator between AI shopping assistants and online stores. It lets the AI check prices, see what's in stock, add items to a cart, and complete purchases on your behalf. Google announced UCP in January, went live in February, and just dropped four major upgrades on March 19th. Multi-ite carts, the exact thing that killed instant checkout. Google solved a enhanced catalog endpoint with live inventory, pricing, and product variance in real time. a loyalty program integration, so your Walmart Plus membership or Ultra Rewards or whatever loyalty account you have travels with you into AI shopping and a merchant center for self-service on boarding so merchants can just sign up instead of being special partnership deals. The speed is wild. Announced in January live in February, then four major upgrades in March and they've now solved loyalty plus merchant or record, which are arguably the hardest pieces. And then there's Meta, which is, you know, interesting. Meta is testing AI shopping inside it Meta AI chatbot. So, US users on desktop can now see a shopping research button. You ask for product suggestions. The chatbot shows you a carousel of product images with prices, brand info, and merchant links. The key difference is Meta has no checkout yet. You click through to the merchants website. Classic Facebook, collect the intent data, sell better ads. But there's a bigger signal here. Watchers of the ACP does the agent commerce protocol have spotted evidence that Meta is now an active ACP participant. Zuckerberg announced agentic commerce plans on their two forings call in late January. By early March, Meta AI went live with agentic commerce results and by mid-March ACP activity from Meta went from zero to a low roar. With 3.58 billion active users and existing commerce through Facebook shops and Instagram shopping, Meta has the audience and appears to be picking a protocol. An ACP announcement could come as early as their next earnings call. Now, while Walmart welcomes AI agents, Amazon is building a walled garden, but they might have a bigger play going on here. Reuters reported exclusively that Amazon is working on a new AI phone cenamed Transformer led by Amazon 01 group. The focus is AI integration, Alexa plus features and mobile personalization and is apparently inspired by the minimalist like phone. An analyst noted Amazon could skip app stores entirely, bundle it with Prime and even tie it into their satellite network. If they pull this off, they don't the AI shopping device itself, but the dose of the Firephone looms large. Now, here's why you shouldn't listen to the naysayers who say agentic commerce is dead because two new data sets tell a very different story. And Kenzie ran a global consumer survey in February 2026 with about 4,000 respondents and the top uses of AI shopping were comparing options at 62%. Learning about a product category at 55% and giving purchase inspiration at 46%. Even checkout and payment hit 23%, repurchase and replenishment 22%. Top categories for AI shopping included travel and lodging at 33%, vitamins and supplements at 33%, beauty and personal care at 32%, and electronics jumped to 38%. And then logic broker and midsell research put out another report showing that 47% of executives expect to invest a million dollars or more in the next 12 months on agent commerce. Uh 57% plan to deploy AI shopping agents within 6 months and 91% expect AI to influence 20% of orders by 2027. Real budgets, real projects getting funded right now. Now, if you keep hearing the term enentic commerce and you're not sure what it means, here's a simple version. In traditional online shopping, you search, you browse, you compare, you buy, you do all the work. With Agentic Commerce, an AI assistant does work for you. You say, "I need running shoes under $150 with good arch support." And the AI searches stores, compares options, checks inventory, and either buys for you or presents the best options. The protocol is being built. Google's UCP, Shopify's ACP, those are the plumbing that makes this work. Without them, the AI has no way to talk to the store systems. So, what does all this mean for Amazon sellers? First, the discovery layer is shifting. AI chatbots are creating a whole new discovery layer above Amazon. And if Chad GPT or Gemini or Meta AI recommends products and yours are included, you're invisible to a growing segment of shoppers. Second, the product data quality matters more than ever because these AI systems pull from structured product data reviews and catalog. So thin descriptions, bad images, or missing attributes mean you just don't show up in AI recommendations. Third, Amazon blocks AI scrapers while Walmart welcomes them, and Amazon may be betting on owning the AI device instead with that Alexa Plus phone. Fourth, if you sell on Shopify or Walmart or other platform alongside Amazon, you got more service area for AI agents to find your products. And Google's new merchant center makes it easier than ever to get into UCP powered experiences. And finally, answer engine optimization is becoming real. It's optimizing your product content. So AI systems recommending you is no longer theoretical. And the sellers who prepare their product data now are going to have a first mover advantage. OpenAI's instant checkout flop because shopping is complicated. People want multi-m carts, loyalty points, synced lists. But Google is building the rails at breakneck speed. The Open AI is quietly still building. Meta is joining with its massive user base and Amazon may try to own the hardware layer. For sellers, the message is clear. Your product data is your new storefront. The better structured and more complete your product information is, the more likely AI agents will find you, recommend you, and sell for you. All right. Uh today's BDSN software tool of the day is called seasonal ads. It helps you plan and optimize ad campaigns around seasonal events like Q4, Prime Day, holidays using your actual SQ data. It builds datadriven campaigns for peak periods and then keeps optimizing beyond just the seasonal spikes. If you want to manage your seasonal ad strategy inhouse, it's worth a look. There's a link in the show notes. Now, if you want to boost your Amazon ranking,