How to stop paying for Amazon software tools

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 King and today is March 19th, 2026. We got a lot to cover today, so let's get right into it. But first, let me hit you with today's Stumb Bezos question. So, social media right now is just filled with these shady AI deep fakes, pedalling beauty products through affiliate links, and they're basically stepping all over the turf of real human influencers. So, the question is, how big is the global human influencer industry? Think about it. I'll give you the answer at the end of the show. Before we jump in, quick mention. If you're looking to connect with top tier creators face to face, we've got more than a hundred of them coming to Nashville April 8th through 11th. And I'm talking big names. Creators doing serious sales volume. People like Dane Heapner, who's done $2.2 million, Kim Kuna, $2 million, Melissa Marich had $1.6 million, and a bunch more. Stop sending thousands of product samples into the void, you know, hoping something sticks. Instead, come to Nashville, meet these creators, and make deals on the spot. One connection could drive hundreds of thousands in sales for your brand. There's a link in today's show notes if you want to check that out. All right, let's talk about something that I think could save a lot of you serious money. How to get access to your own Amazon data. So, back in January, Amazon changed the pricing on something called the SP API, which is basically the technical pipeline that software tools use to pull your seller data. Third party developers now have to pay $1,400 a year plus usage fees to pull your data through the SP API. And what that means is every tool you use, your repericers, your inventory managers, your analytics dashboards, they all just got more expensive and those costs are getting passed directly to you through higher SAS subscriptions. But here's what most sellers don't realize. If you register as a private developer and use the SP API for your own business, it's still free. No subscription, no per call fees. Amazon only charges third party developers who are building apps for other sellers. Your own internal use, $0. And the same goes for the Amazon ads API. Completely free. No usage fees. Now think about how much you're spending every month on SAS tools, your reperic, your analytics dashboard, your PPC management tool, your inventory forecasting software. You probably dropping $500 to $2,000 or more a month across all of them. And most of those tools are just pulling your data from Amazon's API, running some logic on it, and showing it back to you in a pretty interface. Now, here's where it gets interesting. With your own API credentials and either some vibe coding skills or a developer on Fiverr or Upwork or a tool like Quad Code, you can build custom versions of almost any of those tools yourself. And I'm not talking about crappy spreadsheet workarounds. I'm talking about actual working software tailored exactly to your business. Now, if you haven't heard the term vibe coding, it's basically where you tell an AI what you want in plain English and it writes the code for you. You don't need to know Python. You don't need to know JavaScript. You describe a tool you want. The AI builds it. You test it. You refine it. Tools like clog, cursor, lovable, replet, and bolt all let you do this right now. So, let me walk you through what you could actually build with your own API access. custom profitability dashboards that pull your sales, your fees, your ad spend, and your COGS all into one view and show you real margin by skew, not the vanity metrics most tools give you. Or automated PPC bid adjustments based on your actual inventory levels. Running low on stock? Your system automatically reduces bids or pauses campaigns so you stop burning ad dollars on products you can't even fulfill. No more paying $300 a month for a PPC tool to do this badly. Or how about AI powered account health monitoring that watches for things like listing suppressions, buy box drops, policy violations, or negative review spikes? And then it sends you a Slack message or text alert in real time. Not when you happen to log in, not when some daily digest arrives, but immediately. You can build pricing automation that actually follows your rules. Maybe you want to be 50 cents under the lowest FBA offer, but never below a certain floor. Or maybe you want different strategies for different asens. Build exactly what you want instead of fighting with some repericers rigid settings. Ad spend and knowledge detection that flags when your AO spikes or your conversions drop on a campaign without waiting for you to notice 3 days later on a weekly report. Inventory forecasting based on your actual velocity data, your seasonality patterns, your lead times, not some generic algorithm that doesn't know your supply chain. The point is you're not locked into what some SAS company decided their tool should do. Now I know some of you are thinking that sounds great Kevin but I'm not technical. You don't have to be. There are three paths. Path one by Kodi yourself. Open up claude shad GBT cursor or replet and just describe what you want. Something like build me a Python script that connects to Amazon SP API pulls my order data for the last 30 days. Calculates profit by skew after fees and ad spend and outputs it to a Google sheet. The AI writes the code. You run it. You iterate on it. And this works surprisingly well for dashboards, alerts, reports, and simple automations. The second path is hire a developer. Take your API credentials and a clear description of what you want to a freelancer on Upwork or Fiverr. A decent Python developer can build you a custom dashboard or automation tool for $500 to $2,000 as a onetime cost. Compare that to $200 to $500 a month forever for a SAS tool that only sort of does what you need. And the third path is use quad code. This is Anthropic's command line coding agent. You tell it what to build in plain English. It writes, tests, and fixes the code right on your computer. It can set up your entire API connection, build the data pipeline, create the dashboard, help you deploy it. It's like having a senior developer working alongside you who never gets tired and charges a fraction of what a human dev costs. Any of these paths can replace thousands of dollars a year in SAS subscriptions. And the tools you build are yours. No monthly fees, no price increases, no worrying about a tool shutting down overnight. And if you've been in this space a while, you know that happens. Let me give you a quick example of what this looks like in practice. Let's say you're currently paying $150 a month for a repricer, 200 for analytics, $250 for PPC management, and $100 for inventory alerts. That's $700 a month or $8,400 a year. with your own API credentials and some vibe coding or a higher developer, you could replace most of that functionality with custom tools that cost you essentially nothing to run. Maybe you keep one or two SAS tools that genuinely add value you can't replicate, but the rest you built it better, cheaper, and exactly how you wanted it. The sellers who set this up now are going to have a massive operational advantage. They'll spend less on tools, have more control over their data, and be ready to plug in AI agents that can actually run parts of their business. The ones who wait will keep renting access to their own data through increasingly expensive middlemen. So, here's what I want you to do today. First, register as a private developer on Amazon. There's a link in the show notes. Second, create your own app for internal use only. Then, generate your SP API credentials. That's your LWA client ID plus secret and your refresh token. Also, generate your Amazon ads API credentials. Again, link in the show notes. And finally, open up clog cursor or your AI coding tool of choice and just say, "Help me connect to Amazon SP API and pull my last 30 days of order data." Once you see your own data flowing, I promise you, you'll immediately start thinking of 10 things you want to build. You've been renting access to your own data long enough. Now, let me tell you about a really interesting approach to fixing Amazon profit margins. What some people are calling it the dumb person method, and it's what sellers who never learn advanced PPC strategies do when they need to boost margins fast. Chris ran it on one of their brands at Sophie Society and the core idea is almost too simple. Get customers to buy more than once. If every customer buys two units instead of one, you turn a 40% AOS into 20% without touching a single bid. An aggressive lifetime value strategy paired with three other PPC profit margin fixes put the brand Cardiology on a healthy growth path. And the numbers are nuts. They saw a seven time growth of subscribers. The click-through rate quadrupled and total sales went up by four. He also borrowed some principles from Google advertising and applied them to Amazon PPC which alone is worth checking out. There's a full case study linked up in the show notes if you want to see it. All right, you got to see this. There's a great YouTube video by the marketing misfits. So that's Norm Ferrar and yours truly. We brought on the legendary Jason Flatland, the man responsible for some of the biggest launches in internet history, including a $57 million webinar and massive 8 figureure launches with Aman Gadi. Jason breaks down his pitch upfront strategy, the psychology of delayed gratification, and how he consulted on Alex Hormos's $100 million book launch. If you want to master the art of selling one to many, and understand why context beats content, uh, this one's a master class. links in the show notes and be sure to subscribe to the brand new marketing misfits newsletter, too. Now, let's talk about something that could really change product discovery on Amazon. BDSS Dream 100 member Dainy Wishan recently broke down Amazon's newest AI powered feature called interest. It's now out of beta and it's worth paying close attention to. You know the product discovery problem on Amazon, right? A shopper knows what they want, but they can't find it because they don't know the right keywords to type. Instead of only learning from what you buy, Amazon's starting to learn from what you're interested in. And that's a big difference. So, here's how it works. Interest lives inside the Amazon shopping app under the Mi tab. And it lets shoppers describe what they're looking for in plain everyday language. Not keywords, just natural descriptions of what they want. Think prompts like, "I'm training for my first marathon and need supportive shoes that won't hurt my feet." or wall art for my home, something abstract or modern, black metal, geometric, industrial style, not canvas or anything too traditional, or even just brewing tools and gadgets for coffee lovers. Amazon's AI then translates that natural language into search queries and product attributes behind the scenes. The AI takes a phrase like premium skincare brands and automatically maps it to specific brands in the category to surface relevant results. But here's what makes interest different from Roffus. It keeps working in the background, continuously scanning Amazon's catalog and notifying you when new products, restocks, or deals show up that match what you described. You said it and it watches for you 24/7. So, why does this matter for sellers? As the stay. Brand should absolutely keep an eye on this roll out. If shoppers start discovering products through introspace prompts instead of keyword searches, the way you optimize your listings has to change. Your product titles, bullets, and descriptions need to sound like how real people talk, not like keyword stuff robots wrote them. Something like best for sensitive winter skin beats gentle formula moisturizer cream hydrating every time. Think intent, not just index. Your product detail pages need to clearly communicate who the product is for and what problem it solves because that's exactly what the AI is trying to match against. Customer Q&A sections and reviews are going to matter even more since Amazon's AI likely pulls from that content to refine its recommendations. And think broadly about all the different reasons someone might watch your product, not just the obvious ones. Because the w the range of intents your listing speaks to, the more prompts it can match. Amazon is layering AI on top of AI at this point. Roffus shopping guides, review highlights, and now interests. The common thread is that Amazon wants to move shoppers away from basic keyword search and toward natural conversational product discovery. Now, let me tell you about something that could be a gamecher if you're doing a million more on Amazon and you've ever struggled with cash flow. Luke Sutherland's products were flying off the shelves. Reviews were stacking up. Business was booming. And it was about to destroy him. The issue wasn't demand. It was cash. Every dollar went right back into inventory, shipping, and PPC. Luke told me they had difficulty with traditional lenders who couldn't see the inventory in their warehouse. He said they had to use personal collateral to secure funding, could never get enough inventory, and were always chasing cash. And if you've sold on Amazon for more than a year, you know this cycle. Sell fast, run low, scramble for cash, restock late, lose rankings, start over. That's what caught my attention about a product called liquid inventory from EC Capital. It's a revolving credit line tied directly to the value of your inventory. As your inventory grows, your available credit grows with it, and you only pay interest on what you actually draw, not on some fixed loan amount collecting dust. So, like, you could have $600,000 available to draw, but only be using $23,000, and you're only paying interest on that 23,000. Their system tracks your inventory levels in real time and adjust your credit accordingly. For a seasonal seller gearing up for Q4 or scrambling when Amazon moves Prime Day up a month, that flexibility is everything. I've been in ecom for 30 years. The MCA guys take a fat percentage of your revenue whether you're having a good month or not. And traditional banks don't understand FBA. The inventory linked revolving model is genuinely different because it aligns the lender's risk with your actual business. He told me, "We doubled our sales in 2025, and we anticipate 100% revenue growth in 2026." He doubled sales not from a new product or algorithm hack, but because he could finally keep his best sellers in stock. If you're doing a million or more on Amazon and you ever lost a buy box because you stocked out, this is worth a look. There's a link to learn more about liquid inventory in the show notes. Before we wrap up, here are a few more hot picks for you. Amazon is adding one and three-hour delivery options in the US. There's a report that Amazon is now delaying seller payments, or are they? There's a little debate about that one. Tamu is rapidly growing in Spain and Italy. Amazon's move into big box retail could be a massive opportunity for sellers. And Chad GPT sources 83% of its carousel products from Google Shopping. Links to all of those are in the show notes. Oh, and one interesting stat I got to mention. Trust Pilot became a surprise AI winner last year. Their revenue nearly tripled in about 5 years, going from $48 million to $138 million because AI shopping tools are pulling from review platforms like crazy now. And here's your parting shot for today. This one's from Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia. Mac and Windows are the operating systems for the personal computer. Open Claw is the operating system for personal AI. Oh, and remember that question I asked you at the beginning. How big is the global human influencer industry? The answer is $ 32 billion. $ 32 billion. And AI defects are out here trying to eat into that. That's all for today, folks. Have a great weekend and I'll see you again on Monday. This is Kevin King signing off from the Billiondollar Sellers podcast.