Never use these words on Amazon

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 Thursday, March 5th, 2026. We have a packed show today, including what's happening at Prosper next week, why online businesses aren't dead, but the old way of selling is, and some big news on tariff refunds and nut killing credit card payments. But first, here's your Stump Bezos question for today. AI overviews now answer queries before anyone even reaches your site. So, here's a question. What percent of all searches now end without a click? Think about it and I'll give you the answer at the end of the show. All right. If you're heading to Prosper Show in Las Vegas next week, March 9th through the 12th, listen up. The conference itself is packed, but the real networking happens after hours. I've put together the econ triage guide to every party, meetup, and dinner happening during Prosper Week. Plus, I'll tell you how to get a free expo only pass and a shot at free tickets to my Ecom Mastery AI event in Nashville. The mustattend event is the Atomic Golf Networking Party on Tuesday, March 10th from 9:00 p.m. to midnight. It's at Atomic Golf on the 4th floor in the Cosmic Lounge and 1850 South Main Street in Las Vegas. This is the kickoff networking event of Prosper 2026 and Ecom Master AI is a proud sponsor. Solar Systems has taken over the entire fourth floor, including the cosmic lounge, bar, patio, overlook, and 26 private golf bays. Expect more than 500 six, seven, and eight figure Amazon sellers, brand operators, agency owners, and educators, golf bays, light bites, dream tickets, and real conversations, all in a high energy setting designed for building meaningful connections before Prosper officially begins. Use coupon code ecom mastery when you register. Links in the show notes. While you're at Prosper, make sure you stop by the Ecom Mastery AI and Dragonfish booth on the expo floor to play Murderbot. It's our insanely addictive game that's become the most popular attraction at every BDSS Market Masters event. Beat your fellow attendees and you could win free tickets to the Ecom Mastery AI featuring BDSS event in Nashville April 8th through 12th at the Grand Hyatt. We're bringing Murderbot to prosper so even more sellers can experience what all the hype is about. And if you love it, you'll get to play again at BDSS Market Masters 4 in Austin August 20th through 24th. Haven't registered for Prosper yet? Grab a free Expo only pass using promo code EO-at-620 at prospershow.com. Now, let me run through the full party schedule real quick. On Monday, March 9th, there's the Prosper welcome drink at Tacos and Beer LV from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m. Tuesday the 10th is stacked apparativo at Cypriyani covering Amazon Rufus Optimization from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. Then Night of Illusion, the unofficial Prosper kickoff from 7:00 to 9:00 p.m. And then, of course, the Atomic Golf Networking Party from 9:00 p.m. to midnight. Wednesday 11th is the biggest day for events. Ecom founder Spa Morning from 8 to 10:00 a.m. Prosper after hours with vendor at 5:00 pm. Another apparativo at Cypriyani on Amazon automation and open claw from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. Capo Capy hour from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. A datadriven Amazon brand dinner from 6:00 to 8:30 p.m. Prosper Partners Connect and Good Stakes private dinner both at 7:00 p.m. Shane Starlight Social from 8:00 to 11:00 p.m. Spin Prosper Bottle with top brands and a VIP suite starting at 8:00 p.m. and MDS Ecom Founder Connect from 9 to 11:00 p.m. Thursday, March 12th, wraps up with the partners VIP suite party from 8:00 p.m. to midnight. And don't forget the Prosper Booth Crawl. Grab a shirt, collect signatures from booths across the expo floor, and enter to win more than $5,000 in prizes. Full descriptions, locations, and registration links are all in the show notes. All right, let's shift gears to some big picture thinking about where e-commerce is headed. Sam Woods of Bionic Business recently spoke to Brian Curts's accelerator mastermind about AI agents and autonomous business operations. The short version, what he expected to see in 2027 is already happening now. His company runs with four humans doing the work of 50. One of their Shopify stores and one newsletter business operate with zero human involvement dayto-day. Someone checks the logs twice a week just to make sure nothing went sideways. It hasn't. So, what's actually working right now? Agents connected to your email marketing platform, e-commerce store, and ad accounts can do real work, not just answer questions. One person's agent pulled their top performing email campaigns from 6 months ago, figured out why they converted, rewrote them with fresh angles, and loaded the whole sequence into their ESP. What used to take a small team in a full week, took under 30 minutes. Another person's agent runs their Shopify store autonomously. Coding agents are working 7-hour stretches overnight while their operators sleep. A connector making this possible is something called MCP or model context protocol. Think of it like USBC for AI. It lets AI plug into your software tools and actually take action inside them, not just talk about what you should do. The economics have completely shifted. Building this kind of setup used to cost $200 to $500,000 and months of engineering time. Now the frameworks are free on GitHub or you can use platforms like lindy.ai for a monthly fee. Someone can set up a working version for around $10,000. Here's the key insight for sellers. The bottleneck going forward isn't competition, it's attention and distribution. The number of competing stores is about to explode because the barrier to launching one has dropped to nearly zero. Most will be ghost towns nobody visits. But sellers who win will be the ones who figure out how to get in front of buyers and their AI shopping agents at a cost that makes the math work. An agent to agent economy is forming where your customer's personal shopping assistant browses, fills carts, and asks for approval. The transaction mechanics change, but the underlying direct response math of acquiring a customer for less than they're worth stays exactly the same. Woods says the next 12 to 18 months are when the people who figure out agent-driven operations pull ahead of everyone else. You don't have to go all in tomorrow, but you should be testing. Pick one function in your business, like email, customer service, or competitor monitoring. Get an AI agent running on it and build from there. The window is open. It won't stay open forever. There's a link to Sam's full video in the show notes. Speaking of getting better results, if you want a second set of eyes on your PPC, was a case study from Chris at Sophie Society worth checking out. They took one brand and saw seven times more subscribers. Click-through rate jumped from.36% to 1.47% 47% and total sales increased by four. The core idea is almost too simple. Get customers to buy more than once. If every customer purchases two units instead of one, you can turn a 40% a cost into a 20% effective a cost without touching a single bid. An aggressive LTV strategy paired with three other PPC profit margin fixes put the brand Ciology on a healthy growth path. Chris borrowed principles from Google advertising and applied them to Amazon PPC. That alone makes it worth a look. Link to the full case study is in the show notes. All right, time for you got to see this. According to Steve Larson, the real problem in selling is the hook positioning and message. In a recent episode of Marketing Misfits, Nor Ferrar and I talked with Steve Lson, former ClickFunnel CMO and Russell Brunson's funnel builder. We broke down what actually drives leads, conversions, and sales online. Steve explains why there's no such thing as internet marketing, only marketing and distribution, and why studying classic marketers like PT Barum and Claude Hopkins can make you a better modern marketer. We went deep on the psychology behind hooks, how to position yourself in a red ocean with a blue offer, and the exact framework Steve uses to create marketing messages that generate hand raisers and qualified leads. If you build funnels, run ads, sell online, or create marketing campaigns, this episode gives you a clear blueprint for writing hooks that make people say, "Tell me more." Link to the full episode is in the show notes. Now, for some interesting stats, AI shopping traffic is now converting better than traditional channels. Looking at monthly conversion rates and retail from October 2024 through December 2025, AI conversion rates surged past nonI traffic in Q4 of 2025. By December, AIdriven traffic was converting at about 7% while nonAI was hovering around.5%. That's a significant uplift and the gap keeps widening. Data from Adobe Digital Insights and ECDB. Link in the show notes. Here's a big one. Meta started notifying advertisers last week that credit cards will no longer be accepted for ad payments. Effective accounts have until March 31st to switch to monthly invoicing where Meta extends a credit line and you pay within 30 days of receiving your invoice. meta pitched it as predictable billing and fewer payment interruptions. But the real story is what they didn't say. You're losing your credit card rewards. For sellers spending $50,000 a month on meta ads, a 2 to 3% cash back card was putting 12 to $18,000 a year back in their pocket. Some advertisers had stacked reward strategies, hitting 4 to 4.5% effective cash back. Cars like the MX Business Gold give 4x points on ad spend. That money is now gone. And it's not just the rewards. Credit cards give you a 21 to 30-day float before the bill comes due. Essentially a free short-term loan on your ad spend. Monthly invoicing sounds similar, but the timing depends on when Meta issues the invoice. For brands running heavy Q4 spend against inventory bought months earlier, losing that cash flow buffer hurts. Google already made the same move for high spend advertisers, requiring them to shift off credit cards and onto invoicing or direct debit. The DTC community pushed back hard. Google didn't budge. The big question is Amazon next. Amazon ads is now one of the biggest digital ad platforms in the world with sellers running serious monthly budgets through sponsored products, sponsored brands, and DSP. Amazon still accepts credit cards for ad payments. But if both Google and Meta have decided high-spend advertisers belong on invoicing, Amazon has every structural reason to follow suit. The interchange fees platforms pay on processing millions in credit card transactions are a real cost and eliminating them is pure margin improvement. There's been no announcement from Amazon, but the industry trend is moving in one direction. If credit card rewards are baked into your unit economics on ad spend, it might be time to stress test what happens when that line item disappears. All right, today's software tool of the day, the label it strategy. One of the simplest ways to boost your click-through rate on Amazon is something most sellers overlook. Adding your unique selling proposition directly onto your main image. I'm talking about text callouts like 60-day supply or two pack value placed right on the product photo. Even if that text doesn't appear on your actual packaging, it works because shoppers are scrolling fast. They're not reading your title. They're not reading your bullets. They're glancing at thumbnails and making split-second decisions. A clear, bold label on your main image does the selling before they even click. It instantly communicates value, separates you from the sea of identical looking competitors, and reduces the mental effort a shopper needs to figure out why your product is the one to buy. One supplement brand tested this by adding 60-day supply to their main image, even though the physical bottle didn't say it anywhere. The result was a 27% bump in click-through rate in the first week. If you want to try it, keep a few things in mind. Keep the text short and punchy, two to four words max. Use colors that pop against your product so the label is readable at thumbnail size. Don't cover up important product details. And most importantly, test different USBs to see what actually moves the needle. Made in USA, three times stronger. Family size. Figure out what your customers care about most and put it front and center. Your main image is your digital shelf space. Make it sell before the click. There's a link in the show notes to try Listing Optimizer AI for free if you want help with this. Here's some big legal news that might affect your bottom line. A federal trade court judge ruled Wednesday that the US government must begin refunding the $130 billion it collected in tariffs that the Supreme Court struck down as illegal last month. Judge Richard Eaton ordered Customs and Border Protection to start recalculating duties owed to importers, saying that every single scent of the IEPA based tariffs must be repaid. More than 300,000 importers paid these tariffs and more than 2,000 lawsuits have already been filed seeking refunds. The Trump administration is expected to appeal, but the government has acknowledged it will pay interest on any refunds it's required to make. If you import products and paid tariffs under the EA orders, you may be entitled to a refund. The court signal refunds can be handled pretty smoothly, but the appeal could delay things. Keep your import records and duty payments organized. You'll meet them. Watch this closely over the coming weeks. Before we wrap up, here are a few more hot picks. The four essentials to live shopping for e-commerce sales. Amazon closes warehouse and halts delivery across the Middle East. Trump faces 2,000 tariff lawsuits after Supreme Court loss. Amazon blocks automated AI software agents as of yesterday and how Tik Tok became Amazon's top demand engine. Links to all these stories are in the show notes. And here's your parting shot for today. Most people overestimate what they can do in a day and underestimate what they can do in a year. Oh, and remember that stunt Bezos question I asked at the beginning? What percent of all searches now end without a click? The answer is 60 to 65%. More than half of all searches never result in a click to any website. AI overviews are answering the question right there on the search page. That's all for today, folks. Have a great weekend and I'll see you again on Monday. This is Kevin Kane signing off from the Billiondollar Sellers podcast.