You're no longer just competing for clicks

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 podcasts. I'm your host, Kevin King, and today is Thursday, July 23rd, 2026, and this is a special one, folks, because this is episode 200. So, thank you for being here with me for all of it. We've got packed show today. So, let's jump right in. On today's show, I'm going to break down how Gen Z is actually shopping right now and why you are no longer just competing for clicks, you're competing for AI recommendations. We'll also talk about Amazon's AI overviews hitting the desktop, the fight that's breaking out over AI avatars flooding Tik Tok shop, vendors finally getting their hands on search query data, and a whole lot more. Before we get going, real quick, mark your calendar for August 6. The folks at Dragonfish are pulling back the curtain for an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at how their whole system works. And this isn't just another email tool. It's intent plus AI brains, 24 specialized AI brains, and an AEO engine. All built to capture inmarket buyers and turn them into a ready to buy audience. Registration details are coming next week, so keep an eye out and I'll have a link for you as soon as they're live. All right, now for today's stump basos question. So, here's a wild one. Almost 51% of AI shoppers, 50.9 to be exact, have actually abandoned a purchase after AI raised some kind of concern about it. So despite that, here's the question. What percentage of AI researched purchases still end up closing on Amazon? Think about it, and I'll give you the answer at the end of the show. All right, let's get into it. So, I want to start with the story this whole episode is named after cuz it completely reframes how you should be thinking about your youngest customers. So Roy Wingo, who's a college sophomore and also the daughter of channel adviser and retail Gentic founder Scott Wingo, wrote a guest post for her dad's Retail Gentic newsletter. And in it, she describes exactly how she and her friends actually shop. And here's the first thing that jumped out at me. Her generation doesn't even say Chad GPT anymore. It's just chat. Skincare routine for the hard water in your dorm. Ask chat. What do I wear for sorority recruitment? Ask chat. Is this thing worth 30 bucks? Ask chat. And the key insight underneath all of it is this. Tik Tok still owns discovery, but AI now owns everything that happens after. Now, if you think about it, shopping has always been a conversation. Trying to dress, step out of the fitting room, and ask your mom or your friends, "Does this look good on me?" You then fire off screenshots to the group chat and say, "Hey, pick one for me." Well, that conversation is not going away. It's just moving over to AI. And here's the difference. Chat remembers every single previous conversations. It knows she wears gold jewelry. It knows she likes neutrals. And it knows she'll pay a little more for something that lasts. Her friends need the whole backstory every time. Chat doesn't. So Rory gives us one great example from her own life. She saw a viral lip combo on Tik Tok. Now the old way of doing this was you pause the video, you dig through the comments, you Google it, you go to Sephora, then Tik Tok shop, you compare everything, and finally you buy. Instead, she just tapped Tik Tok's built-in AI assistant and asked, "What lip combo is this?" and it identified every product in every shade in seconds. Then she asked where can I buy them? And it gave her the retailers, the prices, the availability. Then is there a Tik Tok shop option? And boom, listings, bundles, ratings, tutorials are right there. So the whole funnel just compressed. It went from Tik Tok to Google to Reddit to Sephora to Amazon and then buy down to just Tik Tok one AI conversations and then purchase. And I want you to notice what is not in that second funnel. Google's gone, Reddit's gone, Sephora, Amazon, all gone. Um, so what does this actually mean for you? A few things. First, discovery and validation have split apart. The creators and Tik Tok sparked the want, but AI is now the thing answering questions like, should I actually buy this? Which shade's right for me? Where is it cheapest? Or is there a bundle? So now you've got to win both of those moments. And here's the kicker. There's no ad unit you can buy your way into that second one. Second, and this is uh the line the whole episode's named after. You are no longer just competing for clicks. You're competing for AI recommendations. So if the system is answering, is this worth it? Then your product data, your reviews, your comparisons, your content, all need to give that AI enough information, enough trust to confidently recommend you dim listings and vague claims just so they're not going to get surface in conversations. Third, the platforms are pushing this on purpose. Rory actually got served an Instagram ad from ChatGpt itself. And it wasn't for a product. It was for the habit of asking AI what color suits you before you even shop. So the recommendation is literally becoming part of the products. And fourth this is edge and tech commerce but from the shopper side. Today AI is helping her decide. Tomorrow it compares the retailers. It builds the carts. It applies the coupons and it checks out for her. And for Jenz that's not going to feel like some revolution. It's just going to feel like the next message in a conversation they're already having. So here's the bottom line. Your youngest customers aren't asking their friends if the dress looks good anymore. They're asking chat. So, you better make sure chat has something good to say about you. That's all credit to Rory Wingle and her guest post on Scott Wingle's retail gentic newsletter. And honestly, it's worth reading in full. There's a link in today's show notes. Now, before the next story, let me talk to you real quick about something that trips up a lot of fast growing sellers, and that's cash flow. Here's the thing. Fast growing Amazon sellers rarely have a demand problem. What they have is a timing problem. You're paying your suppliers weeks or even months before that inventory actually sells. And the faster you grow, the wider that gap gets. The next PO comes due before the last one is even paid for itself. So there's a product called liquid inventory from E Capital. And it's a revolving line of credit backed by your inventory built specifically for Amazon sellers. You use your inventory as collateral to fund bigger POS, restocks, and your Prime Day and Q4 stockups. And as the product sells through and you pay the balance back down, that funding just becomes available again. It's not a one-time advance. It's a line you use over and over. And one of their customers, Luke Sutherland over at Product Movement Technologies, put it this way. He said that the traditional lenders couldn't even see the inventory sitting in their warehouse. So, they had to pledge personal collateral. He called liquid inventory a gamecher. So, they doubled sales in February and they're expecting 100% revenue growth in 2026. So, if you're placing larger POS or gearing up for Q4 and you don't want to tie up all your cash doing it, go see how liquid inventory works. There's a link in the show notes. Okay, and this next one picks up right where that left off because there's a new video over on the marketing misfits that you really got to go check out. So, look, if you're still obsessing over getting back links to rank higher on Google, I hate to break it to you, but you're playing a game that basically ended back in 2015. In this episode, Norah Ferrari and myself sit down with Jason Barnard, who's the brand SER guy and the founder of Calcube, and we get into how AI engines like Chad GPT, Gemini, and Perplexity are completely changing the way people discover and buy products. And Jason's big point is this. Stop thinking about AI as a search engine and start treating it like an untrained salesforce. Because if you don't actively educate these algorithms on who you are, what you do, and why you're the best, they're just going to go recommend your competitors instead. Whether you run a little brickandmortar shop or a massive e-commerce brand, he breaks down exactly how to control your narrative across Google's knowledge graph, how to structure your product pages so machines can actually read them, and how to use AI as an orchestrator for your content. It's a really good one and there's a link in the show notes so check it out. All right, let's take a quick look at some interesting stats now. And this one is a look at the top 25 apps in the world ranked by daily use and how well they hold on to people. So the standout here is WhatsApp. It leads on both fronts at once. Both the daily habit and that first month retention which is really hard to pull off at that kind of scale. And when you zoom out, Google and NetUP pretty much own most of the billion user positions on the whole board. But here's the one that should catch your eye if you sell products. Shopppee actually beats Amazon on retention in this group. So, the commerce platform that hangs on to shoppers best isn't the one you'd probably guess. I've got the full breakdown and written version of today's newsletter. Okay, next up, and this ties right back into our whole theme today because Amazon's AI overviews just hit the desktop. So, Andrew Bell spotted Alexa for shopping's latest AB test. It's AI overviews showing up in a desktop sidebar on those broad category searches. And he thinks this one's going to stick. So, let me tell you what's actually inside this module. Uh, first, there's a category insight that gets synthesized from sources both on and off Amazon. And sometimes it's personalized. In his rug example, Alexa referenced the household's kids and their multiple pets, stuff that was never even typed into the search. And then it reordered the pathways around that. It then put machine washable and pet friendly ahead of wool and plush shag. So same exact query but different guidance per shopper which means your Alexa visibility might depend on the shoppers inferred circumstances not just the keyword. Second, there's visual navigation that basically writes the next search for you. So you click nature on a metal wall art search and Alexa just drops nature metal wall art straight into the search bar for you. Alexa is doing the query reformulation that shoppers used to do by retyping. And what that means is that longtail coverage in your listings matters more now, not less. Third, the prompt pills are trained on clicks. Those dive deeper prompts that pop up are the ones shoppers click the most. So the marketplace is literally learning which research questions matter in each category out in the open. And fourth, external sources are feeding this overview. In the earbuds example, it cited sound guys, PC Mag, and what hi-fi. That's editorial content sitting upstream of the Amazon shelf. So Belle's advice here is to work on getting yourself into those cited sources and he calls it authority anchoring. Basically off Amazon PR is now on Amazon SEO on mobile. This is already running inside the results feed as researched by Alexa with the sources, the insight, the prompts and scrollable visual pathways, all of it before the shopper even reaches the sponsored organic listings. Now Belle had two grounding notes worth repeating. Cosmo is a knowledge graph. It's not an algorithm and it did not replace A9. whatever LinkedIn is telling you. And Amazon SEO is alive and well. Alexa is just using the search bar more intelligently than shoppers do. Oh, and Walmart is copying every bit of it. All right, here's a story that's stirring up a real fight, and it's about AI avatars flooding Tik Tok shop. So, the Wall Street Journal's Patrick Coffee reports that AI generated product demos, makeup applications, and dress twirls are spreading all over Tik Tok shop. And the the tension between the creators, the brands, and Tik Tok itself is really boiling over now. And here's the setup. Tik Tok Shop itself launched an AI video maker that lets affiliates autogenerate these shoppable videos. And the platform's own policy allows fully AI generated content to earn commissions as long as it carries an on-screen AI generate tag and doesn't make any misleading claims. So creators are taking still images and turning them into 3D videos where their avatars appear to hold and sample the products. And the backlash is very real. Shark Ninja fired the first big shot. They sent a memo to their affiliate community banning AI generated content outright. So if you use it, your commissions get pulled. Their chief commercial officer, Neil Shaw, said, "We didn't want an AI generated shark vacuum cleaning an AI generated floor." Then you got Rare Beauty, who got AI twin without any consent at all. A creator posted videos of her AI duplicate using Rare Beauty products. All commission eligible sales, zero actual connection to the brand. And because Rare Beauty is in Tik Tok's open affiliate plan, they couldn't do a thing to stop it. And the human affiliates, the real people reviewing real products, they're steamed because they say the AI videos are getting the ad spend and taking the sales. Now, to put some scale on this, Tik Tok shops US sales are projected to hit over $23 billion this year. That's up 48% which puts it past Target and Costco online. And the affiliate ranks exploded from 2.3 million creators in 2024 to 11.3 million globally with about 945,000 of those here in the US. So if your brand's on shop, the control levers are limited, but they're real. You can switch from the open affiliate plan over to targeted where you handpick your creators. You can tighten up your creator approval. And you can disable the setting that autoconverts your top performing posts into paid ads. But there's no way to fully stop AI posts being made on your behalf. So, at the very least, somebody on your team should be reviewing how your products are showing up out there because your brand may already be starring in videos you have never seen. All right, let me tell you about today's software tool of the day. And this one's going to save you some money before you go spend it. So, before you drop another 99 bucks a month on some shiny new seller tool, run through this thing first. Jordi Ornoyz has been reviewing Amazon seller software all the way back since 2013, which makes his directory one of the oldest independent ones in the whole game. And it now covers more than 170 tools across 18 plus categories. So PPC and advertising, analytics, product research, inventory management, repricing, review management, all of it. And here's what makes it actually useful. Instead of just another affiliate farm, you can filter right down to your situation by feature, marketplace, by continent, pricing model, or business size. Everything's scored, not just listed. So, each tool gets numerical ratings on features, integrations, pricing, support, and learning curve, plus honest pros and cons. And you can build comparison lists and wish lists to stack your short list side by side before you commit to any subscription. It's free to browse. It's independent, and it's not funded by Amazon. And so bookmark it for the next time some Facebook group swears up and down that a new tool change their business. There's a link in the show notes. Okay, next up, this is a big one if you're a vendor cuz vendors are finally getting search query data. So, Amazon has finished rolling out the search query performance and search catalog performance dashboards to vendor central and this is query level data that has been a third party only advantage ever since it launched. Now, it's not a perfect match to what the sellers get. Amazon's hiding the market share view from vendors, but the core of it is all there. You get real search volume and rank for the exact terms driving buyers to your products. You get full funnel visibility by search term and by as impressions, clicks, add to carts, and purchases. And you can be aggregated at the brand level or drill it down to individual asens. So why is this such a big deal for vendors? Well, first it's product page optimization with actual data. You can now see which queries you're winning impressions on with them losing a click or the card ad. And that right there is your title, your image, and your price problem laid bare. And second, it's smarter sponsored products. You can steer your ad spend toward the queries where the funnel actually shows you convert instead of just guessing from campaign level data. And if you want to go find it in vendor central, you just hover over brands, then brand analytics, then search analytics, and there's your search query performance and search catalog performance. So, if you're a vendor who's been flying blind on organic search while your third party competitors mine this stuff for years, well, your homework just got assigned. All right, before we wrap up, here are a few more hot picks for you. First, Google is now going to tell you if an ad was made with AI. Second, Bank of America says it's actually Shopify, not Amazon, that's winning an AI shopping. And third, Amazon is building a 248,000 ft robotic fulfillment center down here in Austin. You can find the links to all these stories at our written newsletter over at billiondollarellers.com. And here's your parting shot for today from Calvin Culage. He said, "The chief business of the American people's business. They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing, and prospering in the world almost 100 years later, and that one still holds up pretty well. And finally, remember that Stun Basil's question from the top of the show? Well, the answer is 51%. Even with all those shoppers walking away after AI raises a concern, 51% of all AI research purchases still close on Amazon. So, Amazon's still where the money lands, but as we talked about today, getting recommended that conversations is as the whole ball game now. All right, that's all for today, folks. And thank you again for riding along for 200 episodes. Have a great weekend, and I'll see you again on Monday. This is Kevin King signing off from the Billiondollar Solers podcast.