Your margin is my opportunity - Jeff Bezos

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 Billiondollar Sellers podcast. I'm your host, Kevin King, and today is May 7th, 2026. We got a loaded show for you today. First, we're going to talk about how Amazon is literally showing you where demand is not being met and most sellers are completely ignoring it. Um, we'll also get into using Claude for Amazon keyword research, which is one of those things where once you see it, you can't go back. Then, Amazon just rolled out a native price history feature right on the product page. 365 days of pricing data, and it's going to kill the fake discount game before Prime Day. Plus, we got some wild stats on what influencer marketers actually get paid, an AI tip of the day, and more. All right, but first, here's your Stunt Bezos question for today. So, Sunday is Mother's Day in most of the world, not the UK though. They already had theirs. Flowers and greeting cards are going to be the most popular gifts as usual. The question is, how much are consumers expected to spend this year for Mother's Day? Think about that and I'll give you the answer at the end of the show. All right, let's get into it. So, uh, hats off to Isaac Groves on LinkedIn for surfacing this one. Amazon is literally showing you where demand is not being met, and it's all right there in Product Opportunity Explorer. Now, this is not some third party tool. It's not scraped estimates. This is first party shopper behavior data pulled straight from the platform itself. And the tab you want to pay attention to is the unmet demand tab. What it shows you is high search volume with low conversion, meaning the buyer intent is there. People are searching for this stuff, but the market hasn't answered it yet. That's not a research insight. That is a product brief. Amazon is basically handing you a road map. Now, um before you go all in, there's a couple things to watch out for. A high search with low conversion isn't always a product gap. Sometimes it's a listing gap. The opportunity might be in how you position what already exists, not in creating something brand new. And rising demand still needs validation, right? The gap might be real with too small to support inventory and PPC and launch costs. But if you move early, you build a category position that is really hard to displace. You wait 6 months and you're entering a market that's already filling up. Most sellers chase demand. The winners hunt where demand isn't being satisfied. So, if you're not using the unmet demand report, uh you're leaving money on the table. All right, so this next one is about keyword research and uh specifically using Claude to do it. Chris Rawlings put out an updated video walking through how to use Claude for Amazon keyword research step by step and it's really good. This is an AI slop. What you get is a keyword list that's already sorted, segregated, and ready to plug straight into your PPC campaigns. Uh, negative keywords, branded terms, competitor terms, shopper intentbased, everything. And the cool thing is it's not just about keyword research. He shows you how to build your own workflows with Claude and turn them into custom skills for your Amazon brand. So, if you want to check out the video or download his free Claude keyword research skill, there are links in the show notes. All right, so you know Jeff Bezos has that famous quote, "Your margin is my opportunity, right?" And uh that really sets the tone for this next one. Back in the early days of Amazon FBA, sellers had incredibly cheap storage, massive search visibility, and you could get pay-per-click ads for as low as 12. Those days are gone. Today, the competition is fierce. Margins are squeezed, and building a business solely on Amazon, it's just not a viable strategy anymore. So, on a recent episode of Marketing Misfits, myself and Norm Ferrar sat down with Mike McCclary live in Nashville at Ecom Mastery AI. Mike is the CEO of amazing.com. Has been the e-commerce space for a long time. And uh he showed up in a 1980s Bionic Man jumpsuit, which was, you know, classic Mike. We talked about everything from the hidden power of networking to using AI to write your landing pages. It's packed with highle strategies to futureproof your brand. There's a link to the full episode in the show notes. And um while you're at it, check out the Marketing Misfits newsletter, too. All right, let's talk about some interesting stats. So, here's a wild one. Nearly half of Alphabet's record $62.6 billion profit in Q1 2026 came from updating the value of the equity they own in Anthropic. And it's not just Google. More than half of Amazon's pre-tax gains, we're talking $16.8 billion, also came from their anthropic stake. So, you got two of the biggest tech companies in the world and a huge chunk of their profits is basically coming from their AI bets. That tells you where the money thinks the future is. Quick break. If you've ever dealt with the message error 8541 on Amazon, you know how frustrating the catalog ownership problem can be. Online Seller Solutions put together a free guide on how to diagnose and resolve matching errors for listings in your catalog. It's the most common problem sellers run into on Amazon, and uh this guide walks you through exactly how to fix it. There's a link in the show notes to grab that guide. All right, this next one is a big deal, especially with Prime Day coming up. If your Prime Day strategy involves jacking up your price 2 weeks before the sale, so you can slap a fat percentage off badge on it, kill that plan now. Amazon just rolled out a native price history feature directly on the product detail page, and it goes back a full 365 days. Shoppers don't need KA anymore. They don't need Camel Camel Camel. They don't need a browser extension. There's a price history link sitting right next to the price on every listing. One click and they see every move you've made on that as for the past year. And on top of that, they can ask Rufus questions like, "Has this been on sale in the last 30 days?" or "Is this the lowest price recently?" And Rufus gives them a straight answer. Pull from your own pricing data. This is rolling out now in the US, UK, and India with full availability in the coming weeks. So by Prime Day, the buyer looking at your listing has the receipts. They're going to see exactly what you charged in March and May and the Tuesday before the deal started. So, uh, let me tell you what this wipes out. The classic price pump play. You know, raising your list price from 29 to 49 the week before Prime Day. So, a $24 deal looks like 50% off. That doesn't work when the chart shows you sat at $29 for 10 months straight. It also kills those lowest price of the year claims you might be putting in your A+ content or your external ads because, you know, shoppers can check that in just two seconds now. and also lazy reference pricing. If your product hovers at $19.99 all year and you list it at 1999 Prime Day with a deal badge, the chart exposes it as a non-deal, conversion drops. So, here's what you should be doing before Prime Day. Pull a 12-month pricing audit on every AS you plan to promote. If you've been bouncing prices around, your deal needs to actually beat your trailing 90-day average, not just your list price. Build a discount off your real selling price, not some inflated MSRP. A genuine 15% off a price you've held steady is going to outperform a fake 40% off a number nobody actually paid. If you unsubscribe and save, audit your SNS price against your Prime Day price. If SNS subscribers are paying less than the deal, shoppers are going to see it. And coupons and Prime exclusive discounts still stack cleanly on top of a stable base price. That's now the cleanest path to a real looking deal that survives the price history check. Bottom line, the fake discount game on Amazon is done. If your deal can't survive a 365day price chart sitting right next to the buy box, uh it's just not going to convert. All right, time for a BDSM AI tip of the day. So, this one's about how to structure a really good Claude prompt. And uh there are basically seven pieces to it. First, you start with the task. You tell Claude what you want and what success looks like. Then, you give it your context files, the background documents it needs to read before it responds. Next is the reference. You show an example of what good looks like. And then you paste in the patterns and rules you extracted from that reference. Things like always do this or never do that. Then you've got what I call a success brief where you spell out the type of output you need, who's going to read it, what it should not sound like, and what success actually means. After that, you lay out your rules, your standards, your constraints, the landmines to avoid. And then here's the key. You tell Claude not to start writing yet. Instead, you ask it to ask you clarifying questions first so you can align on the approach together. And finally, before it writes anything, uh, have it list the three most important rules from your context file and give you its execution plan. Only then do you let go. It sounds like a lot, but once you build this framework, the quality of what comes back is just night and day. Here's a visual of this whole layout in the newsletter if you want to see it. So, this next one is uh really eye opening if you work with influencers at all. So, there's this company called Modash and they just did a survey of about 400 influencer marketers. So, the people that brands hire to run their influencer and social media campaigns. And uh some of these numbers are are wild. So, the global average salary is about $50,000. But when you ask them what they would need to feel fairly paid, the number is about 63,000. So, there is this $13,000 gap. And seven out of 10 say the industry just isn't paying them what they're worth. And geography makes a massive difference. North America averages about $87,000. Europe is 45,000. Middle East and Africa around 41,000. Asia and Oceanania about 31,000. And South America only about 18,000. Experience matters a lot too. Under one year, you're looking at about $32,000. The first big jump hits around 3 to 4 years of about 51,000. And then the biggest jump is 8 to 10 years where you hit about 77,000. Now, here's a part that's interesting for Amazon sellers. Fashion and apparel, which is the most popular niche, actually pays the worst. It's the only niche below the global average. Software, health, and wellness, and travel pay the best, probably because higher purchase prices mean fatter margins. And four and 10 influencer marketers are also running their company's social media accounts on top of their actual job. They earn 12% less than peers who don't, and they report 15% lower job satisfaction. Companies are cramming two full-time roles into one paycheck. The unpaid overtime is brutal, too. In North America, they're losing over $10,000 a year in unpaid overtime. That's about four and a half extra hours every single week. And turnover is skyhigh. Most of them have been with their current company under 3 years, even at senior levels. Only four and 10 say their internal teams and leadership actually understand what they do. And that gap kills budgets, breeds unrealistic KPIs, and tanks job satisfaction. So, if you're working with influencer agencies or building an in-house program, this explains a lot. The person managing your campaign is probably also running social, feeling questions from the seauite, doing affiliate management, and clocking unpaid hours. You want better results, hire people who only do influencer marketing. Give them the budget and authority to own it end to end, and don't bury them under extra tasks. There's a link to the full survey in the show notes if you want to go deeper. Okay, before we wrap up, a few more hot picks for you. Amazon quietly closed the keyword stuffing hiding spot, so if you've been doing that, uh, a heads up. GameStop offered $56 billion it doesn't actually have to buy eBay. That's a wild headline. And Amazon opened its logistics network to all businesses, not just Amazon sellers. Links to all of those are in the show notes. And here's your parting shot for today. If you have a good story and weak positioning, you help sell a competitor's products. That's from April Dunford. And uh I think that's one of those lines that should make you stop and think about your listings. You know, you can have the best product story in the world, but if your positioning is off, you're basically driving traffic for somebody else. Think about that. Oh, and about that stunt Bezos question from the beginning, how much are consumers expected to spend on Mother's Day this year? The answer is $ 38 billion. $ 38 billion on Mother's Day. Holy cow, that's a lot of flowers and greet cards. All right, that's all for today, folks. Have a great weekend and I'll see you again on Monday. from Milan, Italy. This is Kevin King signing off from the Billiondoll Solers podcast.