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What, Sh*t Sandwich was Taken?
A guy named Josh Pigford shipped a Chrome extension this week called Knockoff. It filters Amazon search results down to brands people actually recognize. Everything else gets dimmed, hidden, or labeled "No brand." 20,000 people installed it in four days.
The list of brands it keeps is public. Most aren’t on it. Like WNPETHOME, EHEYCIGA, YXYL, LU&MN, JOYIN, TOMY, GODONLIF, YOOJEE, LINGTENG, LANEIGE, VISCOO, BIODANCE, COOFANDY, BALENNZ, TOSY and of course, POOPLUNCH.
The easy read is that this is anti-China. It isn't. Anker sits on the extension's whitelist of established Chinese brands. YXYL gets dimmed. The line isn't where the product is made. It's whether a stranger would recognize your brand.
The app has one job: delete anonymous sellers (what it calls knockoffs) from the page.
And anonymous is how I built my brand. For years Amazon let you win that way. No face, no website, no story. The Prime badge did the trusting for you. A trademark, inventory, and four stars, and you were in business, and not one customer knew who you were.
That era is ending. You can't be anonymous anymore. Shoppers just proved they'll install software to enforce it. AI agents are going to increasingly enforce it by default.
The work now is becoming anti-anonymous. Here’s what to do:
1. Pass the google test. Google your brand plus your category. Something real has to come back: a site, a founder, a Reddit thread. That's the check a curator or an AI runs before deciding you exist. If the only result is your own Amazon listing, you're anonymous.
2. Grow branded search. Recognition has a number: how many shoppers type your brand name into Amazon's search bar. See where you’re at. Do you have packaging worth remembering, an insert worth keeping, a product people recommend by name?
3. Act like a company, not a listing. A real website, real people, an address, emails that get answered. Knockoff has a "Report as a real brand" button. Recognition is crowdsourced now. People vote on whether you're real. Scary.
4. Ask the AI who wins your category. Rufus reached 250 million shoppers last year. Ask it, and ChatGPT, for the best product in your niche. If you're not in the answer, that's the gap the first three moves close. Models learn brands from the same footprint humans check.
Anonymous is over. Would a stranger keep your brand?
The IVS
Big thanks to Ritu Java for sharing this week’s IVS! Ritu is a prominent e-commerce marketing strategist, tech educator, and the founder and CEO of PPC Ninja. On top of that, she lived in Japan for 17 years and is genuinely one of the kindest people you will ever meet.
The AI Relay Race Hack: How I Never Lose a Time-Sensitive Task, Even When My Best Model Taps Out
Here is the main problem with AI coding assistants: the best models are also the hungriest. I run the most advanced models I can, Fable on Claude and Sol on Codex, because they think deeper and make fewer mistakes, but that horsepower burns tokens fast. And it always fails at the worst moment. I was halfway through a time-sensitive build, deadline breathing down my neck, when my premium model simply ran out of runway and stopped. Task frozen. Context gone. Momentum dead.
Here’s a fix. Instead of treating each AI as its own island, I point both assistants at a single shared folder holding one living document I call the handoff file. Every agent has the same two standing instructions baked in: read the handoff file first, and keep it updated as you work. What did you just finish, what is half-done, what comes next, and what does the next model need to know. It is a shift-change log, the same thing a hospital or a factory floor does when one team clocks out and another clocks in. So the moment Fable taps out of tokens, I do not restart and I do not re-explain the project. I point Sol at the same folder, it reads the handoff, and it continues as if it had been there the whole time. Fable stalls, Sol picks up the baton. Sol stalls, Fable takes it back. The work never stops, because the context lives in the folder, not in any single model's memory. This also works great if you have multiple Claude or Codex accounts.
Why this matters, especially for anyone running a business from a laptop and a good WiFi signal, is that it turns a hard ceiling into a smooth relay. You stop being hostage to one provider's limits or one bad token day, and you get the quality of the top-tier models without the fragility of depending on just one. Steal this today: create a shared folder, drop in a file called HANDOFF, and give every AI you use the same two rules, read it first and update it always. Then watch your "I ran out of tokens" disasters turn into a handoff you barely notice.
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The Deep Dive (Premium Content)
The Catalog Compliance Sweep. Every product you sell, checked against the rules that get enforced.
There are more rules touching your Amazon listings than anyone can hold in their head. Chemical warnings, children's product testing, food labels, battery rules, Prop 65, pesticides, and more arriving every year.
I have heard more than my fair share of horror stories: listings taken down over something that could have been caught months earlier, sales gone while the paperwork gets sorted out.
That is what this guide is for. Download your listings report from Seller Central, hand it to Claude with the pdf & prompt, and it scans every listing one by one and tells you if anything might come up: fix this now, check this one thing, or you're fine.
Run the full scan with your Claude/ChatGPT sub and see which of your products…
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CR - Where Everyone Knows Your Name
Took this photo Sunday. Guy in the background…..really looked like Carole Baskin’s (Tiger King fame) new husband Howard…..Just saying its Costa Rica.
Friday night, Marsha and I went out for our usual date night. First things first: if you're not going on a weekly date night with your spouse, start scheduling it now. Don't make excuses. Too busy, too tired, can't find a babysitter. It's only a couple of hours, and those hours matter over the years. Doesn't matter if you have kids or no kids, whether you're 30 or 60. Make it a habit.
So we walked into JP's, a good sports bar and one of those spots where the staff greet us by name. Hugs, fist bumps, the whole thing. And there was a new staff member... JOSE! No idea what his last name is, but he's worked at the Beach Club and Las Catalinas, both places we go. That's the nature of bilingual workers in the service industry here. They move around. Which is great if you're friends, not so great if you've had a disagreement.
Las Catalinas
Just the other day Marsha and I were walking down the beach and a server from the W called out to us. Yep, he used to serve us at Planet Hollywood. It's important in this area to make friends with the staff, know a little about their families, share some laughs. I'm not getting invited to their weddings, but seeing familiar faces when you go out gives you that feeling from Cheers, where everybody knows your name.
That's one of the underrated perks of living in a smaller area. In a big city you can eat at the same restaurant for five years and still be a stranger. Here, you're a regular after three visits. The guy at the fruit stand knows what you buy. The server remembers your drink before you sit down. You run into people you know at the grocery store, on the beach, at the bank (if you have to go…ugh). Some people would find that too small. I find it's the opposite of small. It's a sense of belonging, and no amount of city convenience replaces it. Now that I’ve finished this we are heading to The Shack for lunch and the guys all know what all 4 of us will have to drink!
Strategically Change Your Product’s Category
A 45% traffic bump is sitting one category over.
The Best Seller badge is one of the best badges you can get on Amazon, by far. Profitero measured badge impact across 37,000 products: Best Seller lifts a product's traffic by an average of 45% (the study).
Why it’s so good: the badge shows in search results, where it makes your listing the one orange thing on a page of white tiles. It shows on your product page, where it settles "is this the right one?" before the shopper bounces. And it compounds: the badge brings clicks, clicks bring sales, sales hold the rank that keeps the badge. If one is within reach anywhere in your catalog, it is worth everything in your power to get it.
The opening: While Amazon has bestseller badges liberally across many categories, it doesn’t have them across every one. That being said, it IS in tiny ones. A badge from a tiny subcategory looks exactly the same as one from Kitchen & Dining. You don't have to outsell anyone new, just get filed where you already win.
What to do (do all this with AI, of course!):
- Pull every category your products rank in. Mine came back with 20 categories.
- For each product, ask one question: is there a more specific category it could reasonably fit in? Reasonable matters. A shopper should genuinely expect to find it there.
- Size the gap. Open the target category's public best-sellers page and look at the product in the top spot. My scan found one where a product of mine outsells the current #1 by 5x. But if you’re close to outselling #1, you could switch category, push PPC, and get the badge, then everything is gravy.
- Then the check that saves you from a dead end: confirm the category can actually award the badge. Open that top product's page. Is the orange badge physically on it? Does the category show as a "#1 in..." line in its rank box? Some old categories keep a best-sellers list but never display rank or badge anywhere.
- If the badge shows up there, request the move: edit the listing's item type keyword and make the change.
- Enjoy your new badge!
That's it. What you get on the other side: the orange badge on every search result and on your product page, and the traffic that follows it.
You Probably Already Shop Here, So…
Costco will often rent you the same car for 10-25% less than the rental company will. You pay nothing upfront, and cancellation is free right up to pickup. That combination is the actual hack: book your car now, then re-search the same dates on Costco Travel later.
Rates swing with inventory, and when a cheaper one appears, book it first, then cancel the original (cancelled bookings can't be reinstated, so always lock in the new one before you drop the old one). Travelers knock hundreds off longer rentals doing nothing but this. A second driver rides free too, and they don't even need a membership, which saves the $13-15 a day agencies typically charge to add one.
Better yet, have AI check every day until your trip and continually get the best rate.
Build a fortress during the good times so you can handle the bad times.
Jamie Dimon
FREE CHEESE! Now that I have your attention… you probably would like the Facebook community.
This week in the Facebook group: Robo asks about Amazon’s new passport requirements
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