Welcome back friend!
“You’re Too Late”
AI has never been louder than it is right now. Every podcast, every mastermind, every scroll: agents, automations, somebody claiming they run their whole company on one prompt (I'm part of the noise, so this is partly my fault).
And when something gets this loud, a thought creeps in: "Everyone already figured this out. I missed it. I'm late." So here's a number. The Census Bureau asks American businesses whether they use AI in producing their goods or services. A real survey, not a LinkedIn poll. As of May: about one in five say yes. Read that from the other side. Four out of five businesses are using none. Not "behind on agents." None. AI is burning bright.
Adoption has barely started. Those are two different curves, and the feeling of being late comes from measuring yourself against the wrong one. Think about what the noise means: Nobody gets on a podcast to announce they use email. The things people talk about this much are the things almost nobody is doing yet.
The loudness that makes you feel late is the best evidence that you're early.
I run nearly my entire Amazon business through Claude Code, and I still feel like I'm at the start. It keeps doing things I didn't know it could do. If I'm early, you're not late. If the feeling is what's been stopping you, the guide already exists: Your First 30 Days with Claude Code, Amazon Seller Edition. Exact prompts, no code, and the mistakes we made are in there too.
And one more thing about feeling “late:” it only exists at the start of a curve. When running your business on AI feels settled, safe, and obvious, that will mean the four out of five finally showed up, and the advantage left with them. The day you stop feeling late is the day you are.
The IVS
Big thanks to Matt Kostan for stepping in and sharing this week’s IVS. Matt is one of the kindest and smartest people in the Amazon space. You may know him as the guy who created Productpinion. Matt’s software helps you figure out why shoppers aren’t buying and what to do about it by using the best of both REAL and artificial intelligence.
The Speed Bump Word
Every seller is running the same Claude skill to shorten their titles. So pretty much every title in your category is about to look the same.
Same sucks, and here's what you can do about it…
But first, none of this should be a surprise. Back in 2023 (almost before Ai!) we were sharing how Amazon's own docs were already recommending this: “reducing product title length to under 100 characters to reduce noise and encourage more customers to visit your detail page."
Today is just the day they stop asking nicely.
Ok, so you trimmed your title. Good. So did everyone else, with the same "DM me on LinkedIn and I'll send you my Amazon title Claude skill" skill. (Ok, I may have been guilty of that too.)
And here's the thing, your main image is still mission critical for winning the click, but in a lot of categories it's getting harder and harder to differentiate JUST on the image alone.
So, here's a little known trick that almost no sellers use: start your title with a speed bump word.
A speed bump word is a non typical adjective, one shoppers never see in your category, that describes a MAIN thing about your product they actually care about. Words like:
- Indestructible
- Washable
- Serialized
- Hand stitched
- Bespoke
- Revitalize
- Original (one of my favourites, especially if your brand has a ton of copy cats)
Imagine a shopper scrolling past nine “Stainless Steel Can Opener” listings and comes across one that says "Heavy Duty Can Opener..etc” and their brain trips over it.
That's the speed bump. They stop. They get a little curious. They click to find out what the heck you mean by Heavy Duty.
And, it’s not just theory. Here’s the example of Graceliving using “Heavy Duty” as their Speed bump word and they outsell Amazon Basics 3 to 1….
They have less than half of Amazon basics’s reviews.. And, they charge 67% MORE!!!
Now of course , this isn’t all just because of the title.. But does Heavy Duty help 10x more than “Graceliving” as their first word? Heck yes!
"But my brand name goes first."
Yes, yes, that’s what Amazon wants you to do, but that’s not necessarily what you should do..
You'll be found for your brand name no matter what. It's in your bullets, your A+ content, your storefront, and all over your listing. That first word is the single highest leverage spot you have for stopping a scroll, and most sellers hand it to a word people only search when they already know you exist.
And here's the part I really like. This works on human shoppers AND on AI.
Semantic search means "indestructible" doesn't just rank for indestructible. The AI understands it also means durable, long lasting, and high quality. So one well chosen word makes you relevant across a whole cluster of searches, right at the moment shoppers are asking AI for products using more adjectives than ever.
Human friendly and machine friendly at the same time. Win win!
So how do you find your speed bump word?
Don't guess. Ask real shoppers (you knew this was coming, right?)
Inside ProductPinion, set up a Pinion Ask, show shoppers your product, and get them to describe it in their own words. You'll get back a pile of adjectives you never would have written down yourself.
When I ran this with one of my own product, shoppers kept coming back with "sleek" and "modern."
Here's the kicker: neither word appeared anywhere in my listing. Not as a keyword, not semantically, nowhere. You genuinely do not know how people describe your product until you ask them.
And shoppers actually DO notice this stuff - here’s what they said when they looked at a BBQ brush that had "Indestructible" in the title.
The takeaway here is bigger than titles. With all things marketing, do shit differently (pardon my French).
Everyone in your category is running the same prompts / skills and copying the same "best practices." That's why they all look the same.
Find the thing that actually resonates with your shoppers, then put it where they can't scroll past it.
If you like tips like this, I send out conversion tips via productpinion.com/lab, along with the templates and SOPs to go with them.
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The Deep Dive (Premium Content)
Deep Dive: What Are Your Returns Telling You?
If you want to really hurt a company after you’ve had a negative experience, the first step is to never buy again and never come back. The second step (the painful one) is to never tell them why. Without knowing why, they won’t know what to fix.
Let’s make sure that doesn’t happen to your business.
Every return comes back with a note from the buyer: a reason code, a damage grade, and often their exact words, all sitting in your FBA Customer Returns report…
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Cottage Life and Sleep Away Camp
This week we wrapped up a few days at my buddy's cottage before dropping the boys off at Camp Muskoka for a week of sleepover camp. They went last year, but this time they were seasoned pros and shuffled us out the door a little quicker. The obligatory brothers-at-camp photo will have to wait until pickup.
I never had a cottage in the family growing up, and none of my friends had one either, so cottage life is still new to us. It's a lot of fun. Knife throwing, BB target practice, tubing, and getting used to a lake that's a whole lot colder than the water in Costa Rica.
But I also got a good look at how much work a cottage really is. There's the maintenance, and then there's the work of hosting guests, who come with varying degrees of willingness to pitch in. It's a great way to build memories for kids, but I couldn't help noticing how many cottages were for sale in the area.
From what I understand, it's a common story. The family cottage gets handed down to the next generation, who may not use it as much once they have families of their own. The upkeep and property taxes get heavy. One sibling wants to be bought out. The list goes on.
If you have a cottage you're planning to leave to the next generation, have the serious, honest conversations now. What will it cost to maintain? Who will actually use it? Would selling or another arrangement make more sense? Don't leave it until it's too late.
Storefronts Get an Upgrade
NOTE: Amazon changes to it’s new title format TODAY. Make sure your titles are compliant with the new system. If you make no changes, Amazon will change your titles automatically.
It's probably been a while since you looked at your storefront. Amazon's own advice is to refresh it every quarter (yeah, right). When I finally went back in, the builder looked completely different than I remember.
There's an AI agent built into the store builder now. You give it a prompt, or pick one of the presets, and it builds new pages, updates old ones, or makes a seasonal version of your whole store. It writes the copy, lays out the sections, and picks the products. There's a separate AI tool inside product collection tiles that generates a lifestyle image, a title, and a description for a collection of up to 60 products.
In classic lazy-man fashion, I tried to get the Claude chrome addon to talk to the Amazon AI and fix/make the storefront great. It didn’t work great lol ☹️
The analytics got deeper too. As of January it reports on every individual section of every page: views, clicks, click-through rate And it splits your traffic by source, including search engines and social, not just Amazon ads.
Here's what to do with all that: pull your metrics report, drop it into Claude or ChatGPT, and ask what's working and what to cut.
Why bother? Amazon's own data says shoppers who visit a brand store buy 53.9% more often, and their orders are 71.3% bigger. And in December Amazon changed how it grades your store: the quality rating now scores the sales your store drives, not how long people hang around. By Amazon's numbers, high-rated stores see up to 97% more sales than low-rated ones.
Your store is free (you just need Brand Registry). The agent does most of the work now. Go give it a prompt this week and see what it hands back.
Where Can I Fly Direct?
Here’s the coolest website ever! Pull up flightconnections.com and click any airport. The map draws every nonstop route it serves. For example, Amsterdam shows 282 nonstop destinations in 89 countries, and the site covers 900+ airlines.
Instead of asking "how do I get to X," ask "where can I fly direct from here?" That's how you find the one-stop routings booking sites bury, and how you pick a connecting hub that actually has a direct leg home.
Try out your home airport and let us know how it goes!
A luxury once experienced soon becomes a necessity.
C. Northcote Parkinson
BEER! Now that I have your attention… you probably would like the Facebook community.
This week in the Facebook group: Bell asks about evaluating new niches:
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