Welcome back friend!
The Case for Small Cases
I might catch flack for this, but hear me out.
Every purchase order you write says how many units you want. But I bet you don’t bother to look at how many units per carton, right?
I made a call today: 40 units per carton on everything from here on, unless a product physically can't do it.
Here's why. Amazon's Multi-Channel Distribution (MCD) will ship a case out of AWD to a customer who isn't on Amazon, but only the exact case you sent in. It won't break one open. The other lane, Multi-Channel Fulfillment (MCF), ships single units and prices per unit, but claws your eyes out with fees to do it.
So the case you packed at the factory months ago is the smallest thing you're able to sell to anybody outside Amazon.
Say you sell for $10 a unit wholesale. Most of our cases run 150 units, so a single case puts the buyer at $1,500. Nobody's first order with a brand they've never bought is $1,500. At 40 a case it's $400, which is much more reasonable. For example Faire’s data says the average first order is around ~$250.
(Yes, I could ship to a 3PL and let them break cases all day. I don't want the complexity. I want my inventory in one place.)
AWD charges by the box, $1.40 to bring one in and $1.40 to send one out, and dropping from 150 to 40 nearly quadruples the box count. The prevailing wisdom is to cram as many units into a case as you can. I'm arguing the opposite. And it only increases my cost by about $0.051 per unit.
Five cents a unit to be sellable off Amazon at all. I'll take that.
Note: If you ship by pallet this is a winning strategy. If you ship by SPD, look out.
The IVS
Big thanks to the effortlessly handsome Igor Nuhanovic for providing this week’s IVS. Igor runs Amazonia PPC, a PPC agency for Amazon Sellers! He is one of the few content creators I’ve seen who does an excellent job cutting through the BS and just delivering good value.
Build Audiences of your best customers (then advertise to them in minutes)
Picture yourself on a sidewalk handing out flyers for your new and exciting “We Kill Your Spider Business.” Everyone walking past gets one. A few want what you sell (most don’t), and you pay the same either way. That's keyword targeting. You bid on "spider squisher," Amazon shows your ad to everybody who typed it, and you spend your way toward an ACoS you can live with.
Now picture a second stack. This one only goes to people who walked into your store, picked your product up, carried it toward the till, and put it back on the way out. Same flyer, same cost. Completely different!
That's a targeted audience. And it’s in AMC (Amazon Marketing Cloud)
Here’s a four-minute walkthrough:
Watch the video above
When you get it going, it opens you get pre-built segments off your own account. Top 30 percent of customers by spend. Repeat buyers. And the one to grab first: shoppers who added to cart and never bought. No keyword, product target, or negative gets you near that group.
Build it rule-based to go after those exact people, or as a lookalike seed to find shoppers who behave the same way (start with most similar, the smallest and sharpest). Fifteen minutes later it's in Campaign Manager.
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Amazon News Week 34/52
Amazon confirmed its 75 character title limit, in effect since August 3, applies to its own listings too, and said sellers have already updated over 984 million product titles to comply. |
Nearly a year after the US ended the $800 de minimis exemption, cross-border sellers are reportedly still leaving legitimate duty refunds uncollected. |
Amazon launched Grade and Resell in its Canada, giving Canadian FBA sellers a way to recover value from customer returns that US sellers already had. |
Amazon said more than 350 million customers used Alexa for Shopping over the past year, with active users nearly doubling, pointing to AI shopping as a growing traffic source. |
The Deep Dive (Premium Content)
395 things my AI can do in my Amazon account
You already have the AI. That part is done. The hard part is knowing what to ask it for.
So here is the list. 395 jobs an AI can do inside an Amazon account, one plain line each, sorted so you can jump straight to the part you care about. Every line is something my AI has done for me over the last year.
A few of them:
• Cut ad spend automatically when stock is about to run out
• Push a corrected product image to every marketplace at once
• Get Amazon to lower a fee by proving its catalog contradicts itself
• Screen product launch ideas against import tariffs before sourcing
• Stop liquidating stock that looks dead but was just out of stock
Eleven sections: watching the account, ads, listings and images, inventory, shipments, getting money back, research…
Want the full Deep Dive?
It goes out in the newsletter. Subscribe free, share it with one friend, and every Deep Dive unlocks.
Some Thrive. Some Miss Trader Joes Too Much.
Visit Costa Rica Ad On the Street Car in Toronto Had to Force a Quick Photo!
After a month in Canada, it always feels good when the plane touches back down in Costa Rica. Coming home just feels different. Not dreading being back, but excited.
One thing that always makes me laugh is seeing friends at the airport after the summer. It's the same conversation every time: how much junk from Amazon did we buy to bring back? This year was no different. There's my buddy Mike next to me, putting three large black storage bins on the scanner. I told him, fantastic, you brought storage bins as luggage. Way higher chance they check your bags than mine. Luckily we both went through fine, no extra screening.
This is the time of year when new families come down for a school year. Some will make it, others won't. The first few weeks are always a honeymoon. Let's see how you're doing in a couple of months.
Marsha sat next to a lady on the plane who was just arriving, and got the full rundown of her plan and where she's staying. First flaw: she's not renting a car. Here for 10 months, just going to take Uber. Lady, this isn't Toronto. It doesn't work that way here. She figured she'd be in the Flamingo area, close enough to walk to things like the grocery store. Except she's living on an insanely steep hill with an 8 year old, and the "grocery store" at the bottom is really more of a large convenience store. I'm sure she "researched" plenty, but moving to a different country is never exactly like you planned, and never as easy as you think. Yes, one grocery store delivers, but it's the gringo store, so you can get plenty of North American brands and you'll pay for them.
What makes or breaks you down here is how you adapt to a different lifestyle, language, and culture. Lots of people romanticize a new country. Some thrive. Others just can't live without Trader Joe's.
To the new families just landing: welcome. The ones still here in March won't be the ones with the best plan, they'll be the ones who let go of it. The hill is steep, the store is small, and nothing works like it did back home. That's not the problem. That's the part you'll be bragging about next summer at the airport.
Amazon and Walmart are Besties Now?
Saw this today…
Buried in Amazon's Multi-Channel Fulfillment rate card, dated June 1, 2026, in the Additional Fees table…
"The 5% AMZL block surcharge fee is waived for MCF orders, including Walmart, through January 14, 2027."
Amazon wrote the word Walmart into its own price list. If you’ve been around this game a long time like us, you know how weird that is.
A couple of years ago these two were enemies. Now they're… frenemies. Amazon's warehousing page goes further: "Distribute beyond Amazon. Send to other sales channels, like Walmart Fulfillment Services, all from a single pool of AWD inventory." The biggest retailer on earth is offering to stock the shelves of the second biggest. For a fee, obviously.
I remember going to Amazon Accelerate conferences and the execs were careful to not even say the word “Walmart.” I remember Walmart actively banning people for fulfilling with Amazon. Crazy how things have changed.
If you’re not doing anything with Walmart, it costs you almost nothing to set up your entire catalogue there (use a cross-listing tool), and fulfill the entire thing with MCF. Free money.
Air Tag Everything
I have an AirTag in everything. Keys, backpack, both suitcases, the carry-on (yes, five). It killed an entire category of problem in my life. I don't look for things anymore, I look at my phone.
Since iOS 18.2 came out you can hand that same tracking to the airline.
Open Find My, pick the item, tap Share Item Location, and your phone generates a temporary web page with a live map of where the bag actually is. We all know this.
I always know where my stuff is!
Here’s the fun part:
Airlines take these now. Apple says it has direct arrangements with more than 50 carriers, Delta, United and Air Canada among them, and the links feed into WorldTracer, the tracing system running at 2,800 airports for over 500 airlines and ground handlers. Your live map lands in the same screen the agent is already staring at.
Does it work? SITA, the company behind WorldTracer, says delayed bags get back to passengers 26 percent faster when the link is shared, and bags that go truly lost, gone forever, dropped 90 percent.
Put an AirTag in every checked bag. You were probably going to anyway. Now it feeds the airline's tracing system instead of just your anxiety.
Want to get good?
Volume + Time = Skill
BEER! Now that I have your attention… you probably would like the Facebook community.
This week in the Facebook group: Nicole Witt answers a ton of questions about influencers, off-amazon promotions, & brand awareness.
If you’re liking this newsletter so far, here's where we share more stuff like it:
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To your success,
Rob & Max