Welcome back friend!
Amazon Used to Need Your Yes. Now It Needs Your No.
Amazon now wants to control your account with AI.
And it's not a suggestion.
Last September I wrote about Virtual Multipacks and I was pumped. Amazon takes a single-pack listing you already have and builds the 2-pack and the 3-pack off it. No bundling, no labels, no new inventory, nothing for you to do. Sellers had been asking for it for years. When I came back to the program in January, I summed it up in two words: everyone wins.
I still think that's mostly right.
Because here's what the program actually does, and I published most of it myself at the time under a heading I called "Gotchas." Amazon's selection process picks which of your listings get a multipack, and there is no option to manually join or opt into the pilot. Amazon builds the image from your single-pack photos, and it won't update if you change your originals. The default price is your unit price times the pack size. Delete one during the pilot and you can't reactivate it.
Think about that: A product I didn't create, imaged by Amazon, priced by Amazon, sitting on my brand.
And it isn't one program. These are all live right now:
Titles over 75 characters get rewritten by Amazon's AI over time, not chopped off. Brand owners got a short window to review before Amazon pushed them live. If someone put a gun to my head and told me to guess how many people stuck with Amazon's AI titles and didn't change anything, I'd say >80%.
The IVS
Big thanks to my friend Michael Shackelford @ Genrupt. Genrupt focuses on creating content to help brands scale. Michael, a former CNC and 3D printing technician, holds a BA in industrial and product design from the University of Kansas.
Inside
Hey all! If you’re interested in making videos for your products and haven’t taken a look at the tools available lately, check out this video below! I break down Seedance 2.5 (from ByteDance/TikTok) and how easy it is to make an incredible video for your products that will blow you away.
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Amazon News Week 35/52
Amazon has warned sellers that a new federal executive order on customs enforcement could change who is legally allowed to import goods into the United States. |
Sellers are reporting active listings disappearing from Manage Inventory with no warning, and Amazon has not confirmed a cause as of this week. |
Shoppers say Amazon is capping how many reviews they can view on a listing, with some told to wait up to five days to see more. |
The Deep Dive (Premium Content)
You can now PAY Amazon to deliver your products faster
Amazon just put same-day delivery up for auction.
This one has been creating quite a bit of buzz in the Amazon space. In a nutshell, Amazon is now letting us bid for faster shipping.
The new FBA program is called Sub-Same Day Placement Reservation. Amazon's 2-to-5-hour delivery network has limited space, and 100,000+ products are already in it for free. For products Amazon didn't pick, you can now name a per-unit fee to get placed, and you only pay when a unit actually ships same-day. You may not see it in your account yet. It's rolling out account by account.
So we built you a one-page cheat sheet…
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Thousands of Dead Crabs On The Beaches
You couldn't miss them this week. Thousands of little crabs dead on the sand, beach after beach, from Conchal down to Carrillo. Everyone on social media had a theory, and the one I kept hearing was El Niño.
Quick refresher on what that actually is. Every few years the Pacific flips into a warm phase. Trade winds weaken, and a big pool of warm water that normally sits out by Asia slides east toward our coast. That's El Niño. It changes rainfall, fishing, everything, and it's why some years the ocean here feels like bath water. This year rainfall has been really bad….not much at all.
The crab is called a Jaiba mora, and it's not a beach crab at all (but we have lots of those too). It lives offshore in open water, and warm water is exactly what it loves. When the ocean heats up, their numbers explode. Ecuador saw swarms so thick a couple years back they were tearing up fishing nets.
So….why are they dying on our beaches? Nobody knows yet. The best guess is the warm water created way more crabs than the ocean could carry, and shifting currents stranded the overflow on shore. But that's a guess. In the mean time, I wouldn’t let any animals near them. The ocean should clean itself up, but I suspect some areas businesses will start to remove them as they decompose.
Find a Bad Guy
For years I've spread my ad budget across the whole catalog. A little for every product, nobody starves, nobody feasts. Last month I did the opposite on one product, and it beat everything else I've tried in ads this year.
Here's the play:
- Identify a villain. Pick the brand sitting on top of your niche. You're not copying them, you're aiming at them.
- Build keyword campaigns around the fight. Exact-match campaigns on every search term that matters in the niche, each with its own real budget. Add the villain's brand name to the list.
- Build product display ads targeted at the villain. Sponsored Display on their product pages, so your product shows up while people shop theirs.
- Build Sponsored Brand ads targeted at those exact match keywords. Own everything in the niche.
Sales jumped in week one while the rest of my account had a soft month. Profit went up too, and I'd raised prices. I didn't understand why it worked this well until I went digging through the research. Three reasons, and none of them is "more ads." (I would've bet the villain ads themselves made the money. They were a small slice.)
Coverage. Unless you have a very complex or expensive product, Your niche's buyers don't browse for weeks. They show up ready to buy, search once or twice, and pick something. You get seen in that moment or you lose that buyer for good.
The same budget spread across forty products is a flashlight: it warms nothing. Pointed at one niche, it's a laser, and suddenly you're present for nearly every buying moment that the niche has.
Familiarity. Within one sitting the shopper sees you in the results, again on the villain's page, again on their next search. Familiar feels safe, and safe is what people pay full price for.
The machine. Every search-click-purchase gets fed to Amazon's ranking systems as a vote for what your product is, and Amazon's own patents weight a purchase at 10x the value of a click. A concentrated week of buying in one niche is a landslide of votes in one place. Amazon answered by showing my product on dozens of searches I never bid on, including the villain's own brand name.
Start with one villain at a time. Hold it 30 days, judge your slice of the niche's purchases in the Search Query Performance report, then give the next product its turn.
Ship Your Suitcase Instead of Dragging it on the Plane
Dug up a cool one this week. SendMyBag collects your luggage from your home or hotel and delivers it in 80+ countries, typically 1 to 2 days between major cities. Their published example: a 66 lb suitcase from the US to the UK for $147 on the express service.
Now the airline math. Delta charges $100 just for the overweight surcharge at 51 to 70 lbs, stacked on top of the regular checked-bag fee. A third checked bag on a domestic flight? $200.
Where shipping wins hardest: golf clubs, ski gear, a move, a long family trip, or any tight-connection itinerary where the checked bag is the piece most likely to miss the plane.
Fine print: each flat rate covers up to 30 kg (so that 66 lb example is a maxed-out bag), with a 70 kg per-item cap. Advertised floors run $88 to the US and $169 to the UK, and exact prices are per route. Run their quote tool before you decide.
To be lost is to be fully present.
Rebecca Solnit
SCARY CLOWNS! 🤡 Now that I have your attention… you probably would like the Facebook community.
This week in the Facebook group: Max finds the absolute cheapest way to send direct mail marketing in Canada.
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