Welcome back friend!
Two Is One, One Is None
The Navy SEALs have a rule about gear: two is one, one is none. Carry one flashlight and you're not carrying a flashlight, you're carrying a bet.
I got my own small lesson in it this week. My main supplier ran short of raw material, right in the middle of a reorder on a product I've sold for years. One factory. One name in my contacts for a thing that pays a real chunk of my bills. I never thought of that as a risk until the day it stopped. (For a guy who writes to you about this stuff every week… i’m embarrassed, frankly).
But… It worked out. I found a second factory, in the US, that could run 10,000 units in about 3 weeks. But I want to be honest about what that was. It wasn't a backup plan to do this… I just got lucky.
There's a statistics idea that explains why the rule exists. It's called the law of truly large numbers: give a rare event enough chances and it stops being rare. A 1-in-20 disaster in any given year sounds ignorable. Run it for 10 years and there's about a 40% chance it lands. Now count how many 1-in-20s your business carries at once. One supplier. One marketplace. One product doing most of the revenue. One warehouse. Each one alone is probably fine this year. All of them, over enough years? Something on that list is going to stop. You don't get to know which one. You only get to know it's coming.
And still, almost nobody (like me) builds the backup, because a second supplier looks like pure waste on every normal day. Worse price. Smaller order. Extra effort for a problem you don’t even have. Your body would disagree, by the way: Two kidneys and you can live on one. The spare costs you every day and might pay off once. Once is enough.
So the useful move isn't losing sleep over the list. It's picking the scariest line on it and getting a second name this week, while it's a quote instead of a rescue.
I asked my new factory to quote the next run anyway. Not because the old one failed me. Because the math says eventually something will.
The IVS
Big thanks to my good friend Jasim Eisa who was kind enough to share an Amazon hack with us this week. Jasim is the CEO of Voadera - an agency that helps brands scale on Amazon. He is what we’d call, a “big dog.” Listen up.
I’ve sold $100M+ on Amazon Since Last Year. Here’s the AI Brain We Used to Do It:
Most brands are using AI completely wrong. So I'm sharing the exact system we use to help out the beach!
The common play right now: open ChatGPT, paste a prompt, ship whatever comes out.
The output sounds like every other listing on the page. Because the AI has zero context. It doesn't know your brand, your customer, or how Amazon ranks in 2026. And Amazon moved on. Keyword matching gave way to an AI engine called COSMO. It reads intent, not exact words. It reads your images to decide what your product even is. So generic AI backfires twice. Stuffed keywords get pushed down as low quality. Weak creative goes invisible.
We built a brain instead.
One Claude project loaded with the brand guide, product specs, and real customer reviews. Then reusable skills you point at any product. Listings are just the start. The same brain directs your creative, mines reviews for the words customers buy with, and answers like your best brand manager.
Here is what you'll learn:
- The exact files to load so Claude writes like your brand, not like AI.
- The reusable skill that produces titles and bullets matched to how COSMO ranks.
- How to point the same brain at your image stack and A+ creative.
- The January 2025 title rules Amazon auto rewrites you for breaking.
- The full build our team runs across 25 to 40 brands at a time.
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Amazon News Week 36/52
Some sellers say Amazon Canada now wants bilingual cosmetic labels proven on listings before September 28. |
China-origin imports now face new Section 301 forced-labor duties (10 to 12.5%) since Section 122's flat surcharge expired, raising landed costs. |
YouTube now lets eligible creators tag Amazon products directly in Shorts, videos, and livestreams through its affiliate program. |
Amazon is expanding its anti-counterfeit unit in India to protect the platform's 1.7 million sellers from fakes. |
Amazon is now limiting how many reviews shoppers can read on a product listing, per new reporting. |
Heading to Amazon Accelerate? (you should go!) Here’s a complete list of all the parties taking place.
The Deep Dive (Premium Content)
Feeling Crazy about your PPC?
If you're anything like me, you're constantly second-guessing whether the PPC strategy you're running is actually working.
That second-guessing compounds. And it gets worse when an agency or an AI bot is the one running it, because now you're second-guessing decisions you didn't even make.
I built this more for myself than anything. It's a sanity ☺️ check that makes sure the main things we're doing aren't hemorrhaging money or heading for a disaster.
To use: You download two files, paste one prompt into your AI, and it runs six checks that are pure lookups, no judgment calls: blocked winners, muted winners…
Want the full Deep Dive?
It goes out in the newsletter. Subscribe free, share it with one friend, and every Deep Dive unlocks.
Getting the Band Together for the First Time
For the last six months, Jackson's been playing in a band, and last night was their first real performance. Honestly, I'm not sure which impressed me more: how good they sounded, or the couple hundred people who packed into the sail center to watch a bunch of kids play. Not bad for a first show. It turned out better than any of us expected, and they've already got another gig booked for the end of the month.
It got me thinking about something I've learned living here. If there's something you want to do, sometimes you just have to put in the effort and make it happen. That's true everywhere, really. It's easy to be lazy about it, or worse, to be "someday-ish" about it. Someday I'll start that. Someday when things slow down. Someday never shows up on its own.
Jackson's music teacher didn't wait for someday. He decided he wanted to put a band together, so he did it. And it wasn't easy. Finding the right group of kids who have both the talent and the commitment to actually show up and practice took a while. Plenty of trial and error before they landed on the right mix. But now they've found it, they're gelling, and last night a couple hundred people got to see what happens when somebody stops talking about an idea and just starts.
If you've been sitting on a someday of your own, take it as a nudge. The gap between the people who do the thing and the people who talk about the thing is usually just that first uncomfortable step.
Q4 Is a Month Away and the First Deadlines Land in September
10 things to do before Q4 hits that will save you big bucks $$$:
Amazon moved the Black Friday inbound cutoffs up a week this year, deals get $50 cheaper if they're in by September 5, and storage triples on October 1. Here's the September checklist:
- Get Black Friday inventory moving now. This year's arrive-by dates: October 14 for AWD, October 21 for FBA with minimal shipment splits, October 28 with Amazon-optimized splits. That's a week earlier than last year, and Amazon says inventory arriving after those dates isn't guaranteed to be processed in time.
- Place your last China PO this week. Factories shut down for Golden Week the first week of October. An order that isn't in production by mid-September comes out the other side of the holiday, and ocean transit from there doesn't land by the cutoffs. If a PO is going in, it goes in now.
- Favor small parcel over LTL from here on. Receiving queues stretch out as fulfillment centers fill up for peak, and a pallet waiting on an appointment misses the window while parcels keep checking in. Splitting a big send into SPD costs a little more per unit and is worth it.
- Submit your deals by September 5. Best Deals and Lightning Deals for Black Friday week don't close until October 20, but submitting by September 5 cuts the $100 upfront fee to $50.
- Rebuild your October unit economics now. Peak fulfillment fees average $0.32 a unit from October 15 through January 14, and the 3.5% fuel surcharge stacks on top of them. Much pain.
- Get dead stock out before October 1. Standard-size storage jumps from $0.78 to $2.40 per cubic foot for October through December. If a SKU won't sell through by December, a September removal order beats paying triple to store it.
- Park overflow in AWD instead of cramming everything into FBA. AWD storage runs $0.48 to $0.57 a cubic foot year-round with "no additional costs for the holiday season" (Amazon's words, not mine), while FBA peaks at $2.40. Let AWD hold the bulk and replenish FBA as it sells.
- Forecast off last Q4, not the last 30 days. September velocity is the wrong input for October orders. Pull last year's October through December numbers by SKU and size your POs and send-ins off that multiple.
- Freeze your listings by mid-October. Finish image, A+, and title work in September, because a listing suppressed by a bad edit during Black Friday week is going to hurt.
- Schedule your PPC budget increases now. Black Friday week spends budgets fast, and a campaign that caps out by lunchtime on the best day of the year is self-inflicted. Budget rules let you set the increase in advance instead of reacting mid-event.
BONUS: Q4 doesn't end December 31. Peak fees run to January 14, and every year Amazon extends holiday returns (last season, anything bought November 1 through December 31 was returnable until January 31). December's money isn't fully yours until February, so keep cash for the returns wave.
Every item on this list is cheaper in September than in October.
Check out is at 11am. Your flight is at 11pm.
The dead half-day between hotel checkout and an evening flight doesn't have to be spent dragging bags around. If you're staying at a decent hotel, the front desk will usually hold your bags after checkout, so just ask.
BUT if that doesn't cover you (you've switched neighborhoods, or you landed hours before check-in), Stasher.com books storage at 10,500+ vetted shops and hotels near stations and city centers, from $1.49 to $2.49 per bag per day (US cities typically $2.49), and every booking includes a guarantee up to 1,000 pounds sterling per bag against theft, loss, or damage. Pretty sweet.
The cowards never started and the weak died along the way. That leaves us.
Phil Knight
BEER! Now that I have your attention… you probably would like the Facebook community.
This week in the Facebook group: 🦗🦗🦗
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To your success,
Rob & Max