Welcome back friend!
The creepy thing won
In 1888 George Eastman started selling a little box camera called the Kodak. "You press the button," the ads said, "we do the rest."
For the first time, a stranger could take your picture without asking you to sit still for it. People hated it. Newspapers warned readers to "beware the Kodak." The people carrying them got a nickname: Kodak Fiends.
Two years later, two Boston lawyers, Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis, published an article in the Harvard Law Review that pretty much invented the legal idea of privacy. They called it "the right to be let alone."
Here’s the most important line: "Instantaneous photographs and newspaper enterprise have invaded the sacred precincts of private and domestic life; and numerous mechanical devices threaten to make good the prediction that 'what is whispered in the closet shall be proclaimed from the house-tops.'"
They were scared of a camera. They should see what Amazon put on its homepage last week. George Orwell would be laughing.
It's called Bee. You wear it on your wrist or clip it to your shirt, and it listens to your conversations. All your conversations. Then it writes you summaries, to-do lists and follow-up emails. It's $74.99, plus $11.99 a month for the full version.
It went on sale October 15. By that evening it had more than 100 ratings, averaging 1.7 stars. One review on the page said it plainly: "Recording people without permission is illegal." Another said “This thing is creepy.”
Within two days, every one of those ratings was gone. Amazon deleted the listing and started again LOL. Today the ratings are slipping again…
My honest first reaction was the same as those reviewers: who on earth wants to wear a wiretap?
Then I thought about the Kodak fiends. Today almost everyone carries a camera in their pocket, and we point it at strangers all the time without thinking twice. The creepy thing won, because it saved people effort. It usually does.
There's one line on the Bee page every seller should read twice: "Bee uses insights from your life to suggest relevant items you might need."
Today a shopper types "dog door mat" into a search bar. Soon they'll say "the dog tracked mud all over the kitchen again" at dinner, and the thing on their wrist will suggest something. There's no search bar. It’s going away soon.
So the question is whether your product is the one it suggests. For that, the AI has to know your product fixes the thing people actually say out loud, in the words they actually use. Go read your bullets out loud. If none of them sound like something your customer would say at the kitchen table, write one that does.
The future? Privacy Schmivacy.
The IVS
Big thanks to my friend Jack Born for this week’s IVS. Jack runs Design Quarry, a design studio in Edmonton. This week he got one of our products onto a real (brick & mortar) store shelf with just one in-person conversation, and I wanted you to hear how he did it.
Attn Amazon Sellers: There Are Two Ways to Sell
Hi everyone,
I think there are really only two ways to sell a product these days.
The first obvious one is selling with your fingers. You build a listing, upload photos, tune your keywords, run ads, and hope a stranger finds you in the search results. It works, but every part of it is rented: the traffic, the algorithm, the ad costs. Anyone who has watched their ad spend creep up while their margins shrink knows how that feels.
The second is selling with your feet. You pick up your product, walk into a store, and ask someone face to face. (Kinda spooky, I know!)
Online sellers often forget this second option exists. I did. I’m a graphic designer, and almost everything I work on, including the packaging I design for one of Max’s brands, gets seen on a screen first.
What I tried
This week I had a few extra boxes of Max’s product at home and wondered what would happen if I simply asked a local store to carry them. So after getting Max’s approval on a brief handwritten agreement, I went to see the owner to propose my win/win idea. The terms were simple:
- No upfront cost. He pays nothing to put the product on his shelf.
- A flat cut per sale. He keeps a fixed amount on each unit he sells.
- Monthly payment. I’m paid once a month for whatever sold.
- Re-stocking. If sales are going well, I give him more product.
- An easy exit. If the boxes aren't selling after four months, I take them back.
With terms like that, there’s no risk for him, which (hopefully) makes it an easy yes.
What happened
He said yes! The next morning he posted the product on the store’s Facebook page and sold one that same day. He texted the next morning to ask for an ‘AVAILABLE HERE’ style poster for his front window.
None of that needed a listing, a keyword, or an ad. It took one conversation.
Why this matters for Amazon sellers
It diversifies your sales. If your account, your rankings, or your ad costs take a hit, you now have a separate channel(s) that don’t depend on any of them.
- It’s real-world proof. Shelf space, a local following and a store owner who recommends you are credibility you can’t buy with ad spend.
- It’s cheap to test. A handful of units and a simple agreement cost almost nothing when compared to a month of PPC.
- It can feed your online sales. Shoppers who find you in a store can search for you online (and check your Amazon listing for re-fills), and a store’s social posts will send people to your brand.
How to try it this week
- Pick one local shop whose customers match your buyers.
- Bring a sample and a one-page consignment agreement covering your terms.
- Make it easy for the owner: clear pricing, a small ‘AVAILABLE HERE’ poster, and a pickup date if it doesn't sell.
- Offer something extra, such as a post of his store on one or more of your social channels, gift one or two of them for his use (or to give to a friend).
- One more recommendation: Use spare inventory purchased from your supplier, shipped to your address (not the stock you’ve sent to Amazon’s fulfillment centers).
Selling with your fingers can work great, but it isn’t the only way. If you have a few extra boxes of your product sitting around, I’d encourage you to try selling with your feet too.
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Amazon News Week 44/52
Amazon will require prepaid return labels on US seller orders starting December 18, which may change what returns cost sellers. |
Amazon made its January 31 holiday return deadline an annual rule, so sellers can plan for it each year. |
Amazon expanded Global Warehousing and Distribution to accept some expiration-dated inventory, which opens GWD to more catalogs such as Beauty and Baby. |
The Deep Dive (Premium Content)
Deep Dive: Get your products into holiday gift guides, for free
Yep, like this one.
Every weekday, free services email out what journalists are writing about. This time of year, a lot of it is gift guides that need products.
I started answering them in August. In ten weeks, 941 requests came in. I sent 16 pitches and got 3 published, with 8 more that could still run before the end of December.
It costs nothing to join. The hard part is reading every request to find the few that fit, so I hand that part to AI.
Inside:
- The free lists to sign up for, and the one all my results came from
- Which requests
Want the full Deep Dive?
It goes out in the newsletter. Subscribe free, share it with one friend, and every Deep Dive unlocks.
Father, You Got That Right?
We're back in Saint John this week visiting my parents, and the boys have their rotation down to a science. Bulk Barn, Tim Hortons, the trampoline park, the arcade. This year we added one thing: pumpkin carving.
Pumpkins don't really exist in our part of Costa Rica. The gringo grocery store brings in a few small ones each October and wants $40 USD apiece, which is a hard no. It had been a few years since they did one but they drew up their designs, went at it with some knives and spoons, and we got through the whole afternoon with no stitches. Call it a win.
The better show was the money.
The boys had some cash from their grandparents to spend on candy and donuts, and Jackson got stuck at the counter for a few seconds while his mother and I enjoyed giving him the business about it (since he is pretty good at math). He doesn't see Canadian coins very often. A dollar coin is a loonie, a two dollar coin is a toonie, and when you grow up spending colones that's a lot to sort through in your palm with a line behind you. Then there's the rounding. Canada killed the penny years ago, so cash totals get rounded to the nearest five cents, and nobody had ever told him that.
Then he hit the Bulk Barn scale. It's a hanging scale showing pounds and grams, the posted prices are per 100 grams and also 1 lb, and the two didn't line up exactly based on what the scale was showing. He did the math, the math didn't match, and he was not leaving until someone explained why he was getting ripped off. He wasn't. The hanging scale just isn't that precise. Try explaining that to a kid who only knows grams and has decided the store is cheating him.
Chase had his own moment. He'd planned his spending to the dollar, got to the register, and found out about sales tax. Fifteen percent in New Brunswick, added at the till. His exact words to me were "Father, you got that right?" I did. In Costa Rica the 13 percent tax is already baked into the shelf price, so the number you see is the number you pay. He'd never once had a price go up between the shelf and the cash.
None of this is a complaint just things that are different and we forget. The boys get a week of little things that don't exist in our daily life, and they get them with a side of loonies, metric conversions and a tax lesson they didn't ask for.
My 2-unit business discount was costing me $2,200 a year
Business buyers are companies shopping on Amazon for work, and they're the customers I want more of. Amazon's own numbers say they buy 109% more units per order than regular shoppers, and make 42% fewer returns.
(I can confirm this is true)
And it's growing fast. Amazon Business went from $35 billion in sales in 2023 to $60 billion a year by this summer, up about 70%. It's one of the biggest areas on Amazon to get on board with right now.
One way to win them is quantity discounts: price breaks only business buyers see when they buy more units. I've had mine on for a while. I just found out I set them up wrong, twice.
First, I started the discount at 2 units. When business buyers order more than one, they mostly order two. About 18% of all my business orders are exactly two. So my 2-unit discount was mostly handing 5% to people who were going to buy two anyway.
My best seller shows it. Before it had any discount, 25% of its business orders were two units. After the 2-unit discount went on, 23%. It didn't create a single extra pair. Across all my products, that 5% was costing me about $2,200 a year.
So I moved the first discount to 3 units. Now the buyer about to order two sees that one more unit gets them 5% off... nice.
Second, my top tier quantity discount… I didn't know Amazon shows your biggest discount on the listing and in the SERPs. Mine was 50 units on almost every product, so shoppers kept seeing 20% off if they bought 50. In the last 12 months, 8 out of about 9,800 business orders were for 50 or more. (So 99.9% of buyers were never going to touch it.)
I dropped my top tier to a quantity people actually buy (something reasonable).
If you sell to businesses, look at what quantity they order most, and start your first discount one above it.
YAY, BUSINESS!
WhichSideToSit Tells You Left or Right Window
WhichSideToSit.com is a funny little free site that tells you which side of the plane to sit on for your exact flight. Most of us pick aisle or window and stop there. Pick the wrong window on a morning flight and the sun sits on your laptop screen the whole way. Pick the right one and you get the sunrise, or the Rockies, or on a red-eye, the side where the shade can stay down.
You enter your two airports, the date and your local departure time. It gives you a left or right pick for takeoff, cruise and landing separately, because on a long flight the best side can switch halfway. Under the hood it draws your route as the shortest path across the globe, samples it at 100 points, works out where the sun is at each one (daylight saving included), and checks about 15,000 mountains, coastlines, lakes, cities and landmarks against the direction the plane is pointing. So the same answer that tells you where the glare lands also tells you which window gets the view. It works for any airport.
The catch: it's a small one-person project that launched on Product Hunt this summer, and it doesn't forecast weather. Real routes bend around storms and traffic, so treat the pick as a strong head start, not a promise of a clear view.
You have power over your mind, not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.
Marcus Aurelius
BEER! Now that I have your attention… you probably would like the Facebook community.
This week in the Facebook group: Rana invites SFTB Members to a free cocktail social in the GTA
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To your success,
Rob & Max