Welcome back friend!
Just Make the Box Bigger
For almost 70 years, a Hershey bar cost a nickel.
Hershey started selling it for five cents in 1900, and the price stuck. When cocoa got expensive, Hershey didn't raise it. They made the bar smaller. When cocoa got cheap, the bar got bigger again. The nickel never moved.
By the late 1960s the nickel bar was under an ounce. There wasn't much bar left to shrink.
On November 24, 1969, Hershey finally gave up the nickel. What they did next is the part I keep thinking about because I'm stuck in my own version of this right now.
Last month Amazon re-measured one of my products in Canada, and the fee to ship it went from $5.94 to $9.79. The product sold for $9.99. Add the referral fee and I was losing money on every one.
That fee is charged per unit. It's the same whether the box holds a little or a lot, so a single cheap product has to carry the whole thing by itself. My product was a shrunken nickel bar. The fee had eaten the whole price. No bueno.
What should I do? Well… here's what Hershey did. They doubled the price to a dime, and they made the bar more than twice as big. Customers paid twice as much and got more than twice the chocolate. Hershey raised its price and gave people a better deal on the same day.
That works whenever part of your cost doesn't care how big the product is. On Amazon, that's the fulfillment fee. Put two in the box and you pay one fee instead of two. The money you save can come off the price per item, and you still make more on every sale than you did on the single.
For a cheap product, the single is the worst deal on Amazon. Worst for you, and worst for your customer.
Yeah, we could just raise the price. But maybe we should be making the box bigger.
The IVS
Big thanks to thanks to my friend, the effortlessly handsome Scott Needham, founder of SmartScout, for supplying this week's IVS.
TikTok Shop Makes Your Amazon Business Grow Faster. A LOT faster.
Scott's friend sells the same kind of product as everyone else on Amazon. His competitors charge $45. He charges $65, and he still sells.
The reason is TikTok Shop. People see his product in videos on TikTok, then they go to Amazon and buy it there. They already want his product, so they don't shop around for a cheaper one.
Scott wanted to know if this happens to other brands too, so he looked at thousands of them.
It does. Brands that sell on Amazon and TikTok Shop grow their Amazon sales about 6 times faster than brands that only sell on Amazon.
I ran the rough math on Scott's numbers. Every $1 you sell on TikTok Shop comes with about 89 cents of extra sales on Amazon.
So the work you put into TikTok Shop pays you twice: once on TikTok, and again on Amazon.
Scott explains it in a short video here.
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Amazon News Week 41/52
Amazon is auto-enrolling FBA Export sellers into 175 new countries within eight days unless you opt out now. |
Amazon is adding LTL freight labels to Buy Shipping this month, letting bulky-item sellers book pallet shipments at Amazon's negotiated rates. |
Amazon Ads is launching a paid Review Requests beta in late October, an alternative to the free request-a-review button already in Seller Central. |
Amazon now lets toy sellers file one compliance submission across multiple countries, with electronics and baby products getting the option by year-end. |
eBay will hide EU listings missing the new legal-guarantee notice, a rule that could apply anywhere you sell consumer goods into the EU. |
Amazon opened Seller Central to integrations with eBay, Shopify, TikTok, and Walmart, and to outside AI agents, while blocking Meta's Muse. |
The Deep Dive (Premium Content)
Amazon owes you money. AI is (finally) smart enough to find it all
What it is: A read-only audit prompt for Claude Code. Hand it your settlement, reimbursement and fee reports, and it checks 48 lines against the written rules, then shows the math on anything that doesn't match.
What you get:
• The prompt, ready to paste
• The claim windows already running, from Amazon's own pages: 90 days on fees charged on the wrong dimensions…
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It goes out in the newsletter. Subscribe free, share it with one friend, and every Deep Dive unlocks.
Lock In - Not Lock Down
This weekend was lock-in weekend at the boys' school. Not a lockdown. A lock-in. One letter makes a big difference.
The middle schoolers, Chase included, slept over at the school Friday night with a few of their teachers. They played games, hung out, and tried to get some sleep.
The high schoolers did theirs at the director's house, where she and her husband hosted the whole group. Think about that for a second. The head of the school had the high school over for a sleepover. About 35 kids were going. That's a lot of teenagers for one house, but it's a number two brave adults can survive. Try it at a school with 1,200 students and you'd need a hotel and a security detail.
Small schools get knocked for what they don't have sometimes. What you don't hear about as often is what the small number makes possible. The teachers know every kid. The kids all know each other. And when somebody says "let's have everyone sleep over," it's something a school this size can pull off.
Both boys came home tired, happy, and full of stories. I'll take that trade over a bigger course catalogue.
The highlight for Jackson was winning the rock-paper-scissors tournament. He came home with some candy, but that wasn't the real prize. The winner also gets to skip one English assignment. He's already plotting which one.
Amazon's Next Review Tool After Vine Opens in Late October
Amazon’s Review Requests Program
And… to nobody’s surprise, Amazon has found a new way to charge a fee. Read on…
Vine has been the main way to get early reviews on Amazon. You give free units to reviewers Amazon picks and pay a fee per parent product ($0 for 1 to 2 units, $75 for 3 to 10, $200 for 11 to 30). Amazon is adding a second option called Review Requests. It opens as a US beta in late October 2026, so it may not be in your account yet.
Here’s the difference between the programs: It’s all about who gets asked. Vine reviewers get your product for free. Review Requests asks people who already bought it. Amazon shows your recent buyers a one-tap rating prompt on its busiest pages, like the homepage, and they can add a written review with video or images. It's a step up from the free Request a Review button in Seller Central, which sends the buyer one email. This puts the ask in front of them while they shop.
It runs out of your ad console, on the same bids and budgets as your other ads. Only products with fewer than 1,000 ratings and reviews qualify, and the campaign pauses itself once a product hits 1,000.
Amazon says products in its early test got around three 3X as many reviews.
What it costs isn't public yet. You set a bid and a budget like any other ad. One trade site reports you only pay when a review is actually submitted, but Amazon hasn't confirmed that.
If you sell on Walmart, you've seen this before. Walmart's Recognized Reviewer program is its version of Vine: you send free samples to trusted reviewers. Its Post-Purchase Reviews program asks verified buyers for a review and gives them a small reward, $5 to $25 or 25% of the item price, whichever is lower. You pay that reward plus a $5 service fee per review, and those reviews carry an "Incentivized Review" badge. So on Walmart a review from a real buyer costs at least $10. That's a fair number to hold Amazon's pricing up against when it comes out.
One thing to know before you turn it on: the prompt goes to recent buyers, unhappy ones included. A product with a quality problem will collect its low ratings faster too.
Canadians Get 30 Days in China Visa Free, Business Included, Until the End of this year (Americans Get 10 Days)
Since February 17, 2026, a Canadian passport gets you into China with no visa for up to 30 days. The Chinese embassy in Canada lists business right alongside tourism, family visits and transit. There's no visa fee, no embassy appointment and no onward ticket rule. For a supplier trip, a factory audit or the Canton Fair, the visa step is just gone.
It covers ordinary passports only, and your 30 days start counting the day after you land.
Write down the end date though. This is a trial policy, and it runs out at midnight on December 31, 2026, Beijing time. China has extended these before, but if you're planning a spring 2027 trip, don't assume it.
A US passport isn't on that list. Americans use the separate 240-hour transit policy instead. That gives you ten days, and business activities and visits are allowed. The catch is you need a confirmed ticket onward to a third country (not back home), and you have to enter through one of China's designated ports and stay inside the approved regions for the whole trip.
The distinguishing feature between winners and losers is that anyone can have a bad workout, a bad performance, or a bad day at work, but when successful people fail, they rebound quickly.
James Clear
BEER! Now that I have your attention… you probably would like the Facebook community.
This week in the Facebook group: Old listings are always a threat.
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